Faith is a two-way relationship, and we can control only our side

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 12, 2017 (Second Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Genesis 12:1-4, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, John 3:1-17

The season of Lent calls us to be intentional about our spiritual lives: to spend time in prayer, in reading the scriptures, and in self-examination and reflection. One could say that Lent calls us to deepen our faith.

Our readings for today convey the message that our faith is what makes us right with God. These passages represent one side of the classic debate between faith and works – is it our faith, our beliefs, that put us into right relationship with God, or is it our works, our actions, the things we do in this world? Our scriptures for today clearly come down on the “faith” side of the question.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul argues that Abraham was justified – made right with God – not by anything he did, but by having faith – by trusting God’s promise to him. In making this argument, Paul is commenting on a passage from Genesis, chapter 15, just a few chapters after our reading from the Hebrew Bible for today. Chapter 15 includes the famous scene where God shows Abraham a vision – that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky – and after that vision, the scripture tells us that “[Abraham] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). Paul builds his argument for justification by faith on this line from Genesis. He points out that Abraham was considered “righteous” before God officially made the covenant with Abraham, so Abraham’s righteousness did not come through the law, which was given later, but through his simple trusting in the word he heard from God.

In our Gospel passage, Jesus encounters a prominent leader of Israel named Nicodemus. Nicodemus goes to visit Jesus by night – perhaps because he does not want to be seen associating with this “rabble rouser” in the light of day – but the fact that he goes to him at all shows that he is drawn to him in some way. He acknowledges that Jesus is “a teacher who has come from God,” showing that he does not entirely reject Jesus and his teachings. But Jesus doesn’t give Nicodemus any gold stars for acknowledging him as a teacher. Instead, he launches into a statement about the importance of being “born from above” in order to “see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).

Jesus can tell that Nicodemus has not yet “gotten it,” so to speak. Perhaps his concern with observance of the law has gotten in the way of his understanding the deeper spiritual message; we don’t know. But Jesus is not impressed with Nicodemus’s tentative praise of him. The passage concludes with one of the most famous lines in Scripture – John 3:16 – “for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Again, we are brought back to the importance of faith – everyone who believes in him will have eternal life, just as Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

So, the call to us is to have faith, to believe. In Christian circles, this idea is often presented as much easier than “earning” our way into salvation by our works: “What great news – we are saved by faith alone! All we have to do is believe!” But as anyone who has ever struggled with serious doubts knows, it is often much easier to do “good works” than it is to believe in what are some pretty incredible statements that the church holds up as true. This is why plenty of people can go out and feed the hungry and advocate for justice but can’t bring themselves to say the Nicene Creed. It is often easier to do something than it is to believe something.

I’m very interested in why it is that certain people find it easy to believe, to have faith, while other people find themselves stuck, unable to move past their doubt and skepticism to surrender to the life of faith. What made Peter, Andrew, James, and John willing to drop everything and follow Jesus when he called their names, while Nicodemus was drawn to Jesus, but not willing to leave everything to follow him? Why are you all here week after week, active in the life of the church, while you may have friends or family members who were raised with the same exposure to the church and the Christian faith, who are not active in church, and perhaps even skeptical about religion in general? If faith is what makes us right with God, how do we get it? What makes it possible for us to have faith?

I used to believe that faith was entirely a choice: God has created us with free will, so we have the freedom to choose faith or to choose unbelief. From this perspective, the burden of action is entirely ours. God has already acted in history, through the resurrection of Jesus; now it is our choice whether we accept or reject that gift of life.

But as my faith developed, I began to question the notion that my faith was entirely my choice. Yes, I did choose to follow Jesus when I was a teenager and have continued to try to follow him, but why was I drawn to pursue a spiritual path at all? I no more chose my natural inclination toward thinking theologically than I chose my affinity for strawberries or for the color purple. Those things were planted in me from the beginning, it seems, part of my personality, something I did nothing to create.

So I began to think that perhaps the ability to have faith at all is a gift from God. One commentator on this passage from John points out that Jesus’s use of the birth metaphor points to the initiative in matters of faith coming from God rather than from us. Just as babies do not choose to be born, so we cannot choose to be “born again” – such an experience is a gift from God that is bestowed on us. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). Just as we cannot control the wind, we cannot control how God’s Spirit moves in our lives and in the lives of others.

Looking at it this way allows us to let go of feeling like the burden is all on us – to have faith and to lead others to have faith. A friend who was going through a difficult time once told me that she had to believe that God chooses her, rather than the other way around. “I CANNOT choose faith right now,” she said. “So I have to trust that God chooses me.” From that theological perspective, the burden of action is entirely God’s. If we have faith, it is only because God has created and planted that faith in us.

But that idea is not entirely satisfactory, either, for it runs the risk of falling into fatalism and making a mockery of human choice, making us into puppets stripped of any kind of real freedom.

And so, I’m coming to think that perhaps the truth is somewhere in between those two viewpoints. In true Episcopal fashion, I’m proposing a via media, a "middle way," between two extremes. Rather than asserting that faith is entirely our choice or entirely a gift, I’m proposing that it’s both. Somehow at the same time it’s both a choice we make and a gift from God.

The problem with the other two scenarios is that in both of them, there is only one active party in the equation: either faith is entirely up to us, or faith is entirely up to God. But faith in God is a relationship, and a relationship requires action by both parties. For a life of faith to flourish, both we and God need to act. The key is remembering that we control only our side of the relationship.

We can smile and act friendly toward someone, but that does not guarantee that that person will become our friend. We cannot control how the other person will respond to us. The same is true in our relationship with God. We can pray and come to Eucharist and say all the right words and do all the right things, but that does not guarantee that in our heart of hearts, we will truly believe and feel close to God. We still have to wait for God to show up, for God to act on God’s side of the relationship. Despite what our liturgies sometimes lead us to believe, we cannot MAKE God show up by saying certain magic words or making certain gestures with our hands. God is not a robot or a vending machine. We cannot force God’s action in our lives, and we cannot force ourselves to have faith.

So perhaps what we are called to do during Lent is not to deepen our faith, but to deepen our spiritual practice. What we can control is our actions and choices on our side of the relationship. We can choose to show up wherever it is that we feel most likely to encounter God – in the church, out in nature, in the midst of our family and friends – and wait. This might mean we spend more time in silence, more time listening rather than speaking in our prayer life. But whatever the practices that work best for us, we can do them with a posture of openness – perhaps literally, praying with open hands, open palms, or metaphorically, opening our hearts – so that we become more receptive to God’s presence and action within and around us, so that we are primed and prepped to notice when God does choose to show up.

Jesus told Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). In our life of spiritual practice, we are building ourselves a wind turbine, so that when God’s Spirit does blow in our lives, we have the mechanism ready to capture its energy and allow it to fuel us.

This is what spiritual practice is all about – it is quite literally a practice to prepare ourselves to be ready for those moments when we receive a vision, or a strong inner sense of God’s call, or a deep abiding sense of God’s love and comfort – all of which are pure gifts of grace. We cannot make those experiences happen, but we can keep the lines of communication open. And that’s all we are asked to do on the spiritual path – to show up, to be open – and to leave the rest to God.

How do we respond when God gives us a gift?

Sermon delivered Sunday, Oct. 9, 2016 (The Twenty-First Sunday After Pentecost (Proper 23, Year C, Track 2)), at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c; Luke 17:11-19



How do we respond when God gives us a gift?

That’s the question our scriptures invite us to consider today. When we receive a gift from God, when God offers us new life, when God heals us, how do we respond?

In both our first lesson from the book of 2 Kings and the story in the Gospel passage from Luke, we are given examples of people who received gifts from God – healing from the skin disease of leprosy. There were different circumstances surrounding each healing, but in both cases we could say that the healing was example of God’s grace, a gift freely given to the people who were ill. They did nothing to “deserve” or “earn” the healing, they were simply offered it.

So what are the responses of the people who are healed? Naaman, the commander of the army an enemy nation, returns to the prophet Elisha and proclaims that he now knows that the God of Israel is the only God – for him, the healing prompts a conversion experience, a confession of faith.

In the Gospel passage, one of the lepers who had been healed praises God and goes back to Jesus and thanks him. But Jesus observes, wryly, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?”

The other nine are still healed, though. The scriptures don’t tell us that because they failed to thank Jesus, their healing was suddenly revoked. Presumably they still remain disease-free, whether or not they returned to thank the person who healed them or give praise to God. So God’s healing remains a gift, not contingent on the people’s response to it.

Returning to the story of Naaman, the lectionary actually cuts off his response mid-sentence, so we don’t get the full picture of how he responds to the experience of being healed. When he says, “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel,” he immediately follows that statement with, “please accept a present from your servant.” Naaman returns to Elisha not only to make a statement of faith but to offer a gift in return. But Elisha refuses to accept Naaman’s gift, saying, “As the Lord lives, whom I serve, I will accept nothing!”

It’s perhaps natural for Naaman to feel that he “owes” Elisha something after he’s been healed, but Elisha disabuses him of that notion. By refusing the lavish and expensive gifts Naaman offers him, the message Elisha conveys is: “You don’t have to pay me. Your healing was a gift from God. You can’t earn it, you can’t buy it, you can’t make this an even transaction by reciprocating in any way. There is no reciprocation with God. There is only grateful acceptance of gifts freely offered.”

Today we kick off our fall stewardship season, when we’re going to be thinking a lot about the gifts God gives us and how we respond to those gifts. Are we grateful, like the leper in the Gospel reading? Do we give praise to God and return to the one who has blessed us to thank him?

The part of Naaman’s story that doesn’t appear in the lectionary complicates this narrative. In stewardship season, we often hear a lot about how all we have is a gift from God, and so therefore we ought to joyfully “give back to God” in thanksgiving. But when Naaman tries to make a gift to the prophet after his healing, Elisha refuses it. Does Elisha’s refusal of his financial gift mean that we shouldn’t give to the church in grateful thanksgiving for all God has given to us?

As I read this passage, I think the key element here is intention. Naaman is essentially trying to “pay” the prophet for the service he has received. The prophet rejects that as an emphasis on the fact that God’s grace is freely given. We still continue this tradition in the church today by the fact that clergy do not charge for performing the sacraments of the church. In some religious traditions, there is a set fee for every ritual that you ask a religious leader to perform. But we don’t do this in the church. Every time I work with a family who is not closely connected with the church for a wedding or baptism or funeral, inevitably they will ask me what my “fee” is for doing the service. “No fee,” I always tell them. “The services of the church are provided free of charge. They are a gift, just as God’s grace is a gift.” They are usually shocked; given how “transactional” our society is, they can’t imagine something being provided without there being a charge for it. When they persist in asking how they can compensate me, I tell them that the church survives financially on the generosity of its members, so if they feel called to give something, we would welcome a donation to the church, but as a priest I cannot accept “payment” for performing a religious ritual.

To some, this might sound like mincing words. You can’t pay the priest for the ritual, but you can make a donation to the church, and the church pays the priest’s salary. So aren’t you essentially supporting the priest financially if you make the donation as well? Well, on some level, yes, but the distinction between giving generosity out of a free desire to give and giving because you feel you “owe” someone something and you are seeing that gift as a “payment” for services received is important. The kind of giving we encourage in the church is giving as a spiritual discipline, not giving as paying the bills.

What do I mean by this? Well, think about how different your mindset is when you receive a bill in the mail that you owe and you pay that bill verses when you spend money on a gift for someone for their birthday -- or maybe not even for their birthday, but “just because,” when you see something that reminds you of them. Think about how different it feels to spend money because you want to bring joy to someone verses when you spend money out of a sense of obligation.

In the church, we operate out of a principle of abundance and generosity. Rather than using guilt to motivate people to give money by presenting them with a “bill” for how much they “owe” for the religious services and community and use of the communal meeting space they’ve experienced in the past year, we ask people to give as a spiritual practice – as a way to practice generosity, to practice letting go of our attachments to physical things – and as we all do that collectively, together, we have faith that there will be enough money among us to pay the bills.

John Rawlinson [a retired priest who attends St. Cuthbert's] recently left me a handout with a list of differences between “living churches” and “dead churches.” One of the characteristics of “dead churches” was that in their financial giving, “people tip God.” To me, that speaks to the difference between giving out of generosity and joy to support the work of God in a community together and giving out of a sense of obligation or payment – “tipping God” for the services we’ve received. “Gee thanks, God, for going out of your way to carry my suitcase and save my soul while you were at it; here’s a sweaty $5 bill that I’ll discreetly press into the palm of your hand.” When we approach giving that way, we take care of an obligation without it inconveniencing us too much. We’ve settled our “debt” and so now the score is even, or perhaps even a little in our favor, since we’ve gone above and beyond what we owed by adding a tip!

But the story of Naaman reminds us that we can’t “pay God back” for the gifts God gives us. We can’t settle the score, we can’t even things out, we can’t free ourselves from any sense of obligation to God, because the truth is we will be forever indebted to God for our very life and breath as well as whatever other blessings he may have brought into our lives. But instead of that truth making us feel burdened, it can free us. We don’t have to worry about “paying God back.” We can instead “pay it forward” by sharing with those around us – and in doing so, we may find that our needs and theirs are both met. Giving financially to the church is not about “giving back to God” -- remember, the church is not God! The church is a community of other Christians gathered together to praise and worship God and to serve others. So when we give to the church, we’re not “giving back to God,” we’re “paying it forward,” sharing what God has given us with others to ensure that together, we can continue to do God’s work in our church and the neighborhood around it.

In freely giving us the gifts he gives as pure grace, God sets forth a chain of giving that doesn’t circle back to himself, but expands out like ripples from a pebble dropped in a pond of water, touching and benefitting an ever-expanding circle of people. And it all starts with an acknowledgement of the gift as gift, as something we cannot repay, and the gratitude that comes with that realization. As the leper did in today’s Gospel reading, the only thing we can do is praise God and give thanks – and keep that wave of generosity going by sharing God’s grace and mercy with others.