10:30 am, Sun, April 16, 2023 - JGWhite / FBCA
(1 Pet 1:3-9; Ps 16; Jn 20:19-31)
How good are
you at believing the incredible, the amazing, the unbelievable? Well, what I have
told you so far is all true. You are likely told, once in a while, something
that is hard to believe. You have to be convinced, you need proof, or at least
time to think it over, or just see for yourself.
Spiritual
faith is often like this. In the New Testament texts today, we see a confident
faith, and a lack of confidence: Peter’s encouraging letter, and Thomas the
disciple doubting that Jesus was indeed alive again. Your reason, or mine, for
doubting things today, is not the same as Thomas’s situation. We are a long way
off from those resurrection days of Jesus, in the flesh. Thus, we are, after
two thousand years, still facing the same tragedies of humankind, the same
repeated evils that we people do, and same unsolved mysteries that bother us.
In the
mid-twentiety century, prof at Union Theological Seminar in New York, James Muilenburg,
said to his students, studying to be ministers, “Every morning when you wake
up, before you reaffirm your faith in the majesty of a loving God, before you
say I believe for another day, read the Daily News with its
record of the latest crimes and tragedies of [hu]mankind and then see if you
can honestly say it again.”
Sometimes
we still gather, like this, to get encouraged, to find hope, to be able to say
again, ‘Yes, I believe it!’ Sometimes we still gather because we know someone
else needs us to have a bit of faith for them, and help them out.
It is
Easter. It is a Sunday, so it’s a weekly easter. In the Church Year, it is the
second of seven Sundays of Easter. So we sing hallelujah again. We are people
of faith; this is what we do.
To
celebrate the outcomes of our faith, we need to start with faith itself.
And where the good comes from; what is the Source? As I say, sometimes
we look for faith, we need it, we want it, we feel a bit short on our supply of
deep believing.
What did
Peter’s nice paragraph of good stuff end with? You are receiving the outcome
of your faith, the salvation of your souls. The one thing I want to say
about this today is: there is always a tension, always two directions we come
at faith in God and salvation. It is from God, and it is up to us.
Where do you
start?
I guess I
have been so trained to understand the gospel in terms of the grace of
God, that I say it is all up to the Eternal One. Salvation is a gift to us.
What we just remembered Jesus doing is what accomplishes our renewed life that
never ends. Christ comes back to life, and gets busy doing things like
dispensing peace/shalom to His people, filling them with God, with the Holy
Spirit, and giving them His power to speak real forgiveness to others. Give,
give, give: this is how God does it. As the evangelical tradition says, it is
grace, which is an unearned gift from God, something we cannot do for
ourselves.
Yet what do
we humans do? We have faith. We put our confidence in God, in Christ Jesus. Rely
upon God instead of relying upon ourself. Nowadays, as it says, we are blessed
for believing Jesus even when we did not get to see Him in the flesh, his
broken, born from the dead, flesh. We do read the New Testament teachings about
being judged, one day, by Christ, and think we must have to be good, or good
enough.
But grace
tells us all our being right is nothing – we put on Jesus and everything right
and good about Him covers us. Hmm. I make it very simple by thinking faith is
us opening a door that God gives us, with a whole wonderful world inside that
we can walk into. We do have the choice to walk in, or not.
Well, let
us get to the actual outcomes of our faith. The outcomes?
I hear this word used more and more these days. Lots of organizations and
agencies talk about outcomes now. For instance, our NS Public School Program
says: Curriculum outcomes are statements of what a learner knows, is able to
do, and value upon the completion of the learning process.
So, Faith:
what are believers going to know, be able to do, and be
upon the completion of our lives? We could start by looking at the list from 1
Peter 1 that we read earlier. From the Christian Faith the outcomes can be:
the
salvation of our souls, (which is
about now & forever)
a new
birth, (which is a new life in
us, somehow)
a living
hope, (which is also this eternal life,
starting now)
an
inheritance, (which is an
indestructibleness we get)
protection
of us, (for all the good things we are
here for)
rejoicing,
(that is, enjoying God and everything good)
love of
Christ, (we get a great relationship
with Creator)
believing
Christ. (we get to enjoy Jesus as real)
You may
well glean other things from this rich paragraph at the start of the first
letter of Peter. Yet other outcomes of being a person of Faith can include the
things we saw in that scene with Jesus and the disciples, just after Jesus
arose. I already mentioned them. Jesus speaks peace, shalom, to His friends.
(Salvation is friendship with Jesus, I’d say.) Christ speaks the Holy Spirit
right into them – that’s God whom you get to have with you everywhere. The
Saviour speaks about forgiveness: forgiving others, or not forgiving. This is a
great power and responsibility: it is part of the package.
And it
leads us to a third thing to rejoice in: the social side of salvation.
There is something about faith that is not alone, not all
private, not only personal. It is our faith, shared; not your
faith and your faith, and your faith, and my faith. We are
celebrating the outcomes of our shared faith in Jesus.
The old, 20th
century story is told of the evangelist preaching to a big crowd. He’s getting
everyone excited. ‘Amens’ are heard from the congregation. He asks, “Don’t you
want to go to heaven? Who wants to go to heaven? Stand up!”
The crowd
stands up, they all stand up… all but one person. The preacher can actually see
her, and so he speaks out: “Ma’am, you’re the only one; don’t you want to go to
heaven?”
“Pastor,”
she replies, “I do, but I thought you were getting a group ready to go tonight.”
There is a
good point in that story. The bit about ‘going together.’ The social side of
salvation, the shared faith we proclaim. As Charles Peguy said, “We must be
saved together. We cannot go to God alone; else he would ask, ‘Where are the
others?’”
I believe this
goes for our faith life here and now, as well as after this life. One of the
outcomes of our Faith is togetherness, family, fellowship, relationships, community,
team. To use some Bible terms, faith is about reconciliation – we have a
ministry of reconciliation – and it is about unity: Jesus prayed that
His people would be one as He and God are one. It is about Church,
which, in one sense, simply means the gathered ones, those gathered together. ‘I
will build my ecclesia, my gathered ones,’ said Jesus, ‘and the
gates of hades will not stand against it.’ We gather, and we scatter, we
gather, and we scatter: as one.
First
Baptist is an outcome of our faith; Hallelujah! Aside from all the human
structure and tradition we have developed, and our faults and shortcomings, we
are a creation of salvation. We, First Baptist, are an act of God. & not
just in 1809: today. We are wonderful, in the midst of the wacko messes we get
ourselves into. I love those words in 2 Corinthians that tell us we have
the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we
have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this
extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.
The
glorious, resurrected Jesus is here for us to share, with us just as we are
today. A power, a treasure, in clay jars. Not in one clay jar; in us
all, in all these clay jars.
The outcome
of our faith is a Life that is the good life, and together we get to share it. Alleluia!
Amen.
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