Faith is a Verb

 

John 3:1-17

 

            John 3:16 is one of those core Bible verses, right at the heart of what the Bible is all about. One of those nonnegotiable, unambiguous summations.

            “For God so loved the world . . .”

 

            That is one of the most grace-filled verses, perhaps the most grace-filled verse in the entire Bible. It is such an important statement that I want to make sure we don’t use it in a way that sucks all the grace out of it. 

 

            It bothers me to see that verse used as if it were the ultimate game show question. Okay, we have come to the end, and here is your final question. Answer correctly and you win eternal joy and get to live with God forever; answer incorrectly and you will suffer in agony for all time. Let’s have the drum roll now, for the game, all the prize money and your own eternal salvation: is Jesus the Son of God?

 

            It strikes me as a bit like the scene in Indiana Jones where they have to choose the correct grail. There’s no way of knowing which is the right one; if you guess right you win the prize; guess wrong and you are obliterated from the face of the earth.

 

            There is something grossly unfair and even absurd about this.

 

            In this scenario, we’re being tested on something we cannot possibly know the answer to. Isn’t that what faith is—believing something that cannot be proved? There’s no way to prove the truth about Jesus one way or the other, any more than you can prove that there is life in another solar system. There is no way to know. We can spend all our life searching, and we’re never going to know.

            Does it make sense that the compassionate, merciful, and loving God that we come to know in the Bible could have set up such a cruel system where a person’s salvation and fate for all eternity depend entirely on whether or not they happen to guess the correct answer to a single question?

 

            There’s something very wrong with that picture. What happened to John 3:16’s beautiful statement of grace? How did it get turned into this lethal lottery?

 

            As I read the texts for today, it seems that the issue here is our definition of faith. There are at least two definitions of faith at work.

 

            One of them is an intellectual exercise. That may seem contradictory especially if we all agree that faith or belief has to do with things that cannot be proved. Doesn’t faith come from the heart and not the head? But the fact is that there is no such thing as blind faith.

 

            If I were to proclaim to you that vegetables actually rule the world, they control everything that happens, and we are powerless to fight against their will, I’m guessing that would be a pretty tough sell. 

            No one would take me seriously. No one would believe me. Yet when I proclaim to you at the start of the service that your sins are forgiven, you do believe me—at least I hope so.

            Why would you believe one thing and not the other? Neither statement can be proved. You are hearing them from exactly the same source. Yet something in our experience makes the one statement believable, while the other is not.

 

            What if John 3:16 read, “Whoever believes that vegetables rule the world shall have eternal life.” The Bible carries such authority, that there are some people who would swallow hard and try to believe it. But I think it’s safe to say that Christianity would have gone nowhere if that’s what John 3:16 said.

 

            Blind faith is random faith, and faith cannot be random. On an intellectual level, faith is a conclusion based on evidence. There may not be a lot of evidence involved but there has to be some reason to believe it, otherwise it would be easy to get a group of us to sit around at our service today trying to be one with the artichoke.

 

            Whether or not you believe certain things about Jesus has a lot to do with the evidence you have seen for it. Are the witnesses credible—those of the Bible, of the church? Is the tradition credible? Has belief in Jesus made a profound difference in people’s lives? Has it made a difference in your life? Does the Gospel bring light into the world? Do you sense the power of the love of God?

            What you believe depends a great deal on the input. That is why telling the story is so important to Christians.

 

            When John says your salvation depends on your belief, your faith, he is not talking about an examination, a final test to see how well you have figured things out. There is another part to faith that is even more important than voting yes or no on a particular question.

 

            Several things this week steered me in the direction of this other definition of faith.

 

            The first was a quick survey of the word “faithful” in the Bible. According to the Bible, do you know who the person with the strongest faith is? Turns out it’s God. When the word faithful is used in the Bible it is more often used to describe God than any other person.

 

            God is the faithful one, the person who is full of faith. Does this mean that God has the strongest opinions about what it true? I don’t know that God has a lot of opinions. God knows. God doesn’t have to believe anything about God: God knows what the deal is.

            If God doesn’t have to do much believing, then how can God be the one who is faithful; who has the most faith?

 

            Then, during the week, one of our committee chairs made an interesting comment. Referring to the excellent attendance of that group on a cold night, she thanked the group for being so faithful. That was the word she used, faithful. Full of faith.

 

            What was she thanking them for? For their intellectual agreement to a proposition? For their strong belief in something that could not be proved? 

 

            No, she was thanking them for being there. For giving of themselves. For being dedicated to the cause. She wasn’t thanking them for thinking something; she was thanking them for doing something.

 

            It was right after this that I read a column by a seminary professor who said, “The Gospel of John never talks about faith as a noun. It’s not something one gets, or has; it is always something one does.”

 

            This seems to be what Nicodemus discovers in our Gospel reading for today. Nicodemus is looking for a reason to believe. He’s more than halfway there already. “We know you are a teacher who has come from God,” he says, “for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”

 

            He’s getting his faith from the evidence, as an intellectual argument. All of these signs lead him to believe that Jesus is from God. So has he passed the test? Has he shown enough faith so that he is in?

 

            No, Jesus starts to tell him that faith is more than that. Faith is a verb; it’s an action. Faith is change; it is being a new person. Jesus uses the image of being reborn.

 

            Nicodemus is stuck in the literal, intellectual part of the process, trying to work out the details of the theory. “A person needs to be born from above or born again? I don’t get that. How does that work?”

 

            When Jesus explains, Nicodemus’ faith is shaken. He thought he had Jesus figured out. Now Jesus is taking him places he doesn’t understand, with some very difficult spiritual talk. “How can this be?” he splutters, still trying to piece together the literal evidence.

 

            Jesus says, “Nicodemus, you’ve heard the testimony, you’ve seen the evidence, and you’re drawing conclusions. But you will never know what faith is just by thinking through the process. Faith is something that you do.”

 

            Watson Brown was a young farmer whose father was the notorious John Brown, the abolitionist whose aggressive attempts to end slavery in the United States made him a hero to many and a traitor to others. Although Watson was antislavery, he was not committed to his father’s fanatical crusade. While John Brown went to Kansas and got involved in a bloody range war, Watson stayed home in New York to tend the farm.

            John Brown returned to New York, however, and hatched plans to create a massive slave uprising in the state of Virginia. Watson Brown recognized it as a pipe dream with no chance of succeeding, yet there was no way to talk his father out of it.

            When John Brown left for Harper’s Ferry, VA in 1859 to incite the rebellion, the 24-year old Watson Brown rode with him. He believed the thing was going to end in disaster. But he went because he also believed his father needed him. His father needed a level head to steer him away from the worst of his mistakes. And Watson suspected the old man was going to get himself killed. Watson did not want him to go through that alone; he wanted to be there for him. 

            As Watson expected, things did go horribly wrong at Harpers Ferry. Brown’s little army attracted no followers. The locals were up in arms immediately, gunfire was exchanged, people died. Watson Brown went out under the cover of a white flag to try and end the standoff and prevent further bloodshed. He was shot before he could even speak.

            When John Brown and his followers were captured the next day, a Southern newspaper editor found Watson Brown lying in the corner of a barn. Full of self-righteous indignation, the man tore into Brown, calling him a murderous traitor.

            Watson replied, “Sir, I am dying. I cannot debate the matter. I did my duty as I saw it.”

            The editor was stunned by the remark. When he investigated and found out the truth of what Watson Brown had done, he was ashamed of himself. The experience changed him completely. Whereas John Brown’s violent approach to the slavery issue had only hardened the editor’s support of it, Watson Brown’s quiet faithfulness to his father struck home. The editor spent the rest of the war arguing in print that slavery was a moral evil.

 

            The reason I cite this story is because it shows what part of faith is the most important. The action part of faith outweighs the intellectual part. In this case, Watson Brown had little faith in what his father was doing. Yet he showed incredible faithfulness to the one who brought him into the world, and in so doing he changed the life of fellow human being.

            He brought both himself and another fellow human being closer to God.

 

            Why is God the most faithful person in the Bible? Not because God has the strongest opinions. God is the one who shows the most faith, by acting most reliably in a selfless way of life, a way of life shown to us in the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

 

            I would never change the words of John 3:16.  

            But if we want to analyze what the verse is really saying, I believe it is this:

 

            God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, not as a test to see how worthy we are, or how well we can figure things out, but as a lifeline for humanity in trouble. So that whoever lives their life under the conviction that what Jesus taught and did for us on the cross at Calvary is the way, the truth, and the light, will be changed forever. They will far draw closer to God than they could ever have gotten on their own, and this closeness will last through all eternity.

 

            For God so loved the world . . . It’s not a lethal lottery; it’s a verse about grace.