THE UNCERTAINTY OF FAITH Gen. 17:1-7, 15-16; Rom. 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38 The Christian faith is one of three religions that trace their origins to the patriarch Abraham. The other two are Judaism, of course, and Islam. It should not be assumed that Abraham was a Jew. Rather, it seems that he was a figure from before the religion of ancient Israel who was incorporated into Israelite history as the Israelites more or less occupied the shrine dedicated to Abraham at Hebron. There are plenty of great Bible stories that take Abraham for their hero and not least of all, the story which is our Lesson for today. In this story, Abraham is solicited by God to be a partner in a covenant according to which he and Sarah, his spouse, will be the parents of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you, says God in the story. What we re seeing here is Israel reading its history back to Abraham, a figure of great stature from antiquity. Israel thereby understands itself to be the offspring of Abraham and Sarah to whom God will extend the covenant God made with Abraham. And so, the ragtag tribes of Israel will grow and grow into a great and significant people with a world historical destiny. And indeed, that is what happens. The tribes come together into two kingdoms, then into one people, and if Judaism doesn t become the largest religion in the world, it is certainly one of great durability and importance. But it is not the last word. In the lineage of Abraham, a Galilean Jew by the name of Jesus comes on the scene some 1400 years later, and in the course of his short life becomes the center of the second of the Abrahamic faiths. There is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that Jesus has 1
any interest in starting a new religion. Among the things he does seem to want to do, though not at first, is to extend the benefit of God s covenant between God and Abraham and Israel to Gentiles, which is to say, to everyone else. His followers and not least of all St. Paul press this point and make membership in the people of God a matter of belief rather than of birth. No longer is it blood that marks one as a member of the people of God but the water of baptism. Water is everywhere and Christians are everywhere, the religion with the most members in the world today. And does it not make sense that God who is the Creator of the heavens and the Earth is the God of all and not just of some who by accident happen to be born into a certain tribe? Ah, but the story of Abraham s legacy is not over. The third Abrahamic faith and the fastest growing today is Islam, the religion not so much of the prophet Muhammad as of the Quran, which is the gift from God in the Arabic language, given through the prophet, who could neither read nor write, some 600 years after Jesus. For Muslims, the Quran is the perfect unaltered and untranslatable word of God, written by Allah, who gave the words to an angel who gave the words to Muhammad. The Quran is more recited than read by Muslims. It glories not in this world but in the next. The Quran says that its God is the same as that of Christians and Jews, but Islam is the last word on God, even as Judaism and Christianity had claimed to be the last word before Islam. So here are the three sibling religions that claim Abraham as their forebear, a dysfunctional family of siblings that have a terrible history of relations: the Jews persecuted the early Christians, but the Christians gained ground and persecuted the Jews and persecuted them viciously by Crusade and pogrom and ghettoizing and holocaust, the last two of which were not particularly Christian persecutions but persecutions that had 2
their point of departure in Church teaching and Christian complicity. Then there is the persecution of Muslims by Christians by Crusade and imperialism and war. In our own day, Muslims have risen up and are notorious for jihad, holy war waged against the infidel, among them Christians and Jews. Open the newspaper, watch or listen to the news: a large percent of what is documented there consists of battles between the peoples of the three Abrahamic faiths. Why is it we can t just get along? The answer to that question is complicated and fraught as are the relationships of the members of any large family. All three faiths are monotheistic and believe in one God. And so believing, all three faiths are against idolatry of any sort. If there is only one God, this must be the true God, and what is not the true God is an idol and thus afalse god to be rejected. But this is a tricky business, because as Jesus says, we are always in jeopardy of mistaking human things, idols, for divine things, God. Jews think that Christians make an idol of Jesus and Muslims make an idol of the Quran. Christians think Jews make an idol out of the Mosaic Law and agree with Jews that Muslims make an idol of the Quran. Muslims think that Christians make an idol of Jesus and Jews make an idol of the land of Israel. And all three faiths are alike in thinking that they alone have the correct vision of the true God and that the others are to one degree or another idolatrous. Each one claims to be the best of the Abrahamic faiths and sees the others as distortions of the faith in one God who is Creator of the heavens and the Earth. It may be, however, that the question of idolatry is a deeper question and more a question of people claiming to know the one true way; that the problem is not so much an idolization of the way as people s idolization of their own certainty that only they know the way. 3
Thus, the problem is that we re too damned (and I use that word advisedly) sure of ourselves. When Jesus tells Peter that the Son of Man, whom, of course, the church believes is Jesus, must suffer and die, Peter rejects the idea, leading Jesus to say to him, you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things. Peter wants his religion his way. He has an idea of how things are supposed to go that he doesn t want to give up, and in this way has his mind set on human things rather than divine. Jesus, who represents God here, tells him not to be so sure of himself and that true faith is not about winning the world in effect, proving that one is right and everybody else is wrong but about losing the arrogance that thinks it can win the world. True faith is actually faith, not the certainty that I know best the ways of God because my religion is the only true religion. Might we take Jesus rebuke to Peter to be saying, Show a little modesty, Peter, and open your mind, open your heart. There is more to this than you think. In the Letter to the Romans, Paul is trying to make a case for the superiority of faith in Jesus as the way to God over the practice of following Jewish Law, which is his way of saying that the way of Jesus is better than the way of Moses. But what if we understood law, which Paul says brings wrath, not as Jewish Law but as religious presumption of the sort that says I know the only way to God. Faith, on the other hand, is an attitude of openness to God in the realization that none of us knows God with any finality, that, as St Paul says elsewhere, we see as in a glass darkly when it comes to the Infinite One, Maker of the heavens and the Earth. What we can have is faith: the faith of Jesus is that in the end the only thing that matters is love, that love is God s way and should be our way as well. That s the Christian faith, and it would seem that we can t go 4
wrong in our relations with our Abrahamic siblings if we approach them in the attitude of love. That is the end of this sermon, except to say and to say sadly that the churches and religious movements that are most prosperous these days and perhaps always are the most prosperous are the ones that claim to know with certainty the ways of God. People generally do not like ambiguity and uncertainty, so if someone can say with great assurance and a loud voice that they are absolutely certain of what they believe, they will draw a crowd. But in so doing, they say too much, and they mislead, and the effect is to keep us at odds with one another. Beware of dogma! Amen. Second Sunday in Lent, March 4, 2012 Emanuel Lutheran Church 5