Our
Gospel lesson ends with a haunting question,
“When the Son of Man comes, will he
find faith on earth?”//
If
Jesus is using the words “Son of Man”
the way most people meant them in
his day,
they mean an ordinary person, the
man on the street.
That’s
how I think of them in this lesson.
I
imagine the ordinary person on the street
and wonder if he will find faith on
earth.
Here’s
what I mean.
Some
of you may be old enough to remember
the 1965 John Philips song,
California Dreamin’
– or if you’re younger, you may have
heard it
in a movie just a few
years ago, Fish Tank.
It’s
about a guy feeling cold and lonely in New York on a winter day.
He
stops into a church to get warm.
In
how many movies have you seen someone feeling cold and lost
go into a church, perhaps to pray or
just get warm – perhaps spiritually?
I’ve
done it myself in real life.
When
my daughter was backpacking through Europe,
she was homesick one day so far from
home.
But
she found an Episcopal Church
where a priest prayed with her
and it was like a shawl wrapped
around her soul.
A
church building embodies faith in an architectural way.
The
priest embodies faith in a human way.
The
paintings of Caravaggio and Fra Angelico embody faith in painting.
The
sculpture of Michelangelo and Rodin embody faith in stone.
So
here’s what the question in our Gospel lesson means to me:
When
the cold and lonely John Philips of California Dreamin,
or my daughter in Europe, or any Son
of Man
is wandering lost and
lonely on life’s mean streets,
will there be a Church
with a glowing hearth
where he can
warm his soul?
I
don’t just mean will there be church buildings around.
I
mean: will there be faith in the world
when we need it?
Will
we find faith on earth?
By
faith, I mean something that doesn’t fit a nifty definition.
I
mean a deep trust that there is meaning and value to life.
Ultimate
meaning and value is at least part of what I mean by God.
Faith
is trust in the core of reality,
trust that the mystery will one day
be revealed
for what is has always been:
good and true, beautiful
and kind.
Faith
is trust that there is redemption, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
Without
faith, the streets get pretty cold on a winter’s day.
We
need faith in order to live a truly human life.
One
person clothes his faith in one religion.
Another
person clothes his faith in another religion.
But
faith cannot live naked in this world.
It’s
too cold out there.
Faith
needs a medium just like a medicine has to be mixed in a base.
It
is the spirit inside religion.
Faith
needs stories, rituals, art and architecture.
It
needs songs and dances, holy days, saints, traditions.
These
are the flesh and bones.
They
are not faith themselves, but faith needs them to survive.
“When
the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
When
we need faith, when our children and grandchildren need faith,
will they find it?
Brothers
and sisters, faith is not an accomplishment.
It
is a gift from God.
But
it is a fragile gift, a precious gift that must be nurtured.
St.
Paul called it a treasure held in a fragile clay jar.
It
is like a seedling entrusted to us to water, protect, and cherish.
Faith
is a gift that lives or dies, flourishes or perishes,
in our hearts and in our culture
depending on how we treat
it.
That
brings us to our Epistle lesson.
Faith
is clothed in religion, mediated to us by religion
-- but the religion only works if we
know it.
Notice
all the words of learning and knowledge in this text.
“Continue in what you have learned and firmly believed,
knowing
from whom you learned it
and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings
that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith. . . .
All
Scripture is useful for teaching …
(and) training . . . .
Proclaim the message, be persistent whether
the time
is favorable or unfavorable . . .
.with the utmost patience in teaching.”
To
nourish our faith, we have to know our religion.
In
my younger days, I was not a believer.
But
I at least knew what it was I didn’t believe.
I
knew it. I missed it. And when the time was right,
I knew where to look for it.
On
a cold winter day, “I stopped in to a church
I passed along the way.”
Thanks
be to God and the saints who have gone before us,
the church was there. The faith was
there.
Now
here’s what worries me.
A
recent Pew Forum survey of religious knowledge
showed that most of us don’t know
much about religion
– either our own or
anyone else’s.
Atheists
and agnostics knew almost twice as much about religion
as mainline Protestants.
A
couple of years ago, some counselors at Camp Galilee
rose up in protest against saying
the Lord’s Prayer.
Their
basic problem: they didn’t know it.
When
one of them heard it, she thought it was a Satanic curse.
That
was before we hired Chaplain Liz.
Since
we hired Liz, we’ve baptized three counselors.
But
most of the kids who come to camp,
don’t know much Christianity,
and neither do their parents.
There’s
a lot of Christianity to know.
I
don’t know the half of it.
But
in my worst times of fear and despair,
the words of Isaiah have carried me.
When
I have been falling apart,
the Jesus prayer has held me
together.
I
was over 50 years old before the Doctrine of the Trinity
opened my eyes to life being more
beautiful
than I had ever
imagined;
and
the Mystery of the Incarnation blew wide open
all my assumptions about who God is
and what it means to be
human.
Faith
is a precious gift.
We
pass it down from generation to generation.
We
tend it, shield it, feed and water it.
We
tend our faith with prayer and practice,
worship and study.
“Continue
in what you have learned . . . ,”
the Bible says, “knowing from whom you learned it
and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings
that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith. . . .”
Faith
lives between the lines
of the wild story of salvation in
our Bible.
It
lives in the prayers of the saints
and the imaginations of the artists.
But
faith can live in us only if we know these things,
only if we know our religion.
“When
the Son of Man comes,
will he find faith on the earth?”
It’s
up to us.
-- A Sermon from 2013
