September 26, 1999

James R. Gorman

For too much of Christianity, the Christian faith is pretty much reduced to a mental exercise. That is to say, in order to become a Christian, you must believe with your mind things that are impossible to grasp with the mind only.

The great Jewish thinker, Martin Buber, noticed this as a fundamental difference between Jews and Christians. For Jews, faith means primarily a trusting relationship with God and within that trusting relationship, it is OK to leave many questions unanswered. Jews have this marvelous way of delighting in the question. For too many Christians, faith pretty much means belief. Belief in the sense of an intellectual affirmation of truth in which all hard questions are given easy answers.

Which leads to the bumper sticker, "Jesus is the ANSWER!"

As if life is made up of questions that can be answered with one word, or that nothing more is required by the deep questions about life than the one word, "Jesus". If that was all that was required, there would be no need for adult study programs, no need for church, and especially, no need for preaching! Horror the thought! Faith is more complex than that, more wonderful than that. It takes a community of faith to unpack the word "Jesus". Reducing his name to a bumper sticker demeans the great gift we have in Jesus and comes close to being a vain use of the Lord's name.

This idea of faith as an intellectual affirmation, Buber said, comes from Paul and I can understand how Buber comes to that conclusion. The passage we read this morning from Philippians is one of those that suggests that faith is mostly an intellectual exercise.

"Have this mind among you as it was in Christ Jesus . . ."

But I don't really think that that's what Paul meant entirely. Ours is a lived faith first of all. And the living of this faith is not a very intellectual exercise. Life's ambiguities cannot be overcome simply by uttering words that suggest our assent of the mind. The creed by itself doesn't offer salvation. God's ways are too mysterious for that. But creeds offer ways for us to formulate some excellent well-informed questions.

The great mystery of God is that God is at once intimate and remote; present and absent. God is as near and as visible as our breath on a winter's morning, and God is as distant and as beyond our understanding as the call of the loon on a north woods lake.

God is light, but there are times when that light, for reasons none of us are able to discern, is eclipsed. Anyone who has waited for hours in a hospital waiting room only to hear bad news knows about the eclipse of God. In such terrible moments, the one word "Jesus" is NOT the answer.

The ways and movements of God cannot be so easily contained by a simple uttering of words of belief. At some point, we quite simply put one foot in front of the other and begin to walk the walk of faith regardless of our many doubts and questions. The only way out of the eclipse of God is to trust that the eclipse is a temporary one, a small moment in time, and to begin to walk, trusting that God is near even though that nearness can at this moment be neither seen nor heard.

"Have this mind among you" does not mean believe with your head these things. Rather it means to be "of one mind." To be a community that trusts that this God will abide with us in the strangest and most wonderful ways. And that there is no god above this God, no lord above this Lord, no caesar above this King. Having "this mind among you" was no simple intellectual agreement about the truth. For in Philippi the confession that "Jesus is Lord" was not an easy declaration. It could, in fact, mean death.

Philippi was a Roman military colony. We don't have many of those in Wisconsin; cities that are entirely caught up in the military economy, like Subic Bay in the Philippines or Ft. Bragg in North Carolina. Perhaps the communities around Ft. Sheridan and the Great Lakes Naval Station north of Chicago might have been like the military city of Philippi. The citizens were very patriotic. They were loyal to Caesar and proud of their Roman citizenship and willing to be governed by Roman law. "Roman empire, love it or leave it" might have been their motto.

In the days of the anti-war demonstrations, Sally and I lived in the Washington, DC area where I had been stationed in the Army. Not only was that a perfect place to demonstrate against the policies of our government in Viet Nam, it was also a most difficult place, given the number of government and military residents there. Hardly anyone in the local church in which Sally and I were married and which we attended agreed with us about those things. Such was the world in Philippi. People you worked with, people in your own family, might have thought you more than a bit crazy to confess your faith in Jesus Christ.

The soldiers in Philippi, as elsewhere, took an oath of allegiance to Caesar as their only Lord when they entered the military. Their oath was called, interestingly enough, a sacramentum.

In this environment, the claim that Jesus is Lord was outrageous in the extreme and politically unhealthy and sometimes destructive to life-long friendships. Then to add to that claim that every knee--EVERY KNEE--shall bow and every tongue--EVERY TONGUE--confess in heaven and on earth and under the earth, that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the Glory of God the Father, was to compound the offense of the claim that Jesus is Lord.

This is not just a true and false test that you can pass with the right one-word answer. This is a way of life that each of us must work out with fear and trembling.

In the first chapter of his letter to the Philippians, Paul says, "God has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but suffering for him as well." For in Philippi, belief meant action. To declare one's faith was not just an idle intellectual exercise. There was no time to argue about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin or whether God could make a rock so big that he couldn't pick it up.

In those days, you couldn't just talk that talk, you had to walk that walk. Your faith was put into action just as soon as you made the confession of faith, because Caesar didn't really like the idea of his subjects having other Lords over their lives, much less confessing that their Lord was over all other lords.

The task in our own time is harder in some ways. We must make the connection between talking our faith and walking it in a way that the Philippians didn't. Caesar made sure that his subjects saw the connection between their intellectual statement and the physical and historical consequences of making such a claim of faith.

I've always loved the parable that Jesus tells about the two sons of the father that goes out into the vineyard. One says he will not go, but then does and the other promises to go but does not.

For Jesus, what you say with your mouth is not as important as what you do with your life, and what you believe with your mind is not as important as what your heart moves you to do.