Believe!

SCRIPTURE TEXT:  John 11:1-45; SERMON SERIES:  Living Out Our Baptismal Calling; Rev. Monte Marshall

Good morning Travis Park!  What a great day this is!  As you will notice in the newsletter, a new senior pastor is coming to Travis Park beginning July 1.  His name is Eric Vogt.  He is currently the senior pastor of Servant Church in Austin.  Eric’s wife, Valerie, who is also on ordained elder, will join Pastor Billie and other members of our church staff as a ¼ associate pastor.  Eric and Valerie will be joined by their two young sons, Caleb and Jacob. 

I want you to know that the Vogts are not only outstanding pastors, but dear friends.  In fact, Valerie was my associate during the last year I served in Pflugerville.  Knowing that they’re headed this way takes a load off my mind as I prepare for retirement at the end of June.  I’m confident that this church—meaning all of you, the people I’ve come to love—will be in good hands.  So thank you, God!  PRAYER

The words, “I believe,” can be incredibly powerful.  A case in point:  Long after the end of World War II, an inscription was found on the walls of a cellar in the town of Cologne, Germany.  The cellar had been a hiding place for thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi brutality. On the cellar walls, beneath a Star of David, one person wrote: “I believe in the sun even when it’s not shining.  I believe in love even when I don’t feel it.  I believe in God even when God is silent.”[1]  The words, “I believe,” can be incredibly powerful.

As we’ve just seen, the two words, “I believe,” appear three times in the baptismal liturgy of The United Methodist Church.   Each time the words are spoken, they are followed by statements from the so-called, Apostles’ Creed, a summary of Christian beliefs whose current form dates to the eighth century of the Common Era.[2]  This practice mirrors the baptismal process of the early church in which candidates for baptism on Easter were required to memorize certain basic tenets of Christian teaching.[3]

In the years since my own baptism in 1953, I’ve come to realize that there is a dark side to attaching the words “I believe” to statements like those contained in the Apostles’ Creed.   One of the problems is that creedal statements are often presented as certitudes, with no room for doubt or question.  Pastor Robin Meyers notes that “absolute certainty eliminates the need for faith…. It needs nothing beyond itself.  It is entirely self-possessed.”  In Meyers view: “Certainty turns truth into dogma and goes through life in search of question marks that can be turned into periods—or better yet, exclamation points.”[4] 

  I readily acknowledge the dark side of creedal statements.  I see the limitations of the Apostles’ Creed in terms of its language and its content.  But strangely enough, I find myself deeply grateful that the creed has served as one of the theological markers pointing me to God the Creator, Jesus the Christ, and the Holy Spirit.  I now understand that in saying the words “I believe,” there is so much more implied than just giving intellectual assent to a set of certitudes.  When I say those words, I’m talking about trusting and entrusting my life to the reality pointed to by the creed, or, as one commentator has said, “I’m believing into” the one God at work as creator, Christ and Spirit.[5]    And this “believing into” is still shaping my life.  In this sense, I find the words “I believe” to be incredibly powerful.

And speaking of the power of these two words, consider this morning’s text from John’s gospel.  John presents the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead as the seventh in a series of narrated signs.  In fact, it is the final sign John offers as Jesus moves toward the cross.  Each of the signs invites people to say, “I believe.”

John makes this clear in the story.  At one point in the narrative, Jesus portrays the death of Lazarus as an opportunity for his disciples to believe.  Elsewhere in the story, Jesus says to Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life.  Whoever entrusts their life to me”—or believes in me, as other translations put it—“even though they die, yet they will live.  And everyone who is alive and entrusts their life to me shall not die in the age to come.”  Jesus then asks: “Do you believe this?”  Later in the story, Jesus says to Martha: “Did I not say to you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”  After praying a prayer in which he acknowledges his desire that the gathered crowd “might believe,” Jesus then raises Lazarus from the dead.  Given the framework of this story, it appears that the words “I believe” are a gateway to life!

Rev. Gail Miller says that John’s story raises a key question for us.  She writes:

When you can no longer go on

when it looks as though all is lost

over and done…

when you are staring death in the face

when you are lying in a tomb

what do you ultimately believe about the power of Christ

and what will it mean for you?[6]

This is what believing meant to Navy pilot, Eugene “Red” McDaniel:  In 1967, during the Vietnam War, McDaniel’s plane was shot down over North Vietnam.  He ended up in the notorious POW camp called the Hanoi Hilton.  In this tomb-like place, “death” came in the form of torture, beatings, isolation and denial of food.

But for many of the prisoners, believing sustained life.  McDaniel writes: “On Sunday mornings, we worshipped…together, tapping our clandestine worship through the walls.  We found bits and pieces of scripture buried deep inside our minds and shared them with one another—missing words, missing lines, passages paraphrased.  We prayed together through the walls.”

In 1969, a crisis came for McDaniel.  After enduring seven nights of torture, he was close to giving up.  He writes: “I became dimly aware that I wasn’t going to make it after all.  All the positive thinking, optimism and hope I had so carefully nurtured for two long years was exhausted.  I was going to die.  And death would be welcomed.

“As I knelt crumpled on the floor in my own blood and wastes, I found myself yielding control to God…unconditionally.  There was no more human resolve or pride or tenacity of spirit—just surrender: ‘Lord…it’s all yours…whatever this means, whatever You have in mind now with all of this, it’s all Yours.’”

It was then, in the midst of his “I believe” moment, that life came forth from death: “Kneeling there, empty before God, I was overwhelmed by the sheer awesomeness of [God’s] presence and profound awareness that [God] was forging a deeper dimension of faith and commitment in my life.”[7]

The words “I believe” can be incredibly powerful.  This we know from the inscription on a cellar wall in Cologne, Germany, from the baptismal liturgy of The United Methodist Church, from John’s story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead; and from “Red” McDaniel’s witness to the power of believing in his own experience as a POW in the Hanoi Hilton.  The question now is to us:  Do we believe?  Thanks be to God.  Amen.