LIVING STONES IN A WALL OF
FAITH
April 24, 2005
sermon given at St. Thomas Episcopal church,
Medina, Washington
Last Monday, a very influential man spoke the following words:
“Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and ‘swept along by every wind of teaching,’ looks like the only attitude acceptable to today’s standards. We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
That was Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, who is now, of course, Pope Benedict the Sixteenth.
So, according to the new Pope, you have two choices. You can have “a clear faith,” or you can be “swept along by every wind of teaching.” You can go along with what those in power say is correct. Or you can be a relativist: permissive and wishy-washy. You can believe every word the Pope says. Or you can subscribe to every whim of culture, as if you subscribed to cable TV and gave equal approval to everything you saw and heard on every channel. So what’ll it be?
Thank God, I don’t think Pope Benedict XVI has the full picture! He sees the traps at either extreme, and he has chosen one. But we do not have to make that same choice.
The Pope does have scriptural backing for his stance, of course. In his accusation about relativism, he quotes Paul’s letter to the Ephesians:
“We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.”
Relativism is a danger, and I’ll say more about that later. But the Pope seems to interpret “every wind of doctrine” as synonymous with any dissent against the church’s authority. The assumption is that THE CHURCH—in the Pope’s case, the Roman Catholic church—has all the answers, and we as individuals cannot be trusted to come to our own conclusions. We might get something wrong, so we’d better play it safe. The corresponding assumption is that the church’s answers are God’s answers, and that those answers have never changed. Where some Christians make the Bible equal to God, the Pope makes the church equal to God.
Well, this morning we heard an alternate view from a different Pope—the guy who was Pope 264 Popes ago! In today’s Epistle reading, that first Pope, Simon Peter, offers a different perspective. While Pope Benedict XVI tells us we need to be stones, thick and unyielding, Pope Peter urges us to be LIVING stones.
My friend Katrina once gave me a great metaphor for this. Think of your faith as a wall and your individual beliefs as stones. As your faith matures, you learn that some of the beliefs you once held don’t make sense to you anymore.
Some of us, when presented with that problem, might think the wall is weak and needs to be knocked down. Who needs faith? But this isn’t necessary; most of the stones in that wall are architecturally sound. What we need to do is remove the bad stones and either throw them away or chisel them into new shapes and use them somewhere else in the wall. The stone wall you started with may have seemed perfect and unyielding when you were younger. But as you find out that it’s not, you need to keep rebuilding it.
You are always being presented with new stones, and you can do anything you like with them. You can use them as they are. You can throw them at people, as apparently happened to Stephen in this morning’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles. You can chisel them into different shapes. Or you can throw them out completely. The point is that you keep building the wall. Your faith gets bigger and stronger.
And, of course, all this requires work—spiritual work. You can’t plunk down a wad of cash and expect someone to build you the perfect wall. It needs to be your own.
Jesus renamed Simon and called him Peter. The Greek form, Petros, means Rock. Think about it: Simon’s nickname was “Rocky.” He was solid.
“Rocky” was a solid follower of Jesus, but he was also mistaken a lot of the time. Rocky correctly identified Jesus as the Messiah, but within minutes, Jesus scolded his shortsightedness: “Get behind me, Satan!” Rocky boldly walked on water, but then he got scared and sank. Rocky denied Jesus three times, but he went on to become the first Pope.
Huh. If Josef Ratzinger had publicly denied Jesus three times, do you think the cardinals would have elected him Pope?
This brings us to today’s Gospel. Several of Jesus’ most famous sayings can be found here, for instance:
“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places.”
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
“If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”
Now, this is all a bit confusing. First we hear about “many dwelling-places,” but then we hear that Jesus is the only way. It sounds like we have wiggle room and absolutes at the same time. We also hear that Jesus will do whatever we ask. What?!?
“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places.”
Progressive Christians often use this text to explain that the afterlife is not exclusively reserved for Christians. But is Jesus really talking about an afterlife here? Contrary to popular belief, Jesus didn’t say much about our current concept of Heaven. He was much more concerned with doing good things right now. It may be that you don’t have to be dead to dwell in the Father’s house! From this perspective, Jesus is saying that many people, even those who differ from us, walk with God.
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
For conservative Christians, these words are proof positive that you must become a Christian in order to go to Heaven. Jesus is speaking these words, Jesus is the Christ, and he’s using the definite article: “I am THEE way.” He also seems to be excluding some people: “NO ONE comes to the Father EXCEPT through me.” You can almost see Jesus’ outstretched palm, like airport security: “STOP! Before you enter the Everlasting Country, I need to see your passport.”
Sounds like the opposite of what Jesus said before, if you assume he’s talking about an afterlife. But again, remember Jesus’ consistent focus on the here-and-now.
If all that mattered were the afterlife, what would be the point of the life God has already given us?
Jesus speaks to us in our own lives when he says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Jesus lived a God-given life, just like we all do. And he chose to spend it a certain way. How do you choose to live your life? How much do you know about how Jesus lived his life? In what ways can you emulate Jesus?
“If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”
OK, now this one was problematic for me as a kid. “Lord Jesus, in your name, I want the Millennium Falcon for Christmas, along with the Han Solo and Chewbacca action figures!”
But Jesus is not Santa Claus. Jesus is not a vending machine, where you deposit the coins of faith and “pray the right way,” and get back exactly what you asked for. If that were the case, I think it would be proof that God did not love us. Vending machines don’t love us. The mall doesn’t love us. Santa Claus? Well, we’d like to think he loves us, but you may notice he only gives us gifts if we’re nice!
God, on the other hand, knows our deepest desires and fulfills them. Often, the things we think we want right at this moment are just shadows, echoes of the things God knows will really give us joy and faith. God sees beneath our egos to our deepest needs. Sometimes the path to joy and faith is a difficult one; I doubt it ever serves our ego.
To get back to Pope Benedict XVI, he is correct to identify relativism as a danger. To accept whatever beliefs will satisfy your own ego and your own desires is a cop-out. But to accept somebody else’s set of beliefs wholesale is also a cop-out. Neither extreme requires any work from us. Neither extreme will help us build a stone wall of faith that is undeniably our own, tried and tested by the flood waters of life and refusing to crumble.
If I’m raising more questions than I’m answering, don’t mistake that for relativism. Don’t think I’m being wishy-washy, afraid to give solid answers because of what you might think or because of what God might think. I’m building a stone wall, just like all of you are. My parents and my culture gave me a starter wall. I’ve thrown some of the stones into the river. I’ve thrown some at people. I’ve chiseled some down and used them elsewhere in the wall. Some of the original stones remain untouched, but I may find the need to move some of those later. And I’m sure some of those stones will never budge for the rest of my life.
All this is to say that we must never forget how little we know. But at the same time, we must not fail to act on our current faith. The stone wall you’re always building and rebuilding is the faith that must guide you from one moment to the next, throughout your entire life. Pope Benedict XVI correctly identifies the need for “a clear faith.” But it’s just because we need that faith to be clear that we keep working on the wall.
I don’t believe God judges us in an afterlife based on how we lived our lives, tallying up some sort of composite score, the sum total of how we dealt with all the events in our lives. We don’t work our way into God’s house. We are in God’s house now. That means we can’t put off the work we need to do. We need to live our lives in and among that work of faith.
Faith is not work like we usually think of work, either—like homework, or like being “overworked and underpaid.” Faith is not drudgery. The work of God is joyful work, full of wonder at this incredible life. Faith is the work of loving. Faith is the work of trusting. Faith is the work of community. Faith is the work that we find ourselves doing when we just show up, when we risk letting others into our lives. You can’t be a Christian in a vacuum! Yes, God is personal, but God is never private. Our stone walls of faith fit together into “a spiritual house,” the Temple of God in which Jesus came to live.
Guess what … that immovable stone in your dilapidated wall is one of the cornerstones of the Temple! The Temple keeps changing and growing, but it can’t stand without you. God needs you to be part of it.