Faith Changes Everything

The Rev. Harold Masback III (New Canaan Congregational Church, 11 January 2004)

Skip Masback, senior pastor of The Congregational Church in New Canaan, Connecticut, is a member of the Advisory Council and the National Working Group of the Faith as a Way of Life project.

Psalm 16:1–11
1 Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge.
2 I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord;
I have no good apart from you.”
3 As for the holy ones in the land, they are the noble,
in whom is all my delight.
4 Those who choose another god multiply their sorrows;
their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out
or take their names upon my lips.
5 The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;
you hold my lot.
6 The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
I have a goodly heritage.
7 I bless the Lord who gives me counsel;
in the night also my heart instructs me.
8 I keep the Lord always before me;
because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.
9 Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices;
my body also rests secure.
10 For you do not give me up to Sheol,
or let your faithful one see the Pit.
11 You show me the path of life.
In your presence there is fullness of joy;
in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

Romans 1:1–17

1 Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, 2 which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, 3 the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh 4 and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, 5 through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, 6 including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ,

7 To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

8 First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed throughout the world. 9 For God, whom I serve with my spirit by announcing the gospel of his Son, is my witness that without ceasing I remember you always in my prayers, 10 asking that by God’s will I may somehow at last succeed in coming to you. 11 For I am longing to see you so that I may share with you some spiritual gift to strengthen you — 12 or rather so that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine. 13 I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that I have often intended to come to you (but thus far have been prevented), in order that I may reap some harvest among you as I have among the rest of the Gentiles. 14 I am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish — 15 hence my eagerness to proclaim the gospel to you also who are in Rome.

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.”

Romans 12:1–2

1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect.

When I was a boy, our Sundays were bracketed by two unvarying routines: going to church in the morning, and watching Walt Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color” in the evening. Dinner, rough-housing with my brother, even the odd head fake at homework had to give way to plunking down in front of our old black and white TV set to watch the show. And I know this would have disappointed the marketing geniuses at RCA and NBC, but I don’t remember it seeming even a little bit odd that we were watching “The Wonderful World of Color” … in black and white. Our TV had always been black and white, every show we had ever watched had been black and white, that’s just the way television world was — even “The Wonderful World of Color” … black and white. Color just wasn’t a possibility.

I can still remember when it all changed — it all changed the day I got … a telescope. My family wouldn’t get a color TV until I was in high school, but my grandma gave me a telescope for Christmas, 1962, and my contented days of watching black and white TV were about to change forever. You see, as I aimed the telescope out our apartment house window, I discovered that I could focus right in on the television repair shop across Mamaroneck Avenue and the color TV they kept flickering in their window. Suddenly, color was a possibility. And just that quickly our Sunday night routine changed. Now, my brother and I would set the telescope up at 7:25, aim it at the repair shop window, anxiously await the opening credits for the Disney show.

The color was just as wonderful as the show’s title suggested. First, a black and white drawing of the magic kingdom, then a brilliant streak of color as Tinker Bell soared above the castle, and finally bright splashes of blues and reds and yellows exploding at the touch of her wand until the entire screen was alive — drab black and white bursting into what the marketers called “living color.” The view through the telescope was alluring, fleeting, and, of course, impracticable; and, as soon as the opening was over, we raced back to watch the real show on our suddenly drab old black and white TV.

Is that the way you experience God’s promises of deep joy and peace? Jesus’s promises of abundant, flourishing life? Is that the way you viewed our preaching series on joy last fall? Colorful descriptions as remote and impracticable as a television gleaming at the end of a telescope? And when we preached that God’s path to joy leads through deep attitudinal orientations of faith in God and trust in God’s promises of love, forgiveness, and provision, was the roadmap just alluring enough to leave you vaguely dissatisfied with your black and white reality, but not credible enough to summon an actual turn in your real life? As Dana Tierney writes in today’s Times Magazine section, “[O]ver the years I’ve come to feel I’m missing out. My friends and relatives who rely on God — the real believers, not just the churchgoers — have an expansiveness of spirit. When they walk along a stream, they don’t just see water falling over rocks; the sight fills them with ecstasy. They see a realm of hope beyond this world. I just see a babbling brook. I don’t get the message.” [1]

Or, to shift the metaphor a bit, is there a tightly bounded little zone in your life where faith is alive? Imagine a color television of faithful life flickering in the corner of an otherwise black and white existence. The color and vibrance of your faith is alive; but it’s limited to the formally designated “religious” zones of your life: Sunday worship, a favorite hymn, praying before bed, serving at Pivot House? You do experience brief interludes of living color, but then you always return to your work-a-day world of grays.

Just this Friday night I received an e-mail captioned “Wonderful Choir.” I figured a caption like that wasn’t likely to be spam, so I opened it to read a parishioner enthuse, “Just a note to say how much I love the choir! Their voices are truly heavenly and give me goose bumps every week … even bring tears to my eyes on occasion.” Occasions like that are wonderful, aren’t they? Most of us would count ourselves blessed to experience such color maybe one Sunday a month. Unless, that is, unless we were to discover that we were settling for far too little. Unless, as C. S. Lewis wrote, we discovered we were settling for playing at mud castles on the shore, when all along God was offering us his shimmering kingdom just the other side of the dunes.

Imagine that little color TV again, flickering away colorfully in our otherwise black and white world, and consider for a moment a far grander possibility. What if God wants, yearns, labors for the colors of faith to burst beyond their little ordained boundaries and flood throughout every corner of our lives. What if Christ came among us precisely so the joy of faith might spring free beyond the narrow bounds of churchy times to permeate the whole of our existance. What if Trappist monk Thomas Merton had it right when he described the following experience not while praying in his monastery but rather while running errands smack dab in the middle of downtown Louisville, “At the corner of Fourth and Walnut in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness…. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. There are no strangers! … The gate of heaven is everywhere.”

Imagine waking as if from a dream and seeing the colors of living faith streaming out of our little TV and splashing all throughout our black and white lives. Brilliant colors billowing out the windows, bursting out the doors, flooding green across the lawn, jumping blue into the sky — cars flicking one by one from shades of gray to yellows and reds and teals, strangers’ faces lighting up with pinks and tans and browns.

Living faith flooding into places you might expect like religious holidays, vacations and family celebrations, and even places you might not expect like work and finance and politics and finally into places that would frankly astonish you, like disability, conflict, even prison camps. Just before being killed by the Nazis, Dutch priest Titus Brandsma smuggled the following message out of Dachau, “I see God in the work of his hand and the marks of his love in every visible thing, and it sometimes happens that I am seized by a supreme joy which is above all other joys.” [2] In Dachau!

That would be real faith. Not faith sparkling and remote on the other side of a shop window, not faith confined to precious little scheduled moments, but faith as way of life. As Paul writes, the “righteous will live by faith,” “walking in a newness of life,” experiencing the entire world as a “new creation.” As Dostoevsky’s holy father Zossima says, “Gentlemen, look around you at the gifts of God, the clear sky, the pure air, the tender grass, the birds; nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we, are sinful and foolish, and we don’t understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that, and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, and we shall embrace each other and weep.” [3]

Surely, living such a faith as way of life would change everything. Surely living such a faith we would not be “conformed to this world but rather transformed by the renewing of our minds” [Romans 12:2].

And, if we know anything about Paul and his letter to the Romans, anything about Martin Luther and his Protestant Reformation, anything about the Puritans and their pilgrimage to America, we know that they all staked their lives on the good news, the gospel, that faith as a way of life is God’s chosen dynamo to redeem God’s entire creation. Such a faith would change everything. Unless … unless it’s just too good to be true. Unless we’re getting that old “flickering screen at the end of a telescope” feeling again: beguiling colors to be sure, but just plain beyond the reach of black and whiters like you and me.

For you and I have all come far enough along in life to be a bit resistant to cries of “this changes everything.” For most of our lives, we’ve been surrounded by pundits, books, pitchmen crying out “this changes everything,” but mostly life has taught us, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chôse.” Remember how after 9/11 we were never going to waste time on frivolous entertainment, never take our families for granted, or never quibble over partisan politics ever again? Who can even remember their own “this will change everything” New Year’s resolutions of 2002? 2003? 2004?

So, as we begin studying Romans together as a template of faith, as we ask your help launching our “Faith as a Way of Life” program, let me offer up just three preliminary counter-weights to place in the balance against our hard-won skepticism.

First, for all our questions, for all our uncertainties, for all the differences among us in understanding the promises, demands, and miracles of scripture, can’t we all agree that from start to finish it is a story of men and women for whom faith did change everything? Abraham looking up at the stars of Chaldea, Moses looking up at Sinai’s summit, Mary looking up at Gabriel, Matthew looking up from his tax ledger, Jesus looking up from his cross, Paul looking up from the dust of the Damascus road. And don’t we all know that the faith story continues right down to our day, right through the Luthers and Puritans and Brandsmas and Mertons, right through to friends and neighbors we’ve each met along life’s way? Faith changes everything.

Second, we could hardly dream up a better guide for our journey than Paul. Paul was a “type A’s” “type A,” a perfectionist who knew a thing or two about black and white living. A student of Gamaliel, most zealous of the Pharisees, Paul poured out his youth straining ceaselessly to make himself acceptable, straining fruitlessly to remove the thorn in his own flesh, carving endessly at his own behavior from the outside so as to conform to Jewish law. All his perfectionist strivings led Paul only to the Road to Damascus — a colorless, graceless gallop twisting a religion of love into an excuse to kill. There, on Paul’s worst day, on his darkest day, on his lowest day, there Paul discovered beyond question that he needn’t climb to the perfection of God, for the forgiving grace of Christ reached down to him in the dust holding out the gift of faith. And once Paul discovered that the color of faith was a living possibility, neither he nor the world would ever be quite as black and white again. Faith changes everything.

Finally, as we ask the questions of faith together: What is faith? Where does it come from? Is there anything we can do to get it? Why do we still doubt? What would faith look like in our families, our careers, our communities? As we ask after these questions together, we couldn’t start with a more helpful, important book than Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Martin Luther called it “the most important piece in the New Testament. It is purest Gospel. It is well worth a Christians while not only to memorize it word for word but also to occupy himself with it daily, as though it were the daily bread of the soul.”

It was in studying Romans that Luther developed the faith and the understanding that would form the basis of his Protestant Reformation, itself the seedbed of western individualism, Puritanism, capitalism, and constitutional government. Truly, faith as a way of life changes everything. May it do so for us. Amen.

Notes
[1] Tierney, “Coveting Luke’s Faith,” New York Times Magazine, January 11, 2004, at 66.
[2] Quoted in Woodward, Making Saints.
[3] The Brothers Karamazov, vol. 1, 352.