Faith that Trusts; Faith that Seeks

The readings from scripture this morning show us two believers, both very human, both commendable in many ways, and both deeply flawed. (I’m sorry they both happen to be males. On other Sundays we can read of females just as commendable and just as flawed.) I suppose you could call these two scriptural figures "archetypes." I prefer to call them "cousins in the faith." Cousins are kinfolks you can claim if you want to and disclaim you find out something really embarrassing about them.

We begin with cousin Abraham. For most Christians, he’s the claimable kind of kin, somebody you’d want to have in the family album. Cousin Abraham (whose name at the time was Abram) was sitting under a oak tree one day, resting his arthritic bones and filling out his application to Westminster Oaks, when the Lord God spoke to him.

"Go," the Lord said. "Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house. Leave everything that’s familiar and dear to you, including that bassinette in the attic that you bought, but have never used, and go to the land that I will show you."

And if that weren’t shocking enough, the Lord made a promise to cousin Abraham: I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and by you all the families of the earth will be blessed.

It was a shocking and outrageous promise for the Lord to make, seeing as how cousin Abraham and his wife, whose name at the time was Sarai, had been members of AARP for twenty-five years. But the Lord said "Go" and cousin Abraham went. He packed up Sarai, his nephew Lot, Lot’s family, and, just for good measure, that unused bassinette, and off he went. No map. No plan. No guarantees. Just that word from the Lord and that outrageous promise.

Thumbing though the family album centuries later, cousin Paul (whose name used to be Saul – Our kinfolks are always changing their names) comments on cousin Abraham. He’d been looking for a good example of justification by faith to put in his letter to our cousins in Rome, and cousin Abraham fit the bill nicely.

Abraham, you see, was a squirrelly old rascal. More than once he let God down. That doesn’t matter, Paul says. As a follower of the law, cousin Abraham wasn’t much to brag about, but "He believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." Shaky as it was at times, cousin Abraham had faith. The Lord said "Go" and he went. Faith-wise, Paul writes, Abraham is "the father of us all" (Rom. 4:17).

So Abraham is our first example of faith. Let us call his faith trusting faith, the kind that rests on grace.

Trusting faith -- the kind that rests on God’s promises. Abraham had it. Sarah had it. You and I have it – at least some of the time. It comes by grace as a gift of God. It has nothing to do with how good we are, or how hard we try, or how far short we fall of God’s best hopes for us. God takes care of all that by choosing us before we can choose God.

And why does God do that? Why does go choose us to receive God’s blessing and to pass it on to the whole world? For no other reason than this: God loves. God loves not just us, but the whole world.

Trusting faith.

But here’s another face in the family album. Cousin Nicodemus, B.A., M.A., D.Phil., Ph.D., QRSTUVW. He’s one of our better educated cousins. He studied under the very best Torah scholars. He’s got a tenured position sitting in an endowed chair. He wears horn-rimmed glasses and a rumpled tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows. You know the type. Around this town they’re fairly common.

But cousin Nicodemus isn’t the kind to rest on his laurels. He’s what we’d call a "lifelong learner." He wants to know more about a fellow named Jesus, who obviously knows a lot about the Torah himself – someone Nicodemus obviously respects. Nicodemus wants to meet Jesus, to sit down and talk with him, but, having a certain reputation to uphold, he waits until the sun goes down before he comes calling. Think of him as "Nic at night."

Before he can ask Jesus what he has to do to get into the kingdom of God, Jesus starts talking about being "born from above." Or perhaps he says "born again." Nicodemus isn’t sure. "That’s impossible," cousin Nicodemus says. "You can’t be born again. Can a person enter the womb a second time and be born?"

"You have to be born of water and the Spirit," Jesus replies, which only makes cousin Nicodemus more confused. "The wind blows where it chooses, and you know it’s there, but you don’t where it comes from and where it goes. People born of the Spirit are like that." He goes on to talk about Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness and the Son of Man, whoever that is, being lifted up as well.

It’s more than cousin Nicodemus can take in. He came to ask Jesus what he had to do to get into the kingdom, and Jesus won’t even let him ask the question. Instead he speaks in riddles about being born a second time, and about the Son of Man being lifted up.

It’s all too deep, even for a person with a string of letters after his name. Cousin Nicodemus came for a plan, a set of rules and regulations. He wants to know what to do, and Jesus insists on talking about something else – something that God does. He talks of being born and of being lifted up, of the wind blowing and the Spirit moving.

It’s not a very satisfying conversation, and one gets the feeling that cousin Nicodemus comes away from it scratching his head and searching his heart in a way he’s never done before. He comes for answers and he leaves with questions.

I want to suggest that in cousin Nicodemus we have an example of another kind of faith. Call it searching faith. Searching faith is the kind that lives with almost as many questions as answers, the kind that wrestles with the words of scripture and the signs of the times. It burns the midnight oil and makes us stumble over words in the Creed. "Why?" it asks, and "Why not?" "Who says so?" "On whose authority?"

Searching faith may look like skepticism or even heresy. It’s even mistaken for cynicism now and then, but it’s none of these. For just like trusting faith, searching faith depends on grace. It doesn’t know all the answers, but it lives in the hope that the answers are there, somewhere.

Trusting faith and searching faith – they’re not so very different. If you look more closely at Abraham’s story, you’ll see that he asked questions even while he modeled trust. And Nicodemus? Well, he appears only two more times in John’s Gospel.

The second time is about halfway through John’s gospel. Many in Nicodemus’ religious party, the Pharisees, are out to get Jesus. They want to have him arrested without a trial. Nicodemus pipes up, "Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?" (John 7:51). Ever the academic, Nicodemus wants to give Jesus a fair hearing.

The third and last time we see Nicodemus is the last place you’d look for a dignified academic. He’s bent over, struggling with the most unlikely burden you can imagine – a huge sack of burial spices – what John calls "a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds' weight" (John 19: 39). He’s hauling that enormous load up a hill to a little tomb hewn out of the rock. He and a colleague named Joseph of Arimathea have taken it upon themselves to give the crucified Jesus a decent burial.

I don’t know why Nicodemus did that. Maybe he was grateful for the questions Jesus raised. Maybe he wanted to pay a final tribute to a man whose wisdom far exceeded his. Maybe he was still searching and felt that the answer to all his questions might still be found in this man who welcomed him by night.

Trusting faith and searching faith. They’re not so far apart. When we say we believe in Jesus Christ, when we recite the Creed, when we gather at the grave and make our song, when we gather round this Table spread for us, it’s with a mixture of both.

Both, I think, are reckoned to us as righteousness. Both arise from the fathomless grace of God. Both are gifts from the God who so loves the world that he gave his only Son to save it.