Drastic Acts of Faith and How to Avoid Them

Ok, it's blog-sermon time. In college class at church this morning, we were talking about the story where Jesus asks the rich man to sell everything and give it to the poor.

I think we often miss the point when we talk about stories where people do (or are asked to do) something drastic for their faith. When we talk about somebody who abandoned everything or suffered torture for God, we're really good at finding ways to make it irrelevant.

We can make drastic faith irrelevant by a yokelish dismissal of the unusual -- just blink very emphatically and refuse further consideration because it's so extreme. Which is silly, of course. The unusual is not the impossible; somebody really does this, and if it isn't us, whose fault is that?

Or, similarly, we can neutralize stories we don't want to be part of by the generous and broadminded strategy of calling them metaphorical and/or highly instructive for our lives and stopping there. But metaphor and instruction point somewhere, so if we want to use those labels to get out of anything, we're just stalling. "Sell everything you have and follow me," if it's a metaphor, probably isn't a metaphor for "Go to church a couple times a week and give 10% of your money." And Mother Teresa's life, if it's instructive, probably isn't teaching us, "Watch documentaries about the poor and feel piously queasy." We can't dismiss scary faith stories as instructional but not actually pertaining to anything scary on our end.

A far more cunning evasive strategy is to go head on, take the most daunting moments of sacrifice to be our example, and then search the tortured depths of our own psyches for the strength to give up absolutely everything -- while in fact giving up absolutely nothing. That makes us feel like we're for real, but it keeps the combat safely psychological. We've got the guts to consider seriously the possibility of martyrdom. Whoo. But how does that help anybody? It doesn't, of course, and it doesn't help us either (if we stop there), because if we don't think we could do it, we'll be discouraged, and if we do think we could do it, we'll be proud. Considering whether we could do things that we're not actually going to do in the foreseeable future can be a convenient dead-end.

Considering what we can do now is more hazardous and more right. Whether or not we think we could die for God if it came to that, there's no question that we could show our loyalty to him in less climactic ways. It is right sometimes to consider whether we could give it all up, but no matter where we get with that, we can go on to do something real. If we think we couldn't do anything really dangerous for God and that's discouraging, we can build strength by doing small things. If we think we could give up everything, but no breakneck Godquest is in sight, we can prove our willingness by small sacrifices -- and that attempt tends to bring humility.

This last bit may seem like another cop-out, but I don't think it is. Doing small things doesn't mean that total sacrifice is out of the picture at all. It could still come up, or we could still actively pursue a more drastic life of service. But it seems to me that the people who express dedication in the details are the most ready for total sacrifice. And I think that's what the parable of the talents is getting at -- we've got to be faithful in small things before we're entrusted with big things. Which is why serving in the details is doubly hazardous: First, it's real work by itself (unlike the aforementioned shirkings), but then it also might give God room to ask us for something even more dangerous.

But it's what we need to do if we mean our faith. Yup, pretty much. I even try doing it sometimes in rare fits or courage or when I haven't thought it through. :-p

(P.S. I don't think I have a career ahead of me in motivational speaking.)