Sermon for January 28th 2007

On a Journey Just Begun – Step One …

Today, I am trying something a bit different, or rather, I am beginning something a little bit different. Today’s sermon and the next four, until we find ourselves standing in the Season of Lent will find us exploring the growth and progress of faith, or to use the terms of James Fowler, whose work I am relying upon – we will be exploring the stages of our faith …

Each stage is a progression from one to the other – very much like the steps on a journey, or the steps of a stair case … You begin at the beginning, and continue until you arrive at the destination of a mature and healthy and life-affirming faith. This isn’t to say that we all MUST be on the same step, or stage, or that being ahead or behind is wrong – it just means that we are pilgrim people on a journey and for the next couple of weeks we’ll be exploring what that means …

And so, today we begin with stage one of Fowler’s stages of faith – that of primal faith. Primal Faith is based on emotion – predominantly the emotions of trust and anxiety. The religious experience in this first stage is based in a fusing of trust, courage, hope, and love. If you feel loved and cared for and not abandoned – you’re happy and your faith is strong. If you are feeling unloved and abandoned, then your faith is warped and weak.

In this first stage you begin to develop rituals and habits such as praying before bed, holding to a talisman like a rabbits foot, or having a particular stuffy to sleep with. Without words, you begin to visualize the HOLY in non-verbal ways. The best example is understanding God as a bearded old man, or a divine Santa Claus sitting on a throne watching over us - Much of this first stage of faith lacks the language to express it – it is basic, and intuitive … It is the faith of young childhood. You believe God is UP there somewhere, and if you’re a good person that’s enough …

It echoes Paul saying to the Corinthians – “when I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child – but when I became an adult, I put aside childish ways …”

The challenge of Fowler’s stages of faith, is the movement … Like Paul 19 Centuries before him, Fowler identified the diversity of religious experience and the idea of faith as a pilgrimage or a journey.

In the life of our community we have, over the last 11 months lived the stages of faith – we are spread out over a continuum of experience. Some of us are very ready to move into a new building, some of us are still mourning in the ruins of the old church, and still others are spread out along the road at any number of points …

The challenge as a community is to recognize that. To remember that we are ALL in very different and unique places – and where we find ourselves is okay, providing we haven’t become rigidly stuck … being a pilgrim people is about movement and growth.

Paul knew this when we wrote to the church at Corinth. He saw a church struggling, but more significantly, he saw a Church with HUGE potential. He wrote to them of many things – usually in response to a crisis or a conflict. But in our reading today, we has put to parchment what is perhaps the most beautiful expression of LOVE that humanity has …

Love is patient, love is kind … the words roll over us and we can say – “Yes !!” and “Amen!!” and even the occasional “Preach it brother …”

So, it is appropriate to turn for a moment to the teachings of Martin Luther King who perhaps offers us the most concise and straightforward summary of love that the modern church can encounter …

King spoke of love, noting that there are three distinct kinds of love. The first is eros. It is the shallow love – the romantic passionate love. Eros is the love that has given rise to wonderful expression of love – the yearning of the heart and soul for the divine. He notes that eros is a beautiful love that is grounded in romance and is often what we mean when we speak of love.

Then King notes the second kind of love is philia – the intimate love that exists between friends. Philia love is the friendship love that you have for people you get along with well. People you like and who like you – people you enjoy spending time with …

But then King moves into the third kind of love – Agape love. He says that Agape Love is more than romantic love, it is more than friendship love. Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all men (and women). Agape is the overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God operating in the human heart. To quote from King:

"When you rise to love on this level you love all people not because you like them, not because their ways appeal to you, but you love them because God loves them. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “Love your enemies.” And I’m happy he didn’t say “like your enemies.” Because there are some people that I find it pretty difficult to like. Liking is an affectionate emotion, and I can’t like anybody who would bomb my home. I can’t like anybody who would exploit me. I can’t like anybody who would trample over me with injustices. I can’t like them. I can’t like any body who threathened to kill me day in and day out. But Jesus reminds us that loveis greater than liking. Love is understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all people. And I think this is where we are as a people, in our struggle – we can’t ever give up. We must work passionately and unrelentingly for citizenship. We must never give up in our determination to remove every vestige of segregation and discriminiation, but we shall not in the process relinquish our privilege to love.

I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate myself. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many … to want to hate myself; and everytime I see it I say to myself ‘hate is too great a burden to bear.” Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say – “we shall match your ability to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soulforce. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey unjust laws and abide by an unjust system because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. So throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and we will still love you. Threaten our children and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside oad and leave us half dead as you beat us, and we will still love you … be assured, we will wear you down by ou capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we iwill so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”

Rising to love at the level envisioned by King is to live faith at a higher level, but not an unattainable level … all around us every day, we can and do find people who live love at that level. It’s not just extra-ordinary people like King who can love at that level … we ALL can …

Fowler’s stages of faith lead us up the stairs from a childish faith to the place where we not only can love in all the ways Paul envisions, but we can hear the words Jesus offered to his family and friends in Nazareth, and we can begin to MAKE those ideas happen … The Kingdom of God is the ultimate rebuilding project – and it is something that is very much part of what we are about as we envision and actualize the new building that WILL rise on Main St.

We really get down to it – if we really listen to our readings this morning, we are found lacking … we are called to be a people of faith, to bring into being the Kingdom of God, and to make real in our world the gift of love … God has called us by name – since before our birth God has known us, and has hoped and planned and dreamt great things to be achieved in our lives …

This is perhaps best summarized by Mother Teresa who noted that in life there are no great things, only small things done with great love …

Our challenge – the calling of our faith – the whisper that speaks to our soul is a whisper of love … the question we have to face is – whether we want to heed that call or not??

Our journey of faith has begun … there is much to do … and it call happens with one small action of love at a time … our first stage is heeding the call from God to love …

May it be so, thanks be to God …