An impressive television preacher equates faith with positive thinking and promises happiness, success, wealth, and health to those who live by his formula. A faith healer explains to a family which has just lost a mother that if she had just had enough faith, she would have lived. A business man who has gone to the top of his profession gives his testimony – a testimony which says that once he gave his life to the Lord, he was promoted time and time again, received raise after raise, and now owns the company – and he promises the same to those who have paid $100 to hear his testimony at a “successful living” seminar.
Our text for today presents quite a different picture of faith. According to the letter to the Hebrews, some “by faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, and put foreign armies to flight. Women received their dead by resurrection.” Now, many today would say, “See, their success was a result of their faith. If you have enough faith, then the sky’s the limit. You can have it all. Cast your bread upon the water and it will return to you a hundred fold.”
But then the letter to the Hebrews throws us a curve. By faith, “others were tortured, refusing to accept release. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, sawn in two, and killed by the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted and tormented.” Those are verses that Robert Schuller and his kind would rather not have in the Bible. Were such people failures? No, Hebrews says. They were men and women of faith who in their commitments to God paid the price of ultimate devotion.
So by faith you can conquer kingdoms, win in life, and even receive your dead by resurrection. And by faith you can suffer torture, imprisonment, persecution, and hideous forms of death. In other words, “success and failure” as the world understands these terms are meaningless when applied to a life of faith. And that realization gives quite a jolt to Christianity as it is popularly understood. As the Bible itself recognizes, such a naïve understanding has been around for quite a while.
As Jesus suffered on the cross, his tormentors taunted him with these words: “He trusts in God; let God deliver him now” (Matthew 27:43). In other words, if Jesus really had faith and if he was really God’s Anointed, then God would deliver him from his agony. The logical conclusion to such thinking is this: we can know our or another’s relation to God and whether we or another is true to God by examining the life in question. Pain, suffering, and abuse would mean that such a life was not trusting in God and on the wrong track. Happiness, success and health would mean that such a life was trusting in God and on the right track. Those who held such a view of faith went home from Calvary that dark day persuaded that Jesus did not trust in God, was not God’s Anointed, and thus was allowed to suffer a hideous death by a calculating God. And that should be enough to give all of us pause concerning the popular notion aired by the electronic church and preached from many a county seat church that faith always brings success, happiness, and health.
Some of the most faithful, trusting, loving Christians I have known in my life have endured more pain, disappointment, and sorrow than the worst criminals could possibly deserve. And some of the meanest, most selfish and heartless persons I have known have never even needed a Tums for the slightest inconvenience of indigestion.
The cross of Jesus Christ is a lesson for all ages. The notion that the consequences of faith are always or even predominately success cannot be substantiated by those who trust in a Crucified Messiah.
The cross of Jesus Christ is a lesson for all ages. The notion that the consequences of faith are always or even predominately success cannot be substantiated by those who trust in a Crucified Messiah.
Let’s bring all of this down to our lives today. Success and failure are not proper categories by which we can judge legitimate faith. Fred Craddock, that great Disciples preacher and New Testament scholar has offered a perspective that we may find helpful. Craddock says that faith has its “because of” and its “in spite of.” We trust because of and we trust in spite of.
Our trust in God is made easy by the “because of” in life. Whether it be the grandeur of creation, the beauty of the arts, the hidden hand of Providence, or the loving and inspiring relationships we have all enjoyed, at times faith has its “because of” and legitimately so. For most of us, faith’s “because of” is connected to relationships with which we have been blessed. Maya Angelou, the poet and novelist who read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Clinton’s inauguration shares the following about the “because of” in her faith: “One of my earliest memories of Mamma, my grandmother, is a glimpse of a tall, cinnamon-colored woman with a deep, soft voice, standing thousands of feet up in the air on nothing visible. That incredible vision was a result of what my imagination would do each time Mamma drew herself up to her full six feet, clasped her hands behind her back, looked up into the distant sky, and said, ‘I will step out on the word of God.’ The depression, which was difficult for everyone, especially so for a single black woman in the South tending her crippled son and two grandchildren, caused her to make the statement of faith often. She would look up as if she could will herself into the heavens, and tell her family in particular and the world in general, “I will step out on the word of God. I will step out in the word of God.” Immediately, I could see her flung into space, moons at her feet and stars at her head, comets swirling around her. Naturally, since Mamma stood out on the word of God, and Mamma was over six feet tall, it wasn’t difficult for me to have faith. I grew up knowing that the word of God had power.” (Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now, pp. 73-74).
We all have our “because of” in faith. Perhaps the reason for our faith is rooted in the love and devotion of our parents or grandparents, our spouses, our friends. Most if not all of us have known people whose whole lives would be inexplicable if God did not exist – persons of sacrificial love, contagious joy, abiding faithfulness, and enduring hope. And because of them, our faith has its “because of.” And possibly because of us, others will find the “because of” in their own faiths. This “because of” in faith is real and should be celebrated by us as we walk hand in hand with the Lord.
But faith also has its “in spite of.” As a pastor I have seen more than my share of the “in spite of” in the faiths of others. Whether it be cancer, strokes, heart disease, jobs lost, or loved ones taken before their time, I have seen the “in spite of” in the lives of others.
But one example stands out above all others in my experience. When Susan, Miriam, and I lived in Texas, we attended a Presbyterian church where I preached on the average of once a month. This small church was a sanctuary church – a congregation which provided safety and refuge for Central American refugees when our own government’s policies in that region were resulting in incredible suffering and unconscionable injustice. Maria and Diego, one of the couples who came to us, were beautiful, loving and gentle people with a nightmare in their background. Maria was connected with the Catholic Church in El Salvador where she taught peasant children in a small village. Teaching peasants to read and write is a dangerous vocation in that part of the world. The authorities prefer the peasants to be illiterate and unquestioning of the status quo which caused them such suffering. Maria was married, and she and her husband along with their children lived with her parents. One night one of the death squads sponsored by the government which terrorized El Salvador came to her house. Before her eyes, her husband, parents and children were shot and hacked to pieces. She was repeatedly raped. When the men had exhausted themselves, they stepped outside of the house to enjoy a smoke before returning to rape Maria again and then to kill her. But Maria was able to escape through a concealed door constructed for such an eventuality. She fled to Mexico where, after many months, she met Diego. He had been conscripted into the Guatemalan military where he was forced to kill peasant families. When he could no longer obey these evil orders, he too ran to Mexico. Maria and Diego married and then arrived in Texas. They shared their testimony about the great suffering in Central America, but they also shared their faith in God, sometimes at great risk to themselves. They were constantly in danger of deportation by the INS. While in Texas, Maria gave birth to their first child, a child of hope in two life-times of suffering beyond what any of us can possibly imagine. They had faith “in spite of” – in spite of the worse the world can do to human beings. And their faithfulness to their God and to the justice they sought for their people back home carried with it the possibility of even greater suffering.
Our faith also exists “in spite of” – perhaps not in such a dramatic was as that of Maria and Diego, but any authentic pilgrimage of faith will have its “in spite of” as well as its “because of.”
I believe Fred Craddock is right when he writes, “Faith has its reasons, to be sure, but it also bears its wounds.” That is the faith commended in the book of Hebrews. That is the faith that people like Maria and Diego have embraced. And that is the only faith which corresponds to the realities of our world and our lives and to the call of our God. And the testimony from Abraham and Sarah to Peter and Mary to Maria and Diego is that such a faith not only endures, it flourishes as we are nourished in our walk with God.
Communion: Maya Angelou wrote, “Many things continue to amaze me, even well into the sixth decade of my life. I am startled or taken aback when people walk up to me and tell me they are Christians. My first response is the question, ‘Already?’ It seems to me a life-long endeavor to try to live the life of a Christian.”
The sacrament of communion recognized this pilgrimage we call faith. The bread and wine nourish us for every station of the journey, providing us a banquet of joy celebrating the “because of” and renewing our strength as we face the “in spite of” in our faith in this Crucified and Risen Christ.
Commission: So, are you already a Christian? In one sense, no. It takes a lifetime, and perhaps even more, to be a follower of Jesus. We are all on a pilgrimage in which we shall never arrive this side of glory. But in another sense, we are all Christians. Why? Because in Christ we have already been claimed as God’s own. As we go out into the world, may we grow in the likeness of Jesus as we feel those everlasting arms of God hold us with eternal affirmation. Amen.
