Easter 06, Year A: Ephesians 1:15-23
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
May 17, 2020
Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page.
“I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints…” – Ephesians 1:15
Official observance of Christ’s Ascension always falls on the Thursday one week before Pentecost, but since we don’t typically have services on Thursdays, we’ve bumped it up a bit and are celebrating Ascension Sunday today. I feel like I should be talking about that last event of Jesus’ life and how it might look to a modern audience—after all, unless you’re reading comics or watching a fantasy movie, seeing someone being carried off into the sky in a cloud isn’t the kind of thing you’d expect to see. However, I couldn’t make my brain stick to those two texts[1] this week. Instead, one tiny aspect of our Ephesians reading has occupied most of my thinking: the word “faith.”
“Faith” is one of those words that, despite its malleability, saturates the air of our religious communities. It bounces around in the box of Christian jargon and clichés. We talk about being “people of faith,” of supporting “faith-based organizations,” “keeping the faith,” and of “having faith in Jesus.” Sadly, it seems like Christians often reach for it in whenever they’re not quite sure what to say.
Beyond conversation, a plethora of hymns sing of faith. A memorable one from my childhood taught me that “Faith is the victory that overcomes the world.” It’s also a major theme in the Bible, which tells us about faith making people well and the importance of having faith like a child. James famously challenges his readers to “show me your faith without your works, and I’ll show you my faith by my works.” We find a strange definition in the book of Hebrews: “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Jesus even says that if we have faith the size of a mustard seed, we can command trees and mountains to move. Due to the way Greek prepositions don’t quite line up with English thought, theologians argue about the significance of faith “in” Christ versus faith “of” Christ (a topic that once moved me quite a way along in my own “faith” journey.)
In common usage, “faith” generally refers to some sort of intellectual agreement something difficult to understand. We oppose “faith” with “doubt,” and it muddles around with the word “belief” as a kind of trust one has in an opinion or something that can’t necessarily be measured or proven empirically. We “have faith in” the quality of a particular brand or the words of a friend. Some might say that, even without actively thinking about it, a child “has faith” that the rope tying their tire swing to the tree branch won’t break or that an elevator will safely carry us to the next floor of our building.
The most common understanding of faith in the Church, though, is what we could possibly call “blind trust.” This is an expression of belief without any empirical backing whatsoever and is held in high regard across the country. It’s the faith that claims, “God said it; I believe it; that settles it.” While there can be value to that kind of faith in certain circumstances, its domination of religious thought is causing significant problems not only within the America Church but also in our national culture.
Although the various forms of the word we translate as “faith” or “believe” show up more than 500 times in the New Testament, our modern concept of it, especially “blind faith”—better termed “magical thinking” [2]—rarely appears in the Bible. The understanding we’ve been applying to the word is yet another piece of highly developed Christian religious philosophy[3] that is unlikely to have been part of the thought structures of Jesus’ day.
In English we sometimes make subtle distinctions between “faith” and “believing,” but when people translate the Bible, they’re just different forms of the same word. One is a noun, and the other is a verb, but both share an identical root: πῐ́στῐς. [4] (Please forgive my undoubtedly poor pronunciation.) And an important thing to know is that pistis isn’t simply a theological term. It isn’t just an action or an emotional commodity. Pistis is a proper name.
Pistis appears as one of the escaping spirits in the story of Pandora’s box[5], and though I had never heard of her before doing research on the term, she was definitely a known quantity across the Roman Empire in Jesus’ day. Pistis was the embodiment of trust and faithfulness. In fact, we derived the word “faith” in English from her Latin name, Fides[6], whom the Romans revered and worshipped as a god.
The words pistis and fides undoubtedly existed long before they were associated with gods or supernatural entities, and their descendent terminologies have clearly lost most of their celestial connections. But as popular embodiments of the word in Greek and Roman culture, their qualities would have become blended with the understanding of either term when someone heard or used any of its variations. This sort of convergence doesn’t happen often in English, but there are a few times our modern culture has seen a name and a verb collide so they now carry several additional layers of meaning. Think of the word “fester.” As a verb, “fester” is pretty gross, the unpleasant action of an infection, but as a name, Fester is the loveable yet disturbing uncle in the Addams Family. A more current, nonfictional example would be the word “trump,” which has long held the definition of “to excel; surpass; [or] outdo” [7] but is now so associated with the President’s last name that headlines intentionally use it just to play with its multiple meanings. Just like how hearing someone say the word “trump” now evokes emotional reactions associated with the public figure, people of the ancient world would have had a similar type of connection with pistis and fides.
While pistis as a term can denote various aspects of what we use “faith” and “belief” to describe, it would always have carried people’s association with and understanding of what the god embodied: trust, faithfulness, and—you can easily hear her Latin name in this one—fidelity.
I would argue that our modern understanding of faith, especially the blind trust version, has little or nothing to do with what the Bible is talking about when its authors use the term pistis. When I see or hear “faith” in the Bible, instead of interpreting it as the acceptance of an assertion, I’m trying to train my mind to recognize it as faithfulness or fidelity. And when I read the word “believe”, I try to remember that it’s simply the active form of the same word, more like “being faithful” or “showing loyalty.”
This has brought a lot of light to the Bible for me. Passages that felt logically obscure lose their vague, roughly indefinable nature, becoming very specific in their tone. Hebrews no longer defines an intangible intellectual concept but rather an active way of being: “Faithfulness is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” James’ somewhat confusing challenge becomes a mic drop moment: “Show me your fidelity without your works, and I’ll show you my fidelity by my works.” And Paul, in our Ephesians passage and throughout his letters, doesn’t simply commend people for some sort of immeasurable, possibly ignorant trust but rather for the application and embodiment of their commitment to the work and being of Christ as physical action: “I have heard of your fidelity to the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints.”[8]
For me, not only does this bring a much needed clarity to the New Testament, but it also provides a warning call against some of the outstanding sins and complacencies of the American Church. When it comes to fidelity, there is no such thing as “one and done.” Your singular decision or your claims about how you found a relationship with God don’t matter. Anyone can say they “believe in” Christ, but if there’s no sign of faithfulness to anything he stood for, those words are empty: fidelity proves itself through duration, not simply declaration.
At the same time, this challenge to false security becomes a way of providing comfort for those we often describe as “weak in faith.” When you think in terms of faithfulness, of lasting commitment, someone who might have trouble “believing” some of the events recorded in the Bible is no longer excluded from the Kingdom of God simply because of a doubtful thought. Do you find Luke’s description of the ascension, of Jesus flying off into the clouds, implausible? That doesn’t mean you aren’t a real Christian or that you’re a bad one. It doesn’t mean that God’s going to keep an extra eye on you to make sure you start thinking the right things in exactly the right way. It just means that you’re human, that your brain is working exactly the way God designed it to. And being human has never been a sin.
The important thing is, you can’t just look at your thoughts—your opinions, perceptions, ideas, or beliefs—to determine if you’re following Christ.[9] Just like we understand that doing good works doesn’t bring us any special favor with God, saying the right words, thinking the right thoughts, or learning the right doctrine has never done a thing for any of us either. Our inner dialog is largely irrelevant in the face of our cosmic destiny.
Instead, as individuals, as a local assembly, and as living members of Christ’s greater global body, we need to recognize that the works are the fruit. Maybe you have trouble believing in the virgin birth or the ascension. Maybe you struggle with some of what you read in the Hebrew Bible or Paul’s letters. If your life—if your daily choices and actions—demonstrate that you’re working your way toward God’s desire for love and peace, then I honestly don’t care what you think about symbolism or literal veracity. You can be honest with God about your doubts and concerns, and we should be honest with our fellow Christians, too. God loves you if you don’t understand or disagree, and God will keep working in and through you to bring the fruit of your conflict and commitment to maturity.
Maybe you’re a person who never has any doubts. Maybe you can believe everything that you read in the Bible. Maybe you’re known for your spiritual maturity and devotion to God, and you even “have faith to move mountains.” If so, that’s great; keep it up. But if your life—your actions, the words you say, the way you treat other people—aren’t aligned with the scope of God’s vision or don’t show even the slightest bud of something that will grow into faithfulness, you need to seriously reconsider both your trajectory and what you call your “faith.”
Your thoughts won’t rescue you. Your words can’t help you. And your actions don’t somehow make God like you more. There is no hope to be found in any of those things. And there’s no reason to look for it among them—because Christ has already chosen us, not through any of our understandings of “faith” but through his faithfulness!
Despite his trials, the Son remained faithful to the Father, and God has already “seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.” God has already “put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”
There’s no need to worry, even if you do have doubts, because no matter what we think or say or do, “it is finished”—although the resultant works and responsibilities are not. Christ’s message and mission of reconciliation and love continue in our day. With all the division and dissent we see around us, they may be more important now than ever before. Together, through our baptism, through our renewal of vows, through our continuing faithfulness, we are Christ’s body in our neighborhood. We are his presence in our region. We are his incarnation in today’s world. Hope comes through aligning ourselves with Christ—with his life and death, with his resurrection and ascension, and with his teaching. Change comes through the goodness Christ continues to do through us as we seek the welfare of all of God’s creation. And security ultimately unveils itself through faithfulness, the continuing expression of Christ’s love bearing God’s fruit in each of us.
“I have heard of your fidelity to the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints…”
[1] Acts 1:1-11 & Luke 24:44-53
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking
[3] Also known as “theology”
[4] Transliterated “pístis”
[5] https://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Pistis.html
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fides_(deity)
[7] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/trump?s=t
[8] Additionally, theologians can drop the “faith in/of” argument, because when we translate the primary word as “fidelity” or “faithfulness,” of begins to make better logical sense (as in “the faithfulness of Christ”) and the preposition behind in simply shifts to its other valid English translation: to. Therefore the nebulous phrase “faith in Christ” (or God) transforms into “fidelity to Christ.”
[9] Note that “following” is also a verb that expects duration of action