Faith Questions
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 4, 2007
Isaiah 6:1-13
Is. 6:1 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. 2 Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. 3 And one called to another and said:
“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”
4 The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. 5 And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”
Is. 6:6 Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. 7 The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” 8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!” 9 And he said, “Go and say to this people:
‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend;
keep looking, but do not understand.’
10 Make the mind of this people dull,
and stop their ears,
and shut their eyes,
so that they may not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and comprehend with their minds,
and turn and be healed.”
11 Then I said, “How long, O Lord?” And he said:
“Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant,
and houses without people,
and the land is utterly desolate;
12 until the LORD sends everyone far away,
and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.
13 Even if a tenth part remain in it,
it will be burned again,
like a terebinth or an oak
whose stump remains standing
when it is felled.”
The holy seed is its stump.
The text from Isaiah is an appropriate one to read on a communion Sunday because it is the text from which the Eucharistic prayer the Tersanctus, the "Holy, Holy, Holy" comes from. I also think its an appropriate text to read on a Faith Questions Sunday because it, like so many from the texts that deal with the prophets, has a question in the middle of it that the prophet asks God. The prophet says "how long, how long oh lord" - that is, how long will it be that the people will not understand your word. Now God's answer isn't necessarily very comforting; entire cities lie in ruin and people have been deported to a far place. It's not a very good answer but it's an answer and it shows us that as a people of faith we are in relationship with a God whom we can question. God does not dismiss our questions, God does not always answer in the way we would like, but our faith is at heart a questioning faith, it has been since Cain asked, "Am I my brother's keeper?" since the prophets asked "How long, O Lord?" And so we come to a time of year where we ask questions of faith. And as I have said in years past, the title of this sermon is not simply a description of what is happening but a statement in itself. Faith questions. Faith is not expected to be mindless it is not expect to be perfectly comprehensible at all times. And so with that ...I turn it over to Alissa to ask our first faith question of tonight.
Where does the Bible teach "sola scriptura" and do Protestants believe in it anymore?
Sola Scriptura is the Reformation doctrine that says we look to scripture and scripture alone for the understandings that we have of God and theology. Now that was big with Martin Luther, who viewed the practices of the medieval Catholic Church as being completely unbiblical. That is, he said all the doctrine about indulgences and purgatory were not in the bible. That's human tradition that's been made up and these traditions were becoming oppressive. And so the Protestant Reformation, as it began with Luther and continued with Calvin, emphasized the idea of Sola Scriptura. But the question is whether Protestants still believe that and whether it's in the Bible. It's actually not in the Bible; the Bible really refers to itself very little. It never actually says only read what this book says. And so the text itself doesn't refer to itself very much and as Protestants began to realize this, they wondered what does the text even mean. When we look at a story, when we read a text, it's not always self-evident what it means. We need to have context, we need to understand it. Part of that understanding is in understanding how the Church has always interpreted this text. That's a tradition, right there. And so part of the practice of interpreting the Bible involves looking at how others have interpreted it, and there we invoke not only scripture alone but tradition. Now in the Anglican church, they also included reason. They said when examining a question you should look at scripture, you should see how the tradition explains it or has developed it and what the tradition says about it and you should also make an effort to apply reason to that. John Wesley said that you should also add experience, and what he meant was that personal experience of God that people had. Now Methodists call this the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. But what it means is that even among Protestants the idea of only using the Bible to interpret theological truth was never quite true. Some denominations continue to insist on that. I think that when they do they are missing the point, that in order to make sense of their own texts they are engaging in other things like their own reason, their own traditions in order to understand it. So the short answer is the Bible doesn't actually say anywhere that you can only use the Bible. Protestants are of mixed opinion as to whether it's only tradition. It is fair to say that scripture is still central to protestant theology whereas in the catholic tradition it is probably about half and half in terms of scripture and tradition and sometimes tradition wins out. But in the Protestant tradition scripture is always central.
How and in what ways can we actively engage those who disagree with our faith values. For instance, as United Methodist we have the theological tradition of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. But if we are in spiritual discussion with a biblical literalist or a member of another faith tradition, they may not understand or support Wesleyan theology and its process, but how can we still bridge the "faith gap'' that exists to better realize "the One Body" metaphor that Paul uses in I Corinthians?
It's a very well thought out question. What I would say is when talking to anyone else who views any issue differently, it's always important to try to meet them where they come from. It's always important to validate their opinion, and to say "I understand how a person might think that." Its important to start there because having built trust, having built a relationship, you show you do not exist solely to undermine the other person's opinion or to mock their belief. You can say "I understand that opinion and I value it as a valid opinion." It then allows you to open up the process of how you came to your opinion, and one of the things that I would say to someone who is a literalist is that there are a great many things in the bible that they are not taking literally. That is in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus is crucified on the first day of Passover. In John, Jesus was crucified on the day before Passover. If you were taking it literally, you would have to say that Jesus was crucified twice. But no one does that. Instead, they rely on their reason. Some people have tried to harmonize the text which is a way to use reason to make sense of something. Even if that's not the kind of thing we might do, if we are not inclined to harmonize - merge things together that don't quite fit, you can make an appeal to someone and say that "in coming to this conclusion you have used your reason and so you understand that I will use my reason in coming to a different conclusion." And you can say similarly, how do you know the texts says what you say it says. Perhaps you heard this from a Sunday School teacher or a pastor of someone else; that's tradition. So I think it's possible to help people understand what it might mean when we talk about the Wesleyan Quadrilateral - it's not so alien a thing. After all people interpret things the way they've been trained to interpret them, the way they are inclined to see things through reason, and they way their experiences shapes them. The one thing about the Wesleyan Quadrilateral is that it happens to fit the way most people do that kind of interpretation. And so I think there are ways to engage with someone who sees things quite differently, first by validating their opinion and then by second by showing them the ways in which they might already have more in common with you than they think they do.
What is your response when people say that the LGBT community is partaking in a morally wrong lifestyle?
That is a question of obviously controversial debate in the Church today. And people who believe that homosexuals are living in sin, do so out of sincere conviction that what they believe is faithfulness to the Biblical text and so I won't say that they are wrong in that way, in that there is such a clear line. Because for those that have come to a different conclusion they have gotten there through a different process. They have looked at intentions. They say, "well we know the texts says this, and we might debate on what the text actually says, but lets us assume the text says this. And we know that I have met homosexual Christians who are of the most extraordinary and compelling faith. And so somehow I have to reconcile this, somehow I can not live with this split sense of my faith." And the way people have reflected on that is to look at those relevant commandments in the Bible as commandments that they feel no longer obtain. And we've done this before. I imagine many of us in this room are wearing clothing that is of mixed cloth. Something that is explicitly forbidden by the Old Testament. I imagine that a number of us here have eaten shell fish or pork or other foods that the Bible explicitly prohibits. Many of us no doubt have worked on the Sabbath. Well work on the Sabbath is a stonable offense in the Old Testament. And we have come to an understanding where we have made decisions about things in the Bible based on our experience and based on how we feel they fit into the broader framework of the Gospel message. And so that those who feel that homosexuals are living in sin do so because they understand that their faithfulness to the Gospel is faithfulness to the text. That is an opinion that has long been held in the Church. And there are others whose faithfulness they believe to be faithfulness to what they feel is the spirit of the Gospel. That is: love and acceptance and reconciliation. Now it is possible to have a middle ground, there is a way that you can say, and I've heard one Christian ethicist talk about this and say, that there is a way that you can say that this is wrong but even so we should tolerate it in the sense that there are many things that we look at as the broken creation. That women have pain in childbirth, the Bible teaches us, is a sign of the brokenness of the creation. It's not how it was intended to be. Relationships fail and so the modern Church has come to a concession on divorce, even the Gospels now see divorce being worked out. Jesus says no divorce, and then in Matthew's version, unless in cases of marital infidelity. Even there we see the church struggling. By the time St. Paul gets to the issue he says: "or if you're married to a non-believer and that's holding you back or upsetting that balance." So we even see the church struggling with how to accommodate the brokenness of the world, so I think its even possible for people who believe homosexuals are sinning to come to a way to say "well something like gay marriage is at least a concession to that situation." It's making better out of a situation. I think there are different ways people can look at it and they certainly have. There's either focusing solely on the text, there's focusing on the spirit, or there's trying to come to a mixed understanding. And all of those are valid Christian expressions and as a Reconciling Community our task is to make this a space that is safe for all people to express their views and beliefs on that. This is a debate that will continue and a dialogue that should continue, but I think that it's important that when engaging, as sometimes happens when people proffer that opinion, that it not be met with an equally vitriolic condemnation of that opinion. That sometimes there is condemnation and it's met with an equal amount of condemnation on the other. The conversation needs to take place in love, first and foremost, before any kind of agreement or consensus is possible.
I can never bring myself to reconcile with the fact that Jewish people and others who have been raised in different faiths are going to hell....isn't there a verse in the Bible that says to let God handle the different religions in the world? I realize all we can do is love everybody in the same way, but what are Christians supposed to do when confronted with the question of eternal damnation?
What is your response when people say that all non-Christians are going to hell?
I'll take the second one first. It says nowhere in the scriptures that all non-Christians are going to hell - nothing of the kind really. In fact it doesn't even grantee that all Christians will go to heaven. Jesus says "not everyone who says to me 'Lord, Lord' will see the Kingdom of God, but those who do the will of my Father in Heaven." Now Jesus seems to be making a statement that its not about what you believe, its how you live in right relationship with one another. That's a definition that may go far beyond the boundaries of "Christian." I'm inclined to think that it probably does. Also we read in Acts Peter saying "I truly believe that God shows no partiality, that in every nation, those who do what is right are acceptable to him." So I don't think the scriptures support that notion, especially in the Old Testament which has numbers of examples of non-Israelites doing quite well by God: Job, Ruth, others who come into the fold who are not quite of the Covenant are treated with great respect. So I think the text allows for a little more expansiveness than people are inclined to think. But the question is: ok, now that you are either in or out - what are you in or out of? What's happening? And there the tradition is a little more complex. In the ancient world they believe that when you died, your dead. And that was it. In the Old Testament you read the stories of all the genealogies and it will say that so and so lived 900 years and he dies, and it will end and go on to the next person in the genealogy. The ancients came to an understanding however that if God was truly God, if God was truly good and God was truly just, this life could not be the end of the story. That would leave justice unfinished. There were too many righteous people who had suffered, there were too many wicked people who had gotten away with a lot of things - God's justice was not being done. And so influenced perhaps a little bit by the Persians the Hebrew people began to understand this idea of a resurrection from the dead: a day at the end of history when God would raise everyone from the dead and judge them all. Now there were a couple of ways that they thought about that. Some thought that only the righteous would be raised to new life and that the wicked would just stay dead. Some people thought that the righteous would be raised to new life and the wicked would be raised to new life but that the wicked would get killed again. This would be so that they would know that they were getting punished because if they just never came back to life that would not be satisfying from a retributive point of view.
Now, as the Church tradition developed, coming into contact with Greek thought, the idea of a soul living beyond the body comes more to the fore. So you begin to have this idea that when you die, your soul goes somewhere else. Originally the Jewish-Christian understanding was sleeping in death until the resurrection day at which time you were brought back to life. But modern popular Christianity has this imagined heaven and hell. Hell in the Bible is just a place of annihilation, or of sort of shadowy afterlife. So we wind up with a very complex picture. If you ask me what the scriptures say I will say that they don't actually say one thing, and its kind of frustrating. But on balance they tend to favor this resurrection of the dead as the ultimate fate of humans. My own personal belief is that when we die we die, and we are raised on the last day, but like any sleep in between you are not really aware of the passage of time. So as far as you are concerned the next thing that happens to you is being raised into eternal life.
Now I have had that opinion not because I have any idea what actually happens after you die. I have that opinion because for me a belief in resurrection implies so much more than if I thought I was just a spirit that would float away. Then ultimately my body isn't important, I could eat whatever I like. I don't have to worry about physical abuse because they are just abusing my body, my soul is what is important. For me a belief in resurrection affirms not only the goodness, not only of the body, but of the creation, the material world as something we should care about. The environment, social justice is material. Violence against women matters because the body matters. Jesus was raised in bodily form and so will we be and that matters. So the real answer is that I don't know what happens to us after we die, but how we characterize it says a lot about how we live, and to me that's where the importance of a theology comes in.
Have you ever gone through a period of time where you just haven't felt like God was there? I seem to go through "faith cycles," and I've always wondered if there's a way to restore that...
Absolutely. Everyone does. There is not a person of faith that has not - if they are doing it right - has not felt at some point that God was removed. It's actually not that much of a leap to get there. All you have to do is look around, turn on the news. Open the paper and there's hundreds of instances of "God where are you." Why is this happening? So it is not unusual that you would feel that way, that anyone would feel that way. And in fact there will always be those times when God will feel distant and removed. I think what's important is to understand that even when we feel that way, God is still with us even when we cant feel God's presence. One theologian talks about Jesus on the cross. In Matthew and Mark, Jesus' last words are, "my God, my God why have you forsaken me." And this theologian says that at that moment, the distance between God and Jesus was as far as it could be even though they were connected by the Holy Spirit. That Jesus felt in his own being that alienation, that separation. They were as far as they could be from one another. So that we understand that even when we are feeling alienated from God we are still with God and that God understands what that alienation is like for us--that God is aware, that God knows where we are. We do not permanently escape it because our faith is cyclical. There will always be times when God will appear more immanent to us. And there will be other times when God will feel far away.
The Bible has this for us, lays it out beautifully for us at the very beginning. Chapter 1 of Genesis, God creates the world by fiat, from way on high, "let there be light, let the waters be divided from the waters let the seas be gathered in one place and let the dry lands emerge." Then right in the next chapter the creation story starts over and this time God creates by taking the clay of the earth in God's hands and forming it into a human being and breathing life into it. So we have at once an image of God who is far and lofty and high up there and removed, and then we have an image of God who is right there. There is an old Jewish saying that says that "God is as far as the farthest star and as near as the next breath." And our lives are like that, our lives move between times when we feel close to God and we feel apart from God, but that's how we feel about it. God is always there, God is always in the struggle even in the alienation God is there. God who is on the cross saying "my God, my God why have you forsaken me" knows what that alienation is and can redeem that alienation and can bring us back into a sense of God's presence.
I always enjoy this service. It feels a little bit like appellate argument in court. It feels a lot like my Board of Ordained Ministry questioning, but for me these are the Questions of Faith and I encourage you to keep asking them. I also don't want you to trade uncertainty for my certainty. Asking questions of faith is an important part of faith - asking questions of me saying, can that really be so, and asking someone else "well my chaplain said this but I don't know about that." Faith is a dynamic process, one that has to keep itself fresh, else it become stale, else it become something that's not really faith. And so I thank you for the opportunity to do this and I encourage you too keep asking the questions your whole life's faith journey long.
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Copyright © 2007. Mark A. Schaefer.
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