In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
It’s been said that preachers only have one sermon. Each week, we just put a different spin on the thing that is most important in our theology. There’s a lot of truth in that. I think that I have more than one point that I preach about, but probably not more than three. I wonder if you have an idea of what those might be? I’d love to hear how my sermons are heard, so feel free to send me a message and let me know what you hear as the central claims of my preaching. Today, in considering this portion of Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, one of my primary preaching points will be on display.
One of the things that I often preach about because it is so central to my understanding of faith is that what we often mean by faith is misunderstood. Some of it comes down to translation. The word used in the New Testament for “faith” is best translated as trust or having confidence. When this word was translated into Latin, it became credo, which is where we get our word “creed,” and it’s also related to the whole set of words related to our heart, as in cardio. Credo is a verb that means to give your heart to. The noun version of this word was fides, which is best translated as “loyalty or allegiance.” Latin was translated into Old English as a word that means “to hold dear, or to prize” It’s a word related to the German word belieben, which is about love; you can even hear how close “believe” and “belove” are to one another. You can also hear how this is related to the word libido, which is all about passion. This is what belief means – to trust, to be committed to, to be in a relationship of love.
But by the way people speak of faith today, you wouldn’t know that belief has anything to do with your heart or your will, you’d think it’s a purely intellectual matter. Faith is not supposed to be ideas about God, rather faith is an embodied relationship to God. Jesus never asked people to acknowledge anything, but rather to commit to something. Jesus didn’t ask people to trust that the Kingdom of God exists, but instead asked them to join it, but the word “belief” doesn’t carry that meaning for us. Belief no longer has anything to do with how you live your life, what you trust in, or to whom you pledge your allegiance.
What happened was with the rise of science, belief was translated from Old and Middle English into the word “opinion.” Scientists in the 1600s were starting to challenge many assumptions – that the sun revolves around the earth, for example. Beliefs became things that could be refuted and disproved. Beliefs became theories, things to measure against the scientific method. Eventually, science showed that some beliefs were wrong, and doubt began to be cast on religious beliefs. Beliefs that could not be proven were considered either wrong or immature.
For the vast majority of Christian thought, faith has never been about certainty, but now belief has come to be a series of thoughts that can either be accepted or doubted. Doubt, or agnosticism, went from a healthy part of faith to a sign of weakness. So we don’t accept anything other than 100% certainty as counting as a strong faith. Belief is an orientation of the heart, not intellectual assent to a hypothesis. And how many of us really base our lives around a hypothesis? Even if that hypothesis seems to be valid, no one says “I live my life rooted in this idea that may end up being wrong.” And so, given this choice of all or nothing, many people walk away from faith because we’ve turned it into a series of thoughts that really don’t make much sense without lived experience.
When Paul was writing to the church in Thessalonica, everyone knew all about the different gods out there. Each of them required different things of people. Generally, these requirements were around the preferred style of worship and what sort of sacrifices would appease the gods. A relationship with a god was about what humans do to earn divine favor. But the God that is revealed in Jesus Christ is different. This God doesn’t make demands of us, doesn’t require burnt offerings. Rather than demanding that humans give something to God, this God gives things to us, quite apart from us asking for or deserving them. What God gives us is so different from the transactional view that we have of God.
For many people, we give God our positive thoughts in order to gain favor; but that’s just now how the God that we call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit operates. Rather, God gives us grace because God loves us so deeply and fully. Faith then, is not about us accepting or earning this love, but rather about thriving in it. Jesus said that came that we might have abundant life, and that is what faith is about. Faith cannot be confined to only what we think on the topic of the existence of a supernatural deity. Faith is so much more than that because God is so much more than that.
God is in all things, the source of all things, and the destiny of all things. For this to be true, it is not required that we think it is true. It simply is. Faith, then, is the journey into this truth which sets us free. Faith is about the transformation of our hearts, minds, and lives into the fullness of God in which we live and move and have our being.
There is a theological word that describes this, and that word is “sanctification.” Sometimes you’ll hear Orthodox Christians speak of “deification” and John Wesley often wrote about “holiness,” and those are referring to the same thing. The idea is that by living more fully into the grace of God, we become holier. Now, “holy” doesn’t mean superior, but it does mean to be different. When St. Paul writes to call us to “a life worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory,” this is what he is speaking of – of growing in holiness. As the section that we heard today concludes, he writes “We also constantly give thanks to God for this, that when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word, which is also at work in you believers.” The key here is that God’s word is at work in us to transform us, to bring us into God’s holiness.
And so faith isn’t about thinking that this is true, but rather trusting that it is. Faith is about giving our allegiance to God, not in order to gain anything from God, but rather to grow closer to the love out of which we were made. Maybe you think that you can’t change. You’ve always been judgmental and you just can’t stop. You’ve always had a short temper. You’ve always struggled to see yourself as a smart and beautiful person. You’ve struggled with an addiction for years. You’ve never had what you would call an awareness of God’s love for you. Whatever it is, the good news about faith is that it’s not an either you have it or you don’t proposition. Faith is about growing in holiness, in trust, in fidelity. And so Paul writes that the Thessalonians have witnessed how pure, upright, and blameless his conduct was. He’s not doing this to boast, but to say “See what’s possible through God?” He’s showing them what faith is all about, not thinking the right things, but a relationship in which we are transformed by God.
This is what Baptism is all about – it’s the start of this process of growing into the full stature of Christ. In the same way that we misunderstand faith, we misunderstand Baptism. When we are baptized, it is not an event, but rather a process. Just like marriage, no one has a wedding as says “Well, I guess I’ve completed that relationship, back to life as it was yesterday.” Of course, that isn’t the case – it’s about growing in a relationship of love, about being transformed, about recommitting daily to the relationship. The faith that is initiated in Baptism is the same – by the gift of the Holy Spirit, we grow more and more into the truest reality of our lives – God’s love, mercy, and grace for us.
St. Paul knows this is hard work, it goes against the way the world often works. And so he notes that he has been urging and encouraging believers in this life of faith. That, brothers and sisters, is our work. Today, we’re going to baptize Kira, bringing her into the Body of Christ. She’s going to need you to urge and encourage her in this faith. The world will challenge her, it will call her things other than “beloved child of God,” and she may come to think faith is about certainty and walk away if she doesn’t have that certainty. Our task is to urge her on, reminding her of God’s all-surpassing love for her. Our task is to encourage her, to help her in her growth in Christ. And it’s not only true for Kira, but for all of us as members of Christ’s Body.
There’s a reason why we speak of practices of faith. Faith really is something you have to practice. You never know the moment when you will be called upon to speak the Good News, or to show the love of Christ to a person in need, or to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. If you don’t have a practice of prayer, not only are you missing out on this growth in faith, but it’s nearly impossible to develop a prayer life in the midst of chaos. If you don’t have a practice of regular Sunday worship, it means you are not connected to the rhythm of faith and blessings of community. If you don’t practice generosity by taking part in stewardship, it means it’s much harder to see God’s abundance all around us. If you don’t practice living as if God’s love is the truest thing about you, you might be tempted to believe that your value is rooted in your earning potential, or outward appearance, or intellectual ability.
And so, as Paul suggests, we are to urge and encourage in these practices of faith. We are to remind each other by the way we speak to one another, by the way we care for each other, in the way we are generous to each other that we are beloved children of God. When the world shakes our confidence, we encourage each other. When we reduce faith to thinking the right things, we urge each other to orient not just our minds, but our lives towards God. When we forget how deeply God loves us, we show that love to others, and in doing so we will find it anew. This is the Good News: that God loves us and brings us into that love through a relationship called “faith.” This love isn’t something to consider in our minds or to prove or disprove, but rather to feel in our bones, to grow and thrive in, to orient our life around. And by doing so, by responding in faith to God’s love, we find rest for our souls, we find a peace that passes all understanding, we find the meaning of life, we find the love out of which we were made and to which we will find our eternal life. For the gift of faith, thanks be to God!
