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).

Persistence in prayer even when we do not get what we ask for

Sermon delivered Sunday, Oct. 20, 2013 (22nd Sunday After Pentecost, Year C, Proper 24) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN, on Luke 18:1-8.

“Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” (Luke 18:1) Luke tells us that today’s parable, about the widow and the unjust judge, is about persistence in prayer. It has a similar theme to another parable Jesus tells earlier in the Gospel of Luke, about the friend at midnight. We heard that parable earlier this year, at the end of July, but let me refresh your memory. The parable of the friend at midnight is in Luke 11:5-8:

“[Jesus] said to them, ‘Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, “Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.” And he answers from within, “Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.” I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.’”

“Because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.” Although the friend initially turns down the request, he ultimately gives in because the person knocking at his door just won’t give up. The same is true with the widow and the unjust judge. Though the judge cares nothing about the woman or about granting her what she asks for, he finally gives in because of her persistence and tenacity.

Jesus’s message in both these parables seems to be: if you know that persistence and constant asking can be effective in finally getting what you want from other broken and sinful human beings, who do not always have your best interests at heart, how much more should you be certain that God, who loves you and does have your best interests at heart, will give you what you want if you are persistent in asking?

These two parables are unique to Luke, but Luke links the parable of the friend at midnight with a saying of Jesus that appears in some form or another in all four Gospels: “ask, and it will be given to you.” The parable of the persistent friend at midnight in Luke is followed by this passage, which appears to be commentary on the parable: “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Luke 11:9-10). The same exact words appear in Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:7-8). Mark and John do not have this exact passage, but the same theme appears in those Gospels as well. “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours,” Jesus says in chapter 11 of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 11:24). And in John 14, Jesus promises the disciples, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” (John 14:14)

These passages seem to suggest that all we have to do is ask, and God will give us whatever we want. They can easily lend themselves to a “vending machine” view of God, where all we need to do is insert prayer, press D4, and health and wealth will promptly be deposited into the receptacle at the bottom of the machine, ready for us to grab and tear into like so many candy bars. But I expect that most of us would bristle at that concept of God, because we know that most prayer does not work that way. It does not seem to be as easy as “ask, and you shall receive,” as “select your desired outcome and it will be delivered to you, no questions asked.” Although sometimes our prayers do seem to be answered exactly as we have asked, I’m sure that most of us have any number of examples of times when we asked for something from God and did not receive what we asked.

This is not a new problem for the “modern believer;” the earliest Christian communities already recognized that they did not always get everything they asked for from God, that not all their prayers were answered by a fulfillment of the requests they had made. The author of the letter of James deals with this issue by arguing that the people are not receiving what they ask for because they are asking wrongly, because their desires are not in line with the will of God. James 4, verses 2-3, says this: “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.”

James’s answer for why some prayers go unanswered is that people are asking for the wrong things for the wrong reasons. That can be a helpful interpretation when we know deep down that our motives in asking or the things we are asking for are probably not the most godly, that they may be motivated by selfish desires. In those cases, we can accept that our prayers are not answered because we were not asking for the right things. But what about the cases in which we ask for something that we believe to be in line with the will of God, when we ask for the very things God has promised us, like life and health and justice and mercy and resurrection and peace, and we do not receive them?

Jesus tells the disciples that they will be able to heal in his name, and in the Gospels and the Book of Acts we have stories of the disciples healing the sick and raising the dead, but I have never known a Christian who was able to literally raise the dead. The prophets constantly tell us that God has promised to “restore the fortunes of Zion,” and yet the conflict in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas continues unabated. The prophets tell us that God wants “justice to roll down like waters,” but we see oppression and injustice continuing in our own society and around the world.

So how are we to reconcile these unanswered prayers with Jesus’s words that “if in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it”? That “everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened”?

Again, this is not a new question. The biblical authors also struggled with unanswered prayers. The psalmists asked, “How long, O Lord?” How long will you hide your face from us, how long will you not respond to our prayers, to our cries for help? The prophet Habakkuk asks, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” (Habakkuk 1:2) Job cries out to God, “Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice” (Job 19:7). In Psalm 22, the psalm Jesus quotes while dying on the cross, the psalmist says, “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer. By night as well, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:2).

Significantly, though, the biblical authors never take the step that so many people do today, to assume that the fact of unanswered prayer must mean that God does not exist. The biblical writers “keep the faith” even in the midst of unanswered prayer, even when God does not turn out to be their own personal divine vending machine. They express their anguish about unanswered prayer to God, not only to other people. And they remember the times God has answered prayer and how many blessings they have received from God. In the same chapter as Job cries out that there is no justice and his prayers are not answered, he goes on to say that “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25). Immediately after the verse in Psalm 22 about crying to God but receiving no answer, the psalmist goes on to say, “Yet you are the Holy One… our forefathers put their trust in you; they trusted, and you delivered them… you are he who took me out of the womb, and kept me safe upon my mother’s breast” (Psalm 22:3-4, 9). In the midst of laments about unanswered prayer in the Bible, there is almost always a recall of times that prayer has been answered, when we asked and it was given to us, when we sought and did find, when we knocked and the door was opened to us.

Perhaps this is what it means to be persistent in prayer: not only to keep asking over and over again, but to stay in relationship with God even when we do not get the things we ask for in that particular moment – to ask questions and struggle with God even when the door seems to be closed. To remember, even in those moments, Jesus’s promise that God has our best interests at heart and will in fact grant us the justice and the good things that we seek – even if it might not come in the ways we expect or desire. The biblical writers continued to affirm the goodness of God despite their unanswered prayers, and Jesus invites us to model their persistence not only in making continued requests for what we want, but not to lose heart as we ask – to remain steadfast in believing that the God to whom we pray does indeed have our best interests at heart.

Parable of the Dishonest Manager: An Opportunity to Admit We Don't Understand

Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 22, 2013 (18th Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 20C), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN, on Luke 16:1-13.

Our passage from Luke’s Gospel today presents us with one of Jesus’s more difficult parables, in which Jesus seems to encourage cheating and dishonesty. The parable is a story about a manager who “cooks the books,” so to speak, adjusting the amounts due from his boss’s debtors so as to give them a break and ingratiate himself with them so they will owe him a favor once he’s lost his job as a result of his corrupt dealings. As we listen to the story, we’re expecting a traditional outcome: the bad guy gets told what-for by the boss and faces the consequences of his actions. We’re probably expecting to hear about some weeping and gnashing of teeth.

But instead, the boss praises the manager for this behavior! And then Jesus summarizes his message with a strange piece of advice: “I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”

What?? “Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth?”

That doesn’t sound like the Jesus we know, the Jesus who consistently warns us about the dangers of our riches becoming an idol, who says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven and tells us we must give up all our possessions to become his disciple. And just a few verses after this strange bit of advice, he warns us that no slave can serve two masters, that we cannot serve both God and wealth.

So what does this saying mean? Why does Jesus tell us to “make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth?”

Well, first of all, it bears saying that this parable has been confusing to the church since its earliest days. Everyone from the early church fathers like Augustine and Jerome through the 16th century Reformers like Luther and Calvin and on to modern-day scholars like John Dominic Crossan and Amy-Jill Levine has attempted to understand and explain it, and there are a variety of different interpretations.

Some say that the “master” in the parable represents God, while others say the “master” represents this world and wordly pursuits. Some say the “children of light” refers to the disciples of Jesus, while others say it is a reference to the Pharisees. One interpreter even suggested that the unjust manager represents Jesus himself, who goes against the typical rules of this world and turns things upside down, stepping in to cancel the debts owed to the master as Jesus cancelled the debts of our sin on the cross. [1]

Some try to make sense of why the manager was praised by suggesting that perhaps the master was really the one who was unjust, a rich tyrant who was oppressing all his tenants, and so the “dishonest” manager was actually the “good guy” by freeing the tenants from the debts they owed this unjust master. In this interpretation, the manager is a sort of “Robin Hood” figure, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Some say that perhaps the master commended the manager because the manager actually had done the master a favor: he made the master look good and generous by cancelling a portion of the debts owed by his debtors, and perhaps the master would have been glad to collect anything, even a partial amount, on the debts that were owed him from people who had accumulated such large amounts of debt.

A fairly common interpretation across the centuries is that because the master commends the manager for acting “shrewdly,” what is praiseworthy about the manager is not his dishonest dealings, but his shrewdness, his cleverness, his creativity. Even though he has essentially stolen from his master, his master commends him out of a sense of resignation – like, “Well, this guy really took me to the cleaners, but hey – you’ve got to hand it to him for his ingenuity!” The lesson for us is that we should be as shrewd and clever in figuring out a way to assure a good eternal future for ourselves as this guy was in securing a good future for himself in this world.

Many interpreters have linked this passage with the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, where Jesus tells us that at the final judgment we will be rewarded based on how we have treated “the least of these,” and with Jesus’s many sayings about the last being first and the first being last in the kingdom of heaven. So, when Jesus says to “make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome us into the eternal homes,” the “they” he is referring to is the poor. Those who interpret the parable this way point out that even though Jesus says “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth,” he also acknowledges that such wealth will not last – various translations have “when it is gone” or “when you fail,” showing that the goal of Jesus’s statement is not for us to put our trust in riches, but to point out that what will last is what we have done with our riches. If we “make friends” with the poor – even through unjust dealings – then the poor will be in a place to advocate for us in heaven when we arrive, saying, yes, these people offered drink to the thirsty and food to the hungry. Those who had been “last” in this world having been made “first,” they will be in a place of power in the next world and will be able to welcome us in if we have done right by them in this world.

One issue with that interpretation is that it still does not explain why we should make friends with the poor by means of dishonest wealth – couldn’t we do the same thing with honest wealth, with “clean” money rather than “dirty” money? And it’s also not clear that the debtors that the manager assists in this parable really were “the poor.” Given the fact that they had such large amounts of debt, they were probably also fairly rich farmers, so that forgiving their debts would hardly be an example of Robin Hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor, but more like Robin Hood taking from the king and giving to the aristocrats. And it doesn’t deal with the fact that, however much the manager’s cooking of the books may have helped the master’s debtors, the manager was ultimately acting out of self-interest – a strange thing to hold up as an example, given how important right intentions are in other places in the scriptures.

At least one interpreter has suggested that the key to this puzzling parable is to read Jesus’s words sarcastically. [2]  It is worth remembering that we do not have any indications of tone of voice in the scriptures, and we all know how much difference tone of voice can make in our understanding of any given statement! For instance, a few weeks ago when we read the Gospel passage where Jesus tells his followers they must hate father and mother, wife and children – basically everyone except Jesus himself – and then Father Bob got up during the announcements and told you all he hated you, everyone laughed because we could tell by his tone of voice and facial expression that he was joking. But imagine if you just read somewhere that the rector told the congregation he hated them! With no tone of voice or context, such a statement could be easily misunderstood! And that’s what some interpreters suggest has happened to this statement from Jesus. Most interpreters have tended to read this statement “straight” – that is, at face value, as genuinely expressing what Jesus meant to say. But what if he was being sarcastic?

“Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” Sure, go ahead and try that. Use your dirty money to strike deals for yourselves. Look out for number one and make sure someone always owes you something. But what good will those friends be to you when that money is gone? Will they be there to welcome you into the eternal homes? In the words of Dr. Phil, “How’s that working for you?”

Of course, we really have no way to know for sure whether Jesus was being sarcastic or not. (Perhaps this is one area where the oral tradition would have been more helpful than the written Scriptures!) And all of these interpretations have some point or another that doesn’t quite “fit” or make sense.

I thought there might be something to this parable that we Christians were missing because of some cultural blinders, so I turned to the Jewish Annotated New Testament, a collection of commentary on the Christian scriptures from the perspective of Jewish scholars and rabbis, of which Amy-Jill Levine is a primary editor. After a few notes connecting some of the Greek words used in this parable to similar words elsewhere in the New Testament and a few brief comments about the differing opinions as to who the “lord” and “master” represent in the parable, that resource summed things up with this helpful piece of insight: “This parable defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking that if A-J Levine can’t even figure this one out, it’s probably time for me to throw in the towel!

But then that got me to thinking. Perhaps there’s a lesson for us in the fact that this parable “defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” There is a tendency for us as human beings to want to be able to explain things – it’s the impulse that drives both scientific discovery and our religious pursuits. We want to know God and understand the universe, and we like anything that makes us feel like we’re succeeding in that regard. We like the parables that are easy to understand because they give us a sense that we have things figured out, that we can summarize the mind of God with a nice little story about the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, where the message is, “we screw up, God forgives us, and we all live happily ever after.” Those stories make us feel good and safe, and rightly so. But parables like this one, that “defy any fully satisfactory explanation,” remind us that we cannot wrap God up in a nice little box and place him on a shelf next to the other subjects we’ve mastered, like arithmetic and spelling. In a sense, God himself “defies any fully satisfactory explanation.”

So these confusing parables remind us, then, that we do not fully understand God. They are reminders of our limitations, and an opportunity for us to admit that we don’t know, that we don’t understand. In the Zen Buddhist tradition, students are often given koans to work on by their teachers. A koan is a kind of parable, but often more like an unanswerable riddle. A famous one that you may have heard before is, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” They are meant to boggle the mind, to circumvent linear, rational thought, and to encourage the student to open her mind to a nonrational, intuitive response to the question – or simply to “be” in a state of unknowing, and to be comfortable with that.

I believe that Jesus often chose to answer people’s questions with parables rather than direct answers as a way to encourage a similar kind of response – stop trying to explain it all and figure it all out. See if you can get the sense of the point I’m trying to make from the gist of this story. Or maybe just take a step back and remember that God is God and you are not – and you don’t have to figure it all out.

So what did Jesus mean when he said we should make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth? The collective wisdom of the church throughout the centuries is: we don’t know. And perhaps that’s a pretty healthy response for us to have sometimes when speaking about the mind of God.


[1] Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002. Summarized in outline form on GoBibleStudy.com, “The Hardest Parable: The Unjust Steward” (9.22.10), http://www.gobiblestudy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Parables_Grace_Capon_Unjust-Steward_Luke-16-1-131.pdf

[2] See Donald R. Fletcher, “The Riddle of the Unjust Steward: Is Irony the Key?” Journal of Biblical Literature, 1963, p. 15-30 (esp. pages 27-29). And some comments in this thread at Christianity Stack Exchange:  http://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/2220/what-is-the-parable-of-the-shrewd-manager-about