Want to be

Many years ago I was interviewing Glen Phillips, lead singer of the once popular and newly resurgent band Toad the Wet Sprocket. I noted that many of their songs dealt with the mistreatment of women, and that this seemed unusual for a group made up of four young men. His reply, not completely suitable for the pulpit, boiled down to the fact that he knew few women who had not suffered at the hands of men. This theme continued to appear on his solo albums, including the poignant “Men Just Leave,” a bitter pill wrapped in a confectionary beat on his 2001 release Abulum.

I don’t know his story, don’t know why he is so awake when it comes to the misogyny that permeates our culture, don’t know why I am awake to the misogyny that permeates our culture, but I am, and am committed, like Glen Phillips, to naming it where I see it. And so it was, in 2006, that I had my encounter with Jake.

If you have read far enough into my blog, you will already know this story, but it bears repeating.

That summer, between semesters at Divinity School, I took a job as a senior staff member at a residential summer camp in the Poconos. I was responsible for the Junior Boys division, around 100 boys in first through fifth grades, divided into eight cabins staffed by college student counselors. And let me tell you, the big boys were as much work as the little ones.

It was the end of an even numbered week, when some of the campers would head home, some would remain, and others would arrive. Jake was one of the campers heading home, and he had asked his bunkmates and friends to sign a blank t-shirt, which he was wearing. This was a fairly common practice.

But Jake’s shirt was unlike others. It was covered with sexual images and misogynist comments. And while these words and images came from his friends, Jake was wearing the shirt and shared some responsibility, not to mention the very real concerns I had about the culture in his cabin.

Now every camp has its own slang. At this particular camp, the office of the camp owner and the administration was called the “Cooler.” So I marched Jake up the hill. He wasn’t one of mine… best to let others decide what, if anything, needed to happen.

Jake was a good kid at heart, and he was appropriately ashamed, worried about what would happen, that he might be banned from coming back to camp in the future, a punishment with the ominous acronym DNR for “do not readmit. He was also worried that his mother would see the shirt he had been wearing.

And maybe his anxiety and shame were why I didn’t press the issue as hard as I might, for there were other crises in the camp that night. I took the shirt and was sending Jake back to his cabin when the Holy Spirit happened, as the Holy Spirit does, even in places like summer camp. I turned to Jake and asked him “Jake, is this the man you want to be?” Tears came to his eyes. “No,” he answered. “Then,” I said, “ start acting like the man you want to be.”

We had another encounter the next day, Jake hugging me, thankful that I had let him off the hook, promising to be the man he wanted to be. I have no idea what became of him… he’d be nearing the end of his undergraduate program if he followed the normal trajectory of those kids, all from privileged families. I hope he is becoming the man he wanted to be that night a decade ago.

The advice I gave Jake falls into a pop psychology trope we might think of as “Fake it until you make it.” And, as much as we might want to roll our eyes, it reveals some simple truths: we choose how we will understand and experience the world, and those choices have a tremendous impact on that encounter, on what will happen. Reality is made up of both the empirical facts on the ground and how we perceive those facts, how we react, which is to say that in our postmodern frame, reality is relativity. How we see the world changes the world we see.

And for the Christian, the frame through which we encounter the world is faith, the subject of today’s reading from the early Christian sermon we refer to as Hebrews. We don’t know who wrote the text, we don’t know who received it. We do know that it continues to interpret the life and teachings of Jesus through the lens of the Hebrew faith, through the living story of that faith, appropriate since Jesus understood himself in that context.

But what is faith? What did faith mean to Jesus? To Paul? To the unknown author?

What is faith to us?

We’ve sometimes used the word to mean a particular religious tradition or denomination, our faith, the “faith and order” of the United Church of Christ, or some other branch of Christianity. The truer meaning is faith as belief. Your faith is what you believe.

This has always been problematic for me, as I was raised by selective literalists who, in the face of reason and science, would suggest that we had to pray harder to believe the unbelievable. It was all a bit too circular to me, believe that God can help you believe in this particular understanding of God that can help you believe the irrational. Or something like that.

Faith as blind acceptance of what you are told simply means to me that truth is dependent on power, for if you are smart enough or powerful enough or maybe just loud enough, you can convince people to believe anything. So this form of faith doesn’t work for me.

It doesn’t help in our understanding of faith that the Pauline and Protestant traditions have constructed a false binary between faith and works. This idea, this either-or, developed in a particular set of historic contexts.

Both Jesus and Paul, were exposed to a religious system that was legalistic and that preserved the power of the elite. It was a showy religion without a heart. Jesus taught that the heart is what is important, the heart of the one that would follow God, the heart of the Law that regulated lives. Law, works, these concepts applied to a very specific thing, to a rigid form of religious expression that Jesus and Paul disavowed.

Fifteen hundred years later faith and works would again divide, as Luther and Zwingli, among others, confronted the corrupt practices of the Medieval Roman Church. The reformers again found a religious system that was showy, that preserved the privilege of the powerful, but that suffered from a rotten heart. As with Jesus and with Paul, these new prophets constructed a false binary, a polemic tool meant to make their point. Again, faith versus works, especially in the work of the second-generation reformer Jean Calvin.

And so faith became this free-floating thing in the Protestant tradition, unhinged from our actions. Faith need not manifest itself in our encounter with the world. We can have a personal faith, completely interior. I am a Christian because I say I am a Christian, no changes to my behavior, no participation in covenant community needed, a cheap grace that can numb my death fear and get me through some mythic pearly gates. It is all about faith, about belief, not about how we actually live.

But we are not Cartesian brains floating in an abstract space. In his teachings about faith, Jesus never intended to divorce internal faith from how we live that faith. The concept of a separation between internal belief and outward conduct didn’t even exist. A good heart leads to good actions. And even the best actions are meaningless if the heart is sick.

In the Koine Greek, a language Jesus surely spoke and the one in which the gospels were written, the words for to believe, pisteuō, and to obey, peitharcheō, share the same root.

It is not orthodoxy, right belief, versus orthopraxis, right behavior. It is orthodoxy, right belief, leads to orthopraxis, right behavior, an enounter with the world that is shaped by our encounter with God in Christ..

The faith of Abram-turned-Abraham was not that he believed in the promises of God, but that he acted on that belief, setting off for a distant land. Believe and then become. Great people, the ones who change the world, do so because of their passion, the firmness of their belief.

Believe that the world is filled with the goodness of God, act as if the world is filled with the goodness of God, and it will be.

Are you the Christian you want to be? Creative? Compassionate? Forgiving? Sacrificial?

Believe and Be.
Amen.