Introverted Faith

Introverted Faith
1 Kings 18:20-21, 30-39;
Galatians 1:1-12; Luke 7:1-10

More years ago than I can count there was a commercial on television (it may have been in black and white) that featured a boy and his dog. The boy was stroking the dog and singing, “My dog’s better than your dog, my dog’s better than yours; my dog’s better than your dog, he eats Ken-L-Ration. My dog’s better than yours.”

We live in a competitive world and it has been that way for some time. It has to do with the rugged individualism which has been force-fed in our pablum since the days when our ancestors had to survive the wilderness of this continent or the rigors of voyages in steerage or worse and the hardship of immigrant communities. The competitive spirit comes with birth.
Who of us hasn’t overheard a conversation, “My daughter walked at 12 months.” “Well, mine did it at 11 months.” Or “My son got an 800 on his math SAT.” “That’s nice. Mine got perfect scores on the ACT. We won’t go into athletics where the competition is even more intense.

Competition even happens in religion. That’s part of the story read earlier about the contest between the prophets of Baal (450 of them, backed by Jezebel and Ahab), and Elijah, God’s chosen representative against the chief fertility god of the indigenous community. It’s a great story. It has always stirred me. We cheer for Elijah. We love the way Elijah mocks the Baal prophets as they vainly try to get Baal to roast the sacrifice. They chant and sing and gyrate and flagellate themselves in their futile attempt to get their god to ignite the sacrifice.

When they give up and it is Elijah’s turn, he builds an altar with twelve symbolic stones. Then he orders the sacrifice to be flooded with water, not once but three times. If you have ever tried to light a campfire after a downpour, you know how well wet wood burns, let alone gets lit.

Elijah invokes God, who sends such a fire that the drowned offering is consumed – as well as the stones of the altar, the trench full of water and the drought earth dust.

Can’t you hear the chorus in the background singing: “My God’s better than your god, My God’s better than yours....”

The competition doesn’t end there. The story concludes with Elijah ordering that the prophets of Baal be slaughtered. That made Jezebel fiercely angry. She was a princess of Sidon, one of the Phoenician cities that worshiped Baal. She issued a vendetta on Elijah and he fled to the wilderness thinking that he was the only one who worshiped God. But that’s an Elijah story for another time.

At first blush we want to cheer Elijah on with the defeat of the prophets of Baal and their subsequent demise. Good defeats evil. The followers of false idols get what they deserve. The competitive spirit is that great. The history of our faith is replete with the crusade mentality of “We are better than you; our God is better than your idol.” Much of the history of the occupation of Canaan by the Israelites, much of the history of David and his descendants, much of the history of the Israelites in subjugation to neighboring political powers, is as much religious braggadocio as it is political machinations.
When Jesus came along, those in positions of religious power perceived Jesus as a threat because they believed that he put himself in the place of God, a stance they understood as a slap against their understanding of God. The Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus, terrorized the followers of Christ until he was confronted by the Lord himself. The Way, as it was called until it became Christianity, was viewed as a threat to the worship of all the various political and domestic gods and goddesses that were popular throughout the regions and cities of the Roman empire where Paul and other evangelists delivered the Gospel in the decades after Christ’s resurrection.

With one vision Constantine gave Christianity the imperial blessing. That led to a spate of bloodshed. The crusades of 11th and 12th centuries were strongly religion based, Christianity against Islam. The rise of the 16th century Protestant Reformation under Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Knox, and Cromwell and the resultant Counter Reformation saw a lot of religious conflict based on pride and bragging rights. The Church waged the Inquisition against both Islam and Judaism.

The American Revolution had its religious side. The expansion west and the conflict with the indigenous Native Americans was sometimes as religious as it was territorial. The American Civil War had religious adherents on both sides. Some aspects of European colonization of South America, Africa, and Asia were religion driven. And the 19th century world mission initiative often had Christians going against religions perceived as pagan. Much of the conflict of the world today pits religious world views against each other.

So we Christians are not really sure what to do with brash triumphalism we see in Elijah’s rout of the prophets of Baal. It is one thing to be sure of the faith that we hold. It is another to brandish that faith as a weapon. Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church’s attempted protests at funerals for military personnel, natural disaster victims and victims of human inflicted evil are a case in point. Some share their views and many more are appalled and ashamed of them. Add to that the increasing bent towards individualistic and private faith, and what we have is an introverted faith. We keep it to ourselves.

Even within communities of faith we may not feel safe to raise the questions we have, share our doubts and wonderings, offer the views we currently hold, confess that we have changed our minds about some application of faith, or admit that we don’t know something about the faith. We keep it all to ourselves.

If everyone would just believe like we do. If we would all agree on what we believe. We no longer have many of the details of faith in common, even within the church. We find that frustrating, vexing, threatening.

Yet our faith that keeps to itself, our introverted faith, is no longer attractive. On the one hand people don’t want conflict. On the other, people like to have something to believe in, some system of belief on which to hang the strands of their life, some system that makes sense. If we sheepishly, defensively, protectively keep it to ourselves, how will someone else ever find out.

I’ve been reading Gordon McDonald’s book, Who Stole My Church, which is about a pastor working with a group of church leaders to envision how to be faithful to God, and to the details of the faith they love deeply, and yet be open to ways to make the faith accessible and inviting to new generations of potential believers. The pastor talks about the era when everything was rational and orderly. All you had to do was walk a person through the Four Spiritual Laws and they would see their existence as sinners, know their need for the saving grace of Christ, and could then pray the prayer of confession and commitment that would signify their conversion to Christ. The great revivals of Billy Sunday, Dwight L. Moody, and Billy Graham capitalized on this process. People came and people believed. Then they found a place to belong.

The last half century has seen a sea change in the way people react to matters of faith. It is less mind and more heart, less rationality and more emotionality. The rapid and extensive change in the way the world perceives itself and operates has shifted the axis of human reality in the direction of relationships. Curiously that is a lot like the way Jesus did faith. He related to people. He didn’t demand, “Believe this way,” before ministering to them. He met them where they were and he celebrated the occasions when they understood God apart from all the institutional language and tradition. The centurion in the gospel reading understood how God worked and he wasn’t part of the chosen people. He was further ahead in faith than many who were steeped in it.

Our understanding of faith has to grow beyond the unabashed bragging about how great God is, to looking for the ways that people who don’t yet know God or who are estranged from God already know something about the love and grace and peace of God.  We also need to move out of an introverted faith to a strength of faith like Paul’s which enabled him to know what he knew about God and not be threatened by the fact that some people watered down their faith with false doctrines and worldly ways or that they could not be bullied into belief. God doesn’t want a bragging faith or a shy faith. God wants strong faith that stands up to the ways of the world and at the same time sees in the ways of the world points of intersection where God is active in the lives of not-yet-believers.

Christ has set the pattern for the church’s mission. And the good news is alive outside the church. Thanks be to God.

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.