“The Future of Faith”

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Sunday August 8, 2010

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20

Psalm 50

Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16

There is a great deal of talk, these days, about faith.

Critics pen books and articles that seek to disparage and discredit the delusion called faith that is perpetrated by those who seek to delve deeply into the mystery of God. 

Some statisticians analyze the latest trends in participation in the institutions of organized religion, and conclude that faith is on the decline; while others note the radical increase and power of faith and of organized religion in the affairs of the world.  Popular pendulums swing back and forth in relation to whether it is politically expedient, or politically suicidal for a campaigning candidate to declare that their faith has had an impact on their views on public and social issues.  Cultural commentators either decry how much of an influence people’s faith has on their opinions and perspectives, or dismiss faith as an irrelevant and anachronistic perspective which no longer should be allowed in public debate.  For the past few weeks, the internet has been a-flurry with debates about author Anne Rice’s decision to quit Christianity – in the name of Christ – and whether her real problem was with the negative perspectives on women, homosexuality, and intellectual integrity that she found in the denomination of which she was a part.  All the while, people were debating what role religious people played in the unfolding debates about same-sex marriage in California and the rest of the United States.  Regardless of where we find ourselves on these, and a host of other issues, there can be very little doubt that faith continues to play an influential role in human affairs.

Many of these issues are related not only to faith, of course, but to the ways that it is practiced by the participants in organized religion.  Many, these days, seem to want Jesus without Christianity, Christ without the Church, the Head without the Body.

At the root of many of these modern debates about faith, however, is the question of whether one believes that there is a supreme being, a god, a personified form of universal and sovereign consciousness.  The question of whether we have faith is rooted in the question of whether we can give intellectual assent to the idea that there is a God. And, if and when we come to that belief, we are then confronted with questions about how we come to know who or what God is, and how do we determine how such a belief – how such a faith – should shape and influence our lives, our actions, our perspectives on the world and our treatment of others. 

This question of whether there is a god is a question that has been debated for centuries, if not millennia.  Throughout the course of recorded history, attempts have been made to either prove or disprove the existence of god by philosophers, theologians, scientists, great thinkers and great critics.  From Anselm’s ontological arguments for the existence of God, to Tillich’s suggestion that faith is, in a significant sense, defined by whatever is our ultimate concern, to Dawkins’ intellectually stultifying argument that the idea of God is as defensible and plausible as the idea that all things were created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster, people have been questioning and pondering the question of God’s existence for a very long time.  

And, to be perfectly honest, while it can be both interesting – and in many ways helpful (except, perhaps for the Flying Spaghetti Monster idea) – to read of these attempts and critiques, the reality is that the existence of God can neither be proved nor disproved by any system of thought that has yet been articulated. 

It is always interesting to remember that the Bible itself never seeks to offer a definitive proof of the existence of God; the Bible, instead, constructs its ideas and its narratives on the assumption of God’s existence, not the proof of it.

But if it is true that faith is supposed to mean the assent to the idea of the existence of God, and the Bible never offers us justification or proof of such an idea, what, then, does it mean to have faith, according to the Bible? 

Today’s suggested reading from the letter to the Hebrews offers to us one of the most powerful, the most inspiring and the most challenging definitions of faith that is to be found anywhere.  We do not know who the author of Hebrews was, nor do we have a clear idea about the individual or group to whom this text was written.  Unlike so many of the other documents in the New Testament – which identify both the author and the original recipients – there are no such attributions in Hebrews.  Instead, the letter to the Hebrews uses many of the images and themes from Jewish history – the concept of the priesthood, the theology of the covenant, the understanding of the sacrificial system and the example of many of the great heroes of faith from Jewish history – to explore the meaning of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. 

And it is in this context that we find the wonderful definition of faith that Hebrews sets before us for our consideration. 

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

While such a statement can roll off our tongues quite easily, it is actually quite a complex idea.  It suggests to us that faith is not simply an intellectual assent to the idea of the existence of God; but rather that faith is an orientation to life – and, in fact, an orientation to the future – that is rooted in hope and in trust.  To be a person of faith – according to this passage – is to be a person whose view of life, of the world, of the church, and of the future, is rooted in an assurance of those things that they are hoping for.

To suggest that faith compels us to face the future with hope challenges most of our visions of the future.  So often, our view of the future is bereft of hope and of trust.  We look at our own lives, and think that the challenges that we personally are seeking to address and overcome are insurmountable and that the best years of our lives must lie behind us; hence the strange and silly quest to do anything to make ourselves feel, act and look young.

Or we look at the state of the world and its future, and worry about what kind of human community that our children will have, all the while longing for a return to some previous, supposedly simpler, golden age in the past. 

Or we look at our treatment of the environment, and envision a planet which is soon to be unable to sustain life as we know it. 

Or, perhaps most dangerously, we even try to assess the health and future vitality of the church, with a vision that is almost entirely rooted in anxiety and uncertainty about what the future will be like. 

In these, and in so many ways, we tend to look to the future of our lives, our world, and even the church with more despair than optimism, with more uncertainty than trust, with more anxiety than confidence. 

And then we read this passage from Hebrews.  Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

And we are called to remember that to be people of faith means that we are a people who face the future – not with despair, not with pessimism, not with anxiety, not with fear – but with hope. 

So what is the reason for this hope?  The reason for this hope is because we believe that the past, the present and the future are held in the hands of a God who loves us, who loves the world, who loves the church, and who has the power to transform the most troubling and broken moments into opportunities for grace and love to be revealed in this world. 

The question that we must ask ourselves, therefore, if we are going to be a people of faith, is not ‘do we believe that there is a God?’   Rather, the question that we must ask ourselves is ‘what is it that we hope for?’  After all, if faith is the assurance of things hoped for, we must be aware of what it is that we are hoping for.

And we must seek to align our hopes with God’s intentions.  After all, there are many things that we can hope for, and in which we can seek to place our trust.  And, in this, we might discover the challenge that lies at the heart of this verse.  That is, there are many things, in this world, that we can hope for.  We can place our hopes in the acquisition of wealth, or fame, or status, or comfort, or power, or success.  All of these options lie before us – and all of these things can be the object of our hope.  And all of these things will not only fail us, but they will fail our world, for they are idols which compete for our allegiance, for our loyalty, for our time, for our faith.

Our calling, instead, is not to hope for whatever we want, and expect that God is going to do what we want.  Faith is not, ultimately, about viewing God as some universal dispensing machine who gives us whatever we ask for simply because we ask for it.  Rather, our calling is to seek to set God’s intentions for our lives ahead of our agendas, and then to live in the hope that God’s intentions will be fulfilled – because faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things not seen.

So what are God’s intentions -- God’s hopes -- for our lives, for the church and for the world?

It is, of course, impossible to list God’s intentions for every one of our lives – that is a task that must be pondered by each one of us in the depths of our own times of prayer and contemplation – but there are a number of general statements that can be made about every one of our lives. 

For example, it is safe to say that God wants each and every one of our lives to be shaped by love – for our family members, for our neighbours, for our friends, for our co-workers, for those that we love and for those that we would otherwise view and treat as our enemies.  Such a love requires us to pursue just and right relations between ourselves and others; it requires that we forgive when we have been wronged; it necessitates the establishment of ethical systems in which we relate to others.  But in all of these things, God gives to us not only the command to love, but a Spirit that will inspire that love for others.

If we are honest with ourselves, we cannot help but admit that there are times when we find this idea of love too idealistic and naïve – how can we, for example, love or forgive the person who has done such a terrible thing to us, or to people that we love?  Love can be the greatest challenge of all – and yet, this is the hope towards which we must strive to orient our lives.  I may not be able to summon the courage or the power to love or to forgive that person right now, but my faith inspires me and compels me to live in the assurance that my hope to live in love will be fulfilled.  To resign myself to hatred, by contrast, is to lose any sense of hope that God’s grace can transform that relationship into one in which love can be revealed.

And what is true of our own lives is equally true of the church.  Our hopes for the church may be many things, but God’s intention for the church is to form a community, in this world, in which grace, peace, justice, joy, kindness, holiness, and compassion are completely evident and extended to all people, all of which emerge out of our shared allegiance to Jesus Christ.  As a result, the church should be known as a place where all people are treated with all of the dignity, respect and love that they deserve as children of God.

God’s desire and hope for the church is that it might be an enlightening and transforming presence in the world – a presence that enlightens the world, like a light shining in darkness; a presence that transforms the world, like yeast transforms the dough in which it is placed.  Churches, therefore, should be communities that bring taste, quality, dignity and compassion into the communities in which they are placed.  We all know that the reality of the church so often fails to match that divine intention – but we live in the hope that the One who began a good work in us will carry it to completion.

But God’s hope is not only for our lives, and it is not only for the church.  God’s hope is also for the world. After all, the Gospel of Jesus Christ makes the bold declaration that God actually so loved the world, and that God will allow nothing – not even death itself – to stand in the way of that love.  This love invokes a vision of the world that is not destined for destruction, but rather of a vision of a world that is saved and transformed into a place of goodness; a place of justice; a place of grace; a place where the divisions between people and nations are healed; a place where the gift of creation itself is cherished and restored to fullness.  Truly biblical faith, therefore, is meant to shape our hope for this world as well as for our lives – and to influence the way that we treat ourselves, one another and this wondrous world in which we live as we orient our lives towards a future that is shaped by God’s hope, God’s intentions, God’s vision.

As a people who have been claimed by the Gospel, may it therefore be our prayer that we will truly be a people of faith – a people who are shaped by hope for our lives, for the church and for the world – in the knowledge that we live and move and have our being in the One whose love assures us that such hope will not be in vain.  In other words, in a world so often warped by despair, by doubt and by discouragement, may we become a people with a faith that is both grounded and inspired by the assurance of things hoped for, and a conviction of things not seen.