BRILLIANT Inspiration!

Just yesterday I talked about the diversity of faith backgrounds and views in our Wednesday Morning Women's Bible Study and darned if we didn't see the Spirit at work in exactly that way this very morning!

We are studying the Book of James and in this particular passage we considered the role of works in faith, how they were necessary but how they could also become a source of distraction when they became prideful or self-righteous.  We talked about how churches often narrow their ministries by keeping their tasks familiar and withing the purview of 4-5 people instead of letting all the gifts of the people in church flower.  We were just getting into the disguise we put over this process--anointing one thing to do and one way to do it and calling that "right" or "holy"--when one of our brilliant theologians brought up a lesson she had been told in childhood:  "If you want something done right, do it yourself!"

This simple statement dovetailed with everything we had been talking about: work being about the self, limiting the range of our daily tasks to things we agree with or things that cater to our own gifts, defining a single way of doing things that only we know, determining right and wrong by internal bias rather than external effect.  Then the true beauty of the statement came to the fore as we made this connection:

1.  If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

2.  Faith, by definition, can never be done by yourself.  (At a minimum you need a God to believe in, right?)

3.  Therefore by simple A-B-C mathematical logic, faith can never be done "right"!

Whoa!!!

Note that this is different than saying faith can never be done well.  It surely can be.  But it can never be done "right" when "right" is defined as "just one way to do it, the way I say".  Faith is not a "get out of the way and let me show you how it's done" endeavor.  Faith is a, "Let's jump in and do this together" thing.  Every time we posit a single "right" way to do it we are isolating ourselves, cutting off our faith from infinite permutations of God's Spirit and from its relationship to people around us.

In other words, every bit of energy we spend on trying to get faith "right" by that self-centered definition is a waste of time.  Every moment we spend doing faith together with each other and God is a blessing, even if we sometimes do it imperfectly.

Thank goodness for all the people and views at our Bible Study.  They bring out this kind of thing that we'd never think of sitting in a room trying to read scripture on our own.  Who knows if we get it right all the time, but we sure do it well!

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)