Musings: Notes From My Daybook

Earlier in March, I had occasion to drive north from Cambridge to Edinburgh while in Britain.  With a couple of hours on hand, I eagerly made my way to Durham to see the cathedral there.  One of the oldest cathedrals in Britain, it offers a beautiful example of Norman construction.  A number of people important  to the Christian community are buried there--including Cuthbert, an early saint and pioneer not only of Durham but of Lindisfarne and Bede, the historian.

But in my time walking through this wonderful space and enjoying the way in which the present Christian community use the building in worshipful and forming ways, I found a stone in memorial of one of the deans of the cathedral that caught my eye.  Spencer Cowper, born in 1713 and who passed in 1774, served as a leader in the Christian community there nearly thirty years.  What I found most riveting was the brief comment on the stone.  Spencer Cowper, Dean of Durham:  "Life spent in the uniform practice of unaffected Piety, Friendship, Humanity, Hospitality, and Charity."

I like that description--the uniform practice of some very basic and valuable virtues.  It can be easy, from time to time, to show piety or friendship.  However, to do so faithfully, consistently every day is no small matter.  To be uniform, consistent, focused, and purposeful about our virtues sounds like high praise.

I hope for something similar to be said about me. 

To take another look at the way in which our language can limit our understanding of God’s activity and God’s call to discipleship, consider the way the word conversion is used.  Normally, we think of conversion as when a person gives up one set of beliefs or ideas for a new set of beliefs or ideas.  For example, “I used to believe that salmon was the best seafood ever, but ever since I tried mahi-mahi I converted.”  And when it comes to faith, it is not uncommon to think about a person having a conversion “experience.”  Some radical event has occurred that has brought about a change in what a person thinks.

So it often happens that persons connect “getting baptized” with the idea of conversion.  And not without reason, since baptism and conversion have a lot of connections.  But it is important for a healthy perspective about baptism to have a healthy perspective about conversion.  And to do that we might well begin with the practices of the early church.

A number of years ago, Michael Green wrote a wonderful book called Evangelism in the Early Church.   He notes three important dimensions to how the early church understand conversion—and why many pagan people would have been astonished at the really radical call that coming to be Christian actually is.

First, conversion requires belief—real belief.  That is to say, that a person believes so completely and thoroughly that she makes choices about her life based on the conviction that Jesus lives and that the Christian faith is actually the right way to live.  This was, for people of the ancient world, more than a little odd.  For first and second century pagans, you could worship any number of different gods and practice any number of rituals, but not really believe, much less act on the claims that those gods made.

Second, conversion requires a change in ethics.  Here again was a surprising move.  To become a Christian in the ancient world meant that your behavior changed.  You no longer sought after self-interests, but rather sought out the interests of others.  In today’s terms, to be in the Georgia Tech Booster’s Club does not require that you seek the well-being of the poor or extend hospitality to the stranger.  Nor do they ask whether you act with integrity in your business dealings.  However, becoming a Christian meant those things—and a whole lot more.

Third, and here comes the real rub, conversion requires accepting the exclusive claim that Jesus is Lord.  As Green writes: “Christians were expected to belong, body and soul, to Jesus, who was called their master. . . and was said to have redeemed them from alien ownership into his own.  Henceforward they were to acknowledge no other ‘Lord,’ be he emperor or pagan deity.  This all seemed very strange, for ancient religion was never exclusive.”   To belong exclusively, totally to one Lord and to the community of that one Lord made for a decidedly robust understanding of conversion.

Thus, with these three dimensions of conversion in front of us—belief that realigns life, an ethic that demands a new set of behaviors, and an exclusive belonging—we need to ask how conversion should be construed.  Is conversion something that can happen in a moment?  Or, is it possible, even in the many examples in the New Testament, that conversion is a process that engages a person’s intellect, emotion, experience, and very soul?

I received a request yesterday to answer three questions for a person who is seeking to understand the way of Christian life.  I thought others might like to interact and consider the same questions.  As always, I would invite you to respond as these basic questions as well!

Dear friend,
Such questions are important questions as you know.  And I am glad that you are asking such things.  In fact, you are already exercising some of the elements of faith in the asking of these questions.

So let me just jump in and give it a go:

What is faith?
Faith is a commitment a person makes to someone or something who is perceived to be reliable or consistent.  Every day, in the ordinary living of our lives we practice this  kind of commitment.  We drive on roads believing that other drivers will observed the rules of the road.  We are dropped of at school or work, believing that our friend or parent will return to pick us up at 4pm.  We have faith that, even though I have never made a Triple Fudge Brownie Cake before, that if I follow the directions given to me by a well-known chef, that I should be able to make a great cake.

Faith is believing and acting out of and in relationship to our conviction about another's reliability.
When it comes to faith in a Christian context, we are now exploring what it means to live out a life believing and living in relationship to the reliability of God as we see and observe God in Jesus.  To say that I have faith in Jesus, is to say that I believe that Jesus is reliable or that he is worthy of trusting in his counsel and leadership.

This kind of faith is different than looking at stars and moon and the wonderful earth and then declaring that I believe that there is a God.  I can say I believe that God created the earth or lives in heaven, but that does not necessarily mean that I will trust his leadership and guidance for my life.

For Christians, faith is an active response to the reliable, trustworthy actions and words of Jesus.  It is not merely saying that Jesus' words are true or that his actions are wonderful.  Rather, faith is when a person acts on those words and actions of Jesus--just like I might do in following the recipe for the cake.

How does one acquire faith?
Interestingly enough, in some respects you really don't "acquire" faith at all.  It may be more likely that faith "acquires" you.  Think about how faith develops in other relationships for a moment.  For example, I was at a conference in Detroit earlier this week and met someone for the first time.  Can I have faith in him upon our first meeting?  Probably not--or at least, I didn't!  However, I did share a meal with him and got to know him a little better.  The next day I had enough faith in him to share a little more of myself with him.  He had proved trustworthy with the little I had offered on the first day and so I was prepared to risk a little more upon the second.

This is the way in which we build relationships.  Little by little, we take risks, testing the reliability of the other.  Over time, if our tests have come along well, then we one day discover that we have "faith" in another.

Of course, I need to acknowledge that we also discover that some people we meet we regrettably discover that they are not reliable or trustworthy.  Such discoveries can be painful and difficult; they can even deter us from trying again.  However, for most of us, we learn that taking risks are important and even necessary for our lives.  Indeed, meaningful life requires us to live with faith.

So to acquire faith or to have faith acquire us, we take little risks with Jesus.  We get to know him.  We read Scripture and listen for his voice.  We learn to hear Jesus through the stories of other believers.  And, of course, we begin to speak to him.  Faith comes from doing and living and risking.  Christian people throughout the ages have learned that the finding faith is like a journey.  We get up and put on our walking shoes and we begin to head down the path.  And as we move down the path, listening for Jesus' voice, we will have the opportunity to exercise faith--to take some risks with Jesus.

Out of this sort of journey, faith grows and matures.

How do you keep your faith?
I would think that our metaphor of faith as a journey might be helpful here as well.  The way of faith means staying on the road.  Faith is formed through the interactions and engagement we have with Scripture, with other people, and with God.  So we keep walking--even when there are times when we are uncertain.  This, of course, happens in all dimensions of faith.  After standing for an hour after school waiting on my friend to pick me up, I may well begin to wonder whether my friend has abandoned me.  But when he finally does arrive, I discover that she was detained by another friend who had just lost a parent.  And, to my surprise, that while I was waiting for my friend, that I was able to complete an assignment that I had forgotten about. 

Of course, we will encounter times of great disappointment in life.  There will be times that abandoning faith seems like that best thing to do.  And with humans, we will discover that no other person is perfect and some people are simply not to be trusted all.  But that does not mean that God is the same way.

What we learn from Scripture is that God is always reliable and trustworthy.  The thing we must remember is that he will likely not demonstrated his faithfulness to us in a way that we might envision or desire.  Afterall, he is God (and we are not)!

So how do we keep our faith? Faith remains alive and viable as long as I exercise it.  Like a muscle, without exercise, it will languish.  And for Christian people, practicing faith is a vital practice.  We exercise faith every time we open the Bible and read with our hearts open to God's teaching.  We exercise faith whenever we take a risk with service in Jesus' name.  We exercise faith every time we pray.  We exercise faith when we give a little more of our money, our time, our heart to God and his work in the world.  But it is the exercise that keeps faith strong.  Otherwise, faith diminishes--just like my ability to shoot free throws (Alas! I haven't been on a real basketball court in three or more years!!)

I hope this is of some help to you as you ask what it means to live with faith.
 

I’m attending a seminar at Rochester College on preaching and the various offerings have been strong.  But what has been particularly encouraging is to see old friends and make a few new ones as well.  In particular, was the trip to Olive Garden (a traditional haunt of the past) with Kent, John, Max, Rex, and Sam.
As I looked around the table and thought of the things that I have shared with three of these good brothers I felt a great sense of gratitude and connectedness.  Short of my own family—and even here I was blessed today by a phone conversation with my cousin Matt, these guy’s lives have intersected my lives at various significant times in life.
One lecturer, Gail O’Day, working on the seminar’s larger theme of the gospel of John, chose to engage the gospel through the framework of friendship.  Setting aside present day casual notions of friendship as someone that you hang out with, O’Day introduced the robust concepts of friendship of the Greco-Roman world.
In the ancient world friendship reflected commitment to one another, a willingness to do for another, even to die for another.  Friendship meant honest, open speech.  A friend was one who spoke truth to you.  The opposite of a friend was a flatterer—who spoke to your vanity.
Using this robust concept of friendship, the gospel of John begins to take on a new hearing.
Listen to the gospel of John:
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.  –John 15.13-15
What Jesus is doing, according to John’s gospel, in going to the cross, is simply doing what friends do.  And, in so doing, he embodies the ideal of friendship.
In a world where relationships are fleeting and multiple diversions distract us from even our families, it might do us good to take Professor O’Day’s lead and think again about the way of Jesus.
. . . .And what would happen wherever a congregation of people take up such a lens for understanding community?

Reworking material for a presentation for an introduction to Christian faith I was reminded, again, of the recent release of Stephen Prothero's book, What Every American Should Know About Religion--and Doesn't. Newsweek, the AJC, and many other media sources have been talking it up recently. Martin Marty plays with Prothero in an appreciative way in Sightings.

The reminder? In spite of all the talk about faith and religion, we are illiterate when it comes to matters of faith. And, at the risk of stepping on toes, I surmise that even folks who call themselves Bible-believing Christians, have taken the way of reading Chicken Soup or the latest devotional guide rather than stepping into the rough and ready of wrestling with texts. It could be compared to going to the mall for dinner because it will be easier to have the usual Red Lobster/Olive Garden/fill-in-the-blank than to go home and create a meal from scratch.

I have no problem with going out to eat. And fixing meals every day can be tiresome when tacked on to an already tiresome day. But the cumulative result is the loss of the communal value of preparing fresh products into some that feeds not merely the body but the spirit.

Of course, Prothero is lamenting our lack of knowledge about religion generally. And, as Marty suggests, to get religion wrong can lead to other misfortunes.

So, maybe assuming that we know all we need to know about faith and religion, may not only be depriving ourselves of food for our own spiritual journey, we may also be limiting our vision for how we understand our neighbors.

Well, excuse me, I have a new cookbook waiting for me.