What would you say faith is? Sometimes the most simple questions are the most difficult!
There is an easy answer though. You could say that every Sunday, after the sermon, we often announce at church that we “confess our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed”, so this is probably what it is, right? When we have faith, we believe to be true a set of statements about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the church. That’s also what we say in everyday language when we see some people who seemed very convinced about the truth of Christianity, we say that they “have faith”.
If we think about it though, we will also notice that when we talk about what it is “to have faith”, we also often describe an attitude towards life. As an example, maybe you can remember some hard times in your life, when you were overwhelmed with all sorts of difficulties, hearing friends telling you that you needed “to have faith”, “to keep the faith”. And then the meaning of this word felt rather different. Your friends didn’t refer so much to a set of beliefs, some maybe didn’t even believe in God, what they meant by asking you to keep the faith was to believe in a positive outcome to the situation you were going through. They invited you to believe that things would turn out well in the end. And so, that’s a second meaning we can give to faith: not just a disposition of the mind, but the will to carry on. As you experienced that, you probably realized that it felt much more intimate, and much more difficult to have this kind of faith. To believe not just with your mind, but with all your life.
And this experience may have led you to an even deeper meaning of faith, a third meaning: That faith was something we cannot give to ourselves. It has to be a gift from above. Maybe some people are born naturally gifted, it’s in their DNA: they seem better at trusting life than others. Or maybe faith is given by God to chosen ones. We may look at some people wishing we had their faith.
So what are we to do about all those experiences? Well, maybe to understand what faith is about we have to start at the beginning and just to turn to the Scriptures and see what the Bible has to say – and this is very fortunate that today it seems that our whole set of readings has something to say about what faith is all about. And we can indeed start with the beginning, with the Book of Genesis.
What I notice first, about the book of Genesis, is that when the Bible wants to show us what faith is, it does not give us a definition, rather it tells us a story, the story of a man – Abraham. And we can see how this story has inspired so many people that, in the New Testament, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews is still meditating on Abraham’s story. Abraham indeed is the “Father of the people” (that’s literally the meaning of his name), but we would be wrong if we only assume that he was the biological father of a large offspring (the Jewish, Muslim and Christian people). Abraham is the father of believers. Abraham is the first who believed, who showed us what having faith is all about. No wonder he waited so long to have a son, he first had to be born spiritually: To become the father of all believers, he first had to learn what faith was all about.
And so this is what the Bible shows us: to learn what faith was all about, Abraham didn’t sit in the pews learning facts about God. Quite the other way around: Abraham set out, went on a journey. If you re-read the book of Genesis, you will see that God took the initiative, promised Abraham a better land and a people, but Abraham had to respond, trusting God and following where God was leading, through uncertainties and dangers and mostly through a very long period of time where nothing was happening, where Abraham he was left with his doubts, not understanding what God was doing in his life, whether God has forgotten him or not (and this is what our passage today is about).
The Father of all believers wasn’t a king or a pope. He was a poor immigrant. He had no country, no house and no family except for his wife. He spent his old days wandering on a land that wasn’t his own, wondering if God had forgotten him. And yet he trusted, and the Bible says: “The Lord reckoned to him as righteousness”.
So there are a few observations we can make about that, and first we can see what faith isn’t about:
1- Faith is not based on a set of beliefs, it’s not about accepting as true a certain number of statements about God we have to convince ourselves about. When we “confess our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed”, we don’t summarize intellectual certainties, rather we recall the whole story of the Bible and of the church’s mission today. We confess that we want to be part of this story where we believe God is at work for our salvation through creation as Father, redemption in Jesus Christ and sanctification through the Holy Spirit in the church.
2 – For this reason, faith is not about the ability to spend our life in the pure light of certainties and blessedness. More often, as it was for Abraham, faith is a journey in the dark, in a foreign land full of dangers. This is what we may experience in difficult times when we know we need “to have faith” or “to keep the faith”. Sometimes having faith is just about being able to keep going or even trying to survive – as Abraham did many times in this life, believing that there would be a better future for him and Sarah.
3 – For these reasons, faith is not blind optimism – Faith is not positive thinking, believing that good things will happen in the end because “the universe will take care of us”, as we hear so often these days! So we don’t have faith just because it’s in our DNA or because God has decided it to be so. If we’re on a journey, it means that we have to travel! If it’s a journey in the dark, it means we have to travel towards the light. Yes, the Bible shows us that God took the initiative, made a promise, but the promise won’t happen if Abraham does not set out first and continue to walk all the days of his life.
So what is faith really about?
1 – If Faith actually is not believing the promise will happen, faith is what makes the promise happen, or rather faith makes space for the promise to happen. The believer waits on God, yet it’s not a passive wait, quite the opposite. Choosing a life of faith is choosing a life of faithfulness. Even if we don’t feel God’s presence when we travel in the dark, we act as if God was to show up at any moment. Jesus explains that to his disciples telling them the parable of the watchful servants: Even if their Master is away, they keep on working as if he was to show up at any moment.
2 – We also see in Jesus’s parable that faith is really more about someone rather than some things. The servants don’t expect to have a good time while their Master is away, or just try to avoid getting in troubles. They long for the Master’s return. Faith is not so much trusting that things will eventually turn out for the best or be okay, it’s trusting God’s goodness and longing for God’s kingdom – in spite of all the things that can go wrong or all the reasons we may have to despair or just to get tired and discouraged.
3 – And so faith is really our response to God. It’s not just in our minds, it’s in our hearts and in our lives. It’s words and actions, it’s actually what we do with our lives, what we do with ourselves, it’s a continual back and forth between us and God. Did you notice in our past readings how often Abraham dialogues with God? (Like when he prays for Sodom and Gomorrah). Faith is not letting go of God as God does not let go of us. Faith is born and grow as we travel with God, as we experience more of this life, the good and the bad. By our faithfulness, we can experience God’s faithfulness. If the servants aren’t faithful at their task, in the darkness, they won’t be able to experience the Master’s faithfulness who eventually comes back, when the night is over.
And so in the end, maybe faith is a gift from God, but maybe it’s our gift to God too. Maybe it’s the only thing we can offer to God, who created all and possess everything – except the response we choose to give Him.