Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen Me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”
John 20:29
At a recent retreat, I asked participants to anonymously write down things that challenge their faith. Today we will begin a unit that will last several weeks that will reflect on several of the challenges they listed. If there is something that is challenging your faith, please email it to me. It may already be on the list of topics for this unit, but if it is not, I will certainly consider adding it.
Before delving into the challenges to our Christian faith, let’s first define the word “faith.” When someone “takes something on faith,” they are in essence, believing something without seeing it or fully comprehending it, or doing something without knowing the outcome. It is NOT an act of faith to sit on the chair I’m currently sitting on while typing out this message. When I bought this chair, it said it was recommended for people of a certain weight, that it hold so much weight. I do not exceed the weight limit (thankfully), so I KNOW (as opposed to believing) that this chair will hold my weight each time I sit in it. I don’t need faith in my ability to type on my computer keyboard. That is a skill I learned many years ago. My ability to type is based on knowledge combined with many years of experience. It takes skill to drive a car, that’s something many of us do every day.
Faith comes in when the outcome is not fully known. For instance, many of us fly on a airplane periodically. I’ve know a few airline pilots but I have never had one that I know be the pilot on any flight I’ve been on. This means that I am trusting a complete stranger with my life, because once that plane gets up in the air, there is not way for me to get off of it and he or she will be the only one who can land it.
For those of us who have been under general anesthetic, we may know our doctor, but we probably don’t know the anesthesiologist, and even if we did know that person, we are still trusting someone to take us out of consciousness and bring us back when the procedure is over.
Marriage is an act of faith, not knowledge. There are billions of people on the planet. Most of us date only a few of them before deciding to get married. To marry with knowledge would require dating millions of people, something that is impossible.
My point in writing these examples is because many people say they struggle with the idea of faith, or faith in an unseen God, and we don’t realize that acts of faith are part of our everyday lives, whether we believe in God or not. In fact, if we had no “faith” in anything, we wouldn’t have much of a life. We wouldn’t fly, or have surgery, or get married.
Faith is based on trust, and trust is based on experience. I’ve flown many times. Even though I may have to put faith in the pilot on a given flight, I have the experience of flying many times so that makes it easier to put faith in pilots I don’t know. When someone recommends a dentist or a handyman that I don’t know, I place my trust in someone I don’t know, based on the trust that someone I do know has in them. Thus, faith is based on experience—our own experience, or the experience of someone around us that we trust.
This also holds true for our faith in God. Our faith in God is based on our own experience of God, and other’s experience of God. For many people, their first experience of God comes from parents who take them to church, or who pray at home. Faith in the life of parents is among the greatest precursors of faith in their children. I never remember a time when I didn’t go to church, nor do I remember my parents asking us as small children if we wanted to. It’s what we did.
Of course, at some point, the faith of parents is not enough. Faith has to become personal to each of us. At some point, (for me I was pretty young) people must decide to believe for themselves, to worship in church because they want to. It is the obligation of a parent (and a Godparent) to make sure that their child (Godchild) develops their own sense of faith. And this is done first by sharing their own experience of faith with their child.
There are people who say that they have no faith in anything. I would respectfully disagree. We all have faith in something because we all do things for which we do not have complete knowledge. Where there is not complete knowledge, the gap between doing something and not doing it is filled with faith. We do not have complete knowledge over everything. Thus, we all have some deal of faith in something. The question is, what/who are the things/people we have faith in?
One last note on faith—either the Christian faith is the Truth, or it is the biggest fraud ever perpetuated. And the Christian martyrs, those who have died for this faith, as well as those who have lived out the faith, lived and died for a truth, or their lives were meaningless. The sheer number of people who have lived and died for the Christian faith, the experience of so many, inspires me (at least) to believe that this is true. As a priest of the Orthodox Church for 26 years and counting, either I have given my life for a truth, or I have wasted my life on a lie. I choose to believe that I have given my life for the Truth!
Lord, before I can have faith in You, help me to understand what faith is, and how I actually have faith in so many things. And as I have faith in so many things, help me to connect the idea of faith to faith in You. Help me to have my own experience of You, and as I seek my own experience of You, surround me with trustworthy people who have had their own experience of faith in You, who will encourage me through their example, so that I can find my own experience of faith in You. Amen.
Now that we’ve reflected on the concept of faith, we will delve deeper into what is the Christian faith, the challenges we face in living it, and strategies for overcoming them.
