(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on June 5, 2016, Proper 5)
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A Faith That Jumps off the Page
When I was little, I spent a great deal of time with our neighbors across the street. They were a friendly family. And also a little bit odd. I think the kind way to put it, would be to say that their heads were in the clouds much of the time. I would regularly come home from their house with pocketfuls of coins, which concerned my parents. But I could hardly help it; loose change was practically growing on their couches and floors. I remember dinner with them one night. We had pizza, and it was piping hot. Their son, who was my age——I’ll call him Christopher—simply could not wait for it to cool off a little. And so what other choice did he have? Without a second’s hesitation, he emptied his glass of milk on his slice. And then happily began eating.
Christopher grew up with many of the same stories that I did. His parents had read him the Narnia series as well as The Hobbit. He had seen the Star Wars trilogy. And so quite naturally, when we played together, our imaginations would run wild in tandem. Sometimes we would be hobbits or elves or talking creatures fighting the White Witch. Sometimes we would create our own stories. In either case, we would take on the lead roles in a living story of universal significance, in a story that would decide the very fate of the world.
When Jesus said that the kingdom of God belonged to children and people like them, I think that part of what he was saying was that faith jumps off the page. It is not confined to what lies between two hardbound covers. It is not merely something that is taught, or something that is memorized and recited, like a multiplication table or the Declaration of Independence. It is a living story—one that we are caught up in, one that we are written into, one that we are writing.
From a Faith of the Word to a Faith of the Event
Paul, the man who writes today’s scripture, had lived almost his entire life thinking that faith was a closed book. He had treated faith like a final word. For him, faith had been the kind of thing that could be taught and passed on from generation to generation. Faith was what he had memorized and recited as a student of famous rabbis. It was the security and certainty of a word that never changes.
But then one day, Paul says, he has a “revelation” of Jesus Christ. In the Greek, he has “an apokalupsis of Jesus Christ,” or as we would say today, “apocalypse.” The word itself means unveiling or uncovering. For many of us it conjures up a dramatic event, an event of earthquakes and fires and floods. And that’s what the “apocalypse” of Jesus Christ is for Paul. Not fire or flood—but a moment of great change, a moment when everything he had read jumped off the page. Suddenly the closed hardbound covers of his faith were wrenched open. Suddenly all the words he had been taught, all the words he had memorized and recited—they were caught up in a live event, an encounter with the living God, a new twist in the story.
And so there’s this delicious irony: the Paul who grew up thinking that faith was a closed book, is the same Paul who writes another page in that very book. His letters have become a crucial part of the Bible, a book dear to our faith.
Repeating Paul’s Mistake
Of course, Paul didn’t know that his words would become a part of our scripture. At the time, his only interest was defending himself from certain opponents. Remember, he is facing criticism for suggesting that some of the old laws no longer apply to following Christ, laws like circumcision and the dietary restrictions. His defense is revolutionary. Rather than searching for justification in the precedent of scripture or what Jesus had said, he simply shares his personal experience. His defense is to say that faith is not a word but an event, not an account of God but an encounter with God, not a teaching of Christ but an “apocalypse” of the living Christ.
In the end, Paul’s words won the day. Faith was freed from its hardcover binding; it jumped off the page once more. But ironically enough, today when we read Paul’s words—words that point toward an event of faith, a personal “apocalypse”—we are tempted to shut them away between two covers of their own, to turn them into a new closed canon of faith. To do so is to make the exact mistake that Paul’s words warn against, the mistake that he had made earlier in his life. It is to treat faith as a final word rather than as a living event, as what is memorizable and recitable rather than as the “apocalypse” that reveals something new and different. Like Paul before his encounter with Christ, we treat faith as a finished story rather than as a story that jumps off the page.
The Apocalypse of Christ:
Not a Learned Word but a Lived Event
Consider your own faith. What is its substance? If you’re like me, if you’ve grown up in the church, then it is tempting to say that our faith is what we learned, what was taught to us in Sunday School and church camps and countless sermons (like this one!). But listen again to what Paul says about his newfound faith: “I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it”!
I think we’re all a little bit like Paul. We have grown up in a tradition of faith. We have often confined our faith to the safe and secure space between the hardcover binding of a closed book. We have often confused our faith with what is familiar, so that sometimes “faith” is actually code for my understanding and my desires, what I want God to do, how I think God should act.
But the good and unsettling news of today’s message is that faith is never a closed book; it is always jumping off the page. We encounter Christ not merely in words but in the flesh of our lives. Paul’s life is a perfect example of this. He grew up thinking faith was a final word, one that conveniently matched his own understanding—and who among us has not thought the same at one time or another? But then one day his world was turned upside down. He had an apocalypse, a revelation, of Jesus Christ. Faith was no longer a learned word but a lived event, an event that changed things, complicated things, kept things alive.
In this way, faith bears a close resemblance to the inspired play of children, for whom the story does not end at the end of a book. The good and scary news of today’s scripture is that whether we grow up in the Jewish tradition like Paul, or the Christian tradition, or any other tradition, the event—the apocalypse—of God in our lives will break open the closed book of faith and invite us to write ourselves into it.
“You Have Heard, No Doubt, of My Earlier Life in Christianity…”
Bearing that gospel in mind, I invite us to explore our own lives, to listen to them, in order to discover the event—the apocalypse of Christ—that inspires our faith. With the help of Paul’s words in today’s scripture, I share with you now my own faith, which is not a word that I was taught word-for-word but rather an event. I share with you the apocalypse of Christ in my life:
“For I want you to know, sisters and brothers, that the gospel that is proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.
“You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Christianity. I was going to church every Sunday and Wednesday, memorizing scripture, reading books by inspired Christian thinkers, learning how to speak the Christian language. I advanced in Christianity and gained the recognition of my peers and the approval of my elders, for I was dedicated to their traditions.
“But when I encountered Christ, it was not through my own understanding or even through the understanding of the church, but rather through an apocalypse; through the grace of God that practically threw itself at me, that uncovered Christ in the world, often in unexpected people and unfamiliar places. Christ was uncovered for me in a Burmese refugee boy in whom I heard Jesus call out to me, ‘I’m lonely, don’t leave’; Christ was revealed to me through my parents and my brother—not through their ‘Christian’ words or deeds, but through their sacrificial gifts of love that inspired me to love; and Christ showed himself to me in an unlikely, ragtag group of housemates who lifted me out of loneliness and unwittingly demonstrated a Christ-like belief in the goodness of this world and the holiness of life.”
That is part of the apocalypse of Christ in my own life. And it is my faith that such apocalypses are breaking open the closed bindings and writing a fresh faith in all our lives, in all our stories.
Prayer
Christ of apocalypse,
Who breaks open closed books of faith,
Who flusters final words of faith,
Who encounters us in the flesh:
Be known among us today
Beyond the words we learn;
Jump off the page
And sweep us into God’s living story of love.
Amen.
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