Last week's sermon was from John's Gospel, the story of Jesus'  first miracle, in which he turned the water to wine at the wedding feast at Cana. I suggested that the meaning of the story was not to be found in speculations concerning the "miracle" at the heart of the story, but in an even greater miracle called "belief." I concluded with these words:

"You don't have to taste the wine, to believe in the sign. You don't have to experience a miracle, to believe in the miraculous. There was a miracle here. Without a doubt. The miracle was belief... Do you believe? Do you believe?"

At the door following the service, someone who always listens attentively and speaks generously, said to me, "...but, I'd like to hear more about what you mean by 'believe.'" (Charlie Milford, Pastor Emeritus)

"Then, come back next Sunday," I said, "because that's where we're going." And as we begin, I want to give you the next page of my sermon to do a little processing on this question. I have had a week to get ready for the message, and I want to give you a moment to reflect: What Does it Mean to "Believe"? I'm not asking what you believe, or why you believe. I'm not asking how you believe, or when you believe. But I want to know what the act of believing, itself, means to you? For example, does believing mean "knowing"? Does it mean "accepting," or "trusting," or "hoping"? What is at the very core of the discipline of "believing" for you?

The back side of the bulletin insert has a few words to guide your thoughts, and there is some blank space as well. If you have a pen or pencil, I encourage you to write down the thoughts that come to your mind for the next two minutes. What Does it Mean to "Believe"?

                                                                        PAUSE

                        [The text to the end of this page was printed on the bulletin insert.]

                                                  What Does it Mean to "Believe"?

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable, But there it sits, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.                                                                                   H.L. Mencken

From Last Week's Sermon: ...Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. (John 2.11)

"You don't have to taste the wine, to believe in the sign. You don't have to experience a miracle, to believe in the miraculous. There was a miracle here. Without a doubt. The miracle was belief."

The question is not why do you believe, or in what or whom do you believe? But, what does it mean to "believe"? What is at stake in calling yourself a "believer"? What is the effect of believing?

Do I Dare Believe?

You ask me if I'm "faithful." / I tell you that it's true.

I answer with a question. / It's all that I can do.

Do I dare believe, and let love lead my life?

Could I not believe and leave this love behind?

I don't have all the answers. / I can't explain it all.

I don't know where I'm going. / But I think I hear a call.

Do I dare believe...

words by David Wilcox

What does it mean to "believe"?

[end of the insert page]
 

Doris Betts is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina. Her short stories and novels are laced with the tensions of faith. Several years ago, she was asked by some enthusiastic students to "testify" one night before Billy Graham spoke to 10,000 students in the gymnasium. After some encouragement from the president of the university system, she reluctantly agreed. Listen to her recollection of that night:

I [talked] about doubts and of being of the "tribe of Thomas," and I said that for me faith was always going to be a pilgrimage. And then Billy Graham spoke after me about how he'd never had a doubt in his life. It was a large crowd and people whom I had never met before would come up for days after and say, "I'm a Baptist." It was as if everybody was revealing some shameful secret.

                      An interview with Doris Betts, The Christian Century, October 8, 1997.

This little story reveals for me an interesting dichotomy that I have felt keenly in my own pilgrimage of faith. As a child, "to believe" was the opposite of "to doubt." Belief was "blessed assurance." Belief was certainty. Belief was knowledge. Belief was a cognitive function (some great "aha" of the brain) that, when connected to a spoken confession of that belief, entitled one to eternal salvation. (Romans 10.9) To believe, in short, meant no less than to be "saved."

This experience of belief is shared by many who call themselves "Christian." And, I am grateful to God for it. Many of us are what we are in faith, because of such believing. In the words of Marcus Borg, this kind of believing is a "pre-critical naivete." It is the concrete expression of a deeply spiritual reality. We hope to raise our boys with such a concrete belief and faith. We must teach our children the stories. We must give them the knowledge of the scriptures and the language of faith. We must teach them the love and the security of God's salvation. We much teach them to believe. And we must revel in their childlike faith.

But many of us are where we are, also in spite of such faith. We must not remain in that stage of faith for a lifetime. And we must teach our children as they become men and women, like Paul, to "put away childish things." Faith must grow. Belief must mature, until we have moved "beyond belief, to relationship" (Borg, p.17).

The scholar and writer, Marcus Borg, reflects on the growth of his belief in his book, entitled Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time

Until my late thirties, I saw the Christian life as being primarily about believing... Now I no longer [do]. The experiences of my mid-thirties led me to realize that... the central issue of the Christian life is not believing in God or believing in the Bible or believing in the Christian tradition. Rather, the Christian life is about entering into a relationship with that to which the Christian tradition points, which may be spoken of as God, the risen living Christ, or the Spirit. And a Christian is one who lives out his or her relationship to God within the framework of the Christian tradition.                                                                                                                  Borg, p.17.

Last Sunday evening, as I began considering what is really at the heart of "belief," I read again today's scriptures. When you preach from the Lectionary, you commit yourself to preach texts that someone else has chosen for the day. So I began wondering what, if anything, those texts would say about What it Means to "Believe," since I had already decided what I needed to preach on today.

I read Nehemiah's account of a public reading of scripture. I read of the people gathering together, in excitement, as the Levites read aloud from this scroll which had been recently discovered in their dusty, ill-kept temple. I read that after this act of corporate worship they were sent away to "eat the fat and drink sweet wine(!)... to not be grieved... to celebrate the joy of the LORD, because therein lay their strength" (Neh. 8.10) And I wondered about belief. Do we worship because we believe, or do we believe, because we worship?

In her own story of "Belief, Doubt, and Sacred Ambiguity," Kathleen Norris tells of her experiences in a Benedictine abbey, when she was struggling to believe.

"I was surprised," she says, "to find the monks so unconcerned with my weighty doubts and intellectual frustrations over Christianity. What interested them more was my desire to come to their worship, the liturgy of the hours... They seemed to believe that if I just kept coming back to worship, kept coming home, things would eventually fall into place" (Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris, p.63). 

Perhaps the Israelites of Nehemiah's day were onto something. Perhaps the act of corporate worship is itself central to the process of our believing.

And then I read Paul's words,

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body B Jews or Greeks, slaves or free B and we were all made to drink of one Spirit (1 Cor. 12.12-13).

And I wondered about belief. What Does it Mean to Believe? Would you believe me if I told you that after reading those two texts, God spoke? God spoke, and I heard the words: "To Believe is To Belong."

We must move "beyond belief to relationship."

To believe is to recognize that we are connected to the Source of this infinite universe. As the book of Ephesians tells us, "God is above all and through all and in all" (Ephesians 4.6) To believe is to recognize that we are connected to this Source by One has shown us a "still more excellent way" (1 Cor. 12.31). Paul's "body of Christ" is a metaphor that teaches us humility -- we are not the center of the world. We are not the body, the only body that God cares about.

But, the metaphor also teaches us confidence and joy. For it teaches us that we are a part, an integral part of a body that is much greater, of a way that is much greater, of a mystery that is much greater than any belief can be. "For knowledge (belief) shall pass away," Paul tells the Corinthians, but in this body which is Christ's, "love shall never fail" (from 1 Cor. 13).

To believe is to cast ourselves upon one another, here in this body, in love. To believe is to belong. To believe is to care for one another. To trust one another. To forgive one another. In short, it is to belong to one another by believing in one another.

In her profound but somewhat irreverent look at faith called, Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott says, "I tell you, families are definitely the training ground for forgiveness. At some point you pardon the people in your family for being stuck together in all their weirdness, and when you can do that, you can learn to pardon anyone. Even yourself, eventually" (p.219-220).

To believe is to belong, by becoming family to one another. To become "One body" here, together.

Let me tell you that one of the things I admire the most about you as a "body" is that you have stuck together through many stormy trials of belief. Through a conversation which was started nearly a half-century ago, you have believed in one another, even when you didn't agree with what one another believed. The pastor of the church which we served in Clemson, SC always dismissed the congregation with the words, "so go out and be the church..." He didn't say, go and tell the world what you know, what you think, what you believe. He said, go and be the church... go and even along your separate paths, belong to one another through Christ.

To believe is to belong to one another, and it is to belong to one another by recognizing that all children belong to God. To God who is alone trustworthy.

Anne Lamott also tells in her book, of learning a powerful lesson about God (before she even believed in God) through studying Soren Kierkegaard's work entitled, Fear and Trembling.

Kierkegaard retold the story of Abraham, who heard God's angels tell him to take his darling boy Isaac up to the mountain and offer him as a sacrifice. Now this was exactly the sort of Old Testament behavior I had trouble with... But the way Kierkegaard wrote it, Abraham understood that all he really had in life was God's unimaginable goodness and love, God's promise of protection, God's paradoxical promise that Isaac would provide him with many descendants. He understood that without God's love and company, this life would be so empty and barbaric that it almost wouldn't matter whether his son was alive or not. And since this side of the grave you could never know for sure if there was a God, you had to make a leap of faith, if you could, leaping across the abyss of doubt with fear and trembling. (Lamott, p.27)

To believe is to take that leap, that leap of almost-arrogant-faith, that dares you to believe that you really do belong to God. To believe is to relax in the Grace of God enough that in your frail body on this fallen earth, you might now hear the words, "You are My Beloved." And to believe is to rest in the assurance that these four words, "You are My Beloved," is all the belief you will ever need.

"At its Greek root, 'to believe' simply means to give one's heart to' (Amazing Grace, A Vocabulary of Faith, Kathleen Norris, p.62). The story of Jesus Christ and his cross is a story of passion that tells us but one thing: God has given us God's very own heart.

God believes in you.

Do you believe? Do you believe?

May it be so. Amen!

Pastoral Prayer