Is faith a choice or a gift?

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 16, 2014 (Second Sunday in Lent, Year A), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (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” [1]  – 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 said to me that in her dark moments, she has 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," which is that faith is neither entirely our choice nor entirely a gift from God, but some complicated combination of the two. 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, any more than we can 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 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.

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[1] Dick Donovan, Sermon Writer (www.sermonwriter.com).

What happens when we get what we are waiting for?

Sermon preached at Wednesday Morning Prayer, Chapel of the Apostles, Sewanee, Tennessee.

The reading from Matthew this morning (Matthew 24:45-51) comes from the apocalyptic discourses towards the end of that Gospel, those series of parables about what the last judgment and the kingdom to come will be like. The common theme is that it will come when we least expect it, and we should remain watchful and be attentive to how we are living our lives, lest we be caught off guard when the end comes.

Keep awake! Be watchful! Be alert! These are themes of Advent, which invites us into a period of holy waiting and expectation.

But today, thanks be to God, our expectant waiting for the end of the semester has finally come to an end. Juniors, you’ve survived your first semester of seminary! Middlers, you’re halfway through your seminary career as of today. And Seniors, well, we’re gearing up for our transitions out of this place, with only one semester remaining before graduation.

So here’s a question for us to ponder as we come to the completion of another semester and as we move closer to the arrival of the Christ child at Christmas: What happens when we get what we’ve been waiting for? What happens to us emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, when the object of our expectant longing and hopefulness is suddenly realized?

Sometimes there can be an anti-climactic moment when we you get what you’ve been waiting for. The day after the graduation or the wedding you don’t really feel all that different than you did the day before. Or the day after the big party, you feel the loss of all the excitement you’d felt in preparing for it.

It can also be disorienting to get what you’ve been waiting for: suddenly your identity, which for so long had centered around waiting for that day when you would finally graduate or finally meet that person with whom you would share your life, has changed. If you’ve spent years of your life working for a certain kind of social change and you actually accomplish your goal, what then? If your identity has become that of an “anti-war protestor” and the war comes to an end, who are you now? You’ve gotten what you were waiting for, but now you don’t know who you are. Perhaps this is why common wisdom advises us to “be careful what you wish for – you just might get it.”

As Christians, we teach that our hope and longing will never be fully realized until the Second Coming. We talk a lot in seminary about “realized eschatology,” about the “already” and the “not yet,” but the Advent themes of waiting focus more heavily on the “not yet” part. To be a Christian means always to be waiting, not just during Advent, but throughout the church year. No matter how many To Do lists we check off and no matter how many major life transitions we experience, there will still be something we have to wait for. We will never “get what we’re waiting for” until the Second Coming.

But the “already” part of the equation says that we have gotten what we’re waiting for. The incarnation of God in Christ has “delivered us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” Part of our story as Christians is that we have gotten what we are waiting for – or at least, that the Israelites have gotten what they were waiting for in the Messiah.

So what happens when we realize we have already gotten what we are waiting for? Disorientation? An anti-climax? A loss of a sense of identity? The early church certainly went through these things, and I suspect we continue to experience these responses as we get things we’ve been waiting for in our lives. But there can also be great peace, contentment, and joy in getting what we’ve been waiting for, in seeing our hopes and dreams fulfilled.

As we enter this liminal time between the semesters, we have much still to wait for and anticipate: our final grades from the semester; a visit home to see family and friends; for us seniors, the dreaded GOEs. But in a twist from our usual Advent theme of waiting, as get what we’ve been waiting for today – the end of the semester – and as we draw nearer to Christmas Day, I invite you to reflect a bit more on what we have already received: the gift of Emmanuel, God with us.

Whatever awaits us, whatever things are unfinished, however much the Christian tradition looks forward to that final re-creation of a new heaven and a new earth, we have already gotten some things we’ve been waiting for: a God who offers us unconditional forgiveness and love, a God who took on human flesh, lived as one of us, and died in order to free us from the powers of sin and death. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’s last words from the cross are, “It is finished.”

What more could we be waiting for?

Sermon - Fifth Sunday of Pentecost, Year A, Proper 6

Fifth Sunday After Pentecost, Year A, Proper 6
(Romans 5:1-8, Matthew 9:35-10:8-23)
Holy Trinity Parish (Episcopal), Decatur, Ga.

AUDIO (just of me practicing at home, not the actual sermon-giving live):



TEXT:

For the past several weeks, we have been hearing stories of Jesus’s early ministry from the Gospel of Matthew. We have listened as Jesus calls the disciples to follow him and watched as he heals the sick and raises the dead. Today we reach a turning point in the story. The movement has grown unmanageable. Upon seeing the crowds of people in need gathering around him, Jesus recognizes the limits of his humanity – “the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few” (Matt. 9:37). There are too many people in need for him to reach each person directly – and so he commissions the twelve disciples to go out into the world in his name, bringing healing to those they meet and proclaiming the good news that the kingdom of God has come near.

Not much has changed in 2,000 years. The need is still great, and the workers are still few. Just ask the front desk volunteers, who field calls and in-person visits on an almost daily basis from people looking for assistance with food, rent, or bills. Or ask Ed Buckley or Fr. Deneke about the extreme poverty they witnessed on their trip to Haiti in March. Or talk with Holy Trinity parishioners who have traveled to New Orleans multiple times over the past two years to help with the Katrina relief and rebuilding efforts - and have actually been there again this weekend. The need is great, but the workers are few.

The need is great. That’s not exactly what the passage says, of course – we all know the famous quote: “the harvest is plentiful.” But the “harvest” that is so plentiful is not an abundance of resources but an abundance of need. The potential "harvest" here refers to the crowds of people, those crowds on whom Jesus had compassion because they were in need – they were “harassed and helpless,” like “sheep without a shepherd.” The quantities of people who are in need – of basic necessities, of healing, and of the good news of God’s kingdom – is great. Those willing to go out and address these needs, heal these people, and proclaim the good news – are few.

And so Jesus sends the twelve. And 2,000 years later, Jesus sends us.

Except here’s a little secret for you: we are both the apostles and the crowd in this story. We are both those who are able to give and those who are desperately in need.

It’s easy to forget this in a church as affluent as the Episcopal Church. We are used to thinking of service as something we do to them, not something of which we are on the receiving end. And oh, we talk about the sacrifice of serving others, of how difficult it is to give of ourselves – our time, talents, and treasures – but how much easier it is to be seen and known as one who gives rather than one who receives! For there is power in the giving, there is a security in the knowledge that we have more of something than another – that we have so much of it, in fact, that we are able to give it away. There is great generosity in giving out of our abundance, but there is also great power as well.

William Willimon, the Methodist bishop of North Alabama, writes of our preference to be the servers rather than the served:


"I suggest we are better givers than getters," he writes, "not because we are generous people but because we are proud, arrogant people.”

It is tough to be served by others, Willimon writes, “because I would rather see myself as a giver. I want power -- to stand on my own, take charge, set things to rights, perhaps to help those who have nothing. I don't like picturing myself as dependent, needy, empty-handed.” [1]

So back to my little secret: while we may see ourselves as the apostles in this story, as those who are sent out into the world to help others, we are actually just as much in need as the crowds in this story -- those obnoxious, wandering, clueless crowds, harassed and helpless with no sense of direction.

ShirleyGrace Madajewski, our Monday morning front desk volunteer, often brings in interesting quotes and articles to share with our office staff. A few weeks ago she brought in an article called “Bozos on the Bus,” from a book called Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser, founder of the Omega Institute, a nonprofit organization for personal and spiritual growth in California.

Lesser writes about the clown-activist Wavy Gravy, most famous for his role as the master of ceremonies at Woodstock, and his use of humor in the service of social activism and motivational change. She says her favorite “Wavyism” is the following quote: “We’re all bozos on the bus, so we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride.” She says she loves this phrase because

“I believe that we are all bozos on the bus, contrary to the self-assured image we work so hard to present to each other on a daily basis. We are all half-baked experiments – mistake-prone beings, born without an instruction book into a complex world. None of us are models of perfect behavior: We have all betrayed and been betrayed; we’ve been known to be egotistical, unreliable, lethargic, and stingy; and each one of us has, at times, awakened in the middle of the night worrying about everything from money, kids, or terrorism to wrinkled skin and receding hairlines. In other words, we’re all bozos on the bus.” [2]

So much of how our world is structured and how we live our lives is an attempt to avoid this truth, however. We spend lots of our time calling other people bozos because we don’t want anyone to know that inside, we’re really just bozos ourselves. And because we think we are so deserving of all the blessings we have in this life, often not seeing them as blessings but as trophies we have earned, we approach service to others with a constant eye to whether or not the recipients of our charity are truly deserving of our help.

We live in a world that is mired in measuring and calculating who is "worthy," who is "deserving," and who "qualifies" -- for this aid, for that scholarship, for this welfare program, for that job. And in many ways, the limited resources that we have to address the world’s needs demand that it be so – it is the only way we can deal with distributing limited resources to address an unlimited need.

But what we often forget, when we get so caught up in the systems of the world – systems that do a great deal of good work, by the way – but when we get so caught up in the system’s method of judging and critiquing and figuring out who qualifies, we forget that our faith, that our relationship with God, does not operate in this way. We do not receive love and acceptance from God because we have earned or deserve them – we receive God’s love as a free gift of grace.

We have been reminded of this anew lately as we have been reading through the epistle of Paul to the Romans. In the passage today, Paul says it as clearly as possible: “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). If we were reading the Wavy Gravy Translation of the Bible instead of the New Revised Standard Version, that passage could just as well read, "while we were still bozos, Christ died for us."

God's love for us is not something we earn, but a gift freely given. When Jesus sends forth the disciples, he tells them to give to others without demanding anything in return: "You received without payment; give without payment," he says. (Matt. 10:23). We are called to model our giving to others on the way God gives to us - in waves of crazy, radical, abundant grace. Only if we first recognize ourselves as the recipients of grace can we truly give gracefully to others. This kind of servanthood to which we are called as Christians is not a hierarchical, top-down kind of relationship in which the "haves" give to the "have-nots," but a relationship of mutual sharing and support between all of us "bozos on the bus." We are certainly called to serve others, but we must also allow ourselves to be served as well.

This kind of mutual servanthood is illustrated beautifully in the "Servant Song," which we just sang as our sequence hymn before the Gospel reading, and which, by my request, we will sing again during communion. It reminds us that we are all "fellow travelers on the road" - or fellow "bozos on the bus," if you will - who are all in need of one another to "walk the mile and bear the load." But what I love most about this song is its acknowledgement of how hard it is for us to be served, how hard it is for us to admit that we are not just the apostles going forth to help others, but the crowds in need of that help as well. The first verse, which repeats as the last, starts out with a more traditional response to our call to servanthood: "Brother, sister, let me be your servant, let me be as Christ to you," it says. We're pretty cool with that. After all, we get to be "Christ" in this metaphor. But then it goes on to say, "pray that I would have the grace to let you be my servant, too."

As we sing the Servant Song again during communion, focus on the words and let them seep in. I invite you to think about what it would look like if these words described not just your relationship with your fellow parishioners or those who you already consider your equals, but those who you consider higher or lower than you in our society's hierarchy. And the next time you find yourself silently evaluating whether or not someone deserves your help, remember that you too are a receiver, that you too are just a bozo on the bus -- and respond to that person with God's crazy, radical, abundant grace.

Amen.

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[1] William Willimon, "The God We Hardly Knew," in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001).

[2] Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, Villard Publishing, 2004, p.28.