August 10, 2025

Why Are We Here?

I thought it might be a good time in the life of our church to ask a simple question: Why are we here?
What is this building here for? What are these people doing here? If we are excited about making it possible for us to continue to be the church into the rest of the twenty-first century, what does it mean to be the church in this twenty-first century?
I have some rather straight-forward answers to those questions this morning. First, I believe we here because we are a community of transcendent faith. We have come here and stay here together because we are people of faith, and we work to further the depth and reach of that faith.
Now, if you listen to a lot of the preachers, read a lot of the tracts, and analyze a good share of the theology from the Christian Church in the last century or more, you might be left to draw the mistaken conclusion that faith means believing in things that don’t make sense because you’re supposed to. That’s just the sort of thing that has turned a lot of people off from Christianity. It almost did for me.
I reached a point (somewhere in my late teens or early twenties) of thinking that all the stories I’d heard about things that happened in “Bible times” were a lot of hooey. Adam and Eve, Noah and the Ark, the parting of the Red Sea, the immaculate conception, walking on water, the whole nine yards. None of these were events that connected with my every-day experience of life. I read the stories in the Bible, and I said to myself, “Self, if all those things were going on for all those thousands of years way back then, how come they’re not going on today?” I was forced to conclude that it was probably all made up, didn’t really happen, just some fancy embellishments on what might have happened if it had happened they way some folks wanted it to – kind of like Santa Claus.
I figured out Santa Claus by the time I was seven. It would be nice to believe in Santa, but the Miracle on 34th Street is, after all, just a movie. And the stories about people being miraculously raised from the dead, and seeing burning bushes and hearing God talk to them were, after all, out of a book. Consequently, I figured, faith is a crock!
I was confused by thinking that faith meant believing things that don’t make sense because you’re supposed to. And I wonder, how many people have been cheated out of a certain power in their lives by rejecting faith because they equated it with such silly and juvenile notions.
If faith were just a matter of believing things are real that you can’t see, or that don’t add up, it would be like the observation of the man who was told by his doctor that his ailment was purely psychosomatic. It was “all in his head,” the doctor said. He replied, “Now, let me get this straight, doc. If I believe I’m well, then I’ll be well, right?” “That’s right,” said the doctor. “Fine, then,” he said, “if you believe you’re paid, then you’ll be paid!”
The faithful life is so much more.
Every time I remember, or again encounter, the story of Ann Frank, of all the fear and suffering she endured as a young Jewish girl hiding out with her family from the Nazis – a story told in a tattered diary that ends with tragic silence – I’m reminded of the graffiti written by a young Jew on the wall of a Warsaw ghetto:
“I believe in the sun,
even if it does not shine.
I believe in love,
even when I do not feel it.
I believe in God,
even when I don’t see him.”

Faith does not mean believing in things that don’t make sense because you’re supposed to. Faith means believing in the only things that finally do make sense in a senseless world! Faith means living into the truth of Christ, and drawing deeply from the well of life, regardless of the cost. It means trusting love in scorn of the consequences. It means clinging to joy in the very face of despair. I believe that’s what Jesus meant when he said, “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
And that child, that young girl, Ann Frank, lived out her days in a hiding place of terror, abundantly! Sometimes I truly believe that if the lion and the lamb ever develop the courage and good sense to lie down together, it will indeed be a little child that leads them.
That’s another reason we’re here: to lift up the value of children; in fact, to be like them. Children somehow seem to have an innate confidence in life. They’re born in 5th gear, with the windows down, and a grin on their face. But the cold slaps of reality on the behind quickly teach children to let go of their instinctive faith in life.
In his book on faith development, John Westerhoff talks about an “owned faith” – a faith that is truly yours, not your parents, or your preachers. He tells us that the principle task of developing such a faith is the gradual process of unlearning all of the things that taught you to give up the faith of your infancy. Maybe that’s part of what Jesus meant when he said, “unless you become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Children are born open, accepting, and trusting. They have to be taught to be racists.
Children are born curious and searching. They have to learn how to close their minds.
Children are born with faith as their primary existential attitude. They have to acquire anxiety, fear, and defensiveness.
To become like a child, and therefore a candidate for the kingdom of heaven, is simply to unlearn one’s prejudice, closed-mindedness, and defensiveness. It is not to do away with doubt, it is not to subscribe to a catalogue of beliefs, it is not even to use all the right religious-sounding words.
To become like a child is to run up the window-shade on existence, and approach life with expectant confidence. And to create a place where people can learn and grow and experiment in order to finally do just that, is a wondrous thing, and that is what we are here for!
We are also here to, as Jesus said, “love one another.” But love is really simply another form of faith. Young people frequently confuse love with lust and therefore become jaded when they learn that it doesn’t last. Folks who have been married long enough to ride out some of the major relational storms didn’t bat an eye, I’m sure, when I said that love is simply another form of faith. True love between marriage partners is an attitude about life in relationship, the way faith is an attitude about life in the world. It’s a constant returning, a dependable trusting, and a dauntless caring. Love in any form is like that.
And we learn about it also from children. We should all be moved to tears by the faithful love of the child who relentlessly interrupts, pleads, demands over and over, “Mommy,” “Daddy” because they have a word to share. And even when ignored. Even when given the “I don’t see you. You’re invisible because you’re interrupting” treatment, they keep it up. They will not be turned away. They will not be denied a relationship with you. They will not give up on you! We can learn a lot from them.
And the kind of love that exists between friends can be like a healing balm to calm a troubled spirit. But that also is a form of faith, because every friend you can ever have will someday disappoint you. Every person you trust will in some way’s let you down. Every relationship you cherish will in some ways never be quite enough. Love is that friendship that does not fail when the friend does. People learn about such love in this place.
There is also a love that stretches beyond the close circle of family and friendship – love translated into institutions, programs, structures. Another name for this kind of love is justice. We are not here, as Isaiah pointed out, to “trample the courts” of the Lord with “offerings . . . solemn assemblies . . . appointed festivals [and] . . . prayers.” We are here to “seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”
Those who love this church, and who have loved it over many years and through many pastorates, have demonstrated love by their tenacious confidence in one another, their dependable commitment to ministry and mission in the name of Christ, their unyielding gentleness in the face of adversity, and their dependable presence through storms and struggles, trials and traumas. Such love is, in some ways, its own reward. It nurtures the flowering of something within the heart that is very durable and very beautiful.
To create an environment in which such profoundly meaningful ways of loving can blossom and grow is very worth doing, and that is why we’re here!
In short, we are hear to learn. We are here to learn about faith and love. And it is that joyous learning that gives us hope. These are the things that abide.
Is faith “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” as the author of this letter to the Hebrews claims? In a manner of speaking, yes. But not as we often think. Faith is not about disgruntled belief, begrudging acquiescence, or closed-minded compliance. It is indeed about that for which we hope, about believing in something worth believing in, about nurturing the confidence to boldly pursue that which is “not seen.”
“By faith,” the writer of Hebrews continues, “Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was to go. By faith, he sojourned in the land of promise.” By faith, you and I are called to go out into the world to proclaim the inheritance of Divine Love. By faith, we sojourn in the glorious land of promise.
And that is why we are here!