Sermon begins at 19:45
Adam Gopnik, a columnist for the New Yorker once wrote, “Our ancestors acknowledged doubt while practicing faith. We moderns are drawn to faith while practicing doubt.”
I’m moved to preach to you this morning about the kind of faith that the modern age requires.
St. Paul wrote to the Galations about the coming of Faith
That Jesus’ appearing, the Word becoming Flesh – as John’s Gospel says – was a revelation of a new relationship between God and humanity.
He says, “before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the Law until faith would be revealed.”
And so, the early Christian thinkers saw Jesus as solving a problem that kept some people from becoming children of God.
In the new world, we could all be adopted into the family of God.
The background to this discussion happens earlier on in Paul’s letter as it is obvious that Paul is answering questions and disputes among this new Christian community in Galatia.
It is apparent in Paul’s letter that another group of early Christian missionaries had visited and had slightly different ideas about what Christ’s message meant.
The presenting issues was this: Do we really have to be circumcized to be Christians?
The underlying struggle between Paul and his contemporaries – which we also see in the Acts of the Apostles – is the question of whether Christianity would be a type of Messianic Judaism, or whether it would be a total reform.
Paul’s answer was total reform; faith would be the ultimate arbiter of relationship with God, not the keeping of particular religious legal practices.
Now, this seemed to solve a lot of problems for the new converts. They didn’t have to become experts in a new legal code or be punished for forgetting or not fulfilling every minute detail.
Paul’s ultimate goal was to remove barriers to belonging. And this had precedence with Jesus, whose disciples were often questioned or ridiculed for ignoring certain observances,
And of course Jesus himself who was vilified for healing people on the Sabbath, because that meant he was doing work on the day of rest.
And so, Paul offers us a vision of a world where Faith is the thing that matters the most, not doing the works of the law.
What should surprise none of us is that eventually Christianity replaced works of the Jewish laws with works of faith.
In other words, Faith became a legal code of its own.
So, instead of having to prove yourself by keeping certain Jewish legal codes, you have prove yourself by showing that you believe.
In the pentacostal tradition, you have to prove you’re saved by speaking in tongues.
In born-again circles, you prove yourself by proclaiming Jesus as Lord and giving testimony about how you used to be bad until you found Jesus.
In more recent evangelical circles, you prove your faith by showing your prosperity and blessings.
In a lot of traditional denominational churches we prove our faith by never changing anything, not even the light bulbs.
(Though I’m happy to say that we at St. Andrew’s recently had all of our light bulbs changed)
In catholicism, it is often obligation and guilt that are the vessels of faith.
And for our atheist and agnostic brothers and sisters, who don’t have any use for religion, but whose valuation of good and evil are still suspiciously based on Judaeo-Christian values, the law of doubt has become faith.
If you can’t prove something objectively and scientifically, you must believe that it is unbelievable.
It seems that somewhere along the way between the time of Paul and today, we lost the idea of what Faith was actually meant to be;
Not a new law to replace a perfectly good set of practices that got generations of Jewish people closer to God,
But a new way of seeing relationship with God, an adoption into a relationship of mutual trust that doesn’t require acts of proof.
No: “God, I’ll know you’re really God if you do this.”
Or: “Christian, I’ll know that you believe if you do this.”
So if trying to take everything we know and wrap it up with a pretty little bow, is not what faith is supposed to be.
What does faith look like?
I had a friend the other day ask me if I knew why we celebrate the 12 days of Christmas.
She was very excited, because she and her family had been discussing it over the Christmas holiday.
Of course, it is the celebration of the coming of the wise men from the East to see Jesus;
The kings coming to bring gifts of kingship to the Prince of Peace.
In Christian tradition, and even in their names, these three mysterious men were seen as wise sages, who had all of the scientific knowledge of their day, who knew the astrological signs, and who followed a star.
As we were talking about the 12 days of Christmas, it occurred to me that this may be what Faith looks like; knowledge that can’t help but to seek.
People like Socrates, who is said to have declared, “I only know that I know nothing.”
But, this thought is not original to me.
W.H. Auden was a British-American poet from the twentieth century known for his secular poetry.
He was an intellectual, philosphical type of poet and he became well-known in the 1930’s for his poems on politics, morals, and love.
He was part of intellectual circles of artists and thinkers who thought of religion as the opiate of the masses.
He won a Pulitzer prize for his poem the Age of Anxiety in 1948, which explored the quest for meaning in an industrialized world that only gives value to people for their productivity.
It would hardly have been suspected that within this poet, a strong Christian faith would be found.
But, in 1942, Auden began work on a Christmas poem that baffled his intellectual friends, and challenged Christian believers to make Christmas more than what our material culture had turned it into.
The poem is over 1,500 lines, and it follows the Christmas story from the perspectives of each of its characters.
Each section is a deeply imbued exploration of the psyche of the individuals, who brought Jesus into the world and recognized His coming.
He has Mary deciding whether she can bear a child out of wedlock,
Joseph wondering if he can marry her,
Herod caring for the practicalities of empire building and the sacrifices that must be made to keep the disruption of a new prophet-child from causing political unrest.
And, he has several other characters, but for our purposes, he shows us the wise men, who despite their knowledge of all things, can’t help but be drawn to Bethlehem by the star.
Each wise person seeks what is beyond their knowledge, and this seeking is what is reckoned to them as Faith.
What I want to leave you with today is this thought;
In our age, where we have access to so much knowledge, it seems that when we reach the end of what we can know instead of seeking more,
We become content that we know all that is worth knowing or all that can be known.
And so, anything that goes beyond our certainties should be doubted.
What if we were like the wise men, who find that the end of knowledge is the beginning of faith, the beginning of a journey to an unlikely manger, and to a new Epiphany?
Maybe what is required for a modern faith is to break the shackles that we have placed around our own hearts; about certainty and about doubt; about law and about works of righteousness; about proving that we are good enough.
Maybe instead of living a life of doubt and seeking faith, we could live a life of faith that acknowledges doubt as Adam Gopnik suggested.
Maybe we just need to follow a star and see where it leads.
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