Sermon for 4 May 2008, 1^st Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois

 

FAITH AND COMMITMENT

Ronald J. Glossop

 

I.   Introduction

       A. For much of the world during most of human history religion has been viewed as a matter of following certain rituals prescribed by the religious authorities of that society.  Usually there were myths to explain why these rituals should be done, but the important thing was not whether one believed the myths.  The important thing was to participate in the rituals.

       B.  The Jews introduced a new idea into their religion, the idea that Yahweh, their God, required ethical behavior toward their fellow Jews.  Furthermore, Yahweh had the power to reward those who followed the Law given by Yahweh and punish those who did not.

       C. But the idea that what matters in religion is what you as an individual believe came with Christianity.

 

II.  A widespread view among Christians is that religion is basically a matter of faith, of what one believes about Jesus and God and the Bible and life-after-death for believers.

   A.  Given the way that Christianity got started, this focus on the importance of believing certain ideas could not be avoided.

        1.  The first Christians were Jews who had different views about Jesus than most of their Jewish friends.  The Christians believed that Jesus was the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Christ.  They believed this even though the widely accepted idea among Jews was that the Messiah would restore the nation of Israel to the great dominant political position it had when David and Solomon ruled the nation.

        2.  When Jesus was put to death by the Romans, this convinced most Jews that he was no one special but rather just one more Jewish Zealot who was no more successful than the others in their effort to throw off the rule of the Romans.

    B.  When the Christians claimed that Jesus was killed but nevertheless came back to life, ascended into heaven, and would soon return to establish a new kingdom superior even to the Roman Empire, the critical issue dividing the new sect from the rest of the Jewish religious community was whether to believe this claim or not.

    C.  Furthermore, those who rejected this claim about Jesus coming back to life and going up into heaven and about to return to Earth were angry that such ridiculous ideas were appealing to some of their fellow Jews.  The critical question now was not so much about how people acted or what rituals they practiced but what they believed.

     D.  One of the most amazing things about the Christian faith is that people continue to believe these pre-Enlightenment ideas even though Jesus obviously did not come down right away from the heavens to establish the new kingdom as he said he would in the Bible. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians advises those in love not to get married because “the time is short” (I Corinth. 7:29) and “this world in its present form is passing away.” (I Corinth. 7:31)

     E.  It was not only Paul who thought the end of the world was coming very soon.  It was widely believed by Christians that the end of the world would come before all of the disciples died.  After all, Jesus was quoted in more than one place as saying, “I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power” (Mark 9:1 and 13:30, Matthew 24:34-35, and Luke 21:32).  This belief was so widespread that when the disciple John (who had outlived the others) died, someone had to add these verses to the end of the Gospel of John to try to explain why Jesus had not returned to establish his new kingdom.  He claimed that it was just a widespread misunderstanding.  That early Christian writer adds to the Gospel of John this rather feeble clarification (John 21:23).  “Jesus answered, ‘If I want him (that is, John) to remain alive until I return, what is that to you (that is, Peter)?  You must follow me.’  Because of this, the rumor spread among the brothers that this disciple would not die.  But Jesus did not say that he would not die; he only said, ‘If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?’”

     F. Almost two thousand years later and in a scientific age which should undermine any notion that Jesus can come down from a heaven believed to be beyond the fixed stars, many people still believe, or at least say they believe, these presently incredible ideas adopted by first-century Christians.

 

III.  What is this “faith” that is so important to a religion like traditional Christianity?         

     A.  According to Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, faith is “firm belief in something for which there is no proof.”

     B.  The author of the book of Hebrews in the New Testament says in Hebrews 11:1:  “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

     C.  In other words, faith is firmly believing (or claiming to believe) something one hopes to be true even though there is no good evidence that it is true.

 

IV.  Let me share with you my own transforming experience with regard to Christian faith.

      A.  Some of you know that at one time I studied to become a minister in the Lutheran Church.  (That’s how I came to know so much about the Bible.  As some of you undoubtedly know, Martin Luther and Lutherans are really big on the Bible.)  I even went to a Lutheran seminary for one year.

      B.  I never had any misgivings about the ethical part of Christianity, but from the time I was a teen-ager I had doubts about some of the doctrines like the notion of the Trinity and about the reality of miracles.  But my biggest question was about the Easter story, that is, the story of the resurrection of Jesus.

          1.  If I was going to become a minister in the church it seemed to me that I had to find out the answer to this question:  Is this story about the resurrection of Jesus true or not?  Did something miraculous really happen, or did a small group of people just start to believe it happened and then succeed in persuading some others?

          2.  Why is the story of the resurrection so important?  There are at least three reasons. (1) Because if the resurrection-of-Jesus story is true, it would indicate that Jesus really is someone special, someone different in kind from other people.  (2) Because if that story is true, it would show that miracles can happen. (3) Because if that story is true, it shows that life-after-death is can be a reality.  These are three extremely important beliefs, and I felt that I needed to know whether they are true or not.

          3.  During that year in seminary, one thing I did was to research as thoroughly as I could all the evidence and arguments on this issue.  The biggest argument for the truth of the resurrection story is that it is hard to explain how the church got started if there wasn’t a resurrection.  At the very least there must have been some people, maybe only a small group at first, but some people must have believed that somehow Jesus had come back to life.  (My conjecture on this, which I have not carefully researched in order to determine its credibility, is that there may have in fact been an empty tomb. Joseph of Arimathea had allowed Jesus’ body to be put in his own tomb, but after three days he could well have decided that he wanted his tomb available for his own use and didn’t bother to tell Jesus’ disciples that he was having Jesus’ body removed from it.)  The biggest argument against the truth of the resurrection story (besides the inherent unbelievability of a story that someone came back to life after dying) is that some of the most adamant and influential early believers, like Paul (who wrote about half of our New Testament), believed the story even though they never even knew Jesus.  He nevertheless included his own experiences of the risen Jesus as similar in kind to the experiences of the original disciples.  Paul experiences a vision on the road to Damascus in which he hears Jesus saying, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4)  Since Paul had never seen Jesus, how could he know that the vision he was having was of Jesus?  Furthermore, this vision occurs long after Jesus had ascended into heaven according to the Gospels.  Yet Paul includes this vision of Jesus as comparable to the experiences that the other disciples had of the risen Jesus.

      C.  But as I was trying to figure out the answer to this resurrection issue, another even more important question occurred to me.  Was it really appropriate that I would have to decide on whether to become a minister on the basis of this kind of true-or-false issue that might be falsified rather definitely by some new discoveries?  The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls at this time made me realize that other discoveries could be made that could show that the resurrection story was a hoax.  What if someone would find the physical remains of what could be rather convincingly shown to be the body of Jesus?

         1.  I said to myself, this believing or not believing the truth of a story about some incident in the past is not the sort of thing that should be the basis of one’s religion or of how one should live one’s life.  Instead of focusing on whether to believe this story, on whether to have faith in the truth of something for which there was good reason to be doubtful, something that may or may not have happened in the past, I thought I should focus on the future and what I should do with my life.  What should I do that I was rather confident would improve the world, whether the story of the resurrection of Jesus was true or not?  What did I want to commit myself to doing?  Furthermore, this was not just an issue of what vocation I should choose for myself.  It was a new way of seeing what religion should be about.  Religion should not be about what one believes but about what one is committed to doing with one’s life.  The critical thing is not about believing or not believing some story that is supposed to be true but rather about committing oneself to doing what is good.

         2.  I know that others may have other commitments, but for me I felt I could commit myself to educating others and to getting them to think for themselves about important issues instead of just accepting the propaganda that they happen to hear from others.  That meant for me becoming a professor of philosophy rather than a minister.  If I had known about Unitarianism at that time, however, I might have opted to become a Unitarian minister, but I certainly have no regrets.  I can’t imagine any vocation for myself that would have been better than being a professor of philosophy.

         3.  But my point this morning is not about what vocational decision I made but about the insight I had about what religion should not be and what it should be.  Religion should not be about faith, about what one believes about whether some particular event did or did not occur or about whether miracles can occur or whether there is or isn’t life-after-death.

         4.  Religion should be about personal commitment and what one intends to do with one’s life to make the world a better place.  It is about ideals to be pursued, not beliefs about what is true and false.   Discovering which beliefs are true and which are false belongs to the realm of science of science, not religion.  And arguing about which beliefs are true or false on those issues not readily resolvable by experimentation is a task for philosophers.

 

V.  Commitment seems to me to be what Unitarian-Universalism is really about, but we often have a difficult time throwing off some parts of our Christian heritage.

      A.   Let me hasten to add that there are parts of our Christian heritage such as some of the commitments about what is good that I don’t want to throw out.

      B.  But I think that too much focus on beliefs about what is true and false has kept us from thinking enough and doing enough about what is good.  Sometimes we tend to get bogged down too much in which traditional Christian beliefs we don’t accept.  Others, but even we ourselves, get focused on what UUs don’t believe.  Many of us don’t believe that Jesus was God incarnate.  Many of us don’t believe that Jesus was actually resurrected from the dead.  Some of us don’t believe in miracles.  Some of us don’t believe in life-after-death.  Almost none of us believe that the world will soon end with Jesus actually coming down from the clouds to establish the kingdom of God on Earth.  But focusing on what we don’t believe or what we do believe in not what matters in religion.

      C.  Sometimes we UUs exercise more judgment than we realize.  Take another look at those “Purposes and Principles” of UUs which we print on the back of our Sunday bulletins every week. These are not statements of any beliefs but are rather statements about our commitments.   They unite us regardless of our diversity of beliefs.

      D.  We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Univeralist Association, covenant to affirm and promote:

         1.  the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

         2.  justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.

         3. acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.   

          4.  a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

          5. the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.

          6.  the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and jusice for all.

          7.  respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

      E.  These “Purposes and Principles” are not a creed which all our members must accept, but I am glad to be part of a church with such commitments and with no statements of beliefs which all our members must say they believe, whether they do or not.