September 21, 2003
Faith in God
Riley E. Jensen

From the book Vanishing Boundaries, I borrow this description of a person who may be typical of a large group for whom faith in God has never quite taken hold:  “When it comes to religion, Ann Brooks is not sure what she believes.  I don’t know if I have ever sat down and analyzed my religious thoughts that deeply,” she confesses.  “I’ve never really been compelled to say to myself, well, this is it; this is what I believe.”

Ann always thought that God exists, but she has no conception of what God is like and no opinion on which religion comes closest to having a true understanding of God.  Over the years her interest in religion has waxed-and-waned.  During her teens she prayed a lot and went to church regularly.  Since then she has dropped out of church twice, once when she went away to college and again soon after the birth of her second child.  Now 37 and unchurched, Ann describes herself as a “nominal Presbyterian who’s married to a disaffected Catholic”.

This morning our focus is on the second commandment and I put before you this description of Ann Brooks not because she is typical (though she may be) but because we in the church tend to assume that everyone believes in God the way we do.  However, it may be closer to the truth to say that Ann Brooks is actually expressing the way many in the church would verbalize their faith if given the chance.

It is in this sense that I believe examination of the second commandment is terribly relevant for us today because it conveys an urgency that challenges the vague faith of an Ann Brooks.  As we found out with the first commandment, the God of the Bible first wants our loyalty.  The second commandment goes one step further in describing God’s requirements by saying that we must not worship the true God in the wrong way. 

The wording, “You shall not make for yourself a graven image” may sound a bit outdated but is meant to convey the prohibition not so much of a false god as a substitute for God -- that is whatever stands between the believer and God, whatever gets in the way of God’s communication with the believer and therefore hinders or ruins the relationship between a person and the one who has created us.

I.                  Don’t Worship God in the Wrong Way

This commandment is about worship and its prohibition is that we are not to worship God in the wrong way.  Because its language is taken from another millennium, it sounds like we are talking about bowing down before some kind of wooden statue.  But that’s not it at all for there is a core truth here that provides a basis for all religious faith.

The trouble with the faith of many of us today is that we have not found a God big enough for modern needs.  While our experience of life has grown in so many directions, and our mental horizons have been expanded to the point of bewilderment by world events and scientific discoveries, our ideas of God have remained largely static.  It is obviously impossible for an adult to worship a conception of God that was formed in the mind of a child unless that person is prepared to deny her own experiences of life.  If, however, by some great effort of will she does this, she will always be secretly afraid that a new truth will emerge to expose the inadequacy of that faith.

Herein lie the roots of the privacy of religion upon which most of us have been raised.  We don’t talk about our religious convictions, not because they might prove to be as controversial as our political convictions, but rather because we don’t know how to talk about them.  And so, to the extent that it is true that our concept of God has not grown past a Sunday-school mentality, it will always take great effort to worship and serve a God who is really too small to command our adult loyalty.

Therefore, many women and men both within and without the church are living today without any dynamic faith in God at all.  This is not because they are particularly wicked or selfish, but rather because they have not found with their adult minds a God big enough to account for life, big enough to fit in with a new scientific age, big enough to command their highest admiration and respect, and consequently their willing co-operation.

Therefore, we worship God in the wrong way when we insist on keeping God domesticated like our family pet.  There are many ways we do this.  Let me name just a few.  Years ago an Anglican Rector, J.B.Phillips, wrote a popular little book entitled Your God is Too Small.  In it he talks about some of the destructive images of God that can dominate our thinking.

These are some of the chapter headings which I think are self-explanatory -- “Resident Policeman”, “Parental Hangover”, “Grand Old Man”, “Meek and Mild”, “Absolute Perfection”, “Heavenly Bosom”, and “Pale Galilean”.  The book is in our church library and you might enjoy seeing how Phillips develops these images. 

You see, for most of us our God is too small either because we have created God in our image or we have projected onto God those qualities we deem desirable.  For example, one of the idolatrous gods with whom I have had to contend throughout my ministry is the god of civil religion.

You need to understand that I began my ministry during the Viet Nam War.  During those years there were actually bumper stickers that read, “God is on our side”.  There were some during those days whose god was so small they had reduced that deity to a warlock who would choose sides in an international conflict and would bless the weapons of war.

Having said that I must confess that I personally have invoked the god of civil religion on more than one occasion.  One of the most memorable as well as the most embarrassing came when I was asked to bless the completion of an interstate highway in New Jersey in the presence of the Governor.  It was early in my ministry there (after I had moved across the country from the State of Washington) and while it struck me as a little odd I thought that was just the way they did things in New Jersey.  Little did I know that an environmental controversy had surrounded that final cut through the Watchung Reservation.  So I blithely went forward asking God’s blessing on that monument to human technology.  The god of civil religion had won again and I had been his high priest.

Prayer in public schools evokes similar issues.  President Dwight Eisenhower (himself an erstwhile Presbyterian) is credited with providing us with a national theology when he said, “Everyone ought to have a religion, and I don’t care what it is.”  That sounds innocuous enough until the religious right starts telling us what our national god looks like and approves of.

In the summer of 1994, we were introduced to the Reverend Paul Hill who claimed to uphold the wrath of a righteous god by killing an abortion clinic physician.  Nine years later (just a few weeks ago) he was executed for that crime.  This is not your stereotypical Sunday school lesson, worshipping a god who is meek and mild.  The lesson here is one of the fundamental lessons in Biblical family values -- worshiping God in the wrong way can lead to awful and tragic consequences.

II.              Why Is It So Difficult to Have Faith in God

Why then is it so difficult to have faith in God?  Why is it so difficult to worship God in the right way?  The reason, I believe, is fairly simple; it is hard to put our faith in something outside of ourselves which we don’t understand and which is beyond our control.

Our intellectual arrogance and our self-centered interests get in the way and so it becomes much easier to genuflect before the so-called graven images of our own making.  We, of course, are much too sophisticated to have little stone images strewn around the house.  Our gods are created and managed by a market-driven economy.  Because we are a consumer-oriented culture, we go with the gods that work.

I believe that the perspective of one, Calvin Coletti, is probably shared by many of us right here and provides the practical working definition of our faith.  Calvin’s mother was the Presbyterian in the family while his father was a lapsed Catholic.  She was the one who sent him to Sunday school but it never really took as a motivating force in his life.

For Calvin, the really valuable part of religion is not its doctrine or its ritual but its moral teaching, “I try to think that part of what my mother sees in religion is the part that I think is most positive, which are some of the values that the church has in terms of how you treat other people and how you live your life.” “The most positive thing churches do,” he argues, “is to teach people to be reasonably honest, fair, kind, and whatever.” 

But, you see, contrary to Calvin’s thinking and that of many others the reason for the Ten Commandments was not to get people to live a good moral life even though that is a desirable by-product.  Look no further than Jesus himself for help here.  As Jesus interprets the Commandments in the Sermon on the Mount, he shows us that none of us can live up to them.  He tells us that it is not a matter of murdering a person but wanting to murder with anger in our heart.  Furthermore, committing adultery is not only a matter of the act but also the desires of a lustful heart.

Jesus is teaching us that the purpose of the Commandments is not primarily as a code of conduct, not instructions in a good moral life, but rather their primary purpose is to help us to understand that our relationship with God is not dependant upon the good that we do but rather upon God’s love and grace which we have done nothing to deserve.

And so, after all is said and done, we worship God in the right way by accepting God’s unconditional love for us and by trying to act in loving ways toward others even though they may not deserve it.  Furthermore, we worship God in the right way by being part of a faith community which recognizes its own failures and yet tries to draw strength from one another for the journey of faith.

III.           How We Can Foster Faith in God in Our Families

Before I let you out of here I need to go one step further in order to give you a few handles for how we can foster faith in God in our families.  These words of advice are simple and perhaps self-evident, but if we are not practicing them, maybe we need to take a look at our values as well as our faith.

First, be a regular part of a worshiping community.  When we baptize our children, we use the words “child of the Covenant”.  The Covenant, the promise is that as the child is raised in the community of faith, then he or she will come to know the love of God.

I am the product of a family that kept that promise without really knowing why.  As children, my brother, my sister, and I were sent to the nearest church which happened to be down the alley and a half block to the left.  One day my father woke up to the fact that something unplanned had happened when he looked around to discover that his two sons were ministers and his daughter had married one.

Secondly, allow God to be part of your daily family life.  Calvin Colletti had little use for religious rituals, and yet we know that rituals help to form our faith:

• Grace at meals can be an important reminder that God is part of your family life.
• Try to find ways to let your children know that faith in God is an important dimension of your own life.

Thirdly, I would encourage you to develop a comfort level with the Bible.  Tell Bible stories to your children.  Help them to see the Bible as a user-friendly book.

The story is told of a French general returning from his last Middle Eastern campaign with the seedling of an olive tree.  The first morning back, he delighted in presenting his gardener with the seedling and telling of the joy their ripe olives brought to him when he was far from home.

The gardener was dismayed.  “But sir,” he said, “I have heard of those trees.  This seedling will not bear fruit for 75 years.”  “In that case,” the general replied, “do not wait until after lunch to plant it.”

You see, faith in God does not come all at once to any of us.  It is the journey of a lifetime.   But knowing that we had better not wait until after lunch to plant it and start nurturing it in our families.

Amen.