Why Faith?

As a pastor, it is sometimes interesting to speculate about what motivates people to participate in churches and other forms of religious activity.  (Such speculation should generally not be shared except in the most generic form.)  At times I have the opportunity to ask people directly.  Some folks can answer off the top of their head, but most find this a difficult question.

Sometimes this may be because their participation is a deeply ingrained habit that simply is.  I have known dedicated and intensely loyal church members who seemed to be not so much religious or spiritual as institutional.  They viewed the church as a worthwhile institution - not unlike a university or civic club - and they believed in working hard to support the particular church they had chosen to affiliate with.  But I should add that folks I presumed to be of this sort have regularly surprised me and revealed a deep faith I had never suspected.  (This surprise is not unlike discovering that the cranky old couple who barely seem to tolerate each other are in fact deeply in love.)

Figuring out what motivates faith turns out to be every bit as complicated as figuring out what motivates human relationships.  In both cases, it's usually a pretty mixed bag, a concoction that has elements of altruism and self-sacrifice along with self interest and a desire to "have my needs met."  I'm not sure relationships with no self-serving element exist, and so faith is bound to have its "what's in it for me" side.

Today's New Testament readings speak to things often associated with the self-serving side of faith.  There is the blatant religious hypocrisy that Jesus condemns, and then there is the issue of life after death.  In Paul's letter, the worry is for family and friends who have died rather than anything about going to heaven.  But the question, "What happens when I die?" has motivated more than a few folks to profess their faith.  (It's difficult for some modern Christians to imagine this, but many in Paul's day presumed that only those who were alive at Jesus' return would participate in the Kingdom.) 

I think the reason faith sometimes gets a bad rap is because it too often looks like a shallow relationship that is all about the self-serving side.  The "faithful" look like they are after something, but don't seem to have given themselves to the relationship in significant ways.

All relationship have a self-serving side, but those relationships where deep love emerges are never dominated by this.  In relationships with a spouse, a partner, a child, most of us discover a capacity to give ourselves, even to lose ourselves in the relationship.  The self-serving side is still there, but it is balanced by and even subsumed into a self-giving love.

The relationship of faith is not so different, although I suspect that a lot fewer people go as deeply into relationship with God as they do with spouse or child.  Many of us get stuck in superficial, self-serving relationships with God.  That is why we find it so difficult to be extravagant, or even simply generous, in giving ourselves to God.  We are stingy with our time and money and affection because we are still doing the calculations of a immature, self-serving, superficial relationship.

At some point in our lives, most of us find it nearly impossible to resist the allure of love.  It draws us in and we find ourselves giving without calculation, lavishing another person with all we are and have.  I sometimes wonder if we didn't do such a good job of institutionalizing religion and church that we've created an edifice that insulates us from the allure of God's love.  It certainly seems there is something that prevents us from knowing the joy of falling deeply into the love of Christ.

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