May 11, 2014
FAITH ALONE 3: Being True
Exodus 20:1-6, Matthew 22:34-40
Preface to the Word
Virginia Satir was a renowned family therapist who authored a popular book in the 1970’s
called Peoplemaking. In its time, it was a pioneering work on the role of the family in “peoplemaking.” Peoplemaking, of course, is not about popping out babies! It’s about the way our
families make us who we are as people.
Families are formative and today we honor those women who not only brought us into the world
but also those, as biological and surrogate mothers, who played a central role in making us who
we are today. And we place in the center of our prayers this day the women who are mothering
the children of today. It’s an awesome responsibility that requires our attention, support and
affirmation.
We wear flowers this Sunday to say “thanks.” We place pictures of our mothers in the heart of
our worship to highlight the persons in this world who not only make people, but also have a
huge impact on the sort of society we are. Cards are given, phone calls are made, dinners are
prepared, memories and gratitude are rekindled. Jan and I were talking just the other day about
the special Mother’s Day card one of our girls gave her years ago. “Happy Mother’s Day to the
best mom in the whole house,” our daughter penned in her best first-grade handwriting. “If there
were two moms, you’d still be the best.” Jan still has that card! I bet some of you mothers have
treasured memories like this as well.
In the church we celebrate today as The Festival of the Christian Home, broadening the
perspective of our worship to include all those in the home who pass on by word and action a
Jesus-formed faith in God and demonstrate with their lives the content and power of their
convictions. I can’t help think of a comment Paul makes to Timothy in his letter to him. He
wrote in 2 Timothy 1:5: I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your
grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you.
A big part of the role of “people-making” in the Christian home is nurturing a faith that tells us
who we are and how to live in this world.
Today we celebrated the sacrament of Baptism. One youth claimed the faith that has been passed
on to her. Two parents promised to nurture their baptized child in Christ’s holy church, that by
their teaching and example, she may be “guided to accept God’s grace for herself and to profess
her faith openly.” As a church we have promised to nurture one another in the Christian faith and
life and include these baptized ones in our care.
But what is the “faith” this child will be nurtured in and guided by until she is old enough to
proclaim it for herself? That’s the question we’ve been talking about for the last couple of
Sundays. Some would say that faith is simply the beliefs we hold about God and Jesus and the
Bible and sin, and salvation, and the church, and so on. But faith is greater than beliefs. One can
assent to all these doctrines and beliefs and still remain unchanged.
Faith, on the other hand, transforms us.
But if faith isn’t simply our beliefs, what is it?
Last Sunday we defined faith as trust. Having faith means radically trusting God. A common
metaphor for God throughout the Bible is that of a rock. Our trust in God is our solid ground, our
foundation, our fortress, our refuge, our safe place, our peace. To find our security in God means
letting go of or overcoming the many insecurities and anxieties that plague our lives.
Here’s the difference between beliefs and faith. I’ve talked before about the famous stuntman of
the early 20th century named Charles Blondin. One of his best-known stunts was walking a
tightrope across Niagara Falls. Blondin would ask the crowd if they believe he could safely
walk a wheelbarrow across a tightrope over Niagara Falls. Most in the crowd would shout in
reply that they believed he could do it.
That’s belief.
Then he asks who was willing to get into the wheelbarrow.
Now that’s faith!
I like the way Robert Driskell makes the distinction:
“Belief” can be simply a passive mental acceptance which amounts to nothing when it comes to
how it affects our life. Simply to say “I believe in God” means very little if it is merely coming
from the lips and not from the heart. People can, and do, say that they “believe” in God, but
their lives never change at all. However, when one has true faith in God, one’s life cannot help
but reveal this truth. True faith, dependence/reliance/trust in God reveals itself in our actions,
our thought life, and our priorities. A saving relationship with the Creator and Sustainer of the
universe can result in nothing less than a radical readjustment of our entire worldview. We will
love God with all our hearts and we will love others as we love ourselves.
So faith involves trust, and it is our worldview. Faith is the “spectacles” through which we see
reality. Through faith, when we look at reality we see God. We see God’s generosity, goodness,
and grace. Where others see threats to their happiness, security and existence; where others see
an apathetic or indifferent universe, we see God at work – blessing, healing, redeeming,
restoring, rectifying, sustaining – bringing life out of death, hope out of despair, love out of hate.
But there is something else to say about the faith that saves – the foundation of the Christian
home, the gift that is passed on from one generation to another. It’s captured in our readings
from Exodus and Matthew today.
Scripture Reading : Exodus 20:1-6, Matthew 22:34-40
Sermon:
I.
A. The faith that we pass on from generation to generation is not only about trust and
perspective. Faith is also about fidelity or faithfulness. One of the oldest meanings of faith
is being faithful to our relationship with God. In recent decades, scholars have researched the
meaning of the Greek word pistis, frequently used in the original language of the New
Testament and translated into English as “believe,” “faith,” and “trust.” Several scholars have
concluded that “faithfulness” is the most satisfactory English translation in many
instances. This recent research has prompted some to argue that New Testament faith and
belief in Jesus should be understood primarily in terms of faithfulness, loyalty, and
commitment to him and his teachings, rather than in terms of belief, trust and reliance.
Faith means being faithful or loyal. It means allegiance; it means the pledge of the self at its
deepest level… the commitment of the heart.
B. It’s opposite is not doubt or disbelief. It is being unfaithful. This is why the Bible often uses
adultery as a metaphor for the absence or weakness of faith. When the Bible speaks of
adultery, most of the time it is not about human sexual relationships. Sometimes it is, like in
the Ten Commandments. But when the prophets indict Israel as “adulterous,” or Jesus
speaks of “an evil and adulterous generation,” they are referring to unfaithfulness to God and
God’s covenant.
C. Another way of talking about this is idolatry. Biblical warnings against idolatry are
addressing the problem of people giving their ultimate loyalty or allegiance to someone or
something other than God. They are centering their lives on something finite rather than the
sacred. Having faith, therefore, means being loyal to God and not to the many would-be
gods that call for our worship. The earliest Christian creed we know about in the Bible is
“Jesus is Lord.” Christian faith means devotion to Jesus as Lord, and not to the seduction of
the would-be lords of our lives – the nation, affluence, achievement, family, political party,
desire.
D. Faith is summed up in the Old Testament in the first commandment: “I am the Lord your
God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have
no other gods besides me.”
Faith as faithfulness is summarized in the New Testament in what we call today The Greatest
Commandment:
‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all
your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall
love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the
prophets.
Faith as allegiance or fidelity means loving God and loving your neighbor and being faithful,
above all, to these two primary relationships.
E. And how are we faithful? By paying attention to our relationship with God, in the same way
that faithfulness in a human relationship means not only “not straying,” but being attentive to
the relationship. Worship, prayer, spiritual practice, and a life of compassion and justice are
ways we are faithful. In United Methodism, we understand faithfulness as “doing no harm,
doing good, staying in love with God.” To be faithful to God mean not only loving God, but
loving that which God loves – the neighbor and indeed, the whole creation.
Faith has an ethical imperative.
II.
A. So a saving faith, the faith that is central to the Christian home, the faith that is passed on
from generation to generation is about a radical trust in God, a way of seeing reality, and
faithfulness to God.
I’ve been saying for the last couple of weeks that faith and belief are two different things and
that faith is larger and more transformational than beliefs and that merely agreeing with or
intellectually assenting to doctrines or creeds falls far short of a living faith. Thinking that
faith is limited to beliefs distorts the meaning of faith and the Christian life.
B. But now I want to come back around and say that beliefs do matter and have a role to play in
faith. There are, after all, affirmations that are central to the Christian faith and without
which our faith wouldn’t be Christian. In the most basic sense…

Being a Christian means affirming the reality of God.

Christian faith means affirming the utter centrality of Jesus. It means seeing Jesus as the
decisive disclosure of God and what a life full of God looks like. It means affirming
Jesus as the Word of God, the wisdom of God, the light of the world, the Way, and more
– all known in a person. And as Christians, we can say that this is who Jesus is for us
without dismissing out of hand the other great religions of the world.

Christian faith means affirming the centrality of the Bible. The Bible is the Word of God
disclosed in a book, in the same way that Jesus is the Word of God disclosed in a person.
It means a commitment to the Bible as our foundational document and our identity
document. It’s our story. It shapes our vision of life – our vision of God, of ourselves,
and of God’s dream and desire for the earth.
C. Christian faith as believing means affirming these things fully, but also broadly. Believing
fully means that our faith involves our loyalty, trust, and seeing at the deepest level of the
self. Believing broadly means trying not to get sucked up into this human need to pin
everything down with great precision and certitude.
Christian theology has been plagued by these two tendencies – to know too much and know
it too precisely. The division of the Western and Eastern Christian Church a thousand years
ago was partly because of a theological controversy about whether the Spirit proceeds “from
the Father,” or “from the Father and the Son.” The desire to know too much and too precisely
has bedeviled Christianity over the centuries, and still does today.
D. Prior to the 17th century, the word believe did not mean believing in the truth of statements or
propositions. The object of believing back then was not a statement, but a person. In the
pre-modern world, believing meant to hold dear, to prize, to give one’s loyalty to, to give
one’s self to, to commit oneself. It meant faithfulness, allegiance, fidelity, dedication, and
trust. Most simply put, “to believe” once meant “to love.” In fact, the English words believe
and belove are related. We use the word “beloved” today more as an adjective than a verb,
but once beloving was something we did. What we believe is what we belove.
Faith is about “beloving” God. God is our beloved.
E. To see believing in this way rounds out the experience and power of faith... faith as trust,
faith as a way of seeing reality, faith as being loyal and true.
You see, before the modern era, “believing” covered all of these meanings but with
modernity the meaning of believing has been severely reduced and limited. We have turned
it into “propositional believing” – that is, believing a particular set of statements or claims to
be factually true.
F. But faith is less about propositions and more about relationship – our relationship with God,
with others, with ourselves and creation. Faith is trusting, living, seeing, and centering in
God. And these are matters of the heart… not the head.
G. In Jesus’ Great Commandment, we can replace the word “commandment” with
“relationship.” At the center of the Christian life are two “relationships” that are ultimately
one. The greatest and first “relationship” is this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, soul, and mind.” The second great “relationship” is like it in importance: “You
shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
“Upon these two [relationships] hang all the law and the prophets.”
H. The whole of scripture hangs on these two relationships. The Christian life is as simple and
as challenging as this – to love God and to love that which God loves. This is the central
meaning of faith. This is the faith that Lois passed on to Eunice, who passed it on to
Timothy. This is the faith at the heart of the Christian home. Faith is more the way of the
heart than the head.