Faith

Two weeks from today…just 14 days…and many if not most of you will be gone! I imagine for some of you that's frightening….when you think of how much you have to do between now and then. For others, myself included, it's sad because it means saying goodbye to many of you who have come to mean a great deal to me and to Ellen and to all of us at Greenville College . Of course we hope to see you back on many occasions, hopefully for the next 50 years or more! But it seems too soon. It's supposed to happen that winter ends, spring comes, and then the end of semester. Unfortunately, last weekend's wintry Agape Festival makes us feel we're missing an entire season before you're supposed to leave.

I realized this might be the last time I have a chance to talk to some of you, so I thought even more carefully than usual about what I'd like to say. In some cases, you've heard me talk for four years about the same themes. First, you have often heard me say that to really understand the nature of liberal arts education you must recognize that most of the really important issues we grapple with in life are fraught with paradox. Little things are big things, Good news is for bad people, good people often get bad news, sometimes we see but can't see, our strengths are often our weaknesses too, realism and hope can co-exist, and the mystery of law and grace. These are just a few of the paradoxes I've invited you to consider with me over the past four years in chapel.

But second, you often hear me talk of how Christian liberal arts is also very much about becoming men and women of character. And our character is essentially the sum total of our virtues. So more recently, I've tried to talk about a few of the specific virtues of character that I believe are wanting in our hearts and in our world. I've spoken of the virtue of trust, of discipline, of courage, and last fall, of truth. Today I want to talk about faith. Faith is a virtue with a difference. For those of us who follow Jesus Christ, it is a virtue we do not produce ourselves. Rather it is a gift of God, available only by choosing to accept it from His hand. But it is of course a central virtue to our faith and one with which I believe many of us struggle at various times in our lives.

I considered talking about faith in a fairly theoretical sense. There is certainly much of interest to be said along these lines. For example, as you might predict, I am convinced that a real understanding of faith reveals it to be a paradoxical combination of confidence and doubt. That fact has become a pillar of my own life. Yet another interesting approach to faith, contrasts the typically Greek view of faith as a cognitive state of knowing that something is true, with the Hebrew view of faith as a trusting relationship with another person. Martin Buber develops this contrast in his books I and Thou and Two Types of Faith. And a third theoretical approach to faith is one I found helpful in college, described by Paul Tillich in his books The Courage to Be and Dynamics of Faith.

But many of you have become good friends. And I realized that perhaps you don't really know much about my own personal faith. So before it's too late, I wanted to take opportunity to share my faith with you; to tell you a little of what God has done in my life by his grace. So I started by spending all of yesterday morning listing the major “milestones” in my faith journey. By this I mean the events which stand out in my spiritual life as “stakes in the ground” or moments of particular insight which mark out the course of my walk with Jesus Christ. Maybe because I'm thick headed, or because I forget easily, it became apparent the Lord has had to teach me a lot; and sometimes over and over again! When I was finished I had eleven (11) milestones, each connected to a particular place and time when I realize the Lord taught me something I very much needed to learn. But by lunch time, I realized there was no way you wanted to hear an 11 point sermon! Instead, I decided to pick only those three lessons in faith that I could trace to my years in college. Maybe “Bobo” and GCSA can set up 8 dorm chats next year if anyone thinks it's worth finishing them! But for now I'd like to tell you about my college faith; what I learned about DOUBT, COMMUNITY, and SUBMISSION. By the way, the last of these lessons is published in a book by the title, “College Faith.” The book has about 150 stories of faith college written by Christians from across the country. If you'd like a copy, I have 10-15 I'd be glad to give you…especially you seniors…if you'd like to stop by my office and get it from me in person.

PRAYER

I first accepted Jesus Christ as my savior in the middle of a thunderstorm at a Free Methodist camp ground in Epworth Illinois , near Chicago during the summer of 1954, when I was only 5 years old. I suppose you could say it was just a reaction to fear, but it was a real understanding that I was loved and protected by someone besides my parents. That decision to accept Jesus into my heart “stuck.” After a childhood of multiple trips to the altar, I came to a more solid foundation of faith when I realized at the B.M.A. camp in Brasil that I could be sure I was saved without having to rely on emotions; it was a matter of knowledge not feeling, and it depended on my decision and God's character. These steps, first of accepting Christ, and then of receiving assurance of his forgiveness and love were the two most important milestones of my faith before college.

The most important milestone after college was my discovery on a balcony one day in Harare Zimbabwe , shortly after moving my family there and discovering that Ellen had cancer. I understood as never before, that I was a broken, inadequate, and desperately needy person utterly dependent on God's mercies to be new every morning.

But these were all either before or after college. The three milestones of my “College Faith” were His lessons in my life about DOUBT, COMMUNITY, and SUBMISSION.

DOUBT

It was the spring of 1969. I was 19 years old, Vietnam was in full swing, demonstrators clogged the streets outside my dorm room almost daily, classes were being cancelled, my friends were drilling for riot tactics in the armory next door, Motown, Woodstock, and the music of the film “Graduate” echoed throughout the media. To hear that music today still sends shivers of fear and loneliness throughout my body. The pressure was enormous. On this particular night my physics problem set kept me up late. It was little consolation that my roommate in electrical engineering, stayed up as late as or later than I did. It was probably a Sunday night, and I'd “frittered away” the day attending church twice instead of hitting the books as everyone else did, so now I was sick in the stomach about not being ready for class the next day, aware I didn't really understand the concepts, and knew it was all going to get worse before it ever got better. To make matters even worse, I was haunted by the questions that had been growing for weeks about my faith. My friends scorned the idea of the supernatural at all. As good scientists, there was simply no room for the miraculous. To suppose there was would fly in the face of everything we believed about the uniformity and predictability of nature. In particular, somehow the issue of Jesus' own divinity had become the focal point. And in retrospect, it is perhaps the best that it did, for no other issue is more central to Christian faith. I was finding it terribly difficult to believe that the God of the universe—a God I found it easy to affirm as the guarantor of nature's regularity—would or even could enter this world in the form of a real person in history; namely the person of Jesus of Nazareth. On this night, as I pored over the physics problems, I was unexpectedly seized by the fear that I had been reading the Bible all these years, and had perhaps never paid close enough attention to see if Jesus ever even claimed divinity for Himself. I knew He called Himself Son of Man, and Son of God, but these expressions had also sometimes been used to refer to mere humans. With a sick feeling in my stomach, I remember pulling down the new 4-version New Testament, and almost frantically flipping from page to page beginning in Matthew looking with desperation for some clear indication that Jesus Himself had unequivocally claimed divinity. Now some might say this was a foolish litmus test for me to submit to; there might be other far more important issues to resolve. But again in retrospect, it does seem exactly the right question to ask, and of this I can be very sure. My desperation arose from the impression that if I didn't find an unequivocal claim to divinity I sensed I would simply lose my faith that very night! In addition to the questions raised by my friends, I had been reading quite a bit of theology on my own, even taking a course in that subject at Wellesley College nearby. A lot of my youthful assumptions had gone unchallenged, unexamined, and now seemed much more complex than they ever had before. What would become of me?!

So the first milestone of my college faith, was at the moment when I read John 8:58. In that passage, responding to Jewish leaders who challenged his acquaintance with Abraham, Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” While I was and still am no Jewish scholar, I knew enough of how the people of that day would interpret this claim. It was as unequivocal a claim of divinity on Jesus part as could possibly be made. And His hearers knew it too, as they reached to pick up stones to kill Him for His blasphemy! My heart leapt with relief as I saw in God's Word, the assurance I needed.

Now you might say that this milestone was not then really about DOUBT at all, but about CERTAINTY. The fact is however, that what I remember about this occasion is not just that the Holy Spirit provided me with the answer I needed, but in so doing, taught me that DOUBT is a natural part of real faith. In fact as I have come to see since, without DOUBT, it's hard to believe one has real faith. And our heavenly Father understands our human condition; “Now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face.” (I Cor 13:12 ) And as he understands our doubts, he accepts them, and accepts us….doubts and all. That recognition of His unconditional love that embraces even my doubts was a deep and abiding milestone of my spiritual pilgrimage of faith. Today your world may press you to doubt, to wonder, to question, even to fear for your faith. That night, I came to understand what I still embrace wholeheartedly even today about faith: “Lord I believe, help Thou my unbelief.” (Mark 9:23 )

COMMUNITY

It was now the summer of 1970, and I was 20, about to turn 21. I had traveled to Africa between my junior and senior years to spend 3 months in ministry to drug addicts. In those days the drugs of choice were amphetamines, grass, and the often lethal concoctions of various hallucigens such as lysergic diethylaminide acid, (LSD) or just “acid” for short. It was the dawn of the age of individualistic self-indulgence in America . We were learning that life was about one's own pleasures, about challenging authority on principle, no matter what the authority said or did! It was the age of bumper stickers, anti-institutionalism, Woodstock hippies and Flower People. The rampant individualism had infected Christians too. Church was “out” and Jesus people were “in”….long hair, wooden neck crosses, beads, and all! On this particular evening, I was gathering with 8 friends about to begin a brief service for the 150 Intervarsity students at the University College of Rhodesia in the capital city then called Salisbury . The adult leader of our grouped approached me and in a voice barely a whisper said, “Jim would you preach tonight?” “I have terrible laryngitis!” When I replied that I had never preached before, he said, “Well can you preach tonight?” From that evening forward I felt called to preach and it has led to my ordination in the Free Methodist church. But the milestone of faith, was the subject of my words that evening. I spoke to those students, all them my own age about the Body of Christ. I explained how the Bible is not only a “message book” but also a “method book.” The Biblical “method” for Christians was built on the truly remarkable and obviously inspired analogy of the Church and a human body. Like the body, the Church has many parts, no one of which is more or less important than the others. In fact some of the least public parts are the most important! No part can function in separation from the body, and unless we work together we cannot survive. If my church has no one older and younger than I, no one different in color from me, no one who disagrees with me, no one I find hard to love, no one with different gifts, then that is no church at all.

What's more, for a body to be healthy, it must eat, exercise, sleep, and breathe, and remarkably, these same functions should be expected of a healthy spiritual body; the Church. Bible study, evangelism, fellowship, and prayer are all essentials for the Church to live. This framework for understanding God's plan for His people, was a milestone in my faith. I came to understand that following Christ simply cannot occur in isolation. In an age when the motto seemed to be, “Jesus and me alone,” I came to understand the profound and deep place of community in all healthy Christian faith. While it almost seems un-American at times, followers of Jesus Christ can never go it alone; they are never self-sufficient. His own place in our spiritual lives is mediated through the primitive, sometimes bumbling efforts of His people in the Body of Christ. The central theme of I Cor 12, John 17, and even our GC favorite chapter, Rom 12, is community. It is really quite simple; unless we love one another, the world will never come to know God. Much of this second milestone of my college faith was driven home that night in Salisbury . And when I next spoke to the same Intervarsity group, 17 years later, as a professor at the now renamed University of Zimbabwe , I spoke to them of the same lesson. The first group had been all white, and 17 years later it was all black. But community is still God's method for his Church to live and grow.

SUBMISSION

It was 3am , in the late spring of 1971. Now 21, I was walking alone along the Charles River outside my dormitory, looking at Boston across the water. I was within a few weeks of graduation, stressed to the max by grueling preparations for even more grueling examinations. I had been awake for over 48 hours studying constantly, and at the same time struggling with the big questions of my future. What was I to do? My major in physics no longer interested me, yet I had invested so much! I had considered pursuing education, even applying to graduate schools in that area. I considered escaping the rice paddies of Vietnam by enrolling in seminary along with so many other friends, suddenly “called to the ministry!” I had an offer to work with an optics group in New York City . I wanted so much to make a difference in the world. But it seemed so hard to know God's will!

A few months before, our Intervarsity leadership team urged me begin an evangelistic Bible study in Bexeley dorm where none of us lived. I began the study and soon had 4-5 regulars. For one 3 week period or so, an apparently non-Christian stranger, whose name I have since forgotten, came each night as we began and sat just outside the “cone of light” in that dark basement lounge. Despite our best efforts to get him to join our circle he remained just outside it. After a week or two of discussing how to determine God's will, he made the only comment he ever made, and then never showed up again. We had discussed, as perhaps many of you—especially seniors—have discussed, the usual “tricks” of prying loose God's will. We pray, we read the Bible, we consult with wise friends, and then we do it all over again and again until we figure out His will. Does that seem familiar? Does it haunt you even these very days? This is what the stranger said that last night we saw him. It haunted me when he said it, haunted me again that night walking along the Charles, and haunts me often even today. He said, “You Christians are funny people. If your God is who you say He is—All loving, All knowing and All powerful—it seems He ought to be pretty capable of communicating His will to you. It seems to me, that you shouldn't be worried about what His will is, so much as about whether you are willing to do it, whatever it turns out to be!”

So this night, at 3am along the Charles River , I was wrestling with what God wanted me to do. I knew what I wanted; it was really quite noble. I wanted to “make a difference in the world and in the Kingdom of God .” Who could argue with that! But as I thought about it I realized that there was much of pride in that wish. I wanted to be recognized for my work, to do something unique, to stand out from the rest! When the stranger's lesson hit me that to know His will I had to be prepared to accept it even if it meant living in suburbia, with a wife, two kids, a dog, and a double car garage, I understood I would have to give up my ambitions, however sacred they might have seemed. But I wrestled. And as I walked along the river toward Harvard, I wrestled and procrastinated and rationalized over and over and over. Nearly 45 minutes later, I realized I could not walk all night. Exams would begin in only a few hours, I needed to prepare, and the battle of my will needed to end. I saw the Div School bridge ahead, and pledged that I would decide whether to give up my will, to submit it to His by the time I reached that bridge. I sensed that a milestone decision in my life was about to be made. The struggle continued until the very moment I began to pivot on my foot to turn and walk home. As I felt the pavement rotate under my sole, I told the Lord, I would submit to His will whatever it might be. In that milestone moment, I understood His Lordship in my life.

Three milestones in my college faith. Yours may well be different. I invite you to consider what milestones you are passing? What tent stakes of dwelling are you driving into the spiritual soil of your life? Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior? Have you come to make him Lord of your life? Do you have the assurance of His love for you? Have you come to understand that His love extends to you in spite of your doubts and fears? Do you recognize that His method in the world and in our lives is through community and not our individual isolation? And finally, have you deliberately and self-consciously decided to submit your will to His in every matter of your future…..giving up your own ambitions however noble and spiritually well-intended they may be? If you have not passed these milestones, have not driven these stakes, I beg you to consider doing so even today, right now. It is not without great stress, and great heat, and even great weakness, that the best steel becomes tempered and strengthened for its purposes to the master. May God provoke you and bless you as you seek to follow Him.

Jim Mannoia