Life is Difficult but Faith is Joyful!

Psalm 91; Matthew 15: 21-28

A Sermon Preached by Donald Mackenzie

February 6, 2005

University Congregational United Church of Christ

Seattle, Washington

“With long life I will satisfy them and show them my salvation.” Psalm 91:16

Today concludes a three sermon series on “Holding Faith in a Foreign Land.” In our previous two sermons, we have made four points. First, life with God is home. Life without God is a foreign land. Because we are human, we are often, perhaps most of the time, in a foreign land longing to come home. Second, life in many ways is still foreign to God’s purposes. The Christian church has never fully accepted the substance of the gospel. As Christian people, we are not home. Third, crying and anger are signs that all is not well, as well as opportunities to be moved to a new place where we can reconnect with God and God’s purposes. And fourth, in that new place, we can sing both figuratively and literally because in finding that new connection to God, we, once again, find faith.

But, what is faith? Faith is so many things that a concise definition is difficult. That is bad news for those of us trying to find some focus for this, but good news as it includes so much. So, perhaps the better way to begin is to say what faith is not. Faith is not human certainty. For me, the phrase “human certainty” suggests the popular word “lifestyle.” Lifestyle is a word invented by advertisers to suggest that if we just buy the right products we can create a life that is happy, secure, fulfilling and certain; a life where the outcomes of our choices are guaranteed, the safety of those we love and our own safety is guaranteed and where we become the people we had dreamed of becoming. Of course, this is all very desirable. Who wouldn’t want that? And yet, at some level, we all know that this is false—it can’t be done. Consumer products as good as they are cannot contribute to certainty. There is no guarantee of safety for anyone under any circumstances. Every time we make a choice, there is risk. So another way to move toward a definition of faith is to say that it is a vehicle for helping us to cope with the reality that life is essentially uncertain. Faith involves trust not in human ingenuity and creativity, but in the power of God through love to hold us from birth to death and again through the power of love, to provide for our healing, for our growth toward becoming complete human beings. So faith requires a conviction that there is a being who has created the universe and created us and invited us to help with the completion of that creation, to help with the healing, the salvation of creation. It also requires the conviction that to be the people God dreams of our becoming, we must live together cooperatively, compassionately, forgiving each other and ourselves and working for a world where justice prevails, where every human being has full access to all human and civil rights. And for Christian people, the figure of Jesus is the doorway to that faith. Jesus, at every turn, for every step, shows us the way. For us, Jesus is the way to God.

But we don’t just have faith. We don’t go to a faith supermarket, take a cart and start picking and choosing the pieces that we think make up faith. While we may long for it, we can’t create it. Faith is a gift from God and it comes most often through other people. The apostle Paul said, “faith comes by hearing.” We look to other people to see how their lives are ordered, to see what values inform their choices, their outlook, to see how faith guides their lives. That is especially so since our faith comes and goes, which is why we say we welcome believers, seekers and doubters. We are also always growing into and sometimes out of and then back into our faith. It can be frightening and we need reassurance.

Reassurance is the subject of Psalm 91, which is a song about reassurance. This is someone singing. It is a song of faith. The writer proclaims trust in God and that God will be with us in a safe place. In verse three we learn that God is also with us in dangerous places—in other words, out upon life’s way—the activities of daily living are, among other things, dangerous. God is always with us and holds us secure. We can “trust” in that. This is trust in God—not in human ingenuity. And that the end of the psalm, of the song, suddenly it is God speaking to us directly and saying, in effect, this is true! What a song! We live in a difficult world, a world where if it were the way God would have it, life would be very different and it would take courage on our part to help make such changes.

How faith helps us deal with the changes that are needed is complicated, difficult but ultimately so rewarding we must call it joyful. We have all heard people say that having faith is easy until something difficult happens. What would it mean to hold a faith that could encounter difficulty and survive it, even be helped by it?

This is what our gospel reading is about. It’s a familiar story about the faith of one who saw Jesus as healer. She asks Jesus for help and he replies, uncharacteristically, that he has been sent just to the people of Israel and not to others. The woman is a Canaanite. She persists in asking for help. Jesus says, “It is not fair to take the children’s food (healing for the people of Israel) and throw it to the dogs (people outside of Israel.) If Jesus was ever more offensive or rude to anyone in the Bible, I don not know of it. He might just as well have slapped her in the face. But the woman does not take offense! Instead, she says, “Yes, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table” (it is possible for outsiders to receive healing that was originally intended for insiders.) In other words, her faith transcends the offense.

Faith, it seems, must be able to go beyond the mere comforts that we desire as human beings. Faith must encounter the countercultural purposes of God and remain steady. Faith must encounter the parts of Jesus’ teachings that many have found offensive--teachings such as love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you-- and remain steady.

If faith is not something we create or pickup, how do we do this? We have to work on it every day. We have to hold it so that faith beats next to our hearts. We can’t put it on a shelf, encountering it only occasionally, and expect it will support us in the difficulties of our lives. And to work on it, we need each other. We need to be inspired by each other and to be encouraged. And we need to sing. We can sing God’s song in a foreign land. Amen.