Believing in God – Where Can I Find God?

Exodus 34:29-32 Colossians 1:9-12

A sermon by Kathy Toivanen at EMUC, 1/15/2006

Today we begin a four-part series of sermons to explore some of the basic themes of faith – themes that are commonly found on the course outline of a basic introduction to theology. For the next four weeks, we will take part in our own exploration of basic issues in contemporary Christian theology. There will be no essays required, but there will be homework. Each week, you will be invited to act, reflect and engage in something practical that will help you to continue your learning and growing in the faith. Each week, I will provide a handout to serve as a guide and for those who wish, there will be a few hard copies of the sermon available after worship. I will also post the sermons on EMUC’s website. For those who might like to do more reading and studying, I will provide a list of related books and resources. The list of topics for these four weeks is in today’s bulletin, and in the December issue of the Communique. So let’s begin today with the topic of Believing in God as we ask the question "Where Can I Find God?"

Marcus Borg, in his book, The Heart of Christianity, tells the story of a three-year-old girl who was very excited about having a new baby brother or sister. Within a few hours of the parents bringing a new baby boy home from the hospital, the girl made a request: she wanted to be alone with her new brother in his room with the door shut. Her insistence about being alone with the baby with the door shut made the parents a bit uneasy, but then they remembered that they had installed an intercom system in anticipation of the baby’s arrival, so they felt comforted that they could be in the baby’s room in an instant if they heard anything that alerted them regarding the baby’s safety. So they let the little girl go into the baby’s room, shut the door and raced to listen at the intercom. They heard their daughter’s footsteps moving across the baby’s room, they imagined her standing over the baby’s crib, and then they heard her saying to her three-day-old brother, "Tell me about God – I’ve almost forgotten."

Marcus Borg goes on to say that this story is both haunting and evocative, for it suggests that we come from God, and that when we are very young, we still remember this and know this. But somehow in the process of growing up in this world where the mystery and wonder of childhood is often left behind, we increasingly forget the God from whom we came and in whom we still live. (pp.113-114 The Heart of Christianity)

I would like to make an assumption that many of us are here today because we live with a deep longing to believe in God. Some of us may be just beginning this quest, perhaps some of us are skeptical and even hostile toward the notion of God. (If there is a God worth believing in, then we want proof!) And of course there are others of us who would say, yes, we believe in God, but we long to continue to deepen that belief and find even greater meaning and purpose to our lives.

I want to be clear that the sermon today is not my opportunity to stand on a soap box and tell you what to believe. Nor do I plan to prove anything to you. Rather, I invite each one of us to look at life more closely, more deeply and with greater attentiveness. I offer an opportunity to explore what it means to believe and to have faith in God.

Marcus Borg, a Lutheran and a professor of Religion at Oregon State University and Douglas John Hall, a United Church minister and Emeritus professor of Theology of McGill University, both comment in their recent books on the modern struggle to figure out what it means to believe and have faith.

According to Marcus Borg, we, in the western world, have translated believing to mean giving our intellectual and mental assent to something. We are preoccupied with the notion that believing is all about what goes on in our head and so we make belief in God all about affirming certain intellectual statements about God.

"Credo", Marcus Borg reminds us, is the Latin root of the word believe. "Credo" means "I give my heart to". It follows then that to believe in God is to give our heart to God. Giving our heart to someone or something is much more than just intellectual assent. For example to give our heart to God is the giving of loyalty, allegiance, commitment and trust to God. In short, this understanding of belief represents the giving of self at its deepest and most profound level.

Douglas John Hall affirms that while it is important to be part of a thinking faith, Christianity and indeed most religions often mistake a thinking faith for certitude. He says that when faith becomes a quest for certitude we assume that work of true faith is to get hold of the absolute and the final answer. Faith becomes all about acquiring the truth, as if the truth were some kind of commodity or a certain set of data that we could possess.

Hall proposes to us that rather than making certitude the goal of faith, we need to make confidence the goal of faith. He reminds us that in the Latin, confidence "confide" means living with faith.

Both Borg and Hall resist the practice of confining belief to an intellectual assent to certain facts or truths about God and they reject making faith in God all about certitude, all about the acquisition of absolute truth.

For to practice faith this way they say, makes God into a God who is only concerned with us if we believe in the right things and who will respond favorably to us only if we have correct beliefs.

And isn’t it true that we could, in our heads, believe all the right things and still be miserable, we could believe all the right things and not really change much as a person or a society. We could believe all the right things and still feel powerless and alone.

So, as an alternative, what would it mean to believe in God by giving our heart to God? What would it mean instead to live with confidence in God, to live with faith in God?

Marcus Borg offers four ways to understand the meaning of living with faith: Faith as fiducia, faith as fidelitas, faith as visio, and faith as assensus.

Let’s take each of these definitions one by one.

Faith is "fiducia". Fiducia is trust in God. To live faithfully means relax with God, to let go of worries and anxieties, to grow in confidence that God can be relied upon to hold us up, to support us, to care for us and to guide us in life. Over and over, in the stories of our faith, we are reminded that God is to be trusted and so we too can dare to trust.

When people fail, God can be trusted to forgive. When people lose their way, God can be trusted to find them and to guide them home. When people need to be reminded of what is important in life, God can be trusted to send those who proclaim God’s word of justice and hope, peace and love. When death and despair are all around, God can be trusted to bring new life and a vision of hope to birth.

To grow in our belief in God is to practice trusting in God, to dare to venture out and live lives that reflect our confidence in God; confidence that God forgives, God finds, God restores, God speaks, God guides and God brings life and love to birth.

Faith as fidelitas is faithfulness in God. It speaks of a relationship with God where we love God and we love what God loves.

The opposite of faithfulness is adultery or idolatry. In the Bible, when the prophets indict Israel as adulterous or when Jesus speaks of "an evil and adulterous generation," they are not saying that there is a lot of spouse swapping going on. Rather, rather they are referring to the betrayal of God’s covenant, and unfaithfulness to God and the ways of God. Idolatry, means the giving of our loyalty or allegiance to something other than God – for example the pursuit of money or power or the love of country or an ideology above all else.

Faith as fidelitas, means living the great commandment, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your life force, and with all your mind and with all your strength." And it means loving our neighbour as ourselves.

In practical ways, we are faithful to God as we pay attention to our relationship with God, as we are attentive to God. Like lovers who rejoice in spending time together, being attentive to God is not so much a duty as it is full of rich and wonderful opportunities to draw closer to the one who makes us more whole, who deepens life’s meaning and who expands our capacity for joy and peace.

We can practice being attentive to God through prayer and worship, through reading of scripture and other writings that lift up the sacred, through music and singing, through concrete acts of love and compassion for our neighbour, through the work of peacemaking and justice, through taking time for rest and renewal.

Marcus Borg comments that all of these practices help us to soften and open our hearts so that we can find God. For when our hearts are closed or hard, we are insensitive to the wonder and awe that is all around us. For when our hearts are closed and hard, we perceive the world to be an ordinary, even dull place. When our hearts are closed, we begin to lose sight of God and we begin to forget God’s presence in and among us.

This talk about seeing, leads us to the third understanding of faith, faith as visio, which means faith as a way of seeing. There are many ways of seeing life and the world. We can see life as hostile and threatening. We can see life as uneventful, boring, and meaningless. To be faithful to God means to see what God sees. The legacy of our faith, the scriptures, and the life of Jesus remind us that God sees with the eyes of love.

The story of Genesis, reminds us that God sees the goodness of creation. The stories of the Hebrew people tell us that God sees the oppressed and frees them, the unfaithful and forgives them, the despairing and restores hope to them, the broken and mends them.

In the stories of Jesus, Jesus sees the excluded and welcomes them, Jesus sees the hungry and feeds them, Jesus sees the wounded and sick and has compassion on them, and he sees the lonely and befriends them.

Being faithful means to practice seeing ourselves and others with the eyes of God.

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, wrote profoundly about the life of faith in the 60s and 70s. He said this about faithful seeing.

Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows God’s self everywhere, in everything – in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without God... (p. 155 The Heart of Christianity)

Of course believing in God does mean that we affirm certain things and so lastly, we turn to the understanding of faith as "assensus", which means faith as giving our assent to certain things.

Both Douglas Hall and Marcus Borg would hold up the principle of affirming certain things in our faith deeply but loosely. Loosely, rather than tightly so that we don’t fall into the trap of replacing God with precise facts or with rigid truths, so that we don’t replace confidence in God with certitude.

And so, in the United Church of Canada which is part of the Protestant Christian tradition, we would affirm for example that God is a gracious creator who calls us into a relationship of love, we would affirm that Jesus Christ is God’s word and is central to our understanding of God, and we would affirm that the Bible is our sacred story, a foundational document that shapes our vision of God, of ourselves and of God’s purpose and plan for us and the earth.

In the weeks that follow, we will expand and deepen our affirmations of God and life; we will try to see situations and other life-issues with the eyes of God; we will discern ways to practice being faithful to God; and we will explore God’s trust in us and deepen our trust in God.

Lastly, I want to say that finding God in some ways is deceptively simple. It doesn’t have to be a monumental quest; we can find God here and now in the life we live and in the world around us.

So if you forget everything else I’ve said here today, I’d like you to remember these words of Frederick Beuchner who said:

Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks. It’s in language that’s not always easy to decipher, but it’s there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.