1 Corinthians 15:1-11
November 19, 2000
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
People used to say, “I am not necessarily a Christian, but I do consider myself very religious.” But when that started to feel too demanding, people are now saying, “I’m not too religious, but I do consider myself very spiritual.”
Spiritual religion has the weight of helium.
Lately, I have noticed that the term “faith” has been emptied of any discernible substance. It is true that religion has to do with feelings, but it is more. Faith used to refer to faith in something or someone. Now faith has become an activity. What counts is just to believe. Not what one believes.
Faith has become, in our warped understanding, a human virtue, an activity like breathing. Good in and of itself.
We say to people, “That’s having good faith.” Faith is a good or bad thing, not on the basis of whether someone is sincere, or whether faith works for him or her, but on the basis of faith itself as an object. Having faith has simply become another personal attribute in and of itself with no one or thing to have faith in!
In our modern world today, where the individual is the center of the universe, should we be surprised that people stop talking about faith as faith in some other person, but rather as a subjective attribute of the believer? Today, the attitude of the person is more important than the object of faith. The believer is more important than that which is believed. Refusing to be taught by the saints, we attempt to listen only to our own hearts, in this time and space, and superficiality results.
Religious Tolerance
One reason for this kind of thinking is that the modern world is troubled by religious differences. Realizing that our religious differences cause great problems for keeping our country if not the world together, we seem to deny, or at least suppress our differences in favor of stressing the sincerity of people who believe.
We say, “I have my faith and you have your faith, but the real important thing is that all of us have faith.” Everything focuses upon our experience. Faith is simply another human experience, like falling in love, or being afraid, or having good intentions. My individual experience becomes authority, with no outside reference beyond my own experience. Everybody thinks it is a good thing for people to have faith, and no one is willing to discuss whether what I have faith in happens to be true.
Faith in God
On the one hand, we have come to understand faith as simply another personal attribute that is nice to have—“There goes a faithful person.” And on the other hand, religious faith in our modern society has become a kind of happy-hearted pietism in which, “I have my faith, you have your faith, but the most important thing is that we all have some kind of faith in something.”
Jews and Christians have always believed that faith has an object—God. Once our curiosity, our love, and our interest in God and the church are abandoned, all we’ve got left is our human experience. When we talk about what’s good or bad, right or wrong, it gives way to only what works only for me.
When you and I stop believing in God, we are left with nothing more to believe than ourselves. We may think that we have freed ourselves when all we free ourselves from is accountability to anything beyond ourselves.
The church is not excited that people have faith; rather, we want to know what people have faith in. As a church we respect and are interested in what other religions are about. We can learn and grow to have a greater sense of what the world is like when we appreciate what other people believe in. But it’s an insult to the integrity of other religions to say “All religions, deep down, are saying about the same thing.”
Seniors Appreciation
Today in our church calendar is Seniors Appreciation Sunday, a great time for the church to keep testing itself on the basis of what the saints have believed and practiced before we got here. We do not believe in the autonomous, freestanding individual thinker. Rather, we believe that true individuality is a gift of thinking with the saints. When we submit ourselves to the experience of others, as the only way to free ourselves of the enslavement of our own limited experience, then and only then are we truly free in the Lord.
In today’s Scriptures, Paul bragged to the church in Corinth, not that he came up with some original ideas, but rather that he received from Christ and according to the prophets of old.
“For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.”
We live in a world today that is guilty of a kind of amnesia that leads us to believe that we know more than any generation ever before us.
Some of you know that I like to listen to jazz. In the field of jazz, it only moves forward by the immersion in the traditions of jazz. When a player of jazz wants to become good in jazz, one has to be thoroughly immersed in this tradition as a source of true originality.
When a distinguished professor of jazz was giving a lecture, he found it was difficult to talk about the craft of jazz, its complexity, and its dependence on individual originality. But when someone asked him, “Who are your models?” he immediately listed names of famous pianists, saxophonists, and drummers. He spoke of his mentors with reverence. He spoke of sitting for hours in a piano bar studying nothing but the fingers of a pianist’s left hand. He says that a jazz artist must spend at least a couple of decades in rigorous imitation of others before that person can hope to be original.
Most of education is history. Most professors are historians, no matter what their field is, passing on to one generation what previous generations figured out. The only way for one generation to make advances is for it to thoroughly understand and integrate what past generations have known.
Some people would say that there are times when we need a revolution. But the church historian, H. Richard Niebuhr once said, “The great Christian revolutions come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when somebody takes radically something that was always there.”
The Christian faith is inherently traditional, not because we are old-fashioned, but because we realize that in our tradition is our true revolutionary possibility. Remember how often the prophets of Israel criticize the present order first by calling Israel to “Remember…”
Today we remember our saints and seniors for the example they have set before us. They believed in God. In our struggles to be faithful to Christ, we are not left to ourselves and to our age. We have the examples, the models, the doctrine, the thoughts of those who have walked the path of faith before us.
When someone asks you, “Are you a spiritual?” Say to him, “Yes, I am very spiritual because I practice my faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who remain steadfast with the promise of peace and righteousness.”
When someone asks you, “Are you religious?” Say to her, “Yes, I am very religious because I practice my faith in Jesus Christ who in accordance to scriptures died for our sins, buried, and on the third day appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.”
When someone asks you, “Are you a Christian?” Say to him, “Yes, I am very much of a Christian because I received my faith in Christ from the saints and seniors at the First Chinese Baptist Church.”
The church is not excited that people have faith; rather, we want to know what people have faith in. And the way we receive faith in God is not to think that we already have all the answers from our own insights, but to submit to the guidance and gifts of the saints and seniors. From their examples, we make our way in the world.
Learning from the Saints
Fred Craddock tells of preaching a Lenten sermon on ways in which we deny Jesus. He recounts an incident that took place late one night in Nashville in the early 1960s. Craddock, a student at the time, was seated in the corner of a diner. He watched many white people be seated. They were quickly served fresh food. Then a tired African American came in, but was not given a seat. Instead he stood in a back corner and waited a long time to be recognized.
The cook reached to the back of the grill, took an old, shriveled hamburger patty that had been sitting in the grease, and put it on a plain bun. He handed it to the man without any condiments. The black man limped outside, and sat on the curb, where the road grit thrown up by the passing ten-wheeler became the salt and pepper for the sandwich. Craddock reflected on his own silence during this incident and concluded, “I heard the cock crow.”
After the service, a lawyer who appeared to be thirty-five years old said to Professor Craddock, “What is this about a rooster crowing in Nashville in the middle of the night. I didn’t know they allowed chickens inside the city limits of Nashville anymore.”
The lawyer was not familiar with the role of the cock in the story of Peter’s denial of Jesus. Consequently, the force of the ending of Craddock’s story was lost on the attorney.
We live in a time when many are malformed about the Christian tradition. And when we don’t appreciate our traditions and the saints and seniors who serve as examples and models of believing today, we are only left with faith in our own human development.
Faith is Intergenerational
Faith is not just a personal attribute to have. Faith in God is not a solitary endeavor that you do alone. Rather, Christianity is an intergenerational thing. From the very beginning, our challenge has not been simply to keep the faith but to pass it on to the next generation.
In Revelations 21, John sees,
“a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.”
Our images of our faith are drawn from the hopes and expectations of Israel. Our newness always stands on the shoulders of the past. Our hopes for the future are all based on the promises of God to those who came before us.
On this day when we traditionally celebrate Thanksgiving and our appreciation to the seniors in our midst, we are thankful for the traditions of faith of our fathers and mothers that they had in God. When you are having your turkey lunch today, go up to one of our seniors and thank him or her for their faithfulness in God.
When we ask ourselves whether we are spiritual or religious or what we should believe or what we should think, we should rather ask, “Whom should we trust?” For me, I have trusted all of my Sunday school teachers: Mrs. Wyatt, Mr. Norman, Mrs. Jordan and many more. I have trusted my pastors, Rev. Griffin, Rev. Dawson, Rev Congdon-Martin, and many others. I have trusted the dear seniors and saints who have blessed my life by serving as examples of how to be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ.
We believe that the way for our faith in God is to trust the saints—trust those who have gone before us. These are the people who model, not simply with their own insights, but their lives lived through many years proclaiming that Jesus Christ is Lord.
Let us pray.
O Lord, we praise you with thanksgiving for the many seniors and saints who have demonstrated through their long life the meaning of discipleship. Challenge us all today to follow their paths and to work for a world that makes sure everyone has enough to live. We pray in the name of Jesus, the Bread of Life. Amen.