Faith Or Fear

by Bill Borror

A sermon preached at the Fall Polity Conference
October 31, 2003

Text: Matt. 15:22-33

First of all, thank you for inviting me to speak here today. It has been my lifelong dream to speak at a polity conference. I would like to welcome you to Philadelphia, and I hope you enjoy this great city. In honor of the mayoral election, all of your rooms have been bugged by both the Witherspoon Society and the Presbyterian Layman. So, regardless of your theological bent, you will be in trouble in your home presbyteries.

I would like to thank Cindy [Jarvis] for her good word this afternoon. People are often surprised that we are friends. Some think it is based on professional respect or our mutual commitment to historical orthodoxy or our commitment to intellectual rigor in theological discourse. Actually, I have always thought it was this great sexual chemistry. You know we don’t always have to fight about sex; we can joke about it sometimes.

The times I have spent with Cindy over the last ten years or so for me have been paradigmatic of my relationship with the denomination. I first met her in New Brunswick Presbytery at an Alban Institute seminar. They had just discovered that Christendom was over (something that probably had happened in the aftermath of the Thirty Year War in the 17th century). The tone of both the talks and the discussion were so depressing and fearful about our church’s lack of hope for a future. But rather than despair, Cindy and I were able to give each other hope by making sarcastic comments that demographics must be stronger than the gates of Hell.

Several years later, we were both part of a roundtable discussion made up of pastors from both sides of the homosexual ordination issue. It was clear that most of the folks who were pro gay and lesbian ordination thought that if only I was more educated about the issues and less afraid of gay people, I would come around to their way of thinking. I am probably overeducated and I have never met a homosexual I was afraid of. Cindy did not take such a patronizing approach and also discovered she was not a heretic.

Finally, a few years ago we did a dialogical sermon during a presbytery meeting. Following the service, one of my more conservative friends came up to me very angry. He had sat behind two of the leading liberal lights in our presbytery who had talked the whole duration of my part of the sermon. So I asked him, “What did you say to them?” He sheepishly replied that he had said nothing. Now, what is it about our denomination that made them afraid to listen and made him afraid to confront their rudeness?

Our text says, “They were in a boat beaten by the waves—for the wind was against them.” We are all in this boat together—the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)—but we are getting nowhere, for the wind is against us.

We need to be honest about the condition of the boat: it has seen its better days.

I hate pep talks about the denomination that are contrary to the clear facts. It does not do my soul any good to think of myself better than I really am. It does not serve our church to exaggerate our health or minimize the current crises.

We are afraid to admit it’s not much of a boat. It once was a pretty seaworthy vessel, but not currently. Cindy and I and all of you are sitting in this boat together.

Let’s look at the crew.

Matthew and Judas are jockeying to see who should manage the money, and the endowment purse is lodged between them. Simon the Zealot is organizing a boycott of Gyro Bell. Andrew is a moderate—he doesn’t really know what that means, but he just wishes everyone would get along. He makes banners, sways when he sings, and is always trying to get everyone to hold hands. Philip is working on a reorganization plan—instead of going out two by two, the current proposal is advocating that there be three groups of four in hierarchical relationship; and rather than go out and spread the gospel, each group needs to write a study paper that will be received in two years, to be revised at some future gathering.

James is making a list of why the rest of the Twelve are wrong, and is planning on publishing his own paper called The Son of Thunder Layman. John is a mystic guy: he is on a mental retreat, already doing his own thing. Nathaniel is a polity guy without guile. He knows a real Presbyterian when he sees one—and he does not see one on the boat. Thomas doesn’t really care—he’s a tenured professor at Princeton. Peter, who actually knows something about boats, looks around at the crew and under his breath sighs, “We are in trouble.”

You see, diversity is neither a virtue nor something to be promoted or celebrated. Diversity is reality. It has been since the day after the tower of Babel. From Ireneaus to Cyprian to Augustine to Vincent of Lerins. What makes the church the church is its oneness in Christ: Ubique, semper, omnibus—in spite of the diversity of place, time, and peoples.

We are fooling around in the boat. Some are fighting for the better seats. Some are drilling holes in the boat thinking that will help. Some are bailing water from the front, just to dump it in the rear. Some think it helps the boat to keep rocking it, but all they are doing is helping the storm toward its end—the destruction of the boat and all who are in it.

There are a lot of real problems inside this leaking vessel of our denomination—maybe holes that are ultimately irreparable. But the real problem is the wind. The wind can be a lot of different things. From an epistemological or cosmological perspective, the wind is the post-modern moment. Since much of Protestantism in general and Presbyterianism in particular are so deeply embedded in the project of modernity, then this wind may be the torrent of our demise. For, in a very real sense to be post modern is to be post Protestant, at least in the developed West.

But on a more basic level, the wind is what it has always been—the wind of a fallen world where both personal and systemic evil rage.

It is a wind of people whose lives are adrift. We are so afraid of not being relevant—but can’t you see that this present age is killing our people? It tolerates the rape of the environment and the rape of woman and children.

The wind consumes and makes consumers without regard to the cost to the rest of world or the souls of our affluent parishes. It tolerates people starving and being tortured and oppressed by tyrants, and it tolerates churchgoers—emaciated from their utter ignorance of the Word of God. It tolerates people not having health care and it tolerates silence in the face of sick souls.

We have caved in under the gales of the culture of death. We have bought into defining humans by their sexuality, by their potential, and by their convenience—not as people created in the image of God, individuals for whom God became human. This is the answer to the storm.

As in the words of St. Athanasius, “Divinity became humanity so that humanity could become divinity.” If that is too Catholic or mystic for you, Karl Barth said something very similar: “He is the Lord humbled for communion with humanity and likewise the servant exalted to communion with God.”

In this disaster of a world, God shows up. In the midst of storm, Jesus strolls in. And then they really get scared.

I love the shorter version of Mark’s account of the resurrection. What is the first response to the reality of the resurrection? With joy and terror they fled.

Biblical encounters with the living God always have this element of fear. Everyone is so casual about Jesus. We are all convinced that he is on our side. This is so different from the Gospel accounts where the historical Jesus always surprised people. And you either loved him or tried to kill him—but you could not control him.

I sometimes wish Jesus would come back to the Presbyterian Church like he did in the Grand Inquisitor section of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. If Jesus would come back to a General Assembly, it would unify Presbyterians like nothing else in our history. The Covenant Network and the Coalition would get together and kill him with the blessing of the Permanent Judicial Commission. The only thing that the scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees ever agreed upon was that Jesus needed to be dead.

Jesus shows up walking on the water. Peter, who had that unique gift of being spontaneously right and wrong at the same time, replies, “Lord, if it is you, bid me come to you on the water.” And Jesus says, “Come.” And Peter says under his breath, “Oh shit!” Peter’s verbal response is found only in a few Syriac manuscripts.

Peter in faith steps out. He takes a few steps. He actually walks on the water. Say what you will about the guy, but he for a few seconds defied gravity—because of grace. Then he remembers that he is a man and that he is in the middle of the sea—and he sinks. But because he had enough faith to walk on the water and enough mass to sink, he gives us the best prayer in the Bible: “Lord, save me.”

So many of our prayers of confession are lacking.

We need not to be afraid of the Trinity, or to be afraid to speak of our need for grace and forgiveness. We need to recognize that we are bold sinners, not pathetic moderns who have failed to be self-actualized. We preach not ourselves, but Jesus Christ. We are sinners, and we suffer from being sinned against and the storm of this fallen world.

We are suffering as a denomination. You see it in the eyes of pastors and embattled judicatories. Look at their eyes. Look at their pain.

Simone Weil once said that the false god changes suffering into violence; the true God changes violence into suffering. We must stop being involved in organizational and ecclesial violence.

And we need to get out of the boat and walk toward the Lord.

Merton once observed that fear is born in the soul of one who realizes he or she is shadow. Our collective fear as a denomination-and the scapegoating that follows—is a product of holding onto institutional and ideological shadows instead of the One who is the Truth, the Way, and the Life.

We need to get out of this boat. We need to step out in our own meager faith—so we can see how lost we are, how we are sinking; so that we can hear the word of judgment from our Savior, who is the great lover of our souls.

O, you man or woman of little faith. O, you denomination of little faith. How humbling, how devastating, how remarkably healing that would be, because the only response is, “Thank you, Lord. Increase my faith, Lord.”

Then you would worship him and profess with a fearful, loving, and reverent faith, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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