While getting the kids ready for school this morning, a story on NPR’s Morning Edition caught my ear. It dealt with the insurance plight of Cailyn Fowler, 13, struggling with cystic fibrosis, a disease close to my heart. When I was a grad student, I served as a Big Brother for Mark, 13, at the Methodist Home in Waco, Texas. Mark was a brilliant if diminutive boy whose father was nowhere and whose mother was emotionally incapable of taking care of him. Mark also had cystic fibrosis and doctors said he would not live past his 21st birthday, a prophecy that sadly came true.
As a college student I grappled hard with the issue of faith. Even when I could not answer all the questions, I never gave up on God. Nor did I commit mental suicide and give up on the questions. I still don’t have all the answers, but at some point along the way I determined that if there was the slightest chance God was real, then faith was worth taking very seriously.
The struggle for me then (and now) was seeing how easy it is to take faith without the seriousness. The big stumbling block has been what the biblical writer James calls “faith without action”. Of all the available faith options, Evangelicalism – particularly the kind that emphases the transformative nature of the present Age of the Spirit – is by far the most at home to me. But what to do with the sorry state of the action part of faith among us Evangelicals?
I could identify with 19th Century Evangelicals who preached the Word while fighting slavery, pushing through child labor laws, promoting woman’s suffrage, challenging the economic forces of liquor, banning pew fees in churches, and writing radical books like In His Steps. But I could not reconcile the racial passivity, cultural hypocrisy and uncompassionate capitalism of my own contemporary 20th Century Evangelicalism. And I continue to struggle with a 21st Century Evangelical social agenda that looks suspiciously selective and insincere in its pro-life and pro-family mantras.
How my heart aches when I hear that Gandhi – after seeing a church sign in South Africa that read “No Dogs or Indians allowed” – would have been able to “get” Jesus were it not for his followers! I know faith is not necessarily impugned by the record of the faithful. But I have never wanted to settle for a faith that did not challenge all of me including my mind, hands, and feet as well as my heart. Not that I’ve always succeeded in that goal. But it remains seriously worth striving for.
The only faith worth living is an authentic faith that takes acutely the claims of that faith, all of them. I feel angry today. Not angry at the world that acts like its sorry sinner self. Not even angry at the Church that should know better. I feel angry most at myself for being so slow to embrace what I’ve deliberately chosen to embrace – a sincere and complete faith in Jesus. Forgive me, Lord, for I don’t always know what I am doing. Help me to get it right this time. Amen.
