Sermon from November 15, 2009
"A Community of Faith"
Romans 10:9-10

Thank you for sharing this major milestone in the life of Brandywine Valley Baptist Church. What kind of church is this? In two previous sermons I have answered that question by telling the story of the church’s 40 year existence and by describing this church as a safe haven, a training center, and a base of operations.

The sermons today and next Sunday will answer the question by describing the church’s inner life. Of course, I will leave out a lot, but what I put in will help you to know what kind of church this is. The sermon today is about faith. Brandywine Valley Baptist Church is a community of faith.

The experience of faith is common to everyone in this room. This sermon tries to describe the specific faith that makes this church what it is. When all’s been said and done, I hope you will want to experience this faith and this church, because you sense that something good for human flourishing is happening here.

Social Etiquette and Souls in Communion
I’d like to begin with a story. My wife, Carole, and I, graduated from a small Baptist university in Central Oklahoma. The student body numbered about 1,400, and most lived on a compact campus. You got to know a lot of your fellow students. You also saw many of the same people every day, and you spoke to them. “Hey! How are you?” “I’m fine; how are you?” “I’m fine. See you later.”

Those social niceties bothered some students. They said the people who talked like that were not sincere. They didn’t really care how you were, and they didn’t tell you the truth about how they were. It was social hypocrisy, and it ought to stop.

There are several answers to their accusation. First, would you want to pass people you knew everyday and not say a word? The routine exchanges that some students didn’t like serve human relations the way motor oil serves your engine. They reduce friction and keep things moving. Second, would anyone really want to say, “How are you today?” and then have to listen to everyone give a blow by blow account of aches and pains, disappointments, fears and hissy-fits? Life would be intolerable, unmanageable.

The third answer takes seriously what lay behind their complaint. I don’t want to live among people, who never get beyond social etiquette. Who are you behind that smile? What makes you tick? I want to know you. I need to know you, if I want to know myself.

People need social etiquette; they also need to know each other in a deeper way. The same thing is true about faith, whether you are Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Jew, or atheist. You can experience faith as nothing more than social etiquette, or you can experience it as close contact with God. Let me illustrate what I’m talking about from our experience here, because I want you to know what kind of church this is.

This church, like churches the world over, confesses its faith in the words of the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord.” You can say those words from memory or read them on the screens and pay no attention to them. Your mouth is saying the words, and your mind is thinking about the Eagles’ game or your sick child.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s like social etiquette among your friends. Reciting the creed, even if you are distracted, is good manners toward God. But we need more than that. We need to know what lies behind the words of the creed. What is God like? We want to know God. We need to know God, if we want to know ourselves.

From Mouthing Words to Knowing God
So, what moves us from mouthing words to knowing God? As we’ve already seen, our human nature does it. We can’t tolerate superficiality very long, even in ordinary human relations. It feels phony. It doesn’t satisfy. The same experience happens with faith. If you just mouth the words of the creed and never think about them, you may think Christianity is nothing but words and give it up as a lost cause. Or you may say to yourself, “I’ve got to find out if this is real,” and you begin to seek God.

Something else moves people from mouthing words to knowing God – pain. It may be physical, emotional, or national pain. Nothing burns away nonsense faster than pain. It is an elemental force. It makes you dig deeper to find out what life means. It causes you to rethink what you were so sure about. Digging deeper and rethinking take you below the surface of life and help you to find God.


But there is something else even more basic when it comes to knowing God. It’s what you believe is true. For example, many years ago, a pilot friend died when his commercial jet crashed. As a result, I felt jittery about flying. Another friend pointed out that I was 99 times more likely to die in a car crash than in a plane crash. I believed that statistic was true, and I continued flying. I still had white knuckles for a while, but they didn’t stop me from flying.

There is a hazard here. It is possible to believe that something is true and be mistaken. I have in my files a small pamphlet that circulated around Philadelphia in 1992. It predicted that Christ was coming back into our world in October of that year.

Quite a few people believed that. Some of them charged their credit cards to their full credit limits. Some quit their jobs. Others stopped paying their mortgages. They sincerely believed that Christ was returning in October, 1992. They were sincere, and they were sincerely wrong, and they had a mess in their lives to clean up afterward.

So, how do you know if what you believe is true? You don’t. That’s why we call it faith, and it brings you to one of the great milestones of your life. When someone claims to tell you the truth about God, you have to decide if it’s true. You may puzzle over it for years, and the decision is so quick you might not notice it; and it changes the direction of your life. You move beyond words. You meet God. If all goes well, there will be many other meetings like it in your lifetime.

And you say, “But what if I’m wrong?” I have two answers to that. First, let’s suppose you conclude that Christianity is not true and become an atheist. I’m pretty sure it won’t be long before you ask yourself, “But what if I’m wrong about atheism?” You cannot prove that God exists or doesn’t exist. That kind of proof is not available to human beings. But you will make a decision about what you believe, and that choice will have huge consequences for you and for the people around you.

I have a second answer. You need to identify what is central to the faith you are being asked to believe. Does it make sense out of life? Does it satisfy you? Is it worthy of your allegiance and of sacrifices on your part? Are the people who already believe it credible to you? If your answers keep coming up, “Yes,” then believe it and live by it and put it to the test of time.

Christ and Close Contact with God
My task today is to tell you what kind of church this is, and that means I tell you about what is central to our faith. It is what we believe to be true and try to live by. For hundreds of us it has stood the test of time, even though our faith and our behavior are far from perfect. I’ll say more about that next Sunday.

You’ll find what is central to our faith in the Bible in Romans 10:9. This is the . . . faith we hold dear: That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.

At the heart of our faith is the most charismatic person in the history of the world, Jesus Christ. One third of the human family today has been baptized in the name of Christ. People make ultimate sacrifices in His name. More martyrs have died in the past 100 years for Christ than in all previous centuries combined. Why do people do it?

The Bible passage I just read says it best. People believe in their hearts that God raised Jesus from the dead, and as a result they believe that death doesn’t have the final word about them either.

When Christians say that God raised Jesus from the dead, we don’t mean that Jesus had a near death experience and was resuscitated. We don’t believe He was a ghost. We believe that He died by crucifixion and would have been certified as dead by any competent medical examiner, and they buried him in a borrowed tomb. We believe that on Easter Sunday, Jesus came back to life with an indestructible body on which you can still see the scars from His crucifixion.

When Christians say Jesus is Lord, they believe He lives today and is guiding the affairs of earth so that they will serve his merciful purposes, and they believe that He rightfully commands our allegiance, whatever it may cost us.

There is something else about these verses that I don’t want you to miss. The outcome of our faith is salvation. If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Some people think that just means you’ll go to heaven when you die. That’s true, but there’s so much more.

For example, it means forgiveness for our sins here and now. Here and now it means that God plants His life in you, as you might plant a seed in a flower pot. Here and now it means that Christ will save you and those you love from many of the destructive consequences of disobedience to God.

And there’s something else. Salvation means that Christ gives us inner strength to endure the uncertain times we are living in. There’s an ancient saying from the Bible that goes like this:

Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom
     or the strong man boast of his strength
     or the rich man boast of his riches,
but let him who boasts boast about this:
     that he understands and knows me,
that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness,
     justice and righteousness on earth,
     for in these I delight – Jeremiah 9:23-24

Wisdom! Do you have confidence that those in positions of power will resolve the problems that beset our world any time soon?

Strength! America is the most powerful military force in the history of the planet. Do you have confidence in the outcome of the war in Afghanistan? Do you have confidence that we can deter Iran from building the bomb?

Riches! Do you have confidence that today’s children will be as financially well off as their parents and grandparents?

We need to anchor our lives in something more certain than that. I have proposed something more certain – faith in Christ. That faith is the heart and soul of this church. That faith takes you behind the words to a living experience of God, which helps you to flourish in this world and in the world to come, however unstable life becomes.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
In this community of faith I am one of six ordained pastors on the church staff. In what I am about to say I speak for all of us. I am a teacher of the faith I have talked about today, but I am more than a teacher. I am also authorized to speak on behalf of Christ, a kind of ambassador.

In my responsibility as a teacher I have talked about the human experience of faith in general, and I have talked about the specific faith of this church. That faith defines the inner life of this congregation, and I wanted you to know that.

In my responsibility as an ambassador, it is as though God were making his appeal through me directly to you this morning. I implore you on Christ’s behalf: believe in Jesus Christ and be reconciled to God – 2 Corinthians 5:20. Listen to your heart. As I have been speaking, you may have felt a strong desire to have the same faith in Christ that is central to this church.

You can have it. It’s not mumbo-jumbo. It begins with an act as simple as what Doubting Thomas in the Bible did. He said to Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” – John 20:28. You say that to Christ and mean it, and from there you will discover where your faith can take you. BVBC has dozens of ways of helping you make those discoveries.

Making those discoveries is a little like waking out of a dark room into a bright light. Just give yourself a while, and you’ll adjust to the sunlight and see what you think might be the most help to you in developing a life of faith. In dramatic and undramatic ways hundreds of us in this church have done that. We’d love to make the journey with you.