I found myself in two different conversations this week about how the primary work of the church is to help people grow in faith.
The main reason we exist, at Trinity, or in the whole Christian church, is to be a place, a community, where we get closer to God, get better at following Jesus, find it increasingly appealing to love our uncomfortable neighbors as well as the delightful ones, grow more confident in the stories of the Bible and our own stories, and deepen our trust in God.
All the things we do together – worship, outreach, fellowship, music, building maintenance, hospital visits, pledge campaigns, making coffee – make hundreds of times more difference in the world and in our lives if they are rooted in and powered by our faith.
Two conversations this week, and now a third. Because here’s Jesus, just now, talking about the same thing, more personally and graphically.
If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire…. if your foot trips you up, pulls you off the path of God’s love, cut it off… if your eye traps you, keeps focusing on things that distract you, or pull you away from God, tear it out.
You don’t need a foot, or your eye, or your hands as much as you need the closeness with God, the confidence and trust in God that Jesus teaches. The parts of ourselves we can’t imagine life without are less life-giving than our faith, Jesus says.
The parts of ourselves you and I can’t imagine living without may not be hands and eyes. I know I’ve often said to friends that if I lose the ability to read, or to enjoy learning, you might as well pull the plug immediately. You have something about you, too, that you can’t imagine life without: an ability, a talent, a personality trait that just somehow makes you, you.
And here’s Jesus saying “if there’s any chance that gets in the way of your faith, in the way of your deep connection to and trust in God, cut it off. Cut it off right now.”
He’s not fooling around. And this shouldn’t be all that surprising. Just a day or two ago in gospel time Jesus was trying to teach his disciples (and us, two Sundays ago) that we have to “deny ourselves”, take up the risk of loss and embarrassment, face down death, to follow him, to have the miraculous, unshakeable closeness to God that leads through everything we most fear to resurrection and abundant life. Just like Jesus himself models for us.
There is a lot that you and I – and Jesus’s other disciples, from Peter and John and their contemporaries right up until now – very reasonably fear losing.
And Jesus is telling us in no uncertain terms that your faith – your connection to God, your trust, your hope, your confidence that there’s more to life than just what’s around us – that faith is more important than anything it would hurt us to give up. More important than hands and eyes and feet and your identity itself.
I don’t just think he’s right because it’s my job. I also think that because the thread of faith - the need deep inside me to stay connected to God’s love and power and story, and to other people who know that love and power and story – has pulled me through some of the places in my life when I had lost parts of myself. When I’ve felt frustratingly, un-solvably helpless, and when I’d given up on ever finding out how to be myself again.
Or I hear a story in my family about losing an eye – well, the sight in the eye – and I feel a little anticipatory terror of the independence and delights I’d lose if it happens to me. And sometimes – just often enough – I remember how it feels to trust God enough to ask for help – and accept help – when I need it, and I know that “losing an eye”, if it happens, won’t actually be the end I fear.
If you’ve ever wondered what your faith is actually worth in this world, Jesus is telling you – telling us – today. It’s worth more than eyes and hands and feet and self. More than everything.
But it’s not just your faith that’s worth that – to Jesus, or to you.
Jesus is also telling us that other people’s faith is worth that much to us. More, even.
“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.”
If something you or I say or do or leave undone trips up someone else’s faith, makes it harder for someone else – especially someone “less important” than us – to follow Jesus, or connect with God, it would be better to immediately “sleep with the fishes”.
Not pulling any punches, are you, Jesus?
The faith of other people – other people less important than you or I – is worth our lives.
So removing all the barriers that might keep other folks from following Jesus, connecting with God, growing in faith – that’s just as important, maybe even more important, than our own faith.
That may sound daunting. It’s also actually good news in two ways.
As Mother Angie mentioned last week, helping other people helps us.
I know I feel more deeply rooted in my own faith when one of you has brought me a question you’re struggling with, and we work through it together.
Or when a non-church friend complains to me about the way the Bible or Christian tradition is being used to separate people on the internet, how it makes them hate stories or traditions they used to love, and I get to help them navigate their way back to the hope they found in the Bible or religious community in the first place.
I feel more deeply rooted in my faith, too, when I think about the barriers we’re planning to remove from our beautiful building as we complete our capital campaign. Creating barrier-free access to our worship and fellowship spaces for folks who use wheelchairs or struggle with steps means we’re opening Trinity’s particular ways of growing closer to God in worship, music, study, service, and friendship to people who get treated as “less important” in much of everyday life.
But that’s just the outward and visible sign of how the work we do in our buildings is meant to shape our hearts and habits so that it’s natural for all of us to remove barriers to faith that come in the form of words and actions instead of steps and doors.
Helping others in faith genuinely and powerfully strengthens our own faith. But that’s not the only good news about the stark priorities Jesus is talking about today.
He is also pointing out that it’s not actually all on us.
Today’s story starts with John worrying about people who aren’t part of the original disciples group using Jesus’s name to heal and free people.
They can’t possibly be doing it right.
Or they’ll dilute our message, draw people away from us, or interfere. Right?
“Not at all!” says Jesus. “No one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.”
We don’t have to correct or convert people who desire connection with Jesus and go about it in a different way than we do. We don’t have to correct or convert people who practice small kindnesses motivated by our faith, but don’t see themselves as having faith.
The name and the power of Jesus will do that work, because God creates faith, God enables that connection and trust and power and love.
It doesn’t depend on us.
We just make absolutely sure we don’t get in the way.
To live in faith and grow in faith is the most important thing in our lives. It’s the most important thing in history, in the universe, because it makes us stronger in all the other important, transformative, loving, life-giving things we could do.
Our faith and the faith of others is more important even than life itself.
Which is why God’s building it all around us, as well as in us, all the time.
You and I just have to keep from getting ourselves in the way.
And getting barriers out of the way – in ourselves and for others – is the most life-giving thing we can do.
I’m in. Are you?
No comments:
Post a Comment