Faith

I live and work in a faith community. In our context, there are a lot of options for defining a community of faith, ranging from megachurches preaching gospels of wealth to the other extreme of a gathering of souls seated in silent meditation. There is everything in between. There are so-called mainline churches, offramp upstarts, and gatherings of various and assorted expressions of Being. The result is a root question--what is faith actually?

Hebrews in the New Testament defines faith as “hope in things unseen.” Faith is not based on empirical evidence, but rather its opposite in many cases--it is a leap into accepting something for which there can be no tangible proof, other than the certainty that it must be so--thus, Job cries our from his ash heap of total desolation, “I know my Redeemer lives!” Faith is something reason can understand, but cannot prove. I make the statement, “God is.” I make that statement because as I view creation, human life, and myself, I find that God must be, all the while with the skeptic launching salvo after salvo of empirical evidence that it cannot be so--God bless you, Stephen Hawking.

Faith, though, is more than acceptance of an idea. It is then entrusting oneself to the object of faith. You literally stake your existence on the person or ideology as being the sustenance for all that is. 

Immediately, it becomes clear, then, that one must choose one’s object of faith with extreme care. Entrusting one’s being to something that cannot provide meaning, purpose, compassion, and grace is a wasted trust and dangerous enterprise. To entrust oneself to another is risky.

In human relations, we see this all the time--someone trusts someone else who has no real interest in them other than as a tool to be used or a pawn to be played. Broken trust leads to lasting damage and deep scars that impact and affect the way in which we meet the world, think about ourselves, and feel about other people. Marriages dissolve when one partner proves unfaithful, losing themselves to another, an addiction, or simple selfishness. 

I believe God to be trustworthy. The story of God’s interaction with us, i.e., the Bible, reveals a portrait of God as the self-emptying fount of all being. God spares nothing in the care of creation. John states it simply--God even offers his own Being in Christ for the reclamation of the world from all that separates us from God and from one another--in other words, all the stuff that goes wrong, gets misused, or is trusted to provide what it cannot offer. God is the Waiting Father who graciously created us free to be and to do whatever we choose to be and do--even that which is counter to God--waiting for us to find God who is eternally present with us in every breath. God continues to abide, without condemnation (cf. John 8:1ff.), but with gracious acceptance and endless healing. Things do go wrong; suffering is real; and, yes, it often seems there could be a better way, but creation is as it is. God abides with omnicompetence to make all well and all manner of things well. 

As we seek to love one another, we find this model at play. The truest love we can offer another is to entrust ourselves to their care and acceptance. Receiving the gift, they respond in kind, offering themselves freely to us for our care and acceptance. Together we find a powerful source of being, security, and wholeness. 

So, faith is love. It is love, though, as defined by God--self-emptying, other-centered love. When the Apostle John wrote, “God is love,” this love is the what he meant. God gives all in self-emptying providence, grace, and mercy. God does so because in love God recognizes that we cease to be without these gifts. We accept God when we recognize this presence, but then respond in kind to God, other human beings, and to ourselves. We recognize the complete necessity of loving others as we love ourselves. We cannot truly love others until we love ourselves; we cannot truly love ourselves until we love others. They are inextricably linked together. Compassion girds every aspect of our existence. 

Then faith is a practice. Love is not an idea to be affirmed or agreed to; it must be lived. Love is a verb more often than a noun. You reveal your love as you love. The Apostle James said it bluntly--”Faith without works is dead.” He did not mean we earn God’s favor in doing good deeds; he meant that we can never fully comprehend love until we engage in love. Hence, to know mercy, be merciful; to know grace, be gracious; to know acceptance, be accepting; and so on. 

If we do not live by love--the love defined by God--then there is no real or actual life in us. Love is life. 

Live it.