People speculate all the time about dangers to the church and faith. Usually the conversation involves some combination of atheism, changing moral values, disintegration of society, loss of the "Christian" culture, and the like. Those things can all be hazardous, but truth be told they've been with us for thousands of years. Every generation departs from the last. Every 10-20 years we get a new reason to complain that the end of the world as we know it is nigh. At no point yet has that actually happened.
None of those things qualify as the greatest danger to faith because they're all outside of its realm. Not to say that faith is limited or divorced from these things, rather than most people--Christians included--view them as peripheral to faith, if not opposed to it. Few things outside of faith can truly harm it. Change it, yes...sometimes for the better and sometimes not. But they'll not overcome it.
The biggest danger our generation faces comes from inside the faith. It's not about non-believers or immoral folks. It's about people who profess to believe and live rightly but try to do so apart from faith while at the same time decreeing themselves to be paragons of it. As with outside challenges, this sort of thing has been around for centuries. The Pharisees fit this mold in some ways. Plenty of faithful Jewish people in Jesus' time did too. But none of them had the same power or opportunities that your average person living in the United States today does. They were free to posit whatever they wished about faith, but it remained beyond them. Their circle of influence was too small, their control over their own lives too limited.
In the modern era any of us can communicate with hundreds of people at any given time. We also have near-inviolable power of choice over our own lives. That means the worst instincts of people in Jesus' time find full flower, and often support, among us.
What we don't realize is that the true danger comes not from making choices about this or that aspect of our life--faith or otherwise--rather in the power to choose itself. Every well-meaning person of faith I know fights the same battle: to make God and faith a part of their life. The irony of this is that they fail precisely when they succeed. God is not meant to be a PART of our life, he IS our life...the only life that endures and matters.
We cling to the idea that we can life a "good" and "balanced" and "productive" life and then try to figure out how faith fits into all of that. What we don't realize is that faith is the path to goodness, peace, and the fruits of the spirit. We assume we know what "good" is and then try to match faith to it instead of immersing ourselves in faith and defining goodness from that. Our faith competes with all of the other tasks of life--usually coming in second to more critical-seeming matters--instead of shaping all of the other tasks of life. Thus we get a faith that's reliable, predictable, tame, and utterly in our control. By extension we also get a faith, and through it a God, which is utterly dispensable.
The greatest threat to faith is not anything from the outside trying to knock it down. It's people on the inside failing to hold it up. Faith can deal with any number of wrongs. It can't prosper where nobody cares what's right.
True faith cannot be tamed. It will not follow politely behind a thousand other priorities. True faith transforms you, shocks you sometimes, leaves you wondering where that came from and marveling how you never saw it before. True faith cannot be held; it must be breathed. It cannot be carried in the pocket and brought out at convenient moments either. You swim in it every day, immersed from head to toe, or you end up dry. True faith changes the way you do everything in life, from your dearest relationships to your most chance encounter.
I cannot tell you how to find this kind of faith. It finds you. It calls you every day. The problem isn't making it happen. The problem is that we're all satisfied with something else.
When's the last time faith really burned you, kindling a fire that surprised? When's the last time you were in awe over the work of faith in your life? When's the last time you viewed your day through the eyes of faith rather than viewing your faith through the lens of your daily schedule? God is many things, but he's not small enough to fit in a corner. He's on the loose, running wild, a little dangerous, certainly passionate and exciting. It's time for all of us to see and follow that God, letting him out of the little box in which we've been pretending to keep him and chasing him wherever he leads.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
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