Faith Is How We Live Expressing What We Are Persuaded About

9 Pentecost, C p14, August 11, 2019

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24

Hebrews 11:1-3 (4-7) 8-16 Luke 12:32-40

Lectionary Link

We have read what might be called the faith chapter of the New Testament, Hebrews chapter 11.  The same section recounts all of the heroes recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures and gives the motivating impulse for their heroism.  By faith, Abraham did such and such, by faith endurance under duress happened.

Faith was a motivating impulse which caused the heroes to act in the present toward a more hopeful future.  Faith is presented as a universal human capacity.  It does not necessarily need to be grounded in a specific ideology, whether Jewish or Christian.  It is a natural human phenomenon that in the religious context is associated with and connected to what  is one's relationship with God.

I am one who thinks that it is useful to return to the classic use of the New Testament word for faith, "pistos."  "Pistos" in Aristotle's "Rhetoric," means persuasion.  The goal of rhetoric is persuasion.

Persuasion is universal in human experience.  We live persuaded lives, whether we think that we are or not.  Persuasion comes to us passively through our cultural and family contexts.  We live according to the values of the social paradigm within which we participate.  Persuasion happens in our lives in the passive ways of our cultural contexts.  We just act out from the persuasions of our community identities whether we know it or not.

Persuasion also is something which is always in development because time and freedom mean that we can surpass ourselves or be diminished in how we are related to the main values of life.  Faith is active in the sense that we have a significant degree of freedom to influence the future of our persuasions.

We live our lives by faith meaning that we make our decision and perform the actions of our lives by what we are persuaded by and how we came to have those persuasions.

Religion, politics, education and business and sales all use strategies of persuasion.  People with preferred values in all of these areas, want to persuade others to adopt those same values.  People who want to persuade regarding life values, adopt strategies to make appeals to others to become members or devotees or followers or subscribers or party members or voters or students or consumers of products.

One of the prominent strategies of the early Christians was to convince people to follow Christ by the presentation of the great models of faithful living.  Of course the greatest model of faithful living is Jesus, Himself.  The Gospels are narrative parables of the life Jesus written to persuade the embracing of an identity with Jesus Christ.  The Acts of the Apostles recount the heroic witness of early Christian leaders.

The early Church became persuaded that the Gentile people could have valid faith, and they understood that such faith of the Gentiles was included in the salvation history derived from Abraham and all of the heroes whose stories are recounted in the Hebrew Scriptures.  What united all of the heroic models is that they acted and spoke from their persuasion which derived from their personal encounter with God.

The number of encounters with God can be as many as there are people.  This means that no encounter can be exactly replicated.  The future of hope means that every person can have an encounter with God and come to be persuaded through further excellence in their lives.

The genius of the Incarnation is the persuasion that the divine has fully embraced the human such that human experience can be a valid way to know and live toward the wider horizon of the divine.

The mystical experience of the early Christians of the Risen Christ meant that identity with Christ became the pursuasive impulse of their lives.  This persuasive impulse inspired them to be able to live congruently within all circumstances, including the event of persecution which inspired apocalyptic language of visualization of justice, and also including the situations of community comfort and apparent success within their social contexts.

For Christians, faith in Christ, living from the impulse of being persuaded by one's identity with Christ, was a highly recommendable way of living.  It was something to be shared with everyone so that they could know the universal benefits of what such faith meant.  It meant love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, self-control and further faithfulness.

The task that each of us has today is to ask ourselves the nature of the faith by which we are now living?  What is our currect paradigm of faith?  How does our life style reflect our persuasion to the dominating values of our lives?  Are we living by greed?  By the fear of lack?  By the insecurity of not having enough esteem, fame or public recognition?  By fear?  By worry?  By anxiety? By poor self image?

The Gospel is that we can by faith live in an identity with Christ and ride His coat tails toward the types of favors which are the blessings of a faithful life.

Let us hook our persuasion on the Risen Christ.  The Risen Christ is the vision of the hopeful surpassing of ourselves in excellence in a future state.  This is the kind of faith that is our salvation and our healthy, holistic living.  Amen.