The Challenge of Faith Rich Nathan January 10-11, 2009 Finding God Series Matthew 6:30
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Edited January 14, 2009 The Challenge of Faith Rich Nathan January 10-11, 2009 Finding God Series Matthew 6:30 I’m starting a new series that I’ve titled Finding God. It is all about faith and the contemporary struggle most of us experience in believing. The basic premise is that faith in Christ, and faithfulness to Christ is really hard to maintain these days. The polarization of faith It seems that Americans are more and more polarized especially when it comes to religious faith. On the one hand we have an increasing number of folks who check the box “never attend church” or “don’t believe in God” when they are filling out a religious survey. Atheists and agnostics comprise 10% of adults in America. But another 4% believe that everyone is God. 8% believe that God is the total realization of human potential. Only 70% of folks in America believe in a God who is the all-powerful, all- knowing Creator of the world today. On the other hand, there has been a significant growth of Bible reading in America over the last 15 years. 15 years ago only 31% of Americans read the Bible at least once during a typical week. Now 47% of Americans say they read the Bible at least once during a typical week. A sincere Christian faith continues to be the dividing line between people. Consider the flap over President-Elect Obama’s decision to select Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. Rick Warren drew fire from the religious right for the last few years for inviting President-Elect Obama to his church for a global AIDS forum. And he’s been opposed by the religious right for his views on climate change. But now both he and Obama are under fire from the left because Rick Warren supported Proposition 8 which overturned California’s law allowing same-sex marriage. Warren has been a consistent, passionate advocate for confronting global problems like poverty, AIDS, genocide in the Darfur, and climate change; he’s also an advocate for a traditional understanding of marriage. He is getting hit from the right; he’s getting hit from the left. It seems to me that as a pastor, Rick Warren is exactly where pastors ought to be. A Christian pastor in my mind ought not to fit into secular, political categories at all. We pastors are called to be faithful followers of Christ who offend people on the political left and on the political right. I love, admire and support Rick Warren. He is taking very courageous and at times very unpopular views in certain communities. But as I said, Americans appear to be more and more polarized especially when it comes to religious faith. © 2009 Rich Nathan Not only was Obama’s choice of Rick Warren a source of controversy, but some California atheists filed a lawsuit to bar prayer and references to God at the swearing in of President-Elect Obama. We see this polarization of religious perspectives in popular books and movies. From the non-religious side of the divide there are movies like: Jesus Camp Dogma Religulous There are best-selling atheist books like: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins Letters to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens But then there are massively best-selling Christian books like: The Shack The Purpose Driven Life One of the really dramatic and hopeful signs for people of faith is the explosive growth of the Christian church in the global south and east. You know, 75% of world Christians live in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Now, a hundred years ago only 10% of Christians in the world lived in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. It is up to 75% today. The whole center of gravity of global Christianity has shifted south and east. Do you know that well over half of all missionaries serving in the world are non-white and non-western? What is going on is that churches in what is called the majority world are sending out the majority of missionaries, as it should be. So the highest number of Christian missionaries who are going out in the world continues to be sent from the United States. But do you know the country that fields the second largest number of missionaries? It’s India. There are 30 times more Indian national missionaries working cross-culturally than Westerners who are serving as missionaries in India. I travel once or twice a year to England and you are way more likely to meet an African missionary in Britain than to meet a British missionary in Africa. Brazilian missionaries are going to North African. Nigerians are traveling all over West Africa. And Koreans are everywhere on earth. So, the idea that Christianity is just this Western, mostly Caucasian religion is absolutely undermined by the facts. Christianity is the least culturally captive of any of the world’s great faiths. Now, a really hopeful sign for a people of faith is the growth of faith in various university departments. Somewhere between 10-25% of all the teachers and professors of © 2009 Rich Nathan 2 philosophy in America right now are orthodox Christians. That is up from less than 1% 30 years ago. Stanley Fish, who is a brilliant academic and who writes for the New York Times, was called by a reporter on the occasion of the death of a very famous post-modern philosopher named Jacques Derrida. And the reporter said, “What’s going to be the new center of intellectual activity and energy in the university? What’s the next wave, Stanley?” Professor Fish said he answered like a shot, “Religion. That’s the next wave in the university.” In this series I am going to talk about the challenges to Christian faith in the 21st century; things like the challenge of sexuality and homosexuality; the challenge of suffering – global suffering and personal suffering; the challenge of justice and morals; the challenge of other faiths and how we as followers of Christ can somehow assert in today’s pluralistic world that our faith uniquely offers salvation. I’m going to talk about the challenges to our faith and how we can still find God in spite of the challenges and through the challenges. Today, in my introductory message, I want to simply talk about the challenge of faith. Let’s pray. The challenge of faith As I said, having faith in 21st century America is hard. There seems to be obstacles to believing at every turn. We face intellectual obstacles. Atheists are becoming more outspoken, more aggressive, and more militant in their atheism. There is hardly a day that goes by in which the Dispatch doesn’t print a letter from an atheist who is angry about some perceived slight or offense taken by prayer, or some other religious practice being introduced in the public square. If you are a college student and you take a women’s studies class, you are going to be taught Christianity and, indeed, people of faith in general, are the cause of women’s oppression and that Christianity is the source of patriarchy and hierarchy in male/female relations. If you take a biology class you are likely to be taught that the universe originated without any plan or intelligent mind. You will be taught that traditional Christian views of sex are outmoded, rigid, and puritanical. People of faith are homophobic. If you pick up a Time Magazine you will read that the Bible’s inspiration has been disproved by critical scholarship. Our workplaces and communities are becoming so much more diverse so that thinking people have to ask the question: with so many religions making their own truth claims, why would an intelligent person choose to become an exclusive follower of Christ. Not only are there all these intellectual obstacles to faith, but we have personal obstacles to believing in God. None of us goes through life without experiencing loss. We all have the experience of unanswered prayer. Many people have negative experiences with Christians and with church that form an obstacle to faith in Christ. If Christ’s people are like this, then why would I ever consider personally becoming a Christ-follower? © 2009 Rich Nathan 3 There are political challenges to following Christ in 21st century America. For many, many people, Christian faith has gotten wrapped up with conservative politics. So if you are on the liberal end of the political spectrum, you may find yourself resistant to the idea of becoming a follower of Christ because you reject conservative political ideas. Faith is challenging. Certainly one of the bottom line questions that need to be answered is why does God make believing in him so hard for us? I understand that some people that you and I meet seem to naturally believe. They don’t ask a lot of intellectual questions. They don’t struggle with competing faiths or with what they’re hearing in science class, anthropology class, or a women’s studies class. They don’t struggle at all. They say, and they really seem to mean, that all you need to do is just trust Jesus. It is simple. I’ve met people who seem to always be filled with a childlike trust in Jesus. I wish I was like that. It seems to make life so much easier. God’s honest truth: for me, faith has always come hard. It has always been hard work. I came to faith from a position of total atheism.