I don’t care much about what you profess to believe. It’s nothing personal; I am just not sure that it matters. For over two thousand years, the Christian church has spent most of its time making sure that those in its ranks say just the right things, that we have put belief above everything else. We have spent hours and lifetimes and the cost of seeking souls to create tests and measures of who is worthy of the title Christian and who is not. It seems to me that we have focused on these words so much that we have come to worship creeds instead of God. We have idolized doctrine and forgotten that the Church is not the same thing as God. Again and again, we have put the words that we human beings have written above the words of Jesus of Nazareth.
In the year 325 at the Council of Nicaea, when the Nicene Creed was formed, long after Jesus lived, the focus was of course on belief. The group of men who crafted its words wanted to settle a theological controversy about the divinity of Jesus. Arius, a Libyan preacher, was proclaiming that although Jesus was divine, he was a creation of God, which implied that there was a time when Jesus was simply human. This claim challenged the doctrine of the trinity and forced a conversation about what they decided were the core claims of the Christian faith. The Creed was not written as an invitation to follow Jesus, to love whom he loved and live how he lived, instead the words were seeking to draw lines in the sand. The words were aiming to create categories, to settle a fight and to put rules around who was in and who was out. Since that time, we have proclaimed that reciting these words, that believing a particular thing is what it means to be a Christian.
And I think that this obsession with belief has gotten us lost. We have put so much focus on saying the right words or promising to believe certain things, that being a Christian, for the most part, has come to mean very little. Even though I grew up attending the UCC church in Deer Park, WA my summers would frequently include Vacation Bible School at the local nondenominational church. It was there that I learned that being a Christian was as easy as “asking Jesus into my heart.” I am not sure if they simply didn’t believe me or if they felt I needed some extra support, but each summer they would tell me that I needed to ask Jesus to live in my heart and so I did…many times.
But if being a Christian is just about what we claim to believe, then from what I have heard, most of us will always feel like we can never measure up. As soon as I got to seminary and started spending time in church with the label of minister, I began to hear what I thought was only my own struggle. Whether it is the idea of a virgin birth or the suggestion that God could only fully manifest God’s self in the form of a man two thousand years ago, or the assertion that God killed Jesus to somehow make up for all of the mistakes human beings would make throughout time, whatever it is, most of us struggle with some part of Christian belief and doctrine determined long ago. And because of what we have been told, because many of us were taught that if we could not fully swallow these doctrines, then we did not have enough faith, few of us have gotten very far on our Christian journey. Many of us have not been able to move beyond the facts of the miracles or the resurrection and so we have not been able to seek the holy truth that sits beyond. We are stuck on belief and have yet to see the other side. In fact, from what I have heard from many of you and from those who are not here yet, the Christian church’s preoccupation with belief has pushed many people out and prevented new people from coming in.
We have been so busy worrying whether people believe the right things that we have missed our chance to show them who we are, to bear witness with our compassionate hearts and to radiate the love of our God. And despite our fixation on doctrine and dogma, Jesus didn’t ask those around him to believe what he determined were worthy theological tenets, instead he invited every hungry heart to follow. I don’t remember reading that Jesus approached the woman with the hemorrhage and asked her whether she believed in the virgin birth before he offered her healing. I don’t remember reading that Jesus asked the crowd gathered around him to proclaim his divinity before telling them about the Kingdom among them. I don’t remember reading that Jesus required a personal profession that he was “begotten not made” or that he was “one substance with the Father” before inviting his friends to fish for people. Jesus did not ask for the right words, instead he asked them to follow. He asked a lot of questions, but few of them were about what their hearts could believe. Instead he invited them to come to the other side with him- he invited them to join what he was doing. He invited them to see what he knew with his life.
And that is just what he did in the story we heard from the Gospel of Mark. In fact if Jesus had required a profession of faith in him before they got in the boat, they all probably would have remained on the shore. Jesus leaves the hustle and bustle of the world behind to join his friends for a fishing excursion. The story begins by telling us that Jesus invited them to go across to the other side. I am sure he meant the other side of the Sea but there is something quite profound about what he is really asking them. As the boat is being swamped and as their small worlds are being rocked, they panic and one of them screams out to Jesus, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” In other words, do you not care that ever since we started hanging out with you, everything is different? Do you not care that we are being forced out of the world we have known? Do you not care that we are being changed? He invited them to come to the other side with him- he invited them to join what he was doing even when it was frightening. He invited them to see what he knew with his life.
Jesus calms their storm for the moment, but he knows there are more to come and I bet they did too. They knew that if they said yes to him, they couldn’t stay where they were, the other side was inevitable. That is the thing about creeds and statements that is the thing about doctrine and dogma, the Christian Church has used them to test the worthiness, to decide who is holy or who can wear the Christian label with pride. But, I think they should be seen more as evidence of our often failed human attempts at defining God and understanding the mysteries of God’s creation than a measure of a person’s faith. Just like those who have gone before us, we each yearn for the comfort of reaching that place where we can say we have arrived. But if we are genuinely Christian, if we are serious about following Jesus, it is not about belief; it is about how we follow. Jesus asked a lot of questions, but few of them were about what our hearts could believe or which creed we could manage to recite. Instead he invited us to come to the other side with him. He invited us to see what he knew with his life. So I don’t care much about what you profess to believe all I want to know is are you willing to come to the other side with him, are you willing to join what he is doing? Are you ready to show God’s people who we are, to bear witness with our compassionate hearts and to radiate the love of our God?