Grown Up Faith…

In college, one of my religion professors shared his faith story with us.  I have never forgotten it.  He said, “When I was five, God was five.  He was beside me when I buried my puppy that was run over by a truck in the backyard.  He understood my grief and sorrow.  When I was thirteen and awkward, God was thirteen.  He assured me I was loved even when I was rejected by the in-crowd.  When I was twenty and a newlywed, God was twenty, guiding me in the ways of love, serving, and giving.” 

He continued this vein up to his present age.  I will never forget his closing lines: “God is always ready to meet me wherever I am in life.  And when I am old and can no longer walk or stand, God will be there as well.” 

His testimony has stuck with me for a long time.  For any relationship to be healthy, it must grow in understanding and change to adapt to new life circumstances.  The same is true with our relationship with God.  Now, I believe the character of God does not change, but our understanding of him does.  When I grew up, Jesus was a white male with a beard and flowing hair.  I was in college before I realized Jesus’ skin was probably brown and his hair, whatever its color, was not flowing in the wind.   

I talk to people who have given up on church.  If we talk long enough, I hear the God of their childhood did not grow up.  Sometimes I think we do not want God to grow up.  It is safe to think of Jesus as the kind man with children sitting on his lap.  If Jesus is instead a risen King, that means he has authority over us.  Most of us, especially if you are an American, do not like to be told what to do.   

But eventually, a grown-up crisis presents itself, and we need a grown-up faith.  Grown up faith is honest.  We tell God our anger, our fears, our hopes.  We do so knowing he hears us.  Grown up faith accepts there are answers we do not know, and perhaps we will never know.  Grown up faith comes to our Heavenly Father with humility.  We understand that our experience with God is real, but we honor other people and their experience with God.  We will not all like the same music or the same preachers, and that is okay.  We recognize there is no point in arguing about things that really do not matter, like which Bible translation is best. 

If you are a person of grown-up faith, you take the Bible seriously.  You do not twist its meaning to fit your agenda or to fit your politics.  A friend once told me, “The error of the liberal is to take what is black and white in the Bible and make it gray.  The error of the fundamentalist is to take what is gray in the Bible and make it black and white.”   

I think about my own faith journey.  There are sermons from thirty years ago that I wish I could take back.  I was young and pompous and had not lived enough life to coat my words with love and grace.  I would like to think I have matured, but the truth is I still struggle to divide my agenda from God’s agenda.  One of the marks of grown-up faith is humility and willingness to be open to what God is doing next. 

I also wish I had not presumed to understand people before hearing their story.  I remember the story of the woman caught in adultery.  When the religious leaders brought her before Jesus, they thought they knew her story.  Jesus’ classic response – after giving them a chance to present their case – was to tell them, “Let he who is among you without sin cast the first stone.”  Those who wanted to kill her, faded away and Jesus told the woman to go and sin no more.  The story reminds me that my own sin clouds how I see people.  I project onto people all kinds of garbage that originates within me.  Grown up faith does not do that.  Instead, grown up faith tries to see my own log in my eye before I try to remove the speck in someone else’s eye. 

I have followed Jesus since childhood, very imperfectly.  In so many ways, I am still a child in my faith.  But Jesus still beckons me to follow him and to grow a little more.