Faith That is About More Than Just Appearances
Luke 17:5-10
Robert Wuthnow, author of “After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s” wrote that “at the start of the twentieth century, virtually all Americans practiced their faith within a Christian or Jewish framework.” Spirituality in America was a cradle-to-grave affair and organized religion was a deeply entrenched part of ethnic expression and family life. Basically, being a person of faith wasn’t really something you chose, it was something you were born into.
Throughout the last 75 years since then, there have been significant shifts. There have been crises, wars, social and spiritual movements, the birth and death of churches, generational changes… and now faith is something far less of a foregone conclusion. And so today I find myself asking a fundamental question that might not have occured to a more domesticated and established church in the early 20th century: why?
Why are we Christian? Why do we worship God? Why do we do the things we do, week in and week out, that are connected to our faith in Jesus Christ?
Perhaps these questions feel threatening to those of us who remain Christian today. Or perhaps we feel defensive, as if these questions are implying that we aren’t living up to some kind of standard.
But I do wonder about this question a lot as a pastor, especially these days when almost every pastor leads a congregation that is shrinking. And one thing I wonder about the why question in particular is whether or not one of our reasons might be the reason we do a lot of things; we water our lawns, we buy the most recent phone, we make sure to post certain things for our audience on social media… and that reason is appearances.
Is one of our motives for being Christian about appearances? If I am a Christian, perhaps then that means I gain the “appearance” of being a good person. I wonder if making sure people know we are Christian might come from a desire to be externally validated. If someone sees that I go to church every sunday and am a good Christian, then maybe a person will come up to me and validate my worth.
When we hear about tragedies of violence that result in the loss of life, we often hear about whether or not someone went to church—as if that some how made their death more tragic than someone who didn’t.
What if we had a better reason to have faith than appearances? What if our validation was something we knew inherently because we stood firm in our faith that the life we were living is a life spent following the life and teachings of Jesus Christ? That would be a different kind of Christianity than the kind of Christianity I am seeing most at large in America today: a Christianity that is satisfied with an insipid gospel, pursues wealth more than justice, seeks comfort more than conviction, and chooses to believe easy lies over difficult truths.
I think a true life of faith that is modeled after the life and teachings of Jesus is one that seeks something more than just recognition. A true life of faith is filled with actions that might never be posted about on social media, but still adds incredible value and goodness to the world.
