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17 March 2004
Alpha Talk 8
“How Can I Be Sure of My Faith?”
Jennifer Morrow
I grew up in the church. I come from a long
line of Presbyterians. My great-great grandfather and great-great grandmother were Presbyterian
missionaries to India. My great-grandfather was a Presbyterian minister in Pennsylvania. My
grandparents are buried in a Presbyterian cemetery behind the Presbyterian church where my
parents were married. I spent most of my Sundays during most of my young life eating chocolate
doughnut holes in the fellowship hall of South Jacksonville Presbyterian Church. There I sang
in the choir, served as an acolyte, and memorized the Westminster Catechism for Children. I
fondly remember Mr. Sandlin who taught me to sing, Mrs. Meeks who gave me the doughnut holes,
Mrs. Fulton who worked with me on the Catechism, Dr. Hurst who baptized and confirmed me, and
others. It is understandable then, that it took me by some surprise when I found myself in need
of salvation at the age of fifteen.
At fifteen, my parents and I made the move
from one side of town to the other. Jacksonville is quite a town to move from one side of to
the other, so this move changed not only our neighborhood, my school, but also our church. And
it was in that new church that I first heard the question, “Are you saved?”
Now, maybe I had never heard this question
because the Presbyterians weren’t asking it. The nickname “frozen chosen” couldn’t have come
from nowhere. Or maybe they were asking it, but with different words. Or maybe they were
asking it with the same words and I was too busy digging through my grandmother’s purse looking
for something to do or one of her Sucrets lozenges to eat during the sermons of my youth. But
whatever the case, the question was new.
Tonight’s question was new for me too. “How
Can I Be Sure of My Faith?” I wasn’t sure what to make of that. “Who Is Jesus,” while daunting
was at least clear. But how can I be sure of what “How Can I Be Sure of My Faith” means? Among
the resources that Javier and I use each week when planning our talks is this book available
through the worldwide Alpha network. It has been the source of all of the questions we’ve
considered and so it seemed like a good place for me to start as I sought to understand the
question, “How Can I Be Sure of My Faith?” As I read the chapter it became clear to me that
what the author was really asking was the same thing I got asked upon moving across town at age
15, “Are You Saved?” “Are you sure?”
So that is the question we’ll try to get at
tonight. I hope my disclosing of that won’t make any of you leave. Even if you find it
unpalatable, which I have at times, it’s a question worth asking, and one that is possible. The
church says yes, one can be assured of one’s salvation. But why? And how? And what is
salvation anyway? So we’ve gone from one question to three and we’re already down five
minutes.
When I was in High School, after I had been
attending the church that let me know I needed to be saved for awhile, Christian T-shirts became
popular items. Most of them were near-misses of mainstream advertisements, designed to catch
your attention and appeal to a T.V. generation. I had one that said, “Life is Short, Pray
Hard.” And let me say that I am telling you this less as information and more as a confession.
Mine wasn’t that bad though. I remember one that was bright orange with a chocolate candy on
the front that said Jesus instead of Reeses’. But even that one wasn’t the most memorable.
The mother of all Christian T-shirts had a cartoon picture of a scared teenager riding in a
frying pan that looked like it was re-entering the earth’s atmosphere from a tour of outer
space. The back of the shirt said, “My friend went to hell and all I got was this lousy
T-shirt.” This is abhorrent. It is an excellent example, but it is nevertheless abhorrent.
And the thing that it is an excellent example of is the danger of too narrow a definition of
salvation.
Getting at what we mean by salvation, this is
hard to do, because salvation is an uncommon concept for our minds today. When it comes to
words that describe God’s relationship with us, salvation is among the most unfamiliar.
Reconciliation we understand. We’ve all been reconciled to someone at some point after some
fight. Redemption we have at least a picture of: something to do with freeing, rescuing, even
if our only reference is the Shawshank Redemption, we’re not starting at a bad place. But
salvation. From what have you or any of your friends recently been saved? Salvation is the one
of the three that has taken on little secular or non-religious significance. You can redeem a
gift certificate and reconcile your checkbook, but salvation?
And now I’m wondering if this foreign feel to
the word has rendered it of little importance to many of us. I’m wondering how many of you have
ever seriously considered the question of salvation, yours or anyone else’s. Is this something
you spend time with, or are you more like me as a child, having never even considered the
notion? Aren’t there things about your faith that you feel a much more present need for
assurance of than salvation? How can we be sure our faith is worthwhile? Why waste our time?
How can I be sure God cares for me? How can I be sure of a faith that seems so complex and
ugly? How can I be sure of my faith when I don’t particularly like the people who practice it
with me? We’ll return to some of these questions shortly, but I think any assurance we might
find regarding these will have its roots in an assurance of salvation.
Salvation, to say one needs it, which would
be a prerequisite to being assured of it, has no cultural precedent. We may be apt to think
that time, money, and maybe whales need saving, but there is no discernable social consciousness
leading us to proclaim that we ourselves need to be saved from much of anything. And the church
has done little in recent years to have any positive impact on this trend. The church has not
often found a healthy middle ground when it comes to salvation. Either we don’t mention it at
all, either out of habit, or fear, or both, or more, or we’re lined up outside schmaltzy
Christian bookstores waiting to buy “My friend went to hell and all I got was this lousy
T-shirt” T-shirts. And the really unfortunate thing about all this is that the only people
yelling about salvation are doing it in such a way as to inspire the bumper sticker I saw on a
car several years ago, “God, please save me from your followers.” On Saturday at our retreat
Javier spoke about redeeming some words that have been abused in the Christian tradition. If
that bumper sticker is any indication, salvation is one of those words.
Let me offer two windows, possibly redemptive
ones, through which we might view the word and reality of salvation. The first is from the book
of Acts and begins with the question the crowd reportedly asked upon hearing Peter’s sermon on
Pentecost. “What must we do to be saved?” asked the crowd to Peter on Pentecost. “Repent and
be baptized,” he replied. It’s crucial to note about this story that what Peter said that
prompted such a question was not a good-old-fashioned dose of fire and brimstone, get right or
get left behind kind of sermon. Peter did not tell this group of people about hell. What he
told them about were themselves. [2:22-24] What prompted them to ask this question was not some
graphic description of hell, complete with lakes of sulfur and fire and demons, all he did was
hold up a mirror and the implication is clear: What we need to be saved from is not mostly
Dante’s Inferno but Freud’s Ego.
And now back to one of our other questions
for a moment, How can I be sure that my faith matters? It matters because you need to be saved
from you. Think about the ways you are destructive to yourself. The lies you perpetuate, the
fears to which you succumb, the needs that you use, the weight that you bear. When I look at my
own life as a mother, a wife, a minister, a Christian, a woman, a peer, and a human I see what
everyone who is those things, and everyone who is other things altogether sees: victories and
failures; love and lack of it; faith and absence of it; good days and bad ones; sameness and
change; wars and peace; addiction and self-control; joy and sorrow; truth and lies. Most of
the time, when I look at my life I look at it the way I look at the television when I’ve turned
it on for background noise while I fold laundry. I am aware of it. I probably know what show
is on. But three hours later I won’t remember a thing about it. Every once and awhile, I will
snap out of my sock-matching trance and pay undivided attention to the program at hand. When I
pay attention to this life of mine I find that the failures result from self-interest. The
addictions are always self-serving. The lies told or believed to save face, look good, or feel
better about the self I tend to like an elderly person or a prized orchid. A few weeks ago in
his sermon Javier asked us to consider these questions:
Will you finally repent of the lies you tell
yourself? Will you finally repent for trying to find security in that which is only temporal?
Will you finally repent for not trusting in God, really, and trusting only in that which you can
control or manipulate? Will you finally repent for your intransigence and unwillingness to hear
what those who love you ask of you? Will you repent for trying to make them the type of people
who make you feel safe and comfortable, regardless of what price they must pay to make you feel
that way? Will you repent for not seeing the suffering, the prejudice, the injustice that
surrounds you every day? Will you repent for not saying or doing anything about it? Will you
finally repent of those things I’ve failed to mention yet which are very present to you at this
very moment?
How can I be sure my faith matters? Because
you know of what you need to repent and the faith we’re all here to consider is grounded in a
God who says I’m going to set you free from that. Now. Not later, not when you get your act
together, but now. Salvation is not some distant promise but a present reality about which
there is assurance to be found.
I said I would offer two windows though, and
so far have only offered one. The second is from a story Kathleen Norris tells about a man she
had the occasion to meet who had recently come upon difficult times and then made a decision:
[pp.19-21, Amazing Grace]
Salvation from ourselves has nothing
whatsoever to do with feeling better about ourselves, or exorcising our inner demons. It may
actually feel worse. To get let out of a prison you’ve always known is, in the beginning at
least, no more than going to another prison that also feels lonelier. In the Shawshank
Redemption, the movie I mentioned earlier, an old man gets out of prison after having been
incarcerated for years and years. He is given a new old suit, a place to live in a boarding
house, and an appointment with an employment agency. He gets a job and gets on his feet and
hangs himself. He couldn’t stand the freedom he found. I think most of us would do the same
thing. Because I think what we’re afraid of, more than hell, more than our faith not mattering,
more than God not really making good on this promise of salvation, is the freedom that we might
find if God does.
I refuse to believe that the fact that we
have not at least subconsciously noticed that “the cup of salvation” that we receive in
communion is one about which Jesus said this is my blood, and not too far from another one about
which he begged the Father not to have to drink. And yet, and yet. Henri Nouwen writes that
“We have to drink our cup slowly, tasting every mouthful, all the way to the bottom. Living a
complete life is drinking our cup until it is empty and trusting that God will fill it with
everlasting life.”
But I can feel your dissatisfaction. You
would prefer that hell is what we’re saved from and what I’ve said sounds wishy washy. Or, you
think what I’ve said sounds offensive to all the people all over the world who would much prefer
to be saved from famine than from their ego. I’ll accept your dissatisfaction and chalk it up
to a few things. First, if you are worried about those with nothing to eat I would remind you
that in the book of Acts, just after the question gets asked and the repenting begins a
community begins to take shape in which everyone held everything in common, no one was in need.
Being saved from oneself never leaves the other unattended or underfed. Second, if you are
worried that I have said too little about our needing to be saved from hell let me say that I am
sure that if God would care so much as to save us from our daily deaths and lies and brokenness
then God will certainly also save us from hell. That said, if you are still dissatisfied, be
dissatisfied with me and not with the faith we may choose. God is offering us the gift of
perfect freedom today, which is another way of saying a way broad enough for us to live and not
to have to die. And as far as assurance of that goes, let me take my place among the ranks of
specific hymn-haters in this place and share with you one that I do not love. And in this
sharing what I am aware of is that I will leave you even more dissatisfied with me than before,
but the hymn is “Blessed Assurance,” by Fanny Crosby. In matters of taste, I don’t think dear
old Fanny got much right in this hymn, but in matters of faith there’s one thing that she
nailed. “Blessed assurance Jesus is mine.” I don’t like the tune, I’m not sure how I feel
about the “mine,” but the “is” is dead on. Jesus is mine. Not will be. Is. Now. Not later,
not after our physical death, not only when the world gets itself together, not when I get
myself together, not when you get yourself together, not when we all agree on it, not when we’re
no longer afraid of it, but now. And that means that our assurance of this salvation is as
close as our next blessed breath.
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