Do Beliefs Matter?
Mark 9:33-50
Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, ‘What were you arguing about on the way?’ But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another about who was the greatest. He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, ‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’ Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’
John said to him, ‘Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.’ But Jesus said, ‘Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.
‘If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell., And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.
‘For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.’
Back in the middle of the 19th century, there was a well-known bishop who was traveling through the South Pacific on his way to visit Christian missionaries in Austrailia. One the way, his ship stopped at a small island to take on supplies. Walking around the island, he began to ask the villagers if they believed in Jesus Christ.
Three native men responded “yes.” They said in broken English, “Years ago, a man come to island. Teach us about Jesus. We followers now. Jesus very great.” The bishop, interested in their faith, asked them, “So, when you pray, what do you say?” They responded, “We say to God, ‘You are Three. We are three. Have mercy on us.’”
The bishop was indignant. What ignorance. What blasphemy! This was no way for Christians to pray. He said to the natives, “This way of praying is against God. Let me teach you how to pray properly.” So, he spent the next few days teaching them the words to the Lord’s Prayer. It was difficult work, but slowly they memorized the prayer. His last act on the island was proudly standing on the gangplank, hearing them recite the prayer.
Six months later, the bishop was sailing home, and as his ship sailed by that beautiful South Pacific island at night, he thought back with pride to his work with the three natives. He wondered how they were doing, and if they truly appreciated his work with them. As he looked across the water to the island, he noticed a small point of light coming toward the ship. As he continued to look, the light got closer and closer, and it was moving fairly quickly. Soon he noticed that it wasn’t just one light, but three. As it drew even closer, he noticed that the lights were three lamps being held by aloft the three natives as they ran at incredible speeds across the top of the water. Soon the three natives were standing on the surface of the water along side of the ship. Everyone was stunned.
They shouted up and said, “Bishop, Bishop! We see your boat sail by. We so ashamed. We forget beautiful prayer you teach us. We know we bad Christians. Please teach us again how to pray.” The bishop looked down at them and said with a smile, “When you pray, say ‘You are Three, we are three. Have mercy on us.’”
I love this story because it gets right to the heart of real Christian faith. Basically what it tells us is that to be a Christian is really very simple. It’s a matter of being the right way in our heart, mind, and soul. Let me explain this a bit more.
I think that the heart of Christianity isn’t so much a question of what you believe, or what you do, but who you are. I’m not saying that what you do doesn’t matter, nor that what you believe doesn’t matter. They do. But they matter only to the extent that what you believe and do shapes who you are. God isn’t so much taking note of what we do and believe. What God takes note of is our core. Are we people of love, compassion, grace, peace, and light at our cores, and how are these reflected in our acts and beliefs.
So often in Christianity we get everything reversed. We emphasize aspects of faith that are secondary, making them primary. Let me show you what I mean. Do you recognize the term “works righteousness?” Works righteousness is something that Jesus struggled against, and it was at the heart of the Reformation—the time when the Protestant churches broke away from the Catholic church during the 16th century. The idea behind works righteousness is that in order to get into heaven we have to do enough good deeds to merit inclusion. It’s as though God keeps a big tally sheet of good and bad deeds that we’ve done, and the good deeds have to outweigh the bad ones in order for us to be saved. The Catholic Church, at the time of the Reformation, was fully ensconced in a works righteousness approach to faith. In fact, they used it to pay for the building of St. Peter’s Basilica Rome.
The church declared that giving money to the building of St. Peter’s (what they called “indulgences”) would have the power to release individuals early from Purgatory, getting them to Heaven sooner. So periodically a bishop from the Vatican would travel to a European city in a cart loaded with small, rolled-up documents bound by a red ribbon and embossed with the papal seal. When you gave money to the building of St. Peter’s, you would be given the document certifying your early release from Purgatory. This is works righteousness, and belief in it still exists today when people say that what matters most is how often we go to church, how often we give to charity, and how often we do acts of charity.
So what’s wrong with the idea of works righteousness? Aren’t good deeds good? What’s wrong is that works righteousness goes against what scripture says. Paul, in the third chapter of Romans, tells us that it’s not our deeds that get us into Heaven, it’s God’s grace. In other words, God saves us as a gift out of love. We don’t get in because we merit getting in. We get in because God wants us there. God wants to save us. When we have faith in God, we accept the gift of grace and Heaven. It’s not the goodness of our works that get us in. In fact, Paul points out that our deeds really can’t be considered good, since even the best deeds have some measure of self-interest in them—especially if we are only doing them to get into heaven. That’s the most selfish reason of all. Salvation isn’t a gift that’s merited. It’s just received.
There’s another form of “righteousness” that goes right along with works righteousness, and it’s the one that afflicts Protestants. Works righteousness is still an issue for the Catholic Church, despite the fact that the Catholic Church’s beliefs are much more like Protestant beliefs on this issue. The Protestant version of works righteousness is something I call “beliefs righteousness.” Beliefs righteousness is the idea that we are saved by virtue of having the right beliefs about God, Jesus, Scripture, and the like. You see people caught in the grips of beliefs righteousness who believe that things such as memorizing the Bible, being expert at Christian theology, and knowing what needs to be known to be saved have the power to save us. Many Protestants ignore the idea that grace and salvation are gifts, and act as though it is the purity of our beliefs that save us. They make the same mistake that those caught in works righteousness do: thinking that it’s up to us, when really it’s all up to God.
The bishop in our story was both a beliefs and works righteousness slave. The three men may have been ignorant of Christian works and beliefs, but they had the right hearts—hearts that allowed them to accept the gift of grace from God in a way that transformed them. You see, what makes us righteous is where our heart and soul are.
Okay, so if it doesn’t matter so much what we do and what we believe, then why is it so important for Christians to believe what we believe, and to do what we do? The answer is that Christian teachings shape our minds, hearts, and souls. Acts of love shape our hearts, minds, and souls, as well as those of others. Christian teachings and acts have the power to deepen our relationship with God and others. Ultimately the goal of Christianity is our relationship with God, and what better way to build that relationship than to be like children with God? This is what God wants of us. God wants us to be God’s adult, mature, loving, and compassionate children.
This gets right to the heart of my vision of Christianity. I believe that we are called to be a community that shapes people to become more open to and responsive to God in all areas of life. We are called to be Christ-bearers and love sharers, not gatekeepers who determine who deserves to be in God’s kingdom and who doesn’t.
What does it means to be a Christian? I believe that it means to be exactly like what Jesus described in our passage. Jesus says, “’Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’ Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’’ What he is saying here he says even more clearly Matthew’s gospel: "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
We are called to be like children in our faith, in our works, and in our beliefs. Think about the way children are. They don’t spend hours debating weighty matters as we do. They play. They don’t sit around wondering how they can get to heaven. They play. To be like a child as a Christian means to live a life of play, laughter, and joy. That doesn’t mean going out and getting drunk all the time, spending all our time gambling, or engaging in what can often be called “adult fun.” I’m talking about real play where we can enjoy life with others. You hear this sense of play in the deepest Christian words, ones such as love, grace, joy, hope, faith, and peace. We can learn a lot from watching children.
My daughter, Erin, taught me about being a Christian child the other day. Erin and her sister, Shea, both run cross-country. And last Monday they had a meet with two other schools, although Erin didn’t run because she and I had been sick on Monday and Tuesday. So we sat and watched.
I don’t know how many of you have ever been to a cross-country meet, but it’s a bit of a strange event for parents. You rush to get your children to the meet, and once you get there, everyone hangs out waiting for the time when everyone’s there and the coaches can take the kids on a walk-through, which takes about forty minutes as they walk the two-mile course. Then the varsity team lines up, boys first, girls second, and they run. That takes about another 35 minutes. Then the junior varsity lines up—boys first, girls second. So, by the time my daughters are ready to run, I’ve been sitting there for about an hour-and-a-half. Usually I take work and work on something while I’m waiting. Then the girls line up, and I, as a parent, walk over there and shout out, “Go Erin, go Shea!” I also shout out for some of their friends like Abbie and Bailey. In twenty seconds they disappear into the woods. And then all us parents go back to sitting and waiting.
About eighteen minutes later the first kids show up, and so we start looking for our kids. At about twenty minutes I see my kids running to the finish line. So I shout out “Go Shea, you can do it! Go Erin, you’re almost there!” Then they cross the finish line. By this point, I’ve been there for two hours or more, and I’ve spent a total of thirty seconds cheering my kids and other kids. It’s not like a soccer game where you cheer for an hour.
What’s also hard is that I don’t really know any of the other parents. Being the Protestant parent of children in a Catholic school, I don’t know the parents through church and other activities. So I sort of stand around a bit, feeling like the odd man out. It’s not their fault. I’m not necessarily going out of my way to meet them. So I do work and read while I’m waiting.
Erin taught me something the other day, though, about my attitude, and perhaps the attitude of all us adults. I told her that watching the meets is kind of boring for us parents, so I said to bring books and games, which she did. That only amused her for thirty minutes. Then she told me, “I’m bored!” For the next fifteen minutes I heard, “I’m bored. I’m bored. I’m bored.” I told her that there’s not much I could do. She noticed some younger children, children that she didn’t know very well, and she asked me if she could hang out with them. I said, “Sure, but remember that you are getting over being sick. I don’t want you running around.” So, for the next hour-and-a-half, Erin hung out with those kids, playing games, chatting, and sharing snacks. I sat by myself and did work. Erin played, I worked. Erin laughed, I worked. Erin got along, I worked. Now the truth is that I had a lot to do (believe it or not, we pastors do a lot in-between sermons), but I also realized that Erin had something I didn’t: an ability to overcome differences through prayer. She had that childlike faith that Jesus talked about. She had the ability to get along with others, and not to get hung up on whether or not the other believed what she believed, had the same values she had, or even had the same faith she had.
This ability to live a life of faith-filled love, laughter, and play is so essential to the Christian life, and I think it’s something we miss so much in modern life. I will give credit, though, to this church. Do you remember back in 2005, when Diana Butler-Bass and her assistant, Joseph Stewart-Sicking, spent time with us to research us and other like churches for what eventually became her book, Christianity for the Rest of Us? They were studying churches like ours that were growing, not because we were doing all contemporary worship, but because they were emphasizing spirituality, prayer, and listening to God. They said that they noticed something very unique about our church, which stood out in comparison to other churches. She noticed how easily we laugh in this church. They said that they saw it in worship whenever something didn’t work and we laughed about it. They saw it in our session meetings. Joe said that when he sat in on our session meeting, he heard us have a very intensive discussion about something, and he thought, “Okay, here’s where we’ll see them start to fight.” At the most intense moment, someone on the session said something funny. Then someone else joined in. Pretty soon, all of us were cracking jokes for five minutes. Then we jumped back into the discussion and had it resolved in fifteen minutes. What I love about this church is that we play.
I think that this is what God calls us to. Our beliefs matter. Our works matter. But not to the extent that our love and laughter matter.
Amen.
