Psalm 27 and Acts 16:25-34
Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
“What must I do to be saved?” the jailer
asked, trembling in fear. “Believe on the Lord Jesus,” Paul and Silas answered,
“and you will be saved, you and your household” (Acts 16:31). Believe
on the Lord Jesus. All you need do is believe. Belief is the
ticket, the key to the door that leads to salvation. How many times have we heard similar words
from countless evangelists and revivalist preachers? Perhaps that’s how you came to Christ,
perhaps that’s how you came to believe.
In a moment of decision, you gave your life to Christ, you first
believed on him, and everything changed.
Or—maybe, not. Perhaps there was no moment of decision, no
altar call at a tent meeting. Perhaps
you always knew that God loved you and that you believed in God and believed in
Jesus. Perhaps you grew up in the church
and belief came naturally. That was my
experience growing up in the church. I
joined the church in ninth grade. I took
my public profession very seriously, but, in many respects, I was going through
the motions with my peers. I was
sincere. I confessed my belief in Jesus
Christ as my Lord and Savior, and I remember that amazing moment when I was finally allowed to
share in Communion, to taste the bread and drink the cup. But, years later, I felt that I needed to
make a more personal, public confession.
I really had to declare my belief, in a moment of decision that was
truly mine. We were on a family vacation
in the mountains of Kentucky, and I noticed that a local church—Plum Creek
Baptist Church in Taylorsville—was having a revival all week. So, I went by myself one night, and then the
next, and on that night, I responded to the altar call, walked down the aisle,
and made a public confession of faith.
It was very moving. Looking back
now, it appears that I was an odd young adult, and I’m not really sure what
that was all about. My understanding of
belief and the faith, today, are certainly very different.
The story of Paul and Silas in prison is
dramatic, moving, powerful. But I think
one should be cautious about building an entire theology of belief on Acts
16:31, “Believe on the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.” And while many do come to belief through
altar calls and revivals or through life-changing moments of decision, I think
we need to be cautious here, too. This text appears to place the onus of
responsibility for salvation upon the individual to decide, to choose, to
believe. This view places too great a
burden upon belief—because what
happens, when, inevitably we entertain doubts or have our suspicions, or when
we enter into a dark night of the soul and God is nowhere to be found? What happens when we can no longer believe,
or no longer believe the way we once did?
What then?
Perhaps it’s worse for us Protestants. As a Presbyterian, I grew of hearing that we Protestants
stress faith over works and that “those” Roman Catholics privilege works over
faith. I was told that we can’t earn God’s
favor through good deeds or good works. We
know these words from Ephesians, “For by grace you have been saved through
faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest
anyone should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).
Yes, we are saved by grace, but faith
in that grace is also required—and that’s up to me. Faith, belief is what is
required. That’s what I was taught. My full belief was required in order for
grace to be activated, which meant there was no room for doubt. Doubt was a slippery slope which could lead
the way to unbelief, thus putting my salvation at risk.
Then,
at Princeton Seminary, I sensed that something was wrong in all of this. My desire to have complete faith, to fully
believe had become an unbearable burden.
Then it dawned on me: belief itself
had become a work—I was trying to
“save” myself through my efforts of believing!
And then my world was blown open reading Romans 3 one evening in my
room, room 406 in Alexander Hall. It was
verse 26, “God is righteous and that God justifies the one who has faith in
Jesus.” But the Greek isn’t so straightforward.
It could be translated another way, “God is righteous and that God justifies
the one who has the faith of Jesus.”[1] Faith in Jesus versus faith of Jesus Christ. Everything hangs on that preposition. Faith in
Jesus requires something from me, something that I have to do. The faith of Jesus refers to something done for
me, which I’m invited to receive and accept, invited to affirm Christ’s faith, accepting his
faithfulness, which has been imputed to me. Christ’s faith/faithfulness becomes activated
in me when I accept this to be true.
Whether I believe it or not is a moot point; it’s Christ’s faithfulness
that has already saved me. Prior to this, grace was a theological idea
that I understood conceptually, that I could intellectually assent to, but then
it became real for me, it became an inner experience at that moment.
One of the topics I was asked to
preach on this summer is what happens when we lose our belief in God and
Jesus. I’m not sure what is meant by
“what happens” in the question. Is there
anxiety around losing faith? Is there
anxiety over the waning of belief and the state of one’s soul after one’s death? If one believes that salvation is contingent
upon belief, then lack of belief, loss of belief would generate a crisis of considerable
anxiety and fear. Then, to remedy the
situation, you would have to either do whatever it takes to shore up your
belief, reaffirm what you believe or, failing that, full of doubts, reject
belief altogether and become an agnostic or atheist or whatever. There are many
ways we can go with this question, but I want to focus on the problem of belief itself.
Somewhere in the long history of the
Church we moved from understanding the Christian life as an ongoing experience
of the risen Lord to the Christian life as subscribing to particular beliefs about Christ. A lived, dynamic, transforming experience
devolved into a concession of beliefs and ideas about Christ that one needs to
confess—or else. Getting the
ideas/beliefs right mattered most. Over
time, the faith became overly intellectualized, and overly rationalized (especially in Protestant/Presbyterian circles). And in evangelical/fundamentalist
communities, the obsession over belief is even worse, and has seriously distorted
the nature of the faith. The Christian
philosopher, Peter Rollins argues, “Once the truth affirmed by Christianity is
approached as an object to contemplate”—that is, once it is placed “out there”
at a distance and objectified, turned
into a series of ideas that we scrutinize, debate and argue, and then decide
whether or not we think it’s true, based upon what we consider rational—“it is
treated as something that can be tested in the same way as any other
propositional claim.”[2] As a
result, “the truth affirmed by Christianity ends up being treated like any
other set of factual claims, claims that are provisional and open to being
proven wrong.” This way of understanding Christian truth places it on “very
tentative and fragile foundation.”[3]
When we reduce Christian truth to
ideas, we can say, “I believe in God” or “I believe Jesus was the Son of God”
or “I believe Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior,” and think that’s good
enough. Then we can go about living our
life, with little or no evidence that such confessions have made any difference. This is called functional atheism.
Jesus
wasn’t a philosopher who came with new ideas to form a new religion. As the embodied Word of God, he offered
himself, the totality of his life given in love, through a deep relationship
with the people who followed him. Those who followed him and believed in
him—or, better than belief, those who trusted
in him (the language preferred by John’s Gospel)—were implicated in their
faith, they were immersed in it, they were overwhelmed by it. They were too busy living it, experiencing
it, to be worried about belief. When we
talk about belief, we’re several steps removed from the core, originating experience. The Christian life is not essentially a
belief system, it’s a way of life rooted and grounded in the experience of love.
There was a time when I thought knowing what we
believe and why was enough. There was a time when I thought getting the ideas
right, getting the theology right was the cure for what ails the Church. I’m
not so sure today. Don’t get me wrong,
ideas matter, good theology matters. There’s a lot of loopy theology
out there in the Church these days that’s doing considerable damage and
inflicting great harm.
What I’ve come to know, though, is this: Tending
belief is high-maintenance. Beliefs require verification. Proof. Then defense. It requires protection. Defending
belief involves argument. Then we get
into debate. Soon, we’re in the belligerent
world of beliefs. What I’ve found in the belligerent world of beliefs is that
for these folks, belief has little to do with the reality and experience of God,
they frequently lack love and grace and compassion. Instead, the obsession over belief has more to
do with embattled egos, beliefs that have become the extensions of frightened egos,
beliefs used as weapons by terrified egos against people or ideas that appear
threatening. All of this has absolutely nothing to do with the
gospel.
The Swiss
psychiatrist Carl Jung (1871-1961) understood this. Writing near the end of his
life, he said, “Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and
where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of
grace may depart equally miraculously.”[4] The
world has grown tired of beliefs. The world knows the costly price
of dogmatic assertions and fundamentalisms of every kind. And the
world has lost faith, is quickly losing faith in what the Church believes
because the Church fails to really embody it—incarnate it, enflesh it—in its
practice.
So what happens when we no longer
believe in God or Jesus? I, personally, don’t think one’s salvation
is at risk. That’s my view—and, I’m not suggesting that it should be yours (of
course). So, don’t call the heresy
police on me. I do think, though, that I’m
on pretty good theological ground.
I
agree with Peter Rollins who cautions against turning God, or even Jesus, into
an idea or fact, into an ideology that we subscribe to intellectually. “God is not a problem to be solved,” he says,
“but rather a mystery to participate in.”[5] With this claim, he’s intentionally riffing
on Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) who said, “Life is not a problem to be solved,
but a reality to be experienced.” I’ve
come to sense that God is the Ground upon
which we live out and struggle with our beliefs and doubts. God desires that all people come to
experience the goodness of the Ground, the one in whom we live and move and
have our being (Acts 17:28). As we saw
in Jesus’ life, God desires that we enter in the fullness of life in and
through a dynamic, relationship with God, it’s the relationship that matters
most. This is what the heart
desires. We hear it in the cry of the
psalmist, “‘Come,’ my heart says, ‘seek his face!’ Your face, LORD, do I seek. Do not hide your
face from me” (Psalms 27:8-9). So that whether we believe in God or not, God
still believes in us. You might have
lost touch with Jesus, but he has never lost touch with you. Your path might have taken you far from the
courts of the Lord, you might be wracked by sin and shame and regret,
overwhelmed by doubt and anxiety and fear, but God knows where you are, for
there is no where we can flee from God’s presence, even if we feel like we’re
living in hell (Psalm 139:7-9). “Where
can I go from your spirit?” the psalmist asks.
We are being held by a love that will never ever let us go. Paul asked, “What can separate us from the
love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord?” The answer: Nothing!
Nothing! Not even our
unbelief. This truth is the Ground, the
Ground of the universe, the Ground upon which we can move confidently through
this world. That Ground is always there, it holds us and hold us up—we just
need to remember what we already really know.
So what if we are being held,
despite our faith and our doubt? What if we’re held in our faith and our doubt?
What if we’re being held by God even
when God feels very far away? The
Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross (1542-1591) knew this to be the case. In his encounter with the absence of God,
what he described as the “dark night,” he came to discover that absence is not really
absent, and that the darkness if not really dark. It was in the darkness that he discovered
God’s abiding presence. He came to love
the darkness that hides the living God. “Oh
night thou was my guide/ Oh night more loving than the rising run/ Oh night
that joined the lover to the beloved one/ transforming each of them into the
other.”[6] God holds us in our doubt.
The church can also hold our
doubts. When we stand to confess the creed,
we stand for the entire church, even for those who cannot stand but want to.
When we live out the faith, we are also bearing witness to Christ on behalf of
those who can’t. We’re affirming the faith, being strong in our commitments,
when people are wavering or doubting or have lost their way. God’s truth
abides, whether we believe in it all or not.
The church remains being the church, and we will be here offering
sanctuary whenever the prodigal returns home.
And sometimes our doubt and
waywardness are simply a matter of forgetting.
We need help remembering who we are and whose we are. We need help remembering what is always
true. We need help remembering what is
already true. God as Ground is always
there. God’s faithfulness is always
sure. We are not alone in this
universe. Nothing can separate us from
the love of God. The Holy Spirit is our
companion along the way. These are
things we need to remember, to remember what is always true. Sometimes we just
need help remembering what we already know or used to know.
There was once “a little girl, aged
3… the firstborn and only child in her family, but now the mother was pregnant
again and the little girl was very interested in this pregnancy and very
excited to have a new brother or sister.
Shortly after the parents brought her baby brother home from the hospital,
the little girl approached her parents and made a request: She wanted some time
alone with the new baby in his room with the door shut. She wanted to ‘talk to him.’ The parents were understandably perplexed by
this request and knowing something about how older siblings can feel quite angry
at being displaced by the birth of new brothers or sisters, they were
cautious. However there didn’t seem to
be anything [nefarious] in their daughter’s request and there was also an
intercom in the baby’s room so they would know immediately if anything untoward
was going on.
The
moment finally arrived and the little girl was shown into the baby’s room and
the door closed, with both parents rushing nearby to the intercom to hear what
this ‘conversation’ might be. They heard their little girl’s feet walking across
the room; then there was a pause. And
then they heard her say to her three day old brother, “tell me about God; I’ve
almost forgotten.”[7]
[1]
This is just one of several places throughout Paul’s
writings, especially in Romans, where “faith in Jesus” could also be translated
“faith of Jesus.” A good annotated version
of the Bible, especially the Oxford Annotated New Revised Version, clearly
notes these alternate readings.
[2] Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of
Betrayal: Toward a Church Beyond Belief (Paraclete Press, 2008), 91.
[3] Rollins, 93.
[4] C. G. Jung, “The Undiscovered Self (Present and Future),” Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 10 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1978), par. 521.
[5] Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church
Beyond Belief (2008)
[6] St. John of the Cross,
“The Dark Night,” variant translation by Loreena McKennit, “The Dark Night of
the Soul.”
[7] Recounted in Marcus Borg, The
Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 113.
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