Life beween the verses

Reading the assigned texts for this week overwhelms me. The call of Abram is told like a Haiku—just a few words, yet the mystery of our life as God’s people hinges on this ancient call and response. After the spare text in Genesis, the passages in Romans and John read like dense thickets of complicated sentences and layered metaphors. Together the texts wrestle with the need for faith, the longing for faith, the mystery of faith.

I panic. Of course we need faith. It goes without saying. Yet how will I speak in a way that does not turn our believing in God into just another good work? Paul knows that such trust in God does not earn the label “righteous” (Rom. 4:4-5). Jesus tells Nicodemus that this trust is a new life given “from above” by the Holy Spirit (John 3:5-6). Faith is God’s gift, and the sign of God’s faithfulness. Yet as soon as I begin to speak about faith in Bible studies or in sermons I sense people feeling guilty because they do not believe “enough.”

A great change occurred in my own preaching when I realized this: I had mistakenly assumed that I was preaching to a company of believers. I had thought of my task as giving them direction on what to do now that they believed. But electricity began to run through my preaching when I began to preach to a people who live everyday somewhere between verse one and verse two of Psalm 121. “I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come?” “My help comes from the Lord.”