In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

There is a story that speaks of an old Scotsman who operated a rowboat to transport passengers. On one oar he had written the word “faith”, while the other oar bore the word “works”. The point of the story is that pulling on either oar alone would simply make one go around in circles. Both oars must be used to make any progress at all.

Now the point of the story seems blatantly obvious. There is a relationship between “faith” and “works”. Both are needed in order to move forward but what exactly is faith? I think all of us would agree that faith is central to Christianity. It is faith or at least the search for it which brings us here. Jesus spoke of it often, “your faith has made you well”. The Apostle Paul said that we are made right with God by grace through faith. In our reading from James we heard that faith without works is dead.
But what is faith?

Mark Twain once said that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so. In modern Western Christianity, faith has come to be defined as holding a certain set of beliefs to be true. These would include a belief in God, the Bible is a revelation from God and that Jesus is the Son of God and that he died for our sins. Certainly the list could be longer. But the intellectual acceptance of these beliefs may not necessarily have any bearing on how we live out our daily lives.
And yet none of these definitions get to the root of what exactly faith is. For faith is not confined specifically to religion or belief. In the 1950’s the theologian Paul Tillich wrote a little book called the Dynamics of Faith. In the book Tillich tells us that faith is a universal human concern.

Prior to our being religious, even before we come to think of ourselves as Presbyterians, Lutherans or Roman Catholics, we are concerned with issues of faith. Everyone has faith in something that we give our lives to, an ultimate concern, and it may not necessarily be God or Jesus Christ. It might be work, family, money, recognition and prestige.

To give a common example. Think of someone who works 70 to 80 hours a week at their job. While doing this they are sacrificing time with their family as well as other life pursuits. Their employment is their ultimate concern. Working long hours is an expression of their faith. Faith is the way that we give our lives unity and meaning.

Faith then can be defined then as trust. A trust in something which gives our lives unity and meaning. For us as Christians our faith, our trust rests in God through Christ. We trust in God as the one who is our foundation, who gives our lives unity and meaning. But along with that trust in God there is the notion that faith is also about “vision”.

Faith is like a set of spectacles that we use in order to view our world. And since faith is a universal human concern everyone views the world a certain way.  How we view our world determines how we respond to it. In the film ‘The Corporation’ there is a rather disturbing example of this notion of a worldview.

At one point in the film, a trader on the New York Stock Exchange was being interviewed. He said that on September 11 when the World Trade Center was being attacked the first thought of the traders was not for the victims but “How much is gold up today?” Their worldview was simply focused on trading and making profits and they acted according to that worldview.
Now the relationship between faith and works begins to enter the picture.

But to see the world as God’s creation, to see it as good, to see it as infused with grace and pregnant with the seeds of the Kingdom of heaven is to view the world through “Christian spectacles.” And to see the world this way brings with it that trust of which I spoke earlier. The trust that knows we will not be left alone.

It brings with it an openness to the needs of the stranger in our midst who reaches out for help. An openness to broaden the notion of community to include the one who is suffering, who reaches out in faith as well, in trust, that the need will be received and met. Faith is seeing the face of Christ in the stranger.

“What good is it…if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is that?

When human need becomes desperate, heated and frantic and reaches out to met by (Christian) human compassion this is faith. And yet as I mentioned earlier we church people often don’t think of faith that way. We have all kinds of hurdles, intellectual, creedal, and historical. We are the guardians of the faith. Now theology is fine. Knowledge of the Bible is essential.

But one of the desert fathers, Abba Poemen once spoke of faith not as a modern person might, as an intellectual stance, but in terms of an inner attitude and outward service. Abba Poemen said, “Faith is to live humbly and give alms.” This has to be one of the best definitions I have ever encountered. Faith: a matter of simply reaching out to another in order to offer compassion which incarnates a way of seeing the world.

For faith, as radical trust in God, as a worldview is a fragile thing. It is fluid, surging and ebbing. In the midst of our lives sometimes it is strong and sometimes it is weak but practice or works nourishes faith. We are fed by practice because practice is not only about loving God but about loving that which God loves. Faith and works together as a sacrament of the sacred.
THANKS BE TO GOD, AMEN.