“Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” …Jesus answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table” (Matthew 15:21-28).
I would like to take as my subject a single word, FAITH.
What is it?
Where does it come from?
Who can have it?
How do you know you have it?
Saint Paul, arguably one of the greatest theological minds ever, said this about faith: it’s what saves us. Martin Luther, writing some 1500 years after the time of Saint Paul, went a little farther to say, faith alone saves us. When Paul said it, he was probably in a jail cell, locked up for preaching the Gospel, which, at that time, was equal to speaking out against the authorities. Paul didn’t have anything against the authorities. In his letter to the church at Rome, the same letter in which he wrote, faith saves us, Paul also wrote,
“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval, for it is God’s agent for your good.”
Romans, chapter 13
Paul will go on to say that, for this same reason, everyone should pay their taxes, giving revenue to whom revenue is due, and honor to whom honor is due.
It would be easy, I suppose, to take Paul’s words as blanket approval of government. Many have taken Paul this way, as someone who equated being patriotic with being Christian. But one need not look any farther than to what happened in Germany in the 1920s, or way down south in America in the 1960s, to see the atrocities that come from Christians confusing love of country with love of God. When this happens, people who say they love Jesus, risk becoming complicit in killing people who are just like Jesus. We’re not just talking about the fact that at the time of the Holocaust in Germany, Jews made up less than 1% of the population, while Catholics and Protestants, those who called themselves Christian, made up 99% of the population.[1] Nor are we just talking about the fact that in Mississippi in 1964, members of the Klu Klux Klan, White Knights as they were called, responsible for lynching black people and burning crosses, met in the churches where their leaders attended on Sundays. What we’re talking about is how easily we scare in a world where faith hardly ever seems like enough to save us.
What we’re talking about is how easily we scare in a world where faith hardly ever seems like enough to save us.
It must be one of the most burned-out phrases of all time, to hear someone say: You just have to believe. It might be the first day of school, the first day on the new job, the first day without a job anymore, or the first day after the funeral, and you’re asking yourself, can I really do this? And someone says, of course you can, you just have to believe. You might be alone on the floor in your kitchen, alone in the hospital bed, alone in your car on some dark city street where you didn’t mean to go, or alone in your mind. You’re asking yourself, what if no one comes to find me? And someone says, they will, you just have to believe. The circumstances might be as pithy as trying to figure out how to pay this month’s rent, how to kick an addiction, or how to keep from always thinking the worst about yourself, others, or God. You tell yourself, things will never get better. And someone says, they will, you just have to believe.
Granted, it’s usually the person who is already standing on the other side of some rickety bridge that we ourselves have yet to cross who says this. “What if it doesn’t hold me?” we yell on over. “It will,” they yell on back. “Yes, but what if it doesn’t?” “It will, you just have to believe!” And we say in reply, “That’s easy for you to say. You’re 8, you weigh 50 pounds, and you’re already on the other side!”
We know this, faith isn’t the same for everyone. It’s not the same for everyone out there. Heck, it’s not even the same for everyone in here. Despite the fact that we have all showed up at the same church this morning, to sing the same hymns, to pray the same prayers, and hear the same word from God, we are far from the same when it comes to a great many other things, including our faith. I imagine some of us came here kicking and screaming this morning, if not on the outside than on the inside. Quite possibly, the only reason we are here is because the person beside us made us come, or asked us to come, and loving them so much, we have. For others, it’s all we can do to whisper the hymns and murmur the prayers. Recovering Catholics, washed out Baptists, we grew tired a long time ago of being told, you just have to believe, and then being told what it is that we have to believe. What does it mean to believe anyway?
When I was a child, I was taught it meant being a Christian, and that being a Christian meant having the faith of my grandparents and parents—a faith grown, kept, and passed on in tradition. When I became an adolescent, I was taught that it meant taking that faith and making it my own. So I chose to be baptized, and I prayed to ask Jesus to be my savior, which is what we did in the tradition of my family. The lesson was, being a Christian meant having faith in Jesus to save me from going to hell when I died. As a teenager, being a Christian was about showing the world through good behavior that I was a Christian. So I didn’t drink, or kiss a girl (for too long), I went to church every week, and I tried to do my best to convince anyone who was gay, Muslim, or just not Christian, that they needed my kind of faith if they wanted to be saved, too. Then, somewhere into my adult years, I woke up one day to realize my faith felt heavy to me, burdensome, without joy. I started to think about what it meant to keep faith in a Jesus who would save me from hell, but only if I asked him to. What kind of faith is that? And what kind of savior is that? And what does it mean for Christians to put their faith in someone like Jesus who was Jewish and never a Christian himself?
I woke up one day to realize my faith felt heavy to me, burdensome, without joy.
There are three things I want to give us today. The first is a word of warning, the second, a word of challenge, and the third, a word of blessing. First, a word of warning. The late Jonathan Saks, who served as Chief Rabbi of the United Jewish Congregations of Great Britain, once wrote, “The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in the one who is not in our image.” Because very often, what we believe about God—how we see God—comes from us having made it up. I don’t mean to sound like I’m accusing anyone of committing idolatry, but you would not have to look far to see how I’ve done it. Just check my Bible to see which pages I’ve dog-eared, and which pages are still stuck together, or check my purchases on Amazon, or survey my friends. All will tell you that I stick close to sources that support my views and ideas. And even when I do come across a new idea, I find myself trying to make it fit into an older, more comfortable idea. I have never burned any crosses, but still, my ability to keep a lid on my world says a great deal about the privilege afforded me as a white, rich man in America. None of this makes my faith better or worse than someone else’s, it’s just a reminder of how hard we must work to see God’s image in the one who is not in our image.
“The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in the one who is not in our image.”
Rabbi Jonathan Saks
Which brings me to the second word I want to give us, a word of challenge: a faith that turns away the hungry and hurting is no faith at all. It does no good to tell someone who is hungry, don’t worry, things will get better, you just have to believe, while you’re sitting there munching on a sandwich. Even Jesus had to learn this the hard way. In our gospel lesson for today, he is traveling through the region of Tyre and Sidon when a Canaanite woman comes up to him asking—no, begging—for him to do something to heal her tormented daughter. That she is a Canaanite is significant, for once upon a time her people were enemies with Jesus’ people. When they looked at each other, neither side saw the image of God. They saw only someone to be feared, hated, and eliminated. The Canaanite woman knows this, that she is showing up to the clubhouse where she is never going to be let in. And Jesus tells her just that. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she reminds him that he is a Jew, and his God has always been bigger than the one we imagine, bigger even than the one he imagines. His God has never let anyone, not even the dogs, go hungry.
The disciple named John, who wrote three separate letters, each of which appear towards the end of our Bible, said in his first letter: Those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. In her book, Holy Envy, Barbara Brown Taylor writes the following:
You will have your own interpretation of this teaching and others like it, but here is what it reveals to me: the same God who came to the world in the body of Jesus comes to [us] now in the bodies of [our] neighbors, because God knows that a body needs a body to make things real, and the real physical presence of [our] neighbors makes them much harder for [us] to romanticize, fantasize, demonize, or ignore than any of the ideas [we] have of them in [our] head.
If I could make my neighbors up, I could love them in a minute. I could make them in my own image, [and then tell them how wonderful they are!]. But nine times out of ten these are not the neighbors I get. Instead, I get neighbors who cancel my vote, burn trash in their yard, and shoot guns so close to my house that I have to wear an orange vest when I walk to the mailbox. They put things on their church signs that make me embarrassed for all Christians everywhere. They text while they drive, flipping me off when I pass their expensive pickup truck on the right, in spite of the fish symbol on their rear bumper.
But if you stop and think about it, what better way could there be for me to love the God I cannot see than to try for even twelve seconds to love these brothers and sisters whom I can see? What better way to shatter my custom-made image of God than to accept that these irritating and sometimes frightening people [we call neighbors] are also made in the image of God?
From her book, “Holy Envy,” (New York, NY: Harper One, 2019, pgs. 194-95) Words in bracket [ ] are mine.
Honest to God, with a faith like that, the world would not need saving, for it would be saved already.
I said I was going to give you a third word, a word of blessing. Here it is: Be the kind of Christian, the kind of person, the kind of neighbor today who leaves a trail of crumbs that lead straight to your own door. And should your neighbor ever do the same for you, don’t be afraid to follow the crumbs that lead straight to their door. For in so doing, you may discover a mercy beyond your wildest imaginations.
[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-churches-and-the-nazi-state
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