STEWARDSHIP AND FAITH

Presentation at Come and See – October 23, 2011

Our rector, John Kitagawa, has asked me to speak to this group today about our Fall Stewardship Campaign. I hesitated because he suggested I speak about how my faith has helped me through difficult times and how St. Philip’s strengthens my faith. Those of you who know me know that these questions are not easy because, as you might guess, I often wonder about my faith.

I wrote to him, “My challenge is that I don’t understand faith in the traditional ways or the ways I expect other people understand it. Instead, I have several highly unique, personal definitions of the word. My definition is always changing and subject to interpretation, and I suspect none of them would match a traditional definition. . . I can talk about what St. Philip’s means to me and how precious I consider the parish. I can talk about the various ministries I value – Come and See, the choirs, Grief Recovery, ASMP – and especially the freedom to doubt and live in ambiguities. I just can’t talk about my faith since I don’t understand it myself.

John wrote back that he appreciates my on-going search and journey and that it is important to him that St. Philip’s be a place for people like me! And I would add for people like US who are on a journey that takes us out of the well-trodden path and on a path “less traveled” to quote Robert Frost.

So let me begin by talking about the ways St. Philip’s has ministered to me and why it is so precious to me, the assignment from John, the easy part. Then I will tackle the question of faith and how I think about it, at least today, knowing it may change by next week!

I am a cradle Episcopalian. Actually, my parents attended an Episcopal Church when they were married, so I am probably a “womb” Episcopalian. I grew up going to church and singing in the junior choir from age 6. I was confirmed at age 10, was a member of the Girl’s Friendly Society, a high school church group and the Junior Altar Guild. I went to church camp both as a camper and a counselor. I was a member of the campus group Canterbury Club at the University of Wyoming. My daughters were baptized by their grandfather, an Episcopal priest, and confirmed at St. Matthew’s here in Tucson, where I directed both the adult and the children’s choirs and served on the vestry.

I came to St. Philip’s from St. Matthew’s on the east side of Tucson in 1984. My older daughter Annie spent six weeks in Europe on a tour with a youth orchestra. One of the other orchestra members was an Episcopalian from Atlanta, and they decided when they got to London to visit St. Paul’s Cathedral. Now remember that this was a young girl who had grown up in a church building that was designed for a parish hall and had ten-foot ceilings. When she got to St. Paul’s, she was overwhelmed with the size and the majesty of the cathedral. When she returned to Tucson, she requested that we go to church wherever it was most like St. Paul’s, and so we came to St. Philip’s. In spite of my connections to St. Matthew’s, I was ready for a change and I respected Annie’s request.

For the first ten years, I simply came to services here and then drove back home. At the time, I was teaching fulltime and had stacks of papers to grade at every moment. I felt I didn’t have the time to join the music program until 1993 when I took a leave of absence from teaching. That is the year that I joined the choir and came to know and love the director, Bill Roberts and his partner, David Hoover. Of course, having experienced sacred music with Bill, I continued to sing in the choirs, which I still do today although my voice is not what it used to be!

It was here at St. Philip’s that I met my husband, Don Baker. He was a pillar of this parish: a close friend of the rector, Roger Douglas, a member of the vestry, and a major fund-raiser for the new addition to the church that is now that music and children’s wing. When Don died of a brain tumor just four months after we were married, the choir and my dear friends Bill and David were my strongest support. On the day of the memorial service, surely the most difficult day of my life, the choir sang “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place” from the Brahms Requiem. Although I was unable even to stand that day, I heard the choir sing and Roger Douglas preach a wonderful memorial tribute. In spite of my pain, the day was blessed by the words and music of the people here at St. Philip’s.

After Don’s death, my daughters sent me to the Grief Recovery program led by Doris King. There I met other people who were experiencing huge loss, and we formed a group that supported us through several years. Don had been on the vestry, and Roger Douglas asked me to fill his position. He also asked me to take over construction of the Quiet Garden, a project that Don had undertaken the year before. With the help of other St. Philippians, we funded and installed the Quiet Garden that is now on the far south-east corner of this campus.

Through Don I met Tom and Marilyn Lindell. Tom and Don met weekly for breakfast where they would discuss theology and ways to make it more relevant to people who maybe yearned for it but were not attracted to a standard worship experience. When John Kitagawa put together an evangelism committee to work toward reaching the “formerly churched and the unchurched,” Tom Lindell and Susan Anderson-Smith included me in designing a new liturgy. The result, some seven years later, is this wonderful on-going service called “Come and See.” It has become my spiritual home and the place where I wrestle with theological concepts amongst people who also wrestle with these concepts.

Four years ago St. Philip’s began the After School Music and Homework Supervision program. Our choir director, another dear friend Garmon Ashby, asked me to teach violin at this fledgling school, and it has become a valued part of my life. Every Monday afternoon I teach from 3- 8 children who would not otherwise ever have music lessons. Besides violin lessons, these kids can take piano lessons, receive loving help on their homework, and learn singing and general music one hour for four days a week. In some ways, I think this is the most exciting component of this parish, and it surely transforms the lives of these children in ways none of them – or we – can imagine.

These are among the reasons I cherish St. Philip’s and its people. This community is my family, my support, my investigation partners, my reason Sunday is different from other days of the week, and my receiver of thought and energy and time – and of course – my pledge. More about that later.

I want to move now into some thoughts about John’s directive: to speak about my faith. I quickly realized that we frequently quote passages from the Bible about faith. “Oh ye of little faith,” “Your faith has made you well,” “So faith, hope and love abide,” “one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” “the faithful and wise servant,” “faith like a mustard seed,” etc. We sing “My faith looks up to thee,” and “Faith of our Fathers.” We speak of being “faithful” in a marriage, and we say, “I have faith in you.” We exhort people to “keep the faith, Baby!” (or as I used to laugh, “Keep the baby, Faith!”) Obviously, faith is a concept we talk about a lot.

I expect that for many people, faith is their belief in religious traditions . . . in God, in forgiveness, in redemption from sin, in an afterlife, in Jesus as personal savior, perhaps in a Virgin birth, perhaps in a bodily resurrection. Some of this seems to me to be a definition of faith as belief in things that are not scientifically proven. For some, faith is the glue that holds the mind to things that are pretty doubtful. It is faith that keeps some people coming to church to say things that they want to believe even if they don’t entirely. The opposite of this definition of faith would be “knowledge.” (Parenthetically, I just saw a bumper sticker that said, “Don’t pray in my school and I won’t think in your church!” At some point I may need to tell the car owner that it is possible to think in MY church!)

“Faith” in some parts of the Bible is seen within the framework of requirements. What God wants from us (in return for which we get salvation) is faith. Here faith becomes a “work,” something we do that makes us right with God. The opposite here would probably be “carelessness.”

Faith is sometimes used as a definer as in “He is part of the Mormon faith or Jewish faith.” In this case, the word becomes a separator, a divider of religions into categories. The opposite of this meaning would perhaps be “ecumenism.”

Faith is often understood as “trust” or “confidence.” This definition of faith suggests that we mortals need not worry, that God is in charge. In Matthew 9:20, Jesus healed a woman who had suffered from hemorrhages for 12 years and who simply touched the fringe of his cloak. Jesus said to her, “Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well.” And instantly the woman was made well. The opposite of this definition of faith would be “doubt.”

I find that Marcus Borg, a best-selling author of many provocative books about God and Jesus and the Bible, has written about faith in a way that is helpful to me. He says, “Faith is the human response to God.” He maintains that faith is not a static place but rather a journey. He likens faith to all the grand journeys in the Bible: Abraham with his son Isaac, Moses and the chosen people, Jesus during Holy Week. He believes that faith is fidelity to a relationship, whether it be to a person or a cause or to God.

Marcus Borg manages to combine the various concepts of faith when he states that “faith is setting out on a journey in a posture of trust and seeking to be faithful to the relationship that we are called into.” I like this understanding because it is true of so many of life’s journeys. It is true in the case of the journey of marriage, of raising children, of seeking a new job, of retiring from a job, of going through an illness, of watching a loved one die, of starting a course in school, of beginning an art project, or of any of a number of journeys we undertake in our lives. We begin these journeys (sometimes against our will) with the faith that somehow the journey will continue if we just keep trekking.

I thank Marcus Borg for helping me to understand “faith” in a new way. I think now that faith is not something that we HAVE, but rather something that we DO while we are on our journeys. We probably need to turn the noun into a verb. That way the word “faith” would become an action verb. We could say “I faith that you will succeed.” Or “I faith that God has always been and will always be.” In this sense, the word is a commitment, a decision we make to maintain a relationship even when it may be difficult.

To return to my relationship with St. Philip’s, I have come to realize that I have faith in this parish (that I “faith” this parish!), and that the parish faiths me back. When I need it, it is here, and when it needs me, I want to be present. No relationship maintains without effort, and it is incumbent on me to do what I can to maintain this relationship. At this time of year, I need to pledge my financial as well as emotional faith, knowing that when I reach for strength from this place, it will reach back in the relationship we have established and are maintaining.

I agree with Marcus Borg that faith is a journey within relationship. All of us are on our own journeys that require us to step out in faith. But in order to have faith, we must do our part to establish and maintain the relationship between ourselves and our journey. I know that my life would be far poorer if St. Philip’s were not here, my faithful church and you, my faithful family. Thank you for being fellow journey-ers with me, for being in relationship with me, and for being the family that makes me whole.

A reading from the world around us:

Because of the way many believers use the word “faith,” many skeptics think that the opposite of faith is doubt and that doubt is unacceptable in church. As far as we are concerned, however, that is a misconception. Even without a full awareness of the Hebrew concept of faith that entered the Christian tradition, most of us sense that the opposite of faith is not doubt but denial. To be faithless is to deny the reality of what you know about yourself and about the world around you. If you think of faith as the affirmation of reality, then doubt is not the opposite of faith but an essential ingredient of faith. To doubt is to raise questions about what does not make sense to you. To doubt is to weigh the evidence for yourself when you think people are drawing erroneous conclusions. In my experience of the Episcopal Church, it is a place where the questions are welcome and the weighing of evidence encouraged. We are not required to park our critical faculties at the church door.

From So You Think You’re Not Religious? by James R. Adams