Faith As Alternating Current
Sermon
Sermons on the Second Readings
Series II, Cycle B
Some troublesome things about the Christian life are its mood swings. These are not the common mood swings of everyday life, nor are they the mood swings indicating some psychological condition. They are the distressing oscillations between radiant and joyful faith, and times when we are unable to have any sense of God's sustaining presence. The early pioneers in the development of electricity assumed that electrical current ran constantly without interruption through the wires. Edison held this view. The difficulty was that direct current could not be sustained over long distances. Providing electricity across long distances required cumbersome boosters at short intervals. Then George Eastman proposed that the current be sent in an different fashion, alternating from positive to negative. This proved to be more useful and it enabled electrical power to be sent over long distances.
Our Christian life is inevitably like that of alternating current. No matter the claims otherwise; we do not have an uninterrupted experience of faith and peace. Instead we know swings of emotion and faith that brings us times where doubt and a troubled spirit prevails. Our morning lection from First John understands this: "... We will know that we are [accepted by God] ... and [our faithfulness in loving] will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us" (3:18-20a). Here is an honest confession of those moments when our hearts are uncertain about the love of God; yet it says that our steadiness in living the life of love will bring us calm and peace beyond our dark times.
Many Christians today and in the past have witnessed that the spiritual life is more like alternating than direct current. Christians experience low moments when the glowing warmth of faith has almost been extinguished. A professor of pastoral care, training seminarians to minister to people in grief, said that when his wife died, he was so helpless that he could hardly manage toasting the bread for his breakfast. Another has written that we may be filled with admirable faith and trust, but when we stand at the grave of our spouse, we are filled with grief and sorrow. There are times when we lament and have "a broken and contrite spirit." When this occurs we have no capacity to speak or hear chirpy and misleading comments about the glorious joys of Christian existence.
The Gospel's Ultimate Promise Of Joy
Let us consider first of all, that the ultimate promise of the gospel is one of joy and sustaining power. This is the witness of those experiencing the resurrection faith. The early Christians were filled with the glad news that in Christ, God overcomes our sin, our struggles with fate, and the prospect of our mortality. They not only believed in this good news; the New Testament reports that they experienced it. This experience changed their lives. The resurrected Christ brought them this felt conviction in a powerful way. They felt it in their days and nights.
When August Comte was proposing a fully rational religion replacing Christianity, he believed the ancient faith was no longer valid for the modern world. He asked a friend how he could get his new faith to be inspiring and attractive. His friend said to kill the central figure in his new religion, raise him from the dead, and he would have no difficulty offering his secular faith to humanity. Christianity and all religious traditions are grounded in the personal experience of their followers. John Knox, of modern New Testament scholarship, said in Jesus the love of God ceased to be an idea and became an experienced reality. Here we may locate the power of Christian faith, then and now.
Christianity's attractive power comes as a saving experience, not as a proposition to be intellectually accepted. Evangelistically, we can urge people to accept the saving grace of God in Christ, but this will not be effective unless people have an experiential sense that they really are well within the grace of God. We need not abandon the intellectual and reasoned thinking about the gospel we proclaim. This has always been essential. In many cases today, this will be vital before people can hear the gospel in ways that are intellectually sound to them, bringing them out from an understanding of faith that has become unacceptable to them. In Samuel Miller's inaugural address in becoming dean of the Harvard Divinity School, he insisted that intellectual soundness was absolutely crucial for Christian witness in our own time. He warned that simple good intentions, devoid of intellectual bite would not deliver the gospel in today's world. We agree.
Yet we need to go beyond a clear, reasonable argument for becoming or staying a Christian. Faithfulness must have an experiential power in our lives. In the 1700s, John Wesley led a renewal of faith that evangelized the lower classes of Great Britain and the American colonies. The Church of England was offering a respectable faith grounded in the enlightenment, the age of reason. Many excellent statements of a reasonable Christian faith came from the English clergy and Christian laypersons. They rightly sensed that the faith must engage the new standards of reason and the growing power of science. Wesley himself was indebted to much of their work.
However, these intellectual endeavors could not speak to the full experiences of people; they did not get to the emotions and the everyday experiences. Wesley recognized that faith must also speak to the heart, to the common experience of common people. In the Wesleyan revival people came to experience the love of God. This experience enabled them to live lives of righteousness, having a high moral quality. Wesley's message was never one that abandoned itself to intellectually undisciplined emotion. He tells us that when he began to use laypeople as full-time preachers, he insisted they become acquainted with the sturdy theological thinking in historical Christianity in its best and most cogent interpreters. His gospel and his own preaching were far from being an emotional bath in the blood of Christ. He was critical of those he called, "the blood of Christ" preachers. Yet the final conclusion on Wesley is that he enabled people to experience the love of God, becoming a saving experience for them in this life, and a joyful hope for the world to come. Faith begins in such experiences.
Yet Faith And A Troubled Spirit Alternate
Still, our faith waxes and wanes. Faith is an alternating current -- strong for a while and sometimes weak and indistinguishable at times. When faith's radiance and strength have fallen flat, we are caught in one of the most difficult and dangerous times in our Christian lives. Our text speaks of those moments when "our hearts condemn us." Yes, John Wesley's preaching and teaching brought many into the saving experience of God's forgiveness and mercy. They became people filled with the joys of those redeemed in Christ. Wesley made real the New Testament promise that we can have an inner witness that we are children of God. His brother, Charles, wrote texts to hymns that celebrated this experience. One of the best of those hymns calls us to sing, "Hear him ye deaf, his praise ye dumb, your loosened tongues employ, ye blind behold your master come, and leap ye lame for joy." Beneath such lyrics is an affirmation of the high mood of Christian joy and deliverance.
Francis J. McConnell's biography of Wesley tells of Wesley's confession of his down times, times when "his heart condemned him." Many of these occurred long after he became the dynamic leader of the Methodist revival. Bishop McConnell quotes from a letter, Wesley wrote to his brother, Charles. In this letter Wesley poured out his distress at losing his sense of joy and faith in Christ. Writing in a code that he devised to hide his openness, Wesley wrote:
I do not feel the wrath of God abiding on me, nor can I believe it does. And yet (this is the mystery) (I do not love God. I never did.) There (I never) believed in the Christian sense of the word ... (I have no) direct witness, I do not say that (I am a child of God).
Here is an example of how even those who proclaim the saving experience of God's salvation in Christ, know also that the experience alternates rather than remaining a steady constant. For the Christian who has newly discovered the inner witness of Christ's presence, such moments are devastating. And, for the Christian of long standing, suddenly falling into such moments can also be a time of great distress. Christians are not exempt from these times and we must find ways to deal with them, or face the terrible prospect of concluding our experience of God's love has been a cruel hoax.
Borne Along In Our Empty Moments
Both Wesley and our text give us a clue on how we might handle this. Wesley's revealing letter to his brother goes on to say, "And yet I dare not preach otherwise than I do, either concerning faith, or love, or justification, or perfection. And yet I find rather an increase than a decrease of zeal for the whole work of God and every part of it. I am ... [borne along], I only know that I can't stand still."
Wesley reports that even though momentarily he does not have a great sense of inner faith and conviction, he feels "borne along" by his commitment to preaching the conviction of God's love through Christ. He tells of a "zeal" to continue his work regardless of how he feels at the moment. Here is how our such times of low spirit can be managed: if we keep doing the deeds of love and caring to which Christ has called us, we discover that we are given a reason for life and meaning larger than any temporary emptiness of our souls. Like Wesley, we may find that our "zeal for the whole work of God" increases rather than diminishes in such moments.
In reading the gospels, we can sometimes sense what is not stated -- a reading between the lines. We can surmise that Jesus' mood began to move toward such an inward crisis as he set his face to go up to Jerusalem. From his high moments of preaching, teaching, and healing in the safety of Galilee, he now begins to deal with the possibility of death. His heart becomes filled with the anxiety. His rebuke to the disciples trying to dissuade him from going to Jerusalem, his clash with the officers of the temple, his solemn words in the upper room, the prayer in Gethsemane's garden, down to the cry from the cross -- all imply that his heart and inward experience were not filled with glowing faith or a steady sense of God. If this was true for Jesus, should we expect anything different in our Christian experience? However, we can expect, like Wesley, to be carried on by a power beyond our sparse and barren faith.
First John comes to the same conclusion regarding such times -- when our spirits alternate between strong faith and joy, and moments of depression and anxiety. First John writes that these are the times when we must "love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action." We continue to do the works of love to which Christ has called us, and in this we will discover a filling and a strengthening, giving an ability to do the works of love and caring even when we do not have the inner gladness of Christian witness. The real experience of Christ is the power to deal with what life brings -- highs and lows, successes or failures, mountaintops or painful valleys. To have the Spirit of Christ is not some constant Pentecostal "high" as some suggest. It is to be possessed by a power that enables faithfulness even when all is falling apart around us.
We can see the truth of this when look at the serious, godly commitment we make. Two people fall in love. Their days and nights are filled with the feelings of love and romance, creating songs and poems. Life seems a great and wonderful joy based on the affection they feel for one another. Then comes the commitment of civil union, or marriage as two people give their lives to one another. Over the years, such moments are subdued in the working out the meaning of their love and responsibility for each other. Some can't handle the inevitable necessity of the inner glow changing to a concern for the needs of each other, displacing much of the rapture that first attended their coming together. But again, is this a loss that must be revived else the relationship proves false?
Some think so. Tons of books and magazine articles are written informing us how to put romance back into our marriage; yet this wisdom can deceive one into believing the rapture of the initial commitment can be revived in a significant way. Truthfully, marriages and civil unions across any length of time demand a power to continue in faithfulness, of finding a zeal for expressing love and care for one another, surprisingly proving to be much more of a delight and meaning than our earlier high moments of romance.
If this is true in the relationship of committed love between two people, we can believe that it is also true for our relationship to Christ. Beyond our loss of the initial glow of faith, we may move to a deeper experience, the experience of being carried along by God's love. This happens as we continue our acts of love for others -- including those we dislike -- regardless of how we feel at the moment. So, "little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him, whenever our hearts condemn us."
____________
1.ÊFrancis J. McConnell, John Wesley (New York: Abingdon Press, 1939), p. 210.
Our Christian life is inevitably like that of alternating current. No matter the claims otherwise; we do not have an uninterrupted experience of faith and peace. Instead we know swings of emotion and faith that brings us times where doubt and a troubled spirit prevails. Our morning lection from First John understands this: "... We will know that we are [accepted by God] ... and [our faithfulness in loving] will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us" (3:18-20a). Here is an honest confession of those moments when our hearts are uncertain about the love of God; yet it says that our steadiness in living the life of love will bring us calm and peace beyond our dark times.
Many Christians today and in the past have witnessed that the spiritual life is more like alternating than direct current. Christians experience low moments when the glowing warmth of faith has almost been extinguished. A professor of pastoral care, training seminarians to minister to people in grief, said that when his wife died, he was so helpless that he could hardly manage toasting the bread for his breakfast. Another has written that we may be filled with admirable faith and trust, but when we stand at the grave of our spouse, we are filled with grief and sorrow. There are times when we lament and have "a broken and contrite spirit." When this occurs we have no capacity to speak or hear chirpy and misleading comments about the glorious joys of Christian existence.
The Gospel's Ultimate Promise Of Joy
Let us consider first of all, that the ultimate promise of the gospel is one of joy and sustaining power. This is the witness of those experiencing the resurrection faith. The early Christians were filled with the glad news that in Christ, God overcomes our sin, our struggles with fate, and the prospect of our mortality. They not only believed in this good news; the New Testament reports that they experienced it. This experience changed their lives. The resurrected Christ brought them this felt conviction in a powerful way. They felt it in their days and nights.
When August Comte was proposing a fully rational religion replacing Christianity, he believed the ancient faith was no longer valid for the modern world. He asked a friend how he could get his new faith to be inspiring and attractive. His friend said to kill the central figure in his new religion, raise him from the dead, and he would have no difficulty offering his secular faith to humanity. Christianity and all religious traditions are grounded in the personal experience of their followers. John Knox, of modern New Testament scholarship, said in Jesus the love of God ceased to be an idea and became an experienced reality. Here we may locate the power of Christian faith, then and now.
Christianity's attractive power comes as a saving experience, not as a proposition to be intellectually accepted. Evangelistically, we can urge people to accept the saving grace of God in Christ, but this will not be effective unless people have an experiential sense that they really are well within the grace of God. We need not abandon the intellectual and reasoned thinking about the gospel we proclaim. This has always been essential. In many cases today, this will be vital before people can hear the gospel in ways that are intellectually sound to them, bringing them out from an understanding of faith that has become unacceptable to them. In Samuel Miller's inaugural address in becoming dean of the Harvard Divinity School, he insisted that intellectual soundness was absolutely crucial for Christian witness in our own time. He warned that simple good intentions, devoid of intellectual bite would not deliver the gospel in today's world. We agree.
Yet we need to go beyond a clear, reasonable argument for becoming or staying a Christian. Faithfulness must have an experiential power in our lives. In the 1700s, John Wesley led a renewal of faith that evangelized the lower classes of Great Britain and the American colonies. The Church of England was offering a respectable faith grounded in the enlightenment, the age of reason. Many excellent statements of a reasonable Christian faith came from the English clergy and Christian laypersons. They rightly sensed that the faith must engage the new standards of reason and the growing power of science. Wesley himself was indebted to much of their work.
However, these intellectual endeavors could not speak to the full experiences of people; they did not get to the emotions and the everyday experiences. Wesley recognized that faith must also speak to the heart, to the common experience of common people. In the Wesleyan revival people came to experience the love of God. This experience enabled them to live lives of righteousness, having a high moral quality. Wesley's message was never one that abandoned itself to intellectually undisciplined emotion. He tells us that when he began to use laypeople as full-time preachers, he insisted they become acquainted with the sturdy theological thinking in historical Christianity in its best and most cogent interpreters. His gospel and his own preaching were far from being an emotional bath in the blood of Christ. He was critical of those he called, "the blood of Christ" preachers. Yet the final conclusion on Wesley is that he enabled people to experience the love of God, becoming a saving experience for them in this life, and a joyful hope for the world to come. Faith begins in such experiences.
Yet Faith And A Troubled Spirit Alternate
Still, our faith waxes and wanes. Faith is an alternating current -- strong for a while and sometimes weak and indistinguishable at times. When faith's radiance and strength have fallen flat, we are caught in one of the most difficult and dangerous times in our Christian lives. Our text speaks of those moments when "our hearts condemn us." Yes, John Wesley's preaching and teaching brought many into the saving experience of God's forgiveness and mercy. They became people filled with the joys of those redeemed in Christ. Wesley made real the New Testament promise that we can have an inner witness that we are children of God. His brother, Charles, wrote texts to hymns that celebrated this experience. One of the best of those hymns calls us to sing, "Hear him ye deaf, his praise ye dumb, your loosened tongues employ, ye blind behold your master come, and leap ye lame for joy." Beneath such lyrics is an affirmation of the high mood of Christian joy and deliverance.
Francis J. McConnell's biography of Wesley tells of Wesley's confession of his down times, times when "his heart condemned him." Many of these occurred long after he became the dynamic leader of the Methodist revival. Bishop McConnell quotes from a letter, Wesley wrote to his brother, Charles. In this letter Wesley poured out his distress at losing his sense of joy and faith in Christ. Writing in a code that he devised to hide his openness, Wesley wrote:
I do not feel the wrath of God abiding on me, nor can I believe it does. And yet (this is the mystery) (I do not love God. I never did.) There (I never) believed in the Christian sense of the word ... (I have no) direct witness, I do not say that (I am a child of God).
Here is an example of how even those who proclaim the saving experience of God's salvation in Christ, know also that the experience alternates rather than remaining a steady constant. For the Christian who has newly discovered the inner witness of Christ's presence, such moments are devastating. And, for the Christian of long standing, suddenly falling into such moments can also be a time of great distress. Christians are not exempt from these times and we must find ways to deal with them, or face the terrible prospect of concluding our experience of God's love has been a cruel hoax.
Borne Along In Our Empty Moments
Both Wesley and our text give us a clue on how we might handle this. Wesley's revealing letter to his brother goes on to say, "And yet I dare not preach otherwise than I do, either concerning faith, or love, or justification, or perfection. And yet I find rather an increase than a decrease of zeal for the whole work of God and every part of it. I am ... [borne along], I only know that I can't stand still."
Wesley reports that even though momentarily he does not have a great sense of inner faith and conviction, he feels "borne along" by his commitment to preaching the conviction of God's love through Christ. He tells of a "zeal" to continue his work regardless of how he feels at the moment. Here is how our such times of low spirit can be managed: if we keep doing the deeds of love and caring to which Christ has called us, we discover that we are given a reason for life and meaning larger than any temporary emptiness of our souls. Like Wesley, we may find that our "zeal for the whole work of God" increases rather than diminishes in such moments.
In reading the gospels, we can sometimes sense what is not stated -- a reading between the lines. We can surmise that Jesus' mood began to move toward such an inward crisis as he set his face to go up to Jerusalem. From his high moments of preaching, teaching, and healing in the safety of Galilee, he now begins to deal with the possibility of death. His heart becomes filled with the anxiety. His rebuke to the disciples trying to dissuade him from going to Jerusalem, his clash with the officers of the temple, his solemn words in the upper room, the prayer in Gethsemane's garden, down to the cry from the cross -- all imply that his heart and inward experience were not filled with glowing faith or a steady sense of God. If this was true for Jesus, should we expect anything different in our Christian experience? However, we can expect, like Wesley, to be carried on by a power beyond our sparse and barren faith.
First John comes to the same conclusion regarding such times -- when our spirits alternate between strong faith and joy, and moments of depression and anxiety. First John writes that these are the times when we must "love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action." We continue to do the works of love to which Christ has called us, and in this we will discover a filling and a strengthening, giving an ability to do the works of love and caring even when we do not have the inner gladness of Christian witness. The real experience of Christ is the power to deal with what life brings -- highs and lows, successes or failures, mountaintops or painful valleys. To have the Spirit of Christ is not some constant Pentecostal "high" as some suggest. It is to be possessed by a power that enables faithfulness even when all is falling apart around us.
We can see the truth of this when look at the serious, godly commitment we make. Two people fall in love. Their days and nights are filled with the feelings of love and romance, creating songs and poems. Life seems a great and wonderful joy based on the affection they feel for one another. Then comes the commitment of civil union, or marriage as two people give their lives to one another. Over the years, such moments are subdued in the working out the meaning of their love and responsibility for each other. Some can't handle the inevitable necessity of the inner glow changing to a concern for the needs of each other, displacing much of the rapture that first attended their coming together. But again, is this a loss that must be revived else the relationship proves false?
Some think so. Tons of books and magazine articles are written informing us how to put romance back into our marriage; yet this wisdom can deceive one into believing the rapture of the initial commitment can be revived in a significant way. Truthfully, marriages and civil unions across any length of time demand a power to continue in faithfulness, of finding a zeal for expressing love and care for one another, surprisingly proving to be much more of a delight and meaning than our earlier high moments of romance.
If this is true in the relationship of committed love between two people, we can believe that it is also true for our relationship to Christ. Beyond our loss of the initial glow of faith, we may move to a deeper experience, the experience of being carried along by God's love. This happens as we continue our acts of love for others -- including those we dislike -- regardless of how we feel at the moment. So, "little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him, whenever our hearts condemn us."
____________
1.ÊFrancis J. McConnell, John Wesley (New York: Abingdon Press, 1939), p. 210.
