Colossians 1:15-28;
Psalm 52; Luke 10:38-42
I have an important task for you today. I am giving you fair warning rather than springing it on you sixteen minutes from now. So, if you don’t want a task, a churchy task, you may allow your brain to drift aimlessly and pay no mind to anything I will be saying in the next few minutes. Or you may raise the level of your attention a notch or two so that you don’t miss anything.
To start, let’s pretend you have been given the task of selecting a small group of people to represent Waverly at an intimate gathering with an important person. For fun, let say that the person is the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon. What kind of delegation might you send? Would you choose a 7-year old boy who thrives in making bodily noises? Would you choose a girl who seems on the way to be to become an Olympic whiner? Would you take a 15-year old boy whose low-hanging jeans expose a lot of his boxers? Would you choose a teen girl whose fingers are perpetually texting on her phone? Would you choose the working mom or dad who is so caught up in work that she or he never gets to the child’s softball game or soccer match and is never there to tuck them in at night?
Whoever you would choose, the ones I’ve highlighted are only a sample of the people available. You would have work with them on proper etiquette and deportment, history and context, dos and don’ts.
You can relax. That is not your task. I’m going to turn it around. You are one of the people selected for an event like that one. The team leader is a guy name Paul. And the person you are going to meet has an amazing pedigree and story. His name is Jesus.
Paul lays out the task in a very straightforward manner: “So that we may present everyone mature in Christ.” Your task – if you choose to accept it – is to become mature in Christ.
This is not something that we are responsible for on our own. It is a shared responsibility. Pastor Bob and I have some responsibility for this. Session has some responsibility. And each of us has some responsibility for this, not just for ourselves, but for each other.
In fact we have several teams working of a variety of aspects of this growth in maturity. There is a team that is working to develop an alternative praise and fellowship experience. We have a team dreaming of even more engaging and Spirit-filled traditional worship experiences. We have a team thinking deeply about gratitude as a core value for faith community’s being. And we have a team working to stretch and strengthen our cognitive understanding of faith and living.
Maturity is not something that happens overnight, although there are times when a sudden burst of maturation may occur. Some of us still aren’t sure what we want to be when we grow up. Some of us grew up a long time ago and haven’t had any growth since who knows when. Most of us are works in progress, moving slowly and surely towards the goal of being whole in Christ.
It’s a lofty goal, nigh unto impossible to attain. Paul did not water it down. He started out with the New Testament’s most densely packed, high-pedestal idea about Christ: the cosmic Christ who is firstborn of all creation, who holds all things together, who contains within his being all the fullness of God, and through whom God reconciles all creation to God’s self through the blood of the cross. That, my friends, is a goal beyond reach by any human standard. It puts us in our place.
Maturity in faith, however, is not a quantum leap. It is one foot in front another, some steps tottering, some steps aided by canes, walkers and rehab therapists, some steps strong and determined. Growth in faith maturity yard by yard is hard, but inch by inch is a cinch.
Thirty years ago James Fowler published a significant work about faith maturation. Simply called, Stages of Faith,(1) the book looks at ways faith develops in people. The stages are sequential. Some are more tied to chronological age then others. Yet whether we are 9, 19, 39 or 89, we are somewhere along the continuum of the six stages that Fowler laid out.
We all begin in a pre-stage called Undifferentiated faith in which the seeds of trust, courage, hope and love are fused in an undifferentiated way and contend with sensed threats of abandonment, inconsistencies and deprivation in the environment. The emergent faith is basic trust and relational experience of mutuality with care givers.
Fowler calls Stage 1 an Intuitive-Projective faith. It is fantasy filled, often imitative in which the child can be powerfully and permanently influenced by examples, moods, actions and stories of the visible faith of the closest adults. Here is the first self-awareness and the child often believes that he or she is the center of the world.
Then comes Stage 2, Mythic-Literal faith, when the child begins to take on for her- or himself the stories, beliefs, observances that symbolize belonging to the community. Beliefs are appropriated with literal interpretations. Symbols are one dimensional. Imagination begins to get reined in. Perceptions become more accurate, and the world is based on reciprocal fairness and justice is based on reciprocity, “an eye for an eye.” The actors in the cosmic stories are seen as human. And stories become a means finding a coherent narrative to experience.
As the limitations of literalness and an excessive reliance reciprocal justice are buffeted by reality, Stage 3, Synthetic-Conventional faith, begins. A person’s experience now extends beyond family. Abilities expand as well as circles of influence. These are often the teenage years, but for many adults this stage is their permanent place of equilibrium. Faith provides a coherent orientation in the midst of the complex and diverse context. Faith becomes a basis for identity and outlook. This is a conformist stage in the sense that other people’s opinions overly matter. The person may develop a personal myth about one’s own identity, incorporating one’s past and anticipated future. Perhaps this is Martha’s faith.
As personal identity and story develop, clashes arise with the world and with those who bear authority in the world. One often leaves home figuratively and literally in search of self, meaning, future, and stability. That brings on Stage 4, Individuative-Reflective faith. The self’s identity and world view, once defined by significant others, now seek to define themselves. The myths of previous stages are now demythologized and symbols are translated into concepts. This is a very rational stage. The mind often overrules intuition and feeling. Whatever doesn’t make rational sense can’t be. Maybe this stage represents Mary’s faith
Fowler’s Stage 5, Conjunctive faith, is complex. There is a reintegration of self and outlook, a kind of second naivete in which symbols and rituals reclaim meaning. This stage often accompanies the “mid-life crisis.” The stage is divided, living and acting between an untransformed world and a transforming vision. Stage 5 faith sees injustice in sharply etched terms because it has been apprehended by an enlarged awareness of the demands of justice and their implications. It recognizes partial truths and their limitations. Paradoxes abound. Loyalties are conflicted. Paul must have gone through this in his conversion.
About Stage 6, Universalizing faith, Fowler says:
Heedless of the threats to self, to primary groups and to the institutional arrangements of the persistent order that are involved, Stage 6 becomes a disciplined, activist incarnation — making real and tangible — of the imperatives of absolute love and justice of which Stage 5 has partial apprehensions.(2)Fowler says that very few people reach Stage 6. The ones that do, are contagious in the sense that they create zones of liberation from all the shackles we human in society place on each other and endure from each other. It is ironic that both the saintliest and the most demonic fall under that description. Maybe you and I have been blessed to experience someone who epitomized this stage of faith. World class folks like Dag Hammarskjold, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Abraham Heschel, Henri Nouwen, come to mind. They have wrestled with ambiguity, with paradox. They have gone away from and returned at a deeper level to the basic trust of the earliest faith stage. They have appropriated, dismantled, and reconstructed symbols and concepts. Their faith is not the rote faith of their young years, nor is their faith the anything-goes faith that overtook the rotes and rituals of their formative years. Their faith is personal, crafted in fire and ice, in storm and stillness, in community and in cloistered solitude. Like Jacob, they have wrestled with God and not given up, exacting a blessing, which they incarnate in their lives comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. They truly share with Christ the joy of bearing a significant portion of the fullness of God.
Your task is to become mature in Christ. Pray and reflect deeply on Paul’s words. Look at your faith. Where are the growing edges, the places that need to be nurtured? Where are the faith edges that no longer work or make sense, and perhaps haven’t for some time? How can they be coaxed, stimulated, jump-started into growing faith?
Faith is not something that we hold, as if we could contain it. Faith is something that by the grace of Christ, the love of God, the persistence of the Spirit holds us, from cradle to Kingdom. This earthly life is not the be all to end all, but the womb which develops us into faithful, mature, blessed citizens of God’s eternal realm. That’s all part of the economy of redemption which Paul so eloquently stated. His most earnest desire was to present each of us mature in Christ. May that be our desire as well.
(1) James W. Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Development and the Quest for Meaning, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981). See particularly pages 119-211.
(2) Ibid., p. 200.
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.
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