Hilton Head Island, SC – October 20, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 43:14-21; Mark 9:14-29
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” – Mark 9:24 (RSV)
That may seem like a very odd question to ask. Perhaps many if not most Christians would answer, “Of course faith is a necessity for a Christian! What kind of a cockamamie question is that?” But to those who would huffily say that, I would another question: “What sort of faith? Who determines it? Is there a minimum standard, or is there a failing level beneath which one cannot fall and still be considered a Christian? And who sets the standard?”
It should be obvious to everyone that not all Christians hold fast to one universally recognized statement of faith. In general, Catholics have somewhat different beliefs from Protestants or Eastern Orthodox, and conservative or “Evangelical” Protestants and Mainline or liberal Protestants generally have different sorts of faith from one another.
Up until a hundred years ago or so, most people in most individual denominations believed more or less the same things, because they went through a confirmation class as teenagers and were instructed in the doctrines or dogmas of that particular denomination. Furthermore, most people back then were members of denominational congregations, not nondenominational ones. Some denominations still have prolonged classes for their young people or for adults who are joining the church for the first time, but that has become fairly rare for a whole variety of reasons, which I will not take time today to address. Suffice it to say that currently on either side of the Atlantic Ocean or anywhere else in the world, there are probably droves of Christians who attend church regularly who haven’t a clue about what they are expected to believe, and who believe whatever they choose to believe, thank you very much.
This sermon will be what the ancient rabbis would call pilpul, which means “stringing beads.” I am going to be saying many things about faith, but they are not necessarily connected at all. A few months ago I decided to preach this sermon, and now I have to try to figure out why I did that, As I was preparing to write the sermon, in my appalling scrawl I wrote down thirteen different statements I wanted to address, but they may or may not be related to one another. They are just beads, and I am going to do my best to string them in an acceptable fashion.
So let us begin. If faith is a necessity for a Christian (and at this point that is still an open question), how much faith is enough faith? Does God require a minimum amount? And if so, what is the minimum? If we were Catholics or Hardshell Baptists or Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, we would have been instructed in what constitutes enough faith, but we aren’t, so we weren’t.
I can only tell you this: Through over half a century of being a pastor, I have known a number of people who attended the churches I served who admitted to me with astonishing regularity that they had little or no “faith” at all, meaning the kind of affirmations which most Christians would associate with being integral to “the Christian faith.” They apparently live Christian lives with little or no Christian “faith” to generate that. Here I’m no longer talking about denominational identification faith statements; I am just talking about very general considerations, such as belief in God or Jesus Christ or salvation (however that is defined, and it is defined in many different ways), or the Trinity (don’t get me started), or whatever other “basic beliefs” you think should be included in a minimum laundry list of Christian beliefs.
Furthermore, there are some Christians who are convinced that those kinds of issues are not what Christianity is really all about anyway. Instead, it is what they do that matters to them, not what they believe or what is the nature of their faith. (We talked about that three weeks ago when the Letter of James was the biblical passage, so we don’t need to go over all that again.)
In addition, for some people, faith ebbs and flows just like the twice-daily tidal shifts at the beach, except that these human ebbs and flows take much longer. Sometimes their faith is strong, and sometimes it is weak. They say there are no atheists in the foxholes. Sometimes foxholes are probably one of the most productive environments for creating atheists. I’m sure that if you’re getting shot at by people you don’t know and who don’t know you, it can be an enormous threat to what you theretofore have held near and dear. Foxholes may be great faith-producers or faith-destroyers.
Many young adults drift away from faith in their twenties and thirties, but if they marry and have children, they often return to their religious roots. Then, when the nest is empty, they make take another long hiatus from faith, or at least from religion. When they are getting old, they may return to religion, in effect preparing to depart this world on the best terms possible.
Speaking of religion, about which I will say more next week, Jews have an advantage over Christians in the “religion” department. Many Jews have little or no faith in God at all. Nevertheless they consider themselves to be as Jewish as the Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel. As you probably know, anyone whose mother is a Jew is considered a Jew by all other Jews, whether or not they ever attend synagogue or were bar- or bas-mitzvahed. The reason for that is that being Jewish can have either or both an ethnic and a religious dimension.
That is not the case for Christians. If either your mother or father were Christians, that doesn’t automatically make you a Christian. To be a Christian, most but not all Christians would declare, you must hold traditional Christian convictions of faith if you are to be included in the universal Christian community known as Christianity.
Our Old Testament reading was a passage from the prophecy of Isaiah. Biblical scholars say that there were at least two, and maybe even three or four, writers of this prophecy. Nearly all scholars agree that from the fortieth chapter of Isaiah on, someone other than the writer of the first thirty-nine chapters was doing the writing. And that person, they say, was with the Jewish captives in Babylon after the Babylonians destroyed the Jewish kingdom of Judah in the late sixth century BCE.
In Isaiah 43, Second Isaiah quotes God as saying that He is going to free the Jews from their captivity in Babylon. “For I will give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people” (43:20). According to the Hebrew Bible, God chose Israel twelve or thirteen centuries previously to that time via Abraham, and Isaiah proclaimed that God was not about to abandon His chosen people in Mesopotamia.
We Christians have never managed to convince ourselves that we are a chosen people. If anything, most of us think that we choose God, not that God chooses us. That’s what faith is, isn’t it --- an affirmation of God? Probably most Christians perceive it that way, but not all, just as not all Jews see themselves as believing, faithful Jews, but they still correctly insist they are Jews all the same.
One of the things I miss most in the COVID Incarceration is the forum we used to have after every service when we were in The Cypress. Now, because of the invisible, insidious virus, when the services here in the Jarvis Park Pavilion are finished, all of us quickly scatter to our cars, having tempted the fickle flagellations of the persistent plague long enough. I don’t blame anyone for that. However, in the forum, we always heard exactly what everyone thought. I have concluded, after leading forums (or fora in proper Latin) for over sixteen years, that we are anything but a community of acceptably-orthodox believers. We are a community of all-over-the-doctrinal-map believers and would-be believers and might-be-but-are-not-yet-and-might-never-be orthodox believers.
For some people, faith is easy. For others, it is really hard, bordering on impossible. Seemingly that is a fact. Humans are who we are. To some degree, we can change, but to another degree, we might never change. It is what it is. For some, it may always be what it has always been.
Our New Testament reading today is taken from the Gospel of Mark. Mark is the “Cliff Notes” Gospel. That is, it tells the most basic facts, without many literary flourishes or fancy language. The chronology of this story is exactly the same in Matthew and Luke. Jesus had just been with three of his disciples on what is called “The Mount of Transfiguration.” There they saw Jesus with Moses and Elijah, and Jesus became transformed before their eyes as a figure in a dazzling white robe. When the four men came down from the mountain, they encountered a father with a son who had a severe disability. Nevertheless, where Matthew and Luke describe this episode in only a few verses, surprisingly Mark takes a total of sixteen verses to describe what happened. Furthermore, Mark’s account includes one of the greatest texts in the whole Bible for people who aren’t sure their faith quite measures up to what it should.
In all three Gospels Jesus encountered a father whose son could not be cured by any of the nine disciples who were waiting for Jesus, Peter, James, and John to come down the mountain. So the father said to Jesus, “If you can do anything, have pity on us, and help us.” Jesus said --- and it almost sounds curt --- “If you can! All things are possible to him who believes!” This poor man desperately wanted someone to cure his son of his strange malady, and here was Jesus telling him that all he needed was faith. So the man cried out to Jesus, “I do believe, but help me in my unbelief!”
Sometimes our faith simply fails us, and we are painfully aware of its deficiencies. That was the situation of this father who was mentally and spiritually unstrung by the plight of his boy. So Jesus quickly healed the child of whatever was his infirmity.
We who hear this story have two choices upon hearing it. Either our faith tells us it happened exactly as we are told or our skepticism tells us it couldn’t have happened. The leap of faith, as Soren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich suggested, is a leap into the unprovable and unknowable from the standpoint of the skeptical and the incredulous. Today I am not asking you to believe that Jesus miraculously healed the boy. I am only attempting to say that in that situation those two choices are the only two anyone has.
Does God require us to have a particular kind of faith? Must we have the same kind of faith that we think the most faithful of Christians possess? I don’t think so. In fact, I’m certain that is not required. God wants us to have faith, He has been working on us our whole lifetime to have faith, but He does not demand that we affirm a Divinely Approved List of Faith Statements.
Circumstances can be either an impediment to faith or a producer of faith. I have known parents who lost children at a very early age whose faith was almost totally shattered by that unexpected death. I have also known parents who lost children whose faith somehow originated because of that terrible loss. The occurrences which ignite faith are unpredictable. God can use any happenstance to produce the small spark which evolves into Christian faith, but if so, we need to be open the moving of His spirit within us.
Our last hymn text was written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The hymn tune we will use is Rockingham Old. You may be more familiar with St. Crispin, although you probably aren’t familiar with the names of either tune. Still, you may know Rockingham Old from the Maundy Thursday hymn, “’Twas on that night when doomed to know/ The eager rage of every foe.” Or maybe not.
Anyway, “Strong Son of God, immortal Love” displays the unorthodox faith as well as the unusual poetic style of Tennyson. The same may be said of the Tennyson quote on the front cover of today’s bulletin: “And cling to faith beyond the forms of faith!” Tennyson was a religious man of sorts, but many might assume he was not a man of faith at all. However, both our hymn and that quote show him to be a person whose faith was constantly tested, but he remained faithful in his own way to his dying day. He was appropriately buried in Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey, near Chaucer and Browning.
Tennyson was the fourth of twelve children born to a Lincolnshire Anglican priest and his wife. His paternal grandfather was a wealthy lawyer who forced Tennyson’s father to go into the ministry. His father had mental and physical problems, and he died young. All of Tennyson’s siblings also were afflicted with serious mental and/or physical problems, as was Tennyson himself. His mother was left destitute, since the grandfather did little to assist the family. The poet was studying at Cambridge University when his father died, and he was forced to drop out. He had several books of poetry that were published during his lifetime, which made him famous, but not wealthy. He became a favorite of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and Prime Minister William Gladstone offered him a peerage, making him a member of the House of Lords, the first poet in British history to receive that honor.
Tennyson wrote hundreds of poems, both long and short. Many of them illustrate the perpetual challenge which faith represented to the gifted but haunted poet. Think about that as you sing the words he wrote, which reflect his own continuous struggle to maintain his faith.
Is faith a necessity for a Christian? As I said last Sunday, so I say again today: You’re a Christian. What do you think?