Buck Mountain Church (Youth Sunday)
Faith and Trust
What
does someone have to do to acquire faith?
Where is faith found?
A few weeks ago, David
and I went with Connie to Christ Church to hear poet and essayist Christian
Wiman speak about his own faith.
The former editor of Poetry
magazine, the preeminent journal of its kind in America, Wiman is about to
begin a new phase of his life as he joins the faculty of Yale Divinity
School. In his address at Christ
Church, Wiman acknowledged that his topic was one that most of the poets he has
published would probably never choose to discuss in a public
setting—faith. Really, it’s not a
topic most people would wish to discuss publicly; faith is personal and
individual and talking about it can be prickly.
So
I really appreciated Christian Wiman’s willingness to discuss his faith journey
with us. His story began with his upbringing in a west Texas town, where going
to church on Sundays was just what everyone did. As a young adult, Wiman
abandoned the church and pursued other paths. I believe many twenty-somethings do the same; I admit that I
certainly did. But in his late thirties and after receiving a diagnosis of a
rare and incurable form of cancer, Wiman found his faith again. Actually, it is
probably more accurate to say that his faith found him, and found him willing.
From the moment we are born, God is with us, pursuing us no matter how far we
attempt to stray from faith’s path.
When we, like Wiman, decide to turn around and move back in the
direction of God, it may seem that we follow a trail toward God as if we are
searchers. What we don’t
understand is that the desire we have for faith in God was planted there
within us by God. Jesus said
to his disciples in John 15: 16, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”
Faith—the desire and capacity to believe confidently in God--is a gift of grace
we’ve all been given. What we do with that gift is really up to us.
Wait
a minute, you may be thinking. Faith just isn’t that easy. We rarely know with
any certainty what God is calling us to do, and having a conversation with God usually
means we do all the talking. During difficult times, doubt seems more
accessible than faith. When is
faith simple?
Today’s
gospel lesson from Luke tells the story of the centurion whose faith, Jesus
tells us, is exemplary. The
centurion, an officer in the Roman army, sends some Jewish elders to ask Jesus
if he will heal a very ill slave. The elders praise the centurion to Jesus,
extolling his virtues, and Jesus agrees to go with them and tend to the
centurion’s sick servant. Before
they arrive at their destination, another envoy from the centurion comes to
meet Jesus. Repeating the words of the centurion, this friend says: “Lord, do
not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof;
therefore I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my
servant be healed. For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under
me; and I say to one, `Go,' and he goes, and to another, `Come,' and he comes,
and to my slave, `Do this,' and the slave does it." Jesus is astonished by this comparison
of himself to the centurion, by what the centurion is saying about the authority
of Jesus. The centurion must have
heard stories about other people Jesus had healed. Believing in those stories,
he asks Jesus to come to his home and heal his sick servant. When he amends
even his invitation and asks Jesus simply to say the words of healing from a
distance, confident in Jesus’s power to accomplish such a thing, Jesus says, “I
tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” At that moment, the sick
servant is healed and the centurion’s faith is both justified and rewarded.
In
this story of the centurion, we have everything we need to know about how faith
works. Faith requires confidence, but not a blind confidence in something we
can’t see and don’t know first-hand. The centurion as a Roman officer was
someone used to giving orders and making decisions. Clearly, someone he
trusted had told him about this man Jesus and his reputation for healing.
Maybe it was a close friend of his or a subordinate officer in his command who
had witnessed one of Jesus’s miraculous cures first-hand. Whoever the source
was, the centurion had faith in HIM, and having faith in what he had heard, he
simply knew Jesus would be able to cure his slave.
Our faith is based on trust, and often
it is trust in others.
Think
about Jesus and his reaction of astonishment. His disciples witnessed his
powers first-hand repeatedly, but at times they lost faith and questioned
Jesus. The disciples, who surely should have known that Jesus was the Son of
God and capable of all kinds of miracles, often just didn’t seem to get it. We
certainly see Jesus’s exasperation with them at times. Yet, here was this Roman
officer, who had only heard about Jesus and had never seen him in action,
who yet believed that Jesus had the authority to bring about a miraculous
healing. Now, that’s faith, Jesus
exclaims!
In
reality, we are far more often like the disciples than the centurion. We
question and we doubt. It’s hard
to live every day, every minute with a conscious awareness that God is present
with us. We lose sight of what the Lord is really capable of doing and we let
our faith slip. That’s just the way we humans are.
For
me, the simplest and most significant thing Christian Wiman said in his talk
was this: Even though we have all had moments of blessed assurance when we knew
all was well and God was on our side, we can’t seem to hold onto those times
when our faith was strong. Wiman said that even when we cannot summon that
feeling of nearness to God, we CAN trust in our memories of those past
experiences. When we feel our faith slipping in the present, we can recall our
past experiences of being close to God and be comforted.
The
story of the centurion further illuminates the way this kind of trust in
faith can work. Faith is often something we catch from someone else.
In fact, that is probably the essential truth for most of us who grew up in the
church. As children, we simply came to believe about God and Jesus what the
grown-ups in our lives, the people we loved and trusted most, told us. Often,
the way the grown-ups lived their faith was the most compelling
testimony to us. As we grew older,
we may have questioned (as we are encouraged to do) and refined our beliefs,
but our simple beginner’s faith in God really never left us.
I hope and pray
that our young people today will always have deep memories of what they learned
here about love and faith. I hope
that when they grow up and face difficulties, the faith of their fathers and
mothers and everyone they knew here at Buck Mountain Church will come back to
them as something they can trust with all their hearts to see them through.
Amen.
