03/16/14

On Sunday afternoons I've been going to parks around the city. Today's park: Mount Echo! I used to frolic there like a young deer in the days of my youth. The trails and views have become caked in memories, some good, others not so good. This afternoon I walked around in the chilly wind, snapping pictures on my IPhone and mulling over today's sermon at University Christian Church.

Anthony J. talked about the "privatization" of faith in American Christianity. The trumpeting of a "personal relationship with Jesus" has come at the expense of Christian community. The church has become peripheral at best and supplementary at worst. Sunday services or involvement in a church community is seen, in practice, as an "add on" to Christian faith. Christian community isn't to be religious theater, and the real grit and grime of the Christian life comes in community: carrying one another and being carried by others as we slug out what it means to be devoted to God in a world that has set its teeth against Him. 

The privatization of faith has, in its own way, made the litmus test of faith either (a) emotional feelings, or (b) intellectual prowess. We measure who has the most faith by these two standards: "Do I feel God's love for me? Do I feel a passion for Jesus? Do I feel Christ's forgiveness?" and "Have I thought this through? Can I make a good argument for my beliefs? Do I know why I believe what I do?" I've never really been "emotive" in my faith (emoticons aren't present in my written prayers); my devotion to God hasn't been founded on the way God's love makes me feel. I've always been more intellectual in my faith, and in rightly pointing out the flaws of using feelings as a litmus test for faith, I've been guilty of placing a breed of intellectualism in its place. Being an analytical and skeptical person, it irks me when people believe something but don't know why they believe it; such "irk" in my bones comes from my own predisposition and innerworkings rather than from an appreciation of genuine faith. The real litmus test for faith (the one put forth by Jesus and the Apostles) is obedience, endurance, and faithfulness over the long haul. How ones feels (or thinks) in the midst of that isn't the crux of faith.

A man who is brought to tears in worship, who feels a stirring in his heart at the name of Jesus, who feels the consolation of the Spirit in his prayers, but who doesn't live obediently before God, who doesn't even attempt to do so, has far less faith than the man who's seen as emotionally detached but who pursues conformity to Christ over every other pursuit. Likewise, the woman who can articulate her beliefs with poignancy and elegancy, who can demolish the arguments lifted against Christ's name, who can wow the masses with her intellect, but who clings to pride and refuses to surrender aspects of her life to Christ, has far less faith than the woman who pursues Jesus with everything she has but who can't tell you the names of the twelve disciples or expound on trinitarian theology. 

The point of all this: when we come before God on the Day of Judgment, he won't ask us what books we've read, how well we learned, or how much we felt; he will ask us, "Did you obey?" That is the crux of faith, to the point that faith and obedience are inseparable. You can't have one without the other. Faith absent obedience isn't faith at all, but an emotive concoction in the brain or a mental consent to a body of facts, theories, ideas and concepts. When Jesus looks upon his followers and says, "Well done, good and faithful servants," he won't be saying that based on our feelings or intellect, but upon how we lived our lives--did we truly surrender ourselves to him, truly devote ourselves to him, truly seek to obey him? One can have all the "marks" of the faith but lack true faith, as Jesus makes clear in the gospels; many will be surprised when Jesus says, "I never knew you," because they were convinced all along that they knew him and were known by him. There is a warning in this, a warning we would do well to heed.