“Come and Be Fed … with Faith”
Pentecost 3B
June 17, 2012
2 Corinthians 5.6-17
“We walk by faith, not by sight.”
There’s a scene in the movie, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” where Indiana (Harrison Ford) is forced to follow a path where others have died in order to reach the Holy Grail, the chalice Jesus was supposed to have used at the Last Supper. His father (Sean Connery) and the bad guys have both been searching for it. The bad guys shoot Indy’s father to convince him to go after the grail because only the healing powers of the grail can save him. After getting through the initial trials with the help of a coded guidebook, Indy encounters a chasm in which there appears no way across. The book indicates the one is to step out in faith. Driven by his father’s need, Indy closes his eyes and steps out, and finds there to be an invisible bridge that allows him to walk across, retrieve the chalice, and save his father.
“We walk by faith, not by sight.”
Paul is again helping the congregation at Corinth to see that appearances aren’t everything. Or, to say it another way, that we who follow Jesus Christ look at life and circumstances differently. Yet, we who are following Jesus 2,000 years later have an additional challenge: when we hear the word “faith,” we tend to think of it as something we possess. Faith is stuff that we believe. We believe in God the Father, we believe that Jesus is God’s Son, we believe in the Holy Spirit. But that’s only one part of faith and frankly, it’s not the most important part. There’s the heart part. The heart part of faith is relational. It means a relationship of trust, knowing that God is with us. It means being faithful and loyal, based on God’s faithfulness. It means seeing life differently.[1]
Several years ago, in my first call as a pastor, I took a group of high school students from a small rural town to a servant camp in NE Ohio. We did servant work in Youngstown and team building at the camp. One of the exercises involved having a person fall backward off an elevated platform into the arms of the rest of the crew, who were lined up in a double row with their arms outstretched and locked together underneath. When it came to my turn, with my eyes closed I was to count up to 10, during which time the students were to scatter into the woods. Then, I was to count slowly backwards and, when I hit zero, fall backwards, trusting that the students were reassembled and ready to catch me. I had to trust them, that they would be faithful to the promise they made to catch me. It was not just my head that helped me trust, but my heart as well.
Ultimately, any hope we have to walk by faith and not by sight depends not on us, how much we believe or how much trust we have, but in the faithfulness and trustworthiness of God. Because God has shown himself to be trustworthy in his relationship with us, we are able to trust God. When our oldest daughter, Angela, was very young she fell off a cushiony chair and hit her head on the sharp corner of the coffee table, opening up a large gash just above her eye. We rushed her down to the local clinic to be treated. They needed wrap her in a sheet in to keep her still so they could give her a shot into the wound and then stitch her up. It was my job to convince her that the doctor and nurse were there to help her, even though it looked otherwise. I told she needed to hold still and I held her, too. She trusted me, because I was her father. When we were finished, after telling her how well she did, I asked her to thank the doctor, which she did. The doctor melted into a puddle on the floor.
We walk by faith, not by sight.
In a few minutes, we will come forward and gather around the Communion rail to be fed. We come to the table by faith, for faith, trusting in the presence of Jesus’ body and blood. Because of God’s faithfulness we will be strengthened in our lives of faith, not only individually but also as God’s gathered community, a people called to see God working in our world. The cross is not only a sign of hope, as we discovered last week; it is our assurance of God’s presence and working in, with, and through even the most dire circumstances of our lives.
We walk by faith, not by sight.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] For a fuller discussion on the different facets of faith, see Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004) 25-41.
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