Sermon
Sunday, August 21, 2005
The Reverend Pamela P. Snare

"You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Matthew 16:16

Biblical dictionaries and dictionaries of biblical theology tell us that in the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, there is not one word, but a variety of words that are used to denote "faith". But the predominant term in Hebrew is 'aman. As a verb it means "to be true, to be trustworthy, to be reliable." The root meaning behind 'aman is "solid" or "firm.". Thus, as a noun, it means "solidarity, firmness, stability." As a verb it can mean both that a person is reliable and trustworthy, as well as the acceptance of someone as trustworthy, reliable, dependable.

In today's gospel, Peter is presented to us as a model of faith. He is the first of the disciples to recognize and to articulate who Jesus is: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." Peter is so much the model of faith, that Jesus declares he will build his church on Peter. The well-known play on words in Greek, "You are Petros and on this petra I will build my church - you are Rock and on this rock I will build my church," harkens back to the meaning of this primary term for faith in Hebrew: solidity, firmness, stability.

From the outset, however, we need to put this episode, which presents Peter as a model of reliability, stability and firmness, in the context of the entire gospel. Let us remember that Peter had his up moments vis a' vis faith, and Peter had his down moments. Just a couple of weeks ago, we heard Jesus bid Peter to come to him on the water. After only a few steps, Peter becomes afraid thinking, "What am I doing? I can't do this!" and he begins to sink. His firmness, stability and rock-like character are overcome by fear. Or, let us not forget what must have been the most painful experience of Peter's life. When Jesus is in his greatest hour of need of his friends and followers, having been arrested and brought in for questioning, Peter not only deserts him, but vigorously denies three times that he is even acquainted with Jesus, much less loves him and has been following him.

Peter's faith has its ups and has its downs. He is not constant. Some days he's on and some days he's off. But even when Peter is terribly off, as in his three-fold denial of Christ, he still has a modicum of faith, else he would not have gone off and wept bitterly at his lack of it.

I have this suspicion, and I could be wrong, that most, if not all of us, tend to idealize and romanticize the life of faith. We have this idea that if one is really a Christian, a true believer, one never falters, one never doubts, one never questions, one never lacks faith. This idealized notion of what it means to live the life of faith keeps us from sharing with each other our faltering moments, our doubting moments, our questioning moments, our lack of faith moments. This is a mistake, my friends. It is a mistake because none of us, like Peter, are perfectly constant in our faith. None of us, like Peter, are rock-like in our faith every day and every moment. We need to share our struggles for faith, not only because it is simply true that faith is a struggle, but because we are given to each other by God for mutual strength and mutual support in the struggle that is the life of faith.

The most important thing about faith is not do we have it, or how much do we have, but do we want it? Wanting faith, desiring faith, is the first step toward faith: "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief." Desiring faith is also what sustains us when we think or we feel that we don't have it, or we don't have enough of it. To desire faith is to desire God. And God never disappoints those who desire him.

Today's gospel indicates that faith is a gift - a gift given to us by God: "Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah! For flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven." If faith is a gift, it means we cannot will ourselves to have faith; we cannot make it happen; it is not a human accomplishment. Some of the wisest counsel about faith that I know comes from the pen of Flannery O'Connor in a letter to a young college student who thought that he was losing his faith. She wrote:

"I think that this experience you are having of losing your faith...or having lost it, is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith; or at least it can belong to faith if faith is still valuable to you...If you want your faith, you have to work for it. It is a gift, but for very few is it a gift given without any demand for equal time devoted to its cultivation. For every book you read that is anti-Christian, make it your business to read one that presents the other side of the picture; if one isn't satisfactory read others. Don't think that you have to abandon reason to be a Christian....To find out about faith, you have to go to the people who have it and you have to go to the most intelligent ones if you are going to stand up intellectually to agnostics and the general run of pagans that you are going to find in the majority of the people around you...Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it, or feel it, if he wants it to be there."

If we want faith, or we want to grow in our faith, we have to put ourselves in the way of finding it - by what we read, by taking active part in a community of faith, by praying the Scriptures and becoming conversant with God who speaks to us through them, by receiving the sacrament of Christ's Body and Blood. If we are seeking faith, seeking God, the best places to find him are where he has promised to be. As someone said to me recently, "Simply asking for faith without putting any effort into it, would be like asking God to make me a paleontologist without going to learn about it from those who know it, have experience of it, and have practiced it."

Faith is firmness, stability, reliability, trustworthiness. It is not certainty. It does not mean knowing everything or having an answer for every question. It is not knowledge about God, it is knowledge of God. It is personal acquaintance; it is a relationship. To a certain degree, faith is a willingness to walk in darkness; it is an acceptance of not knowing or understanding completely and yet trusting because one knows God to be trustworthy. Faith requires a certain tolerance for not knowing, for not having all our questions answered definitively, for not understanding completely. If we understood completely, we would be God. Faith requires us to leave room for God to be God. We do not come to faith by first understanding everything and having all our questions answered. Rather, we can only come to understand by first following. The disciples followed Jesus and continued to follow Jesus even though they did not understand what he taught, what he did, or who he was. There was something compelling about him even when they were in the dark. So they kept on following in spite of not understanding. And that, my friends, is the only way to understand - simply to follow his teaching and his way of life.

If you are here today, you have faith. Jesus is compelling to you and that is why you are here. Perhaps you are not yet sure who is he. Perhaps you do not understand all that he taught, all that he said, all that he did. That is O.K. Perhaps you think that you do not have faith or have enough of it. Perhaps you feel that you do not have faith or have enough of it. But you do, if you are here, and any amount of faith, even the desire for faith, is enough for God to work with.

A dear friend of Jerry's and mine wrote to us recently, "Jesus says to us: 'follow me' and we don't know where he will lead us, we don't know the way. I love especially this verse from the letter to the Hebrews: 'By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out...and he set out, not knowing where he was going.' Abraham left without knowing where he was going. We are just there, free, open, available."

That is the life of faith, my friends. It is a life of trust, not of certainty. It has its ups and it has its downs. It has its moments of light and it has its moments of darkness. Our task is simply to set out, to follow Jesus, not knowing or having to know where it will lead, but letting ourselves be free, open and available to him and to his work for us. And we are to hold hands on this journey, sharing our struggles and our triumphs of faith, strengthening and supporting each other, all of us walking together behind him who is our Lord and our God.

AMEN.

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