Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "Pathways to the Christian Faith "
Date: June 10, 2007
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  Galatians 1:11-24

I have a confession to make.  It’s not that I’m wearing denim jeans underneath my robe.  We’ve all been granted a special dispensation for that today.  No, my confession is that I flunked a faith test.

A few weeks ago, Newsweek magazine had an article on faith beliefs, with a little multiple choice quiz to test the readers’ knowledge of characters or names of sacred texts of major world religions.  Some questions dealt with matching characters in one column with events in another.  I did get Adam and Eve matched up with the serpent, and I got Noah matched up with pairs of animals.  I matched Jesus with Garden of Gethsemane and Paul with road to Damascus.  But in between those is where I failed.  I missed the part that there could be multiple answers.  Yes, Paul had his conversion experience while on the road to Damascus, but I, a Christian minister, failed to make the connection that Jesus was also involved as it was his voice Paul heard saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4) 

Paul makes mention today in his letter to the Galatians of his dramatic conversion, from being a Jewish persecutor of those who followed the Christian way, to being struck blind by God and hearing a heavenly voice.  After several days of blindness and not eating, his sight was restored when Ananais, a follower of Christ, came to him and prayed over him.  Saul was baptized as Paul and immediately began to proclaim in the synagogues Jesus as the Son of God.

Such a dramatic conversion to the Christian faith is one pathway followed by some not raised in the faith.  The author of today’s opening hymn, John Newton, was famous as an English captain of a slave-trading ship in the 18th century.  His hymn, Amazing Grace, is an autobiographical one, in which he truly credits the grace of God for saving a wretch such as he.

Illinois Senator Barack Obama is another person who came from no faith background to Christianity, in fact, to our own United Church of Christ.

Before I continue, I wish to offer a disclaimer.  By speaking of Barack Obama, I am not endorsing his presidential candidacy from this pulpit.  He may or may not be the Democratic nominee.  I have no idea at this point who I will be voting for in 2008.  Senator Obama is among the speakers who will speaking two weeks from yesterday at Synod in the City, a day-long event at the United Church of Christ’s 50th anniversary General Synod in Hartford, Connecticut.  There will be dozens of venues throughout the day, and at one of them he will be speaking of his Christian faith.  The denomination is careful not to appear as endorsing any one candidate over another in accordance with separation of church and state issues.

Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1961 to a Kansas-born mother and a Kenya-born father.  His father, Barack, Sr., who earned a doctorate in economics, was an atheist from a Muslim background.  His maternal grandparents dropped evangelical Protestantism for skeptical unbelief.  His mother, Ann, who later earned a doctorate in anthropology, mixed personal secularism with an anthropologist’s interest in religion as a cultural phenomenon.

Early in his life, Obama attended Catholic and Muslim schools in India.  Later, after earning his law degree, he worked in Chicago, where “he wanted to become a Christian before he became convinced that doing so with integrity would be possible for him.  Obama questioned whether joining a church would require him to suspend his critical reason or temper his passion for social justice.  Worshipping at Trinity United of Church of Christ [in Chicago; at 9,000 members, the largest congregation in our denomination], he listened to Jeremiah Wright, Jr.’s sermons and became friends with Wright, and he found assurance on both questions.

“Describing his baptism, he writes:  ‘It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear.  But kneeling before that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me.  I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.’”  (Christian Century, “Hope or Hype?” by Gary Dorrien, May 29, 2007, pp.25-27)

So we have heard so far of adults like Paul, formerly Saul, and John Newton, who had life-changing revelations as they converted to the Christian faith.  Obama was also an adult, but he describes his more like a journey toward Christianity:  “a choice and not an epiphany…”  I remember some students in seminary in the early ‘70s who believed themselves to be Christians, but had not yet been baptized, nor affiliated with any denomination.  They too, would likely experience a choice and not an epiphany.

What are the other pathways to the Christian faith?  A great number of us have experienced it, yet we do not remember its beginnings.  That was our baptism as an infant.  Our parents stood up and made a choice for us when we were too young to decide for ourselves.  By their pledge to raise us in a Christian home where we would come to know Jesus Christ as Savior, they set us out on a path.  It was formed and nurtured by pre-school teachers and Sunday School teachers right up through high school.  At confirmation age, ninth and tenth grades here, teens have an opportunity to affirm for themselves the choice their parents made for them when they were too young to remember.

Other churches, among them the Baptist Church and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in which Rev. Elaine was raised and ordained, practice believer’s baptism.  Occurring perhaps around age 12 or 13, the young person makes their own decision to be baptized in the faith and then is immersed, much as Jesus was in the River Jordan, in a large baptismal tank, usually behind the altar.  I personally believe infant baptism is just as valid, but believer’s baptism is much more dramatic and memorable.

In order to join the church as a member, you must have been baptized into the Christian faith at some time in your life.  That’s why you sometimes see me baptize two or three of our confirmands, or an adult prior to joining the church.  There is no one age that is more correct than another.

There are at least two ways to propel a person into the Christian faith:  through push and through pull.  You can push someone, plead with them, harangue them, prod them forward, stand behind them and shove them in the direction that you want them to go.

Or you can pull them, draw them forward, entice them toward what you or the church has to offer and the direction that might just be appropriate for their lives.

According to Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, Christ appears to work by the latter mode.  In love, Christ draws us toward himself, toward his will for our lives.  He lives, not against us, not pushing us from behind, but he lives in us.  Elsewhere, Paul asserted that “the love of Christ controls us.”  Christ works in us, transforms us, brings us forward toward himself on the pathway to the Christian faith, not by push, but by pull.