Let’s assume everybody here knows how to
text. I need to know if you’ll be around
in the afternoon so I can call you because there are some things we need to
catch up on. I text you to find
out. You text back that you’ll be
around. I text back, “Okay. I’ll shout at you later.” That would seemingly be a harmless exchange,
right?
But, what if you don’t really know me and
my predisposition to be caring, nice, and polite like a Canadian and you were
not up on my colloquialisms?
“I’ll give you a shout” is a fairly commonly understood
colloquialism. “I’ll shout at you
later,” admittedly that one’s a bit tougher.
If you are a non-native speaker of English, you would be perplexed as to
why I would want to call you up and speak to you at the top of my voice. Or, if you don’t know my genial nature, and are prone to anxiety, you will fully be expecting me to call
you up and yell at you about something you did that I thought was wrong.
Well, I bring all this up because it seems
to me that we deal with faith in much the same way as we would deal with that
text message. Like the text, God has
spoken the saving Word of the Incarnation of God the Son. In the power of the Holy Spirit the Church
proclaims the Gospel of this saving Word throughout the world and something
called faith arises in its wake. But
what is this faith?
Carrying through with my analogy, most of
us would say that faith would be my
understanding of and response to “the text”, to the Gospel that in, through,
and as Jesus Christ the Triune God of Grace is saving his creation from sin and
death. To respond appropriately I must
have somehow decided to believe or to make intellectual ascent to the idea that
there is a God, that this God’s nature is love, that I do indeed need saving,
and I need to live accordingly. We may
wish to use the word trust to make us “feel” better. I place my trust in Jesus and live
accordingly.
Yet, this understanding of faith is largely
subjective, meaning it is centered in me
and the internal state of my mind and emotions and how I am able to sort this
“Text of God” out. But if faith and
matters there of are purely subjective, then faith is simply a private affair
and this is what has led many an enemy of God to say that faith is for the
weak-minded and mentally unstable. This
is why atheism is abounding. It is no
stretch to say that history is proving before our very eyes that this subjective understanding of faith is flawed as congregation after congregation closes.
This subjective, this very inside-my-head,
understanding of faith began to fester in the 1600’s when a French philosopher
named Renee Descartes awoke from sleep and answered the question “how do I know
I exist?” with the very profound observation, “I think, therefore I am.” A century later the German philosopher and
theologian Emmanuel Kant took subjectivity to its ultimate end teaching that
there is no objective “reality”. We
cannot know things in themselves. All we
know of them is what we experience of them and what sense we make of those
experiences. Things are what they are
because that’s the meaning we give to them. There are no laws in the universe other
than the ones I place upon it.
Kant went on to say that we cannot know God. We can only know our ideas about God. This is a far cry from our proclamation that
God is knowable and has revealed himself in, through, and as Jesus Christ and
through the presence and work of the Holy Spirit. Sadly, if you want to talk about God in a
world where reality is based in my ability to think and give things meaning,
then agnosticism and atheism are the logical conclusions. God is simply a figment of my imagination and
faith is my crutch.
In this day and time because what we call
faith has been so twisted about by our over-focusing on subjectivity, we need
to stop assuming we know what faith is and step back into the Bible and try a
little harder to understand what the writers of the Bible meant by “faith”. Let’s try this and take a look here at
Hebrews 11:1 where Paul gives us a concise definition of faith. If we look at
the words Paul uses will see that faith isn’t just something that goes on in my
head that I choose to believe in order to make sense of my reality. Rather, faith is something that God is doing
and is bringing into existence in his creation and has included us in it.
Faith is the sphere of reality in which we wilfully
and actively participate out of gratitude and devotion to God for his saving
work in, through, and as Jesus Christ and the presence and work of the Holy
Spirit. Faith is the sphere of reality
in which God is making the future coming reality of the Kingdom of God visible
in our present. The sphere of faith,
which we could call “in Christ”, counters the sphere of reality that Paul calls
“in Adam” or “the flesh” which is marked by sin and death.
Humour me here and let me say Hebrews 11:1
in a way that’s Greek sounding English or English sounding Greek. “Faith is the hypostasis of the hoped for
things, the bringing to light of the unseen.”
This is a far cry from the NIV’s describing faith as “confidence” and
“assurance”, which in themselves are totally subjective words and, in light of what I said a few moments ago, that fact
should make us wary of using that translation.
I like the Holman Christian Standard Bible translation that says “Faith is
the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of things unseen.” Paul says that faith is the hypostasis of the
hoped for things. The “hoped for things”
are God’s promises, that Jesus will return and establish the kingdom, there
will be resurrection, and the victory that Jesus won over sin and death and the
devil on the cross will ultimately be realized.
Faith is the hypostasis of these things.
You
are probably wondering what hypostasis means.
In the ancient Greek world it was a philosophical, scientific, and
medical term. To the philosophers it was
the actualizing in reality of true being.
To talk like the philosopher Plato, a chair is the hypostasis of “chair-ness”
or a tree is the hypostasis of “tree-ness” – an actualizing in reality of true
being. It can also mean the actualizing
of the details of a hidden plan. When
Hebrew writers used the word they used it to speak of God’s plan for history
coming into being and playing out. Noah,
Enoch, Abraham, and all those faithful people that Paul lists are the
hypostases of God’s plan of salvation. They are the bringing to light of God’s plan
for history.
In the world of ancient Greek science
“hypostasis” was used to describe sediment – the end result of the sedimentary
process. Go to your nearest pond and
scoop out a bucket of water. Though it
looks clear or mostly clear, if you let it sit, eventually stuff will settle out
in the bottom. Hidden realities becoming
actual.
In the world of ancient Greek medicine
“hypostasis” was used to describe urine and fecal matter. These were the end results, the
actualizations of hidden, internal processes.
If you were a youth group I would now proceed to actualize my hidden
sense of potty humour. But, I like my
job and wish to keep it, so I’ll keep that hidden.
So, faith is not so much about what is
going on in my inner, subjective world in which we could define faithfulness as
the actualizing of my internal beliefs.
Faith is bigger than that. Faith
is participating in the whole sphere of reality in which God’s hidden plan and purposes for his
creation and our lives are coming to light, actualizing, becoming real through
us, through real people in history by the powerful workings of the Holy Spirit.
We cannot talk about true faith without
talking about Jesus. Faith is God actualizing, bringing into reality the New
Humanity he began in, through, and as Jesus Christ by his life, death, and
resurrection. Faith is God’s working in
us by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit in us and making actual the
hidden reality of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ in and
through us. Faith is God’s getting ahold of each of us, bound in the sphere of sin as we are, and by his grace he
invades our wills and sets us free from our bondage to sin and enables us to
want to love and serve him and to be a part of the actualizing of his plan for
history.
This requires active participation on our
parts. God in his great love for us has
graciously gotten ahold of us and thus we must be faithful; what Paul calls in
Romans 1:5 “the obedience of faith”.
John Calvin spoke of faith as trusting God’s saving love and mercy
towards us in Jesus Christ and spoke of it in the sense that this trust is a
gift of God that arises out of our being encountered by God. Martin Luther taught that because we have
faith – a love and trust of God and a desire to serve him – we know we are saved. God was no mere idea to them or a matter of
private belief. They were, just as each
of us are, active participants in God’s making actual in history his plans and
purposes for his Creation formed in his great love.
In Chapter 11 of Hebrews Paul lists what he
calls “a great cloud of witnesses”, people who throughout history were the
sediment, the actualization of God’s hidden plan. We all know people who we would add that
list. People who by their faithfulness
were obviously living witnesses to what God is doing. They lived in the sphere of reality Paul
calls faith. They, and each of us are
living proof of God’s reality. Let us
stand humbly in this awesome reality and work unreservedly to live
faithfully. Amen.
