Taking a Hammer to Your Faith

Brad Sullivan
6 Easter, Year A
Sunday, May 25, 2014
St. Mark’s, Bay City, TX
Acts 17:22-32
Psalm 66:7-18
1 Peter 3:13-22
John 14:15-21

If God were made of gold or silver or stone, then I could understand fighting over God. That’s what people used to do. When one tribe attacked another tribe, the first thing you’d do is steal their little gods; that way their gods might fight for you, or if you didn’t like their gods, then you could just destroy them. That way they’d have no gods fighting for them. So if god were made of gold or silver or stone, then it would make a lot of sense to fight over God. We fight over all kinds of stuff we don’t want other people to take.

Paul tells us, however, what we already know, that God is not made with gold or silver or stone, or something crafted from the imagination of people, so no one can take God away from you. No one can destroy your conception of God, except of course when they do…destroy our conceptions of God.

Those are actually good times, or they have been for me, when I’ve had my conception of God, whatever it was, and someone’s said something or done something, or something has happened in my life, and that concept of God has been smashed with a hammer, and I’ve been left wondering. God is different than what I thought God was, and that’s a good time because then God gives his Holy Spirit to say, “here’s a new way of understanding me.” It’s like the old way, but different. I don’t believe in God the same way I did when I was four years old. So God grants us his Spirit to take our conceptions of him and smash them with a hammer, so his spirit can then grant us a new understanding, a new concept, a new revelation of himself.

Now, we’ve got the creeds in the church which give us our basic understanding of our faith. We’ve got the Apostle’s Creed which we pray at our baptisms. We’ve got the Nicene Creed, the church’s creed which is what we all believe together about God, and within those creeds, there is an awful lot of wiggle room, and awful lot of variation in what we believe about God.

I hear people talk about what they believe the creed means, and I think, “really? Because that sounds really different than what I believe, but it fits within the creed.” So there is a lot of variation and wiggle room within our faith for what exactly we believe and how exactly we believe it, and that’s good thing because there is a lot of variation in all of us, and God helps us believe in and understand him in different ways.

I just decided not to have a confirmation class this year. I’ve held classes for the pasat nine years, and we’d get folks signed up for the classes and make schedules and prepare what were well-planned classes, people wouldn’t be able to make all of the classes. I realized that over the course of those nine years, I spent more time in make-up sessions with those who couldn’t make the schedule classes than I did in the classes themselves, and without fail, the make-up sessions were better than the classes themselves because we could have about our faith and question and wonder together. That’s what God wants us to do, to understand him and love him with joy and wonder and some questioning too. That way when the hammer blow comes to our faith, it doesn’t destroy our faith and grind it to dust. It just chips a little off here and a little off there, and God’s Holy Spirit comes and reforms where it needs to reform.

Confirmation and the classes that went with it had almost became a hurdle where you had to believe exactly how the bishop or the priest believed. There were tests you had to pass. I never had to pass a test, but I heard about them, and this was 24 years ago, that I heard about having to pass Bishop’s tests. I never had to, and yet today, I still hear questions from people thinking they have to pass tests in order to be confirmed. We haven’t taken test for confirmation for a long time, but people still remember it. I think the point was to help give people a good solid foundation, but it ended up being this barrier. The bishops and priests were barriers to confirmation making sure they held the sacraments holy so that anyone who didn’t believe just in the right way didn’t get to it.

What a bunch of hogwash. Jesus never said that. He didn’t say, “well, if you can claim at least 85% intellectual assent to the creeds of the church, then people will know that you are my disciples.” No, he said they’ll know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.

What we have here and believe in the church is what we have here and believe in the church. We don’t come to worship here in this building to protect anything made of gold and silver, to protect God from his church.

God is in our homes as well, and we worship God and we pray in our homes together. We pray and believe in God a little bit differently in each of our homes, so when parents say, “I want my child to be baptized,” or “I want my child to be confirmed,” I say, “great, teach them about the faith.”

Those are the promises we make whenever we have our children baptized. We say, “I am going to raise my child as a disciple of Jesus.” The church says, “we’re going to help you with that, but we’re not going to take it over for you.” So we raise our children, our family our friends, we raise each other in the faith, and there’s going to be some variation in what and how we believe, and God is not diminished by that. God is glorified in that.

The differences we share and the other ways we believe…I’ve had arguments with people when their beliefs about God were very different from mine. These are Christians I’m talking about, and I’m thinking “that’s just weird,” and they’re thinking, “you’re a heathen.” I’m thinking, “but it’s in the creed!”, and Jesus is looking down saying, “You silly people. Just love each other; that’s what I commanded y’all to do.”

Our beliefs are important, but there’s a lot of wiggle room within them. Our beliefs, sometimes we end up making them into little idols themselves. They aren’t made of gold, or silver, or stone, but they are every bit as rigid. Sometimes we need that hammer to come down and break them so God’s Holy Spirit can enter into us again and say, “love me, and I will reveal to you once more who I am.” Amen.