Is Your Faith a Load or a Lift?

Journal-Review
July 7, 2010
By Pastor Gary Lewis
First United Methodist Church

One of the real blessings about vacation is the thrill I get from visiting other churches. I really enjoy the time I get to spend seated with my wife at a worship service. I get to be a member of the congregation instead of serving as the pastor. We were warmly greeted by people in both churches – one in Arkansas and the other in Indiana.

At the church in Arkansas, a beloved pastor was preaching his last message to the congregation. At the Indiana church, the pastor (a colleague in ministry) was about to lead her first worship service at a new appointment. Each pastor did an excellent job saying “goodbye” and “hello” in their different contexts.

I know by experience it was not an easy thing to do. Yet, you could see their faith in Christ in action. It was as if Jesus Christ gave them the lift that they needed to get through such a trying circumstance. I found it to be an inspiration to see them display such certainty.

With the deadline for this column looming ahead, I began to think about how what I witnessed is a perfect example of what all Christians should experience. Yet, for some reason, many do not.

Allow me to share an old preacher’s story to help illustrate this point. Once upon a time, a person who was a total novice at flying asked the Southwest Airlines agent at the Indianapolis International Airport, “How long does it take to get from here to Chicago?”

The agent responded, “One of our flights leaves at 7:10 a.m. and gets to Chicago at 7:15 a.m.” The silence was long and uncomfortable. Finally, the agent asked, “Would you like me to book you on one of our flights?” The measured response of the first-time flyer was, “No, I think I’ll just stay here and watch that thing take off.”

One of the misconceptions about the Christian faith is the assertion that a one-time Christian experience does it all. We get the idea that the journey from takeoff to destination can be accomplished in one experience. We fail to take into account that true faith involves some time for real joy in the journey. Sure, at times it is time-consuming, difficult, with plenty of trials-and-errors.

But we don’t arrive in five minutes! We tend to overlook the jet-lag, the time-zone realities between our first taste of God’s love, which we call justification, and that much later state of grace called “sanctification.”
For many of us, we have this sense we have already arrived at our spiritual destinations. We’re like a good baseball glove, well-worn and comfortable in all the right places. Many have become fulfilled in their faith. All that is left is the drudgery, the day-to-day niceties of Christianity.

The Apostle Paul warned the early church about such thinking. In his letter to the church at Corinth, he reminds us that we are all part of one body. “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all made to drink of one Spirit …Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:13, 27, NRSV)

There’s the rub. We treat our faith as a load we ought to lift ourselves instead of allowing others to come along side and help us. We each have different gifts to share. We each have unique strengths. This is what it means to be a part of the body of Christ. So, I ask you, dear reader, “Is your faith a load or a lift?” It is rather easy to become a stick-in-the-mud. When our understanding of faith becomes stagnant, when we go to God in predictable ways, we carry a heavy load rather than being an inspirational lift.

Sanctification is not supposed to be that way. It is supposed to be a slowly evolving state of grace, a constant maturing of our faith-life. The most wondrous aspect of it is that we become softened, more tolerant, less judgmental, less brittle, more forgiving and, yes, less cocksure that we have all the answers.

The Christian faith is not having all the answers to life’s questions. Rather, Christian faith is supposed to enable us to better live with the questions … the questions of being human in this world. We need to find within ourselves a vision, a God-inspired vision of our life and our place in it. Sometimes, all we see about ourselves and others are the inferior parts.

But God has so composed the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior part, that there may be no discord in the body of Christ, Paul writes. When the apostle writes about Christ in 1 Corinthians 12, it is not the name of an individual, Jesus, but of the community of believers derived from the individual.

Just as in the Old Testament Israel could serve as the name of an individual and of a people, so in Paul the name of Christ is used both for the individual and for the Christian community. There is a unity to the Christian community. Like a human body, there are multiple parts. So it is with the Church. Each gift we bring to the Church benefits the body.

Yet, many of us languish in our roles. We become a hindrance because we have lost our vision. One way to describe vision is “imaginative wisdom.” It is not accumulated fact, but the intelligence to see what no one else sees because we know that in God’s wisdom what we see must be there.

Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10, NRSV) This abundant living, abundant life, is a life that see the joy, that sees the lift found in Christ Jesus. If there is one central theme in this portion of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, it is this: you can make a difference. You and I, through Jesus Christ, can make a difference. Each of us is called through varying gifts, through various means, to be a part of the body of Christ.

A television station in Minnesota several years ago called together a group of community leaders to discuss the station’s news coverage. And during that meeting, one person said, “Your reports do a fine job of finding the news, of doing investigative reports on many topics. We would all say you do an excellent job. But if all you do is report what is happening around us in the community, all you’ll do is depress us. What we need, after reporting the news, is for you to tell us what to do.”

Indeed, we can make a difference in the life of others. By our putting into practice the vision, the imaginative wisdom, we can see ourselves as a positive, active, part of the body of Christ. So ponder this question one more time: “Is your faith a load or a lift?” I truly believe the answer will make a difference in your life, in the life of the community we share and in the life of the Church, the body of Christ.