Becoming and Being Christian
April 22nd, 2007
Gary Harder
Text:
Acts 9:1-6 (7-20)
2 Timothy 1:3-7
John 21:1-19
Acts 16:16-18
Introduction
Today I want to share with you one of the classes I like to teach at the beginning of my faith exploration course. This was prompted for me by the lectionary reading from Acts 9 for this morning, the story of the conversion of Paul. It is a wonderful, dramatic story, but often raises problems for us because most of us can’t identify with it. Most of us don’t have such a dramatic conversion story of our own. Are we then not Christians if we can’t tell our own story with such drama and such claims of divine intervention?
What is faith
Let me start by asking you what you think the most important part of faith is? That is my first big question in this sermonic faith exploration class. What is the heart of faith? What to you defines being a Christian? Since I’m in the “questions” mode right now, let me ask you further.
Believing? Is faith about believing certain things? Is being a Christian primarily about what you believe about God and about Jesus? Believing has to do with content, with saying an intellectual yes to certain things that we think the Bible tells us about God and about Jesus. This would mean that being a Christian has to do with our mind, with what we think, with what we believe. (John 3:16)
But how much do you have to know or understand or believe before you can call yourself Christian?
The original meaning of being a fundamentalist (not what that word means today), was that you believed five “fundamentals” of the faith. ( 1, Total inerrancy of Scripture. 2, the virgin birth of Jesus, 3, Christ’s atonement for our sin, 4, Jesus’ bodily resurrection, 5, objectivity of his miracles. This last one was at some point replaced by a belief in premillenialism). In the context of a growing liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century where it seemed that any real belief in Jesus was becoming diluted and unimportant, a group of people insisted that you had to believe these five basic fundamentals of faith before you could call yourself a Christian.
My own catechism in preparation for my baptism was to memorize the answers to the questions in the catechism book. I had to know and believe the right things, and then be able to recite them publically on the Sunday before baptism. If I could do that, then I was considered Christian enough to be baptized.
Is believing certain things the heart of being a Christian? If it is, how much do you have to know and believe before you can call yourself a Christian?
Experiencing? Or does being a Christian have far more to do with what you experience in your heart? Is it more basically your personal experience with God? Is it more basically about saying yes to a close personal relationship with God? Has it to do mostly with your feelings, with your heart? Is it about worship where you feel close to God? Is it about prayer where you feel you are in communion with God? Is it about opening your emotions fully to God? (Acts 10).
It is the Catholic mystics and the Pentecostal enthusiasts who have most focused on this experiential aspect of being a Christian, whether in quiet personal contemplation and discipline, or in more exuberant “speaking in tongues” public worship.
But Menno Simons also talked a great deal about “personal transformation”, about your own life being transformed because God’s Spirit was working within you.
Is feeling the right things, experiencing the right things, the heart of being a Christian? If so, how much do you have to feel experiencially before you can call yourself a Christian?
Doing? Or is being a Christian much more about what you do, how you behave, how you live? Is it more basically action oriented, living out your faith, trying to live in the way Jesus taught us to live – a life of service, a life of justice, a life of helping people in need, a life of peace and the rejection of violence?
Mennonites have named this emphasis “discipleship” – following Jesus in life. Walking the talk. Letting the way you live demonstrate that you are a Christian. We have looked to the book of James. “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you?” (James 2:14)
But others would argue that being so concerned about action is just trying to earn your salvation, trying to accumulate brownie points with God, and that doesn’t work. And one could point out that many people who make no claim at all to being Christian can live a very decent, compassionate, giving way of life. Does their good life style then make them unknowingly Christian? How much do you need to do before you can call yourself a Christian?
Belonging? Or is being a Christian all about belonging? It is not so much an individual thing – catering to our flagrant North American individualism – but is rather a group thing, a community thing. It is about belonging to a committed group of followers of Jesus, to a church. It means participating in an “alternative community”, often a counter culture kind of community where the will of the God of the Bible, not the gods of our culture, determines our values and our life style.
You can’t really be a lone ranger Christian. You can’t really be a rugged individualist Christian all on your own without a support group, a community, a church in which to grow your faith and support each other. Community is the central thing about being Christian.
There are a number of stories in the book of acts about “A whole household being baptized”. One person – perhaps the head of the household – turns to Jesus, and then everyone is baptized all at the same time – the whole family and presumably all the servants and ever
yone who is part of that household.. It is not an individual choice then. Being Christian is a communal thing. It is inconceivable to think of individual family members going their own way.
But what about times when your community is not very healthy or very Christian or when it excludes you or abuses you or pushes you to the margins? Is belonging still central then to being Christian, or do you sometimes need to leave your community to follow Jesus?
Being holistic
Right about this point in the class someone will be quite agitated and will say that all of these are important, that its not one or the other, not either or, but is all of these things together. And that really is my point. Being a Christian is a big, all encompassing thing. To me it is believing the Jesus story, it is responding with your whole being, including your head and heart and body, it is action – living your faith – and it is finding and living in Christian community.
But most of us are not that balanced. We are all inclined to be lopsided. And so we do focus more on one or the other of believing, experiencing, doing or belonging. And some denominations emphasize one or the other more. But that is why we need the bigger Christian picture, the more full orbed New Testament perspective. Which one of these four parts of faith are you most at home in? Which one are you most inclined to ignore or feel uncomfortable with?
I too am lopsided, of course. But in the long run I can’t imagine being a Christian without believing some basic things about the Jesus story. Or without some sense of a relationship with God. Or without actively expressing my faith in how I live. Or without belonging to a community which takes Jesus and his way seriously.
How do we become Christian?
All of this leads me to a second huge question. If the first big question was “What is at the heart of faith – what does it mean to be Christian – “, the second big question for today is, “How do we become Christian”?
I want to offer five different models of becoming Christian for your reflection.
Sacramental
The first of these models I will call sacramental. Sacramental means that the saving grace of God is mediated to you by the act of the Church. It doesn’t really depend on your decision or your effort or your worthiness or your piety or even your openness to God. The church mediates the grace of God to you through its sacraments. So, for example, in this model it is the act of baptism which makes you Christian, even as a baby. Or the act of receiving the Eucharist sustains your Christian nature.
The point is that it doesn’t depend on our own fallible and fleeting decisions or feelings or resolutions. It depends on God offering salvation to us through the acts of the church.
We think more of the so called “High Church” denominations that emphasize a sacramental model of being Christian – the Catholics, the Anglicans, and any tradition which practices infant baptism. These traditions might point to the many stories in Acts where entire households were baptized by Peter or by Paul, regardless of personal decisions which these various members might have made. The whole household – probably very large households – is swept along in this pouring out of grace. Or they might point to the story of the slave girl, recorded in Acts 16, where she is incapable of choosing to follow Jesus, so Paul, without her permission or decision, drives out the evil spirit from, her – and supposedly she becomes a Christian through that.
One member of our congregation told me that her infant baptism continues to be a very special thing to her. From then on her parents and her church continuously told her that she was a beloved child of God, marked for ever by God through baptism. She cherishes that.
We Mennonites generally have not felt very comfortable with an emphasis on Sacraments. And yet maybe we have been tempted to throw out something of an emphasis on the grace of God along with the bathwater in our hurry to distance ourselves from a version of Christianity controlled by the Church. Surely God acts outside of the church as well. But there is something appealing to me about a sense of the grace of God in my life which is bigger than what I ask for.
Legal
From the other end of the theological and denominational spectrum, the more evangelical and fundamentalist side, is a model which I would call a legal model. It is legal because it has to do with the law. All of us humans are sinners. We have broken the holy law of God. God, being pure and holy, cannot allow sin, or sinful humans, to enter God’s space, God’s heaven. God can only judge us and punish us. But God sent his son Jesus, the sinless one, to die for our sins, to die in our stead, to accept the penalty that we should pay.
Some members of this congregation have told me how important this understanding was for them to decide to be Christian. They were overwhelmed by the knowledge that Jesus had died “for them”, had forgiven their sins, and that helped them to gladly commit their lives to Jesus.
In this model Jesus is the sacrifice that saves us if we just ask him to. It is kind of like a legal transaction. We confess that we are sinners, that we have broken God’s law. We ask Jesus to forgive us. The language that is often used here is “We ask Jesus into our hearts”. Or, “We are born again”. At the moment of that transaction we become “Saved”, we become Christian, we know that we will go to heaven when we die. Salvation is in essence a one-time transaction in a law court which allows us to escape punishment.
There certainly is language in the New Testament, metaphorical language, which talks about Jesus as the sacrifice for our sins (Hebrews), and about a new birth (John 3). Many Mennonites have responded to this model of becoming a Christian. And yet many of us are a bit uneasy with it. A legal model alone seems too inadequate. Salvation as escaping punishment seems too small a vision of salvation. A picture of God primarily seen as judge is too small a picture of God. And yet this model’s clear simplicity, and its focus on Jesus’ love in his sacrifice, speaks meaningfully to many people.
Dramatic
A third model is offered us by the story from Acts 9 of the conversion of Paul – a dramatic conversion. Paul is an angry persecutor of Christians. He hates Jesus. He is “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord”. But suddenly, on his way to Damascus to hunt up and capture more of the followers of Jesus, he encounters a flashing light from heaven, then
a voice from heaven, and then he is struck blind. And through that powerful, dramatic, intervention of God he becomes an ardent follower of Jesus, becomes the foremost missionary of the Christian faith. His is a night and day kind of conversion, though it is not described at all as a legal transaction. It is described as a total change in the direction of his life.
We have been left with a very dramatic model of becoming Christian. And this does ring true for many people who, like Paul are very anti Christian, or do not grow up in a Christian context, or who’s lives are so messed up that only a very powerful experience of turning to God will help them straighten out.
A Mennonite Colleague in ministry shared his story with a group of us this week. He grew up Buddhist and Animist. He hated Jesus and Christians. A friend told him a few things about Jesus, but he still ridiculed the Christian faith. One day he was fleeing two communist government soldiers who at close range where shooting to kill him. Bullets flew all around him but he was not hit. Only miracle could explain this to him. When he escaped them he decided immediately to give his life to Jesus and to serving him. An absolutely dramatic conversion.
But for many of us who have grown up in a Christian home and in a church, who may know ourselves to be sinners but who have never openly rejected God, we can’t really identity with Paul’s experience. I sometimes wished that my own coming to faith had more drama to it, more day and night difference, more before and after clarity. I sometimes envied a few of the people I knew who really had far more obvious sins to confess to than I did, and who’s conversion made a bigger change in their lives. But that was not to be for me.
It is significant to me that Paul, though he tells his own conversion story several times, never makes it a prescription for others. This is what he experienced, how God worked in his life. He did not insist others have a similar experience.
Multiple (continuous)
From the other lectionary reading for today, John 21, we get a picture of someone who needed multiple conversions. That is another model. Becoming Christian, or being a Christian, needs a continuous process of being converted, changed, made more Christ-like. It is not a one time experience, or a one time decision. One needs multiple reorientations.
Some people in our congregation say that they have had an almost continuous set of struggles with faith issues. Some things may get resolved and immediately other issues surface. Struggle is almost continuous, so much so that they sometimes even question whether or not they can name themselves as Christian. And there is a part of our Mennonite family that tells us that it is presumptuous to claim that we are saved, that we are Christians. (Old Order).
Peter is the prime example of an almost continuous struggle. Peter needed a whole series of conversions – big conversions – before he was fully ready to be the leader, the “Rock”, of the early church. It started with his call from Jesus to leave his fishing life and become a follower of this nomadic Messiah. He stumbles along, understanding a bit, but mostly not understanding fully what Jesus is about. Through one painful confrontation and failure after the other he slowly grows his faith. But then everything comes apart at the seems again when he denies Jesus just before the crucifixion.
And now, despite the Resurrection of Jesus, Peter is ready to go back to his earlier fishing life. Which brings us to the story for today, and a necessary new conversion.
Searing in Peter’s mind and conscience is his memory of having three times denied he knew Jesus. Now Jesus is going to ask him three times whether he loves him. In that three fold question is, I think, a powerful release and forgiveness.
But there is yet a deeper dynamic, I think. “Do you love me? Then feed my sheep”. Three times repeated. “Do you love me. Then feed my sheep”. It is not Peter’s great talents that are the basis of his call to lead the church. It is not his diligent hard work, not his gifted-ness, not his fine theology and training, not his personality. It is rather, “Do you love me”
Peter will need further conversions yet – this one still isn’t enough. His next biggest one will be the reorienting dream and vision he will have which will prepare him to meet with Cornelius and to accept Gentiles as followers of Jesus.
Peter’s being and becoming Christian is a continuous conversion to a deeper and deeper loving, and a fuller and fuller acceptance.
Developmental
A fifth model of becoming Christian has been called the “faith development” model. For those of us who grow up in a Christian context – home and church – our faith tends to develop in stages – stages which you can trace through our growing up years. Paul suggests that this was Timothy’s experience. “I am reminded of your faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice but now, I am sure, lives in you.”
Fowler is the more contemporary person who has most clearly spelled out stages of faith development. He describes the following stages.
– Received faith. The first stage, he says, is “received faith”. As small children we receive the faith of our parents. It is given to us. We totally accept it. We will immediately believe what our parents believe, and picture God as our parents describe God, no questions asked.
– Affiliative faith. Up to our adolescence we will continue to accept this faith, though sometimes a few questions emerge, and from time to time we may say we are bored with church. But we still gladly affiliate with the beliefs and faith of our parents and church. During this time we may in fact have very deep and profound experiences with God.
– Searching faith. Then we hit our adolescence and our teen years, and we are no longer content to just accept and affiliate with our parents faith. We start asking many questions. We may have huge doubts about the truth of those claims we accepted till now. We make critical judgements on our parents and our church. We experiment with alternatives. We might rebel very obviously. For the first time we realize that we can actually say no to the faith that we have grown up with. It may be a time of intense searching.
– Owned faith. At some point then we realize that we need to make our own decision about faith – whether to say no or say yes to being a follower of Jesus. Faith has to become our own – not just our parent
s or church’s faith. We have to claim it personally. This doesn’t mean that all our questions are answered or that all doubt has vanquished. But it is naming the fact that faith in God as known through Jesus makes sense to me, that I can give my life to it, that I can say a clear yes to it. I can claim it as my own. I can commit my life to it.
It is at that point when we, as Mennonites, say that we are ready for baptism. It is when we have owned faith for ourselves. This model reflects the story which Andrew shared with us two weeks ago as he was baptized on Easter Sunday morning.
Probably the majority of those in my faith exploration class – especially those who grew up in a Christian context, identity most fully with this faith development model.
Conclusion
I have tried today to explore two huge questions. The first one is “What is the centre of faith?” Or, “What does it mean to be Christian”? I talked about believing, experiencing, doing, and belonging.
The second one is, “How do we become Christian”? I explored five models. A sacramental model, a legal model, a dramatic model, a continuous model, and a faith development model. I’m sure there are other models as well. God finds innumerable ways to reach out to us, to touch our lives, to invite us to follow Jesus.
One of the immense privileges of being a pastor, and of teaching faith exploration courses, is to hear the various and varied stories of how people have come to personal faith. We in this congregation have an awesome richness of faith stories, an incredible diversity of ways in which God has acted in our lives.
We could feel threatened by that. We could insist that our own way, our own model, our own understanding, is the only proper way to know that we are really Christian. Then we could insist that our way be the norm and all other ways are not acceptable.
Or we can celebrate the amazing grace of God which is expressed among us in countless ways and shared in countless stories. We can be inspired and enriched by the unstoppable love of God.
In the end, what is most important to me is not the models which describe your experience or my experience, but that I – that you – say a clear yes to the Christian faith; a clear yes to the God who came to us most fully and most clearly in Jesus, the Christ.
Wherever you are in your faith journey, I invite you to say an ever deeper yes to God.