Faith is from hearing
#####################
.. role:: language-de
.. role:: language-el
:date: 2020-08-30T12:00:00
:category: faith
:tags: sermon, english, listening, Bible
(this sermon was in seriously modified version preached_ at the
Prague Christian Fellowship on Sunday, August 30, 2020).
So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of
Christ.
-- Romans 10,17 ESV
This is one of the famous verses in the New Testament, and if you
were among Christians at least for some time, I am quite sure
that you have heard a sermon on this verse at least once. In the
missionary oriented churches, like ours, we have a sermon on this
almost every year.
A warning and a disclaimer first. I must warn you, this sermon
will probably be more negative and critical than is usual in this
church. There won’t be any names used, but there will be
a criticism of some things I really don’t like. I apologize to
anybody who may feel offended, please, don’t. Take it as my
one-time repayment for all the times I had to suffer through
sermons which I didn’t like.
I would be willing to summarize those sermons on this verse into
one certainly exaggerated schema: faith to our poor unbelieving
neighbours comes from hearing of what you should be telling them.
In order to be able to provide them with the word of Christ, you
need to study the Bible more. And to put it mildly, the fact
there are so many unbelievers all around is your fault, because
you are too lazy and too ashamed of God to move your behind and
share the most important news of your life with them, despite the
danger of being ridiculed by them. Shame on you, and get up from
that chair and go spread the gospel!
People who have personally found being a missionary as their
life-long calling usually preach such sermons, and they are
cheered by those in the audience who feel likewise. Rest of the
congregation feels dutifully ashamed of themselves. Some of them
are ashamed to the level that they actually try some one-time
desperate action, which being a one-time desperate one, will fail,
and so the total result is that those who were already persuaded
are enjoying their persuasion, and the rest are even more ashamed
of themselves. Next year, the whole exercise is repeated.
To ease the atmosphere a bit, let me show you this video, which
is very relevant to this verse, and let me then continue with
some of my thoughts on it.
`It’s Not About the Nail`_
I. Hearing
----------
So, the first thing is that faith is from **hearing**. I believe
that "hearing" is very under-valued in Protestant practice, that
I could talk hours just about that. Or even these sub-areas:
hearing God on the personal level, silence, and the tradition of
the Desert Fathers in Egypt, hearing and listening in the
pastoral care and interpersonal conflict resolution, or hearing
as the foundation of the mission. We don’t have those hours, so
I will just keep my sermon on a very abstract level and I will
have just a few notes on the subject.
Let me add another self-defence disclaimer: I am very proud to
be a Protestant. I am proud to stand in the tradition of Martin
Luther, Pilgrim Fathers, Czech Brethren, and many others who
lived radically their lives of faith. However, it doesn’t stop me
from seeing the weaknesses of our tradition.
Painting with a very broad brush and drawing just a very large
picture, I would suggest that the strongest part of the
Protestant tradition is a purposeful action. The heroes of our
faith are great preachers like Martin Luther, Jan Ámos Komenský,
Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, John Wesley, William
Wilberforce, William Booth, Dwight Moody, Charles Spurgeon,
Hudson Taylor, Eric Liddell, Billy Graham, Watchman Nee, Loren
Cunningham, Oral Roberts, Reinhard Bonke, and many others. These
were the people of action, organizers of large missionary
organizations, courageous people who step into dangerous and
unknown territories, people whose action changed the world. And
we have every reason to be proud of this tradition and to be
challenged to follow in steps of such fathers of our faith. These
are certainly the leaders, who spoke God's message to the world,
and we should reflect on the outcome of their lives and imitate
their faith (He 13:7) However, when the spirituality turns only
towards one tradition it can stop being an asset and a challenge,
and it can also start to be a burden.
What would you do if you were a deacon in your church charged
with managing donations of the congregation for the various
missionaries and you’ve got an application from a young failed
school teacher, whose only mission statement is “to hug the dying
poorest in the streets of the poorest city in the world”? Not
building a hospital or hospice, just hugging them. Or what about
a missionary who had the real passion for the poor, so much so he
got into conflict with his comfortably middle-class denomination,
tried to have mission on faith without any outside support, but
poor were really poor, so he failed again, and the his mental
illness started to show, so he asks for the third chance, and he
wants to start painting pictures completely different from
anything anybody painted before him? How high would these stand
on the list of the church-sponsored missions? My deep suspicion
is that they would never get much if anything from your
congregation. Congratulations, you have just rejected the support
for Mother Theresa of Calcutta and Vincent van Gogh. Many people
don’t know it, but because of his madness he had to leave the
mission field and thus he became just one of the most influential
figures in the history of Western Art.
Vincent van Gogh is just one of many representatives of how
Protestantism completely missed on art. I was saying that the
biggest Protestant tradition is one of purposeful action. The
problem is that true art doesn’t have any purpose. It is much
closer to the Jewish (and Catholic!) idea of sacrament (in this
context, it has nothing to do with the Lord’s Supper and
baptism). Not far from us, at Hradčany, there used to be until
recently a monastery of the Discalced Carmelites nuns, who
basically shut themselves into something which seriously
resembles a prison for the rest of their lives and they just pray
there for the nation and the world. There is absolutely zero
return on investment from their prayers, they just believe that
the Lord will use those prayers in His own way. I am not saying
that I personally like the idea, but even I should accept that
this very old tradition honoured by our brothers in Christ for
centuries. But mostly the incomprehensibility of this Christian
tradition for us makes me suspicious whether we haven’t got too
much stuck in our own ways.
Or back to artists. They give to God his best without much
knowledge of what God will use his gift for. If ever for
anything. From the first-class masters who really changed the
history of art and who were openly Protestant I can think perhaps
only about Johan Sebastian Bach, and he was a Lutheran (who are
much closer to the Catholicism than any other branch of
Protestantism, perhaps except for the Anglicanism) and most of
his commissions were from the Catholic German princes anyway. And
since then the relationship between the greatest Protestant
artists and Church was usually tight at best. One example of
many. When they asked Johnny Cash in his last interview before
his death (who would certainly qualify as a deeply believing
Protestant Christian and a first-class artist breaking new ground
in his field), whether he was a Christian artist, he resolutely
rejected the idea saying “I am not a Christian artist, I am an
artist who happens to be a Christian.” I believe he meant by the
Christian art that which is purposeful, music and other forms of
the artistic expression which are meant to serve to help
Christians to worship, to create beautiful churches, but which is
not true art in above-mentioned terms of the purposeless
sacrifice.
I could talk about the avoidance of pain in the so-called
Christian Art, but that would be another awfully long digression,
of which I will spare you.
So, I wonder whether by avoiding hearing we lose a huge part of
the Christian spirituality, which could lead to our voice being
more authentic in the rapidly changing new world we are entering.
II. The Word of Christ
----------------------
How many times I have heard in the sermons on our leading verse
that we need to study the Word of God more to have more to spread
among unbelievers. That is just not simplistic and overly
didactic, but flatly wrong. When the verse says “hearing [comes]
through the word of Christ,” it doesn’t use the Greek word
:language-el:`λόγος`, which could really represent the Holy
Scriptures, it uses the Greek word :language-el:`ῥῆμα`. The
latter is much less frequent in the Ancient Greek texts and there
are still many discussions about its true meaning, but in the
context of the New Testament interpretation it is usually
understood to mean not the universal God’s word written on the
paper (which is :language-el:`λόγος`), but more the God’s
utterance, God speaking to the specific situation, specific
moment, and for the specific person. Another way to explain this
distinction is to point to what’s normally called “knowledge in
one’s head” and “wisdom in one’s heart”. It is simple to increase
the amount of knowledge in our heads, it just requires
well-developed what our German brothers call :language-de:`das
Sitzfleisch`, the muscle used for sitting.
It is much more difficult and painful to get wisdom in one’s
heart. In fact, it is one of the most important parts of our
whole-life Christian growth. It requires living through God’s
ordained experiences, to overcome one’s pain, hurt, let-downs. It
requires asking for forgiveness and forgiving others.
What shall we say then? Is the study of the Bible useless, and we
just need to live through our life and learn by the school of
hard knocks? By no means! I am the last person in the world who
would discourage any academic effort. Son of a university
professor, with two university degrees, always type 5 (head-head)
on the Enneagram, proud Ravenclaw in the Harry Potter universe.
Of course, we need the head knowledge of the world around us
based on the Bible. We desperately need to get a true God’s view
of the world, what’s right and what’s wrong, and we can get those
only from the Bible because certainly, the world won’t teach us
about God’s perspective.
Moreover, I believe, that studying of Bible is one of the
pre-eminent God’s methods how to speak to us, how to give us
:language-el:`ῥῆμα`. Many times, when struggling with some
problem in life, when I don’t know what to answer somebody who
asks me when I am lost and desperate, a verse from the Bible
suddenly shines to me as :language-el:`ῥῆμα` and illuminates my
way. Or even more often, some verse from the Bible shines on my
past, and it shows how I screwed up and what should be my lesson
from that experience.
Did I say that the study of the Bible is the pre-eminent method
of acquiring :language-el:`ῥῆμα`? That’s not exactly true. There
is a better one.
In the past couple of months, PCF led a sheltered life, because
there were no public services, and even the small groups were
hurting a lot because people were not willing to go out much.
However, that’s a big problem! I believe that truly the best
method to obtain :language-el:`ῥῆμα` for your own life and your
own situations is to listen to others what they’ve got as
:language-el:`ῥῆμα` for their situations. Of course, that’s what
sermon is supposed to be, and that is certainly also what happens
a lot in the personal environment of the home groups. So, let me
challenge you here and now: “And let us consider how to stir up
one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet
together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another,
and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”
Hebrews 10:24f. It is important because we are literally starving
our spirit of its most important nutrients.
III. Just for evangelization?
-----------------------------
Let us return to those stereotypical sermons on this verse
I dislike so much. So far, I have listened to at least ten of
them, most likely more, and all of them were preached by somebody
who devoted their lives to the missions. There is no surprise
then that all of them considered this verse only in terms of
evangelization as if the faith which should be a result of that
hearing (or speaking for most of them) was the salvation moment
of the pre-believer going from death to eternal life.
And yes, the whole chapter is focused on Paul’s laments about his
fellow Israelites not knowing Christ, but let me suggest here,
that in Paul’s time the division between the Jewish community and
Church was by far not as great as later, truly, that what Paul
talks about here is more talking about the pastoral care, about
leading his fellow brothers back to the right path, and less
about the missions to heathens. Consequently, let me suggest that
the faith Paul mentions here is not just the saving faith but
faith in all its manifestations. Paul later talks in the Epistle
to Ephesians that
[…] he gave [to the Church] the apostles, the prophets, the
evangelists, the pastors, and teachers, … (Ephesians 4:11
ESV)
I don’t want to dive into the discussion whether this list is
exhaustive (and we truly should talk about the Fivefold Ministry
of the Church), or whether it is just a demonstrative list and
there are many more ministries given to the Church by Christ.
Either way, I am persuaded that the final product in the hearts
of believers for all these ministries is the same: renewed (or
new) faith and closer relationship with the Lord Jesus. And for
all of them, it applies that such faith comes from hearing: both
hearing of those who are receiving the ministry as well as
hearing God’s voice to the situation. And for all of them
certainly, it is true that it is necessary for
:language-el:`ῥῆμα`, the living utterance of God, to come to our
hearts and truly make the change which restores our life and our
faith.
Let us pray that we will hear the Lord more every day of our
lives and that we will be able to share :language-el:`ῥῆμα` with
those who need it.
Amen.
.. _preached:
https://youtu.be/Gsxq0S2LC4g?t=3294
.. _`It’s Not About the Nail`:
https://youtu.be/-4EDhdAHrOg
