If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
Three things abide, St. Paul tells us: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.
Today’s sermon is the first in a series of reflections on St. Paul’s famous passage in his letter to the congregation at Corinth. today I will reflect on the meaning of faith. In my next two sermons I will discuss hope and love.
What can faith mean for us -- we who are religious liberals, we who are sophisticated and skeptical, we who find it easier to talk about what we do not believe than what we do believe?
The passage I read earlier, the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, is among the most familiar passages in the Christian scriptures. Most biblical scholars agree that this letter to the Christians at Corinth actually was written by Paul. Biblical scholars have concluded that only about half of the letters in the New Testament that are attributed to Paul were actually written him. Some of the letters attributed to Paul were almost certainly written by others. Now, we might find this shocking, but this was common practice in the ancient world.
While the passage from First Corinthians may be familiar, the situation that prompted the letter is not. Paul was writing to the congregation at Corinth because they were at each other’s throats. Factions were everywhere. Paul had founded the church in Corinth several years before this letter was written (in about the year 54). At a time that this passage was written, Paul was receiving reports that things were a mess in Corinth. To make matters worse, the Corinthians had written to Paul asking all kinds of questions — asking him, in effect, to take sides in their dispute. The Corinthians could not settle their differences, so one group decided to drag Paul into it. Another group, probably fearing what Paul might say, were questioning his authority — saying, in effect, “We don’t care what Paul thinks because he was not one of Jesus’ disciples.” It was a classic church fight. The congregation was coming apart because of theological and ethnic differences and divided personal loyalties.
Corinth was a fascinating place at this time — half a century after the birth of Jesus. Corinth is situated about 35 miles from Athens, on a narrow isthmus connecting the Greek mainland with the Peloponnese to the south. The isthmus was used as a shortcut to connect the Adriatic and the Aegean Seas. It was located at a strategic place for the commerce booming in the region. Corinth also had tremendous cultural influence in the area. When Paul came there it was as cosmopolitan as any city in the Mediterranean region. Corinth, then, presented a unique opportunity to spread Christianity. The success of the church at Corinth was vitally important to Paul. And now, while working in Ephesus across the Aegean Sea, Paul received word that things were falling apart.
Paul tried to find common ground, to exhort the Corinthians to get along and respect their differences. He tried to remind them that the core of true religion are faith, hope and love.
Faith. What the heck is faith, anyway? Faith is a core concept in our Western view of religion. Religious people are called “people of faith.” As we usually use the term, “faith” usually means belief. And “belief” normally means something that we think and hope might be true, but something that we accept without much evidence. “Faith” conveys a kind of uncertainty, an affirmation we make because we want it to be true. So we talk about “accepting things on faith.”
We religious liberals are people who are uneasy with professions of faith. Indeed, most of us are people who have “lost our faith.” Most of us in this sanctuary are here because we do not share the faith that our more traditional neighbors have. We do not have a creed. We do not want a creed. And yet we are a religious people. How can we be religious and not have faith? What can faith possibly mean for us? And is it possible to be religious and not have faith?
I remember my own crisis of faith as an adolescent. The conservative Lutheran church of my youth believed in the literal truth of the Bible. I recall encountering the idea of evolution in junior high school. It seemed odd that God would create a world a few thousand years ago complete with fossils of dinosaurs and thousands of other extinct species. It troubled me. It made me doubt my faith. Eventually my doubts overwhelmed my faith. When I left home for college I also left the church that had raised me. I no longer belonged because I no could no longer believe what they asked me to believe. It’s a common story. Many of us in here have lived some version of this story. It is a story that is being repeated millions of times. People are driven away from religious communities because they can no longer believe what they are told to believe.
Faith. I had it. I lost it. And so did a lot of you.
But did I really lose my faith? Did you?
We are used to thinking of religious faith as belief in a set of theological and historical propositions. We define religious groups by what they believe. And we find it uncomfortable when people ask us: “Well, what do you Unitarians believe, anyway?” “How can you have a church when you can believe anything you want?”
Let me suggest to you this morning something that might sound odd at first: faith is not primarily about what we believe. The whole idea that religion is defined by what people believe is, I suggest, a highly questionable notion. In fact, it is a goofy notion. Beyond this, the notion that faith is a set of beliefs is not even biblical.
Let’s look, for example, at the concept of faith in the Hebrew scriptures. In the Hebrew scriptures the notion of faith isn’t about individual beliefs at all. Faith in the Hebrew scriptures is concerned with the relationship of the people of Israel with Yahweh, the name for their god. The Hebrew term translated as faith is ’aman, which is a verb, not a noun, that conveys the sense of “to be true” or “to be trustworthy.” Faith in the Hebrew scriptures deals with a people, together, being faithful to their notion of the sacred.
When the prophets of Israel take the people or rulers to task, it is because they have been unfaithful to the covenant they have made with their god. This happens over and over in the Hebrew scriptures, from Moses to Jeremiah to Isaiah. The prophets did not criticize the Israelites for doctrinal impurity, for deviation from orthodox belief. The prophets took the people Israel to task for what they did or failed to do, not what they thought. Actually, the Hebrew prophets showed no interest whatsoever in what people believed. Think about that. The great heroes of the religious tradition out of which we arose did not care what people believed. The teachers whose teachings and ideas were considered important enough to write down and that later became scripture did not care one whit about belief. The great prophets in the Hebrew scriptures cared a lot about what people did. They did not care about what they thought. The ancient Jews did not have a creed. The whole idea of a creed was foreign to them. The same is true of Jesus. Jesus did not have a creed. He never taught his disciples a creed.
Paul, a Roman citizen who was also very much a Jew and steeped in the study of Jewish scripture (he makes repeated references to Hebrew scripture in his letters), understood this notion of faith. Yes, Paul exhorted Christians to believe in Jesus and that Jesus would come soon (Paul clearly believed Jesus would return during his lifetime). But Paul did not see faith as essentially an intellectual the matter of deciding that the gospel was true. Faith for Paul was also a matter of fidelity, of striving, of a committed and ongoing relationship which grows and develops.
So how in the world did faith in our culture become transformed into this notion that faith is a stubborn adherence to the belief that Jesus was born of a virgin, performed all manner of miracles, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven where he is one third of the trinity? How in the world did we come to the point that we came to think that reciting some ancient creed is a statement of faith? And how did having faith become this heroic effort to try to believe the unbelievable?
This notion that having faith is about correct belief comes not from a religious impulse. It’s not about religion at all; it’s about politics. In the first three centuries after the death of Jesus there was a broad spectrum of belief among Christians. But the Roman Emperor Constantine, the first Christian emperor, was, in the way of emperors, not comfortable with dissension in the ranks. He called a meeting of three hundred bishops to meet at Nicaea in 325. The purpose was to settle the matter of the true nature of Jesus. Many Christians, following Arius, believed that Jesus was not God. The council went on for weeks, filled with controversy. Most of the bishops in fact did not agree with the position that Jesus was the same as God. The doctrine of the trinity was a minority position. But those who did believe Jesus was the same as God, the followers of the young Athanasius, were fanatical and would not budge. Constantine finally threw his considerable weight behind Athanasius. The Nicene Creed, the first creed imposed on all Christendom, was forced down the throats of everyone, even though it was the minority position among the bishops. Later, in 381, the hard line Athanasians prevailed and an even stricter version of the creed was adopted.
Now the Christian faith had become not an ongoing collective relationship with the sacred, but a kind of rigid loyalty oath to a set of assertions.
Faith became “correct” belief. And in matters of faith, power decided what was correct, not conscience, not open discussion, not consensus. To disagree became both heresy and a revolutionary act.
This is not a notion of faith that Moses or Isaiah or Jeremiah or Jesus would have recognized. And it is certainly not a notion of religion that the Hindu, Confucian or Buddhist traditions would recognize. For example, the idea that science might discover something that is in opposition to your religion is an absolutely foreign notion to Buddhists. The Buddha, bless his heart, wasn’t concerned with metaphysics or doctrine. Either, for that matter, was Jesus. Even the Muslims, who do have a creed of sorts, have a statement of faith that is very brief: “There is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet.” The first Christian creed was much longer because it was careful to list positions on which there was much disagreement among the early Christians. In other words, the Nicene Creed was a way of excluding heretics, a way of eliminating diversity.
Now, all this discussion of the biblical sense of faith and the historic origins of creeds would be just so much dry academic religious history if the results were not so tragic. Think of the thousands who have been killed because someone decided that what they believed was heresy. People have burned their neighbors alive because they interpreted scripture differently — all in the name of a loving god.
But more important for us today, think of the pain that our culture’s sense of faith causes every day. Some of us here today are estranged from family and friends because we do not share the same theological beliefs. I recently preached about this in a sermon entitled “Black Sheep.”
This is insanity. This is tragic. Our religious communities, which ought to be places of fellowship and joy, worship and celebration, places where we grow, where we walk humbly and seek justice, become places of empty argument that tear the fabric of loving community. All this pain in the name of true faith, in the name of a god of love.
Faith is not reciting some creed that the followers of Athanasius convinced Constantine to shove down everyone’s throat 1600 years ago. Faith is not believing the impossible. Faith is not willful ignorance. Faith is definitely not shoving my theology down your throat.
Faith is a relationship. Faith is about being faithful — being faithful to our deepest sense of the sacred. Faith is about how we live in relationship to our sense of what really matters. Faith is about trusting and being worthy of trust. Faith is about making commitments and keeping those commitments. Faith is about being faithful to the people we love. Faith has nothing whatsoever to do with whether you or I believe the historical and theological assertions of the Nicene Creed or the Apostle’s Creed or the Athanasian Creed.
Faith is about being faithful to our principles of human worth and dignity; justice, equity and compassion; acceptance and encouragement of each other; the search for truth and meaning; the right of conscience and democratic process; the goal of a peaceful world community; and respect for and stewardship of the web of existence of which we are all a part.
The central question of faith for every one of us is not “what do you believe,” but rather “to what are you faithful?” The real religious problem is not heresy. The real religious problem is you and I are faithful to things that don’t matter or are destructive. Our being faithful to consumerism is destroying our planet. When we stop to reflect on what really and truly matters -- things like our relationships with family and friends, like creating peace and ending hatred and violence, like taking time to care for our spiritual lives, like creating community and passing on our values -- that act of getting in touch with what truly matters in life can transform our lives. And when we begin to live in harmony with what we hold sacred, then you and I are faithful. And it does not matter what theological label you choose or even whether you choose one. If you and I are guided every day by our highest values, then you and I are faithful, we are religious people, we are people of faith.
When somebody questions your faith, I suggest you tell them you believe in being faithful to your sense of the sacred. and of being faithful to this planet and being faithful to your principles and faithful to the people you love.
My dream, my prayer, is that we be a faithful people — that we keep faith with each other, with our principles, with our vision of what our lives can be, with our sense of the sacred.
May ours be a journey, hand in hand with each other, that keeps faith.
Three things abide: faith, hope and love.
Let us walk together faithfully during this, our time on earth.
Amen.