Saved by Faith –– Created for Good Works

[A slightly edited excerpt from a 2006 homily, Lent 4B, by Bill Lewellis, Eph. 2:4-10]

There was a time I thought faith and belief were simply two words for the same reality. I no longer think that. I have come to experience faith as quite different from belief.

Faith (belief in, trust) has to do with our relationship with a person. "Belief that" has to do only with intellectual assent. "Belief that" requires little more than a nod of the head and, perhaps, an occasional argument. Belief that God is Trinity, three persons in one divine nature, that God became incarnate as Jesus. that Jesus died on the cross, that God raised Jesus.

During the early 90s, our diocesan community invited Bishop William Frey, once bishop of the Diocese of Colorado, to spend a few days at various locations around our 14 counties in order to conduct an evangelism mission, a kind of diocesan renewal. One of the simple stories he told impressed me. He told it as a way to recognize the difference between believing in from believing that.

Imagine yourself in a crowd looking up at someone about to push a wheelbarrow along a tightrope stretched across two four-story buildings. “Believing that,” Bishop Frey said, is to wager $10 with someone near you that the man pushing the wheelbarrow will make it across the tightrope. "Believing in," on the other hand, is to put yourself in the wheelbarrow.

Faith includes believing in.

I believe in one God … And in one Lord Jesus Christ … And believe in the Holy Ghost the Lord, and Giver of Life.

Soon, in our service, we will pray the Creed. Creed, from the first word in the Latin version, Credo … “I believe.” If we go deeper into the Latin root on which the word is built, we discover the Latin word for heart, cor, readily seen in English words such as cardiac, cordial, courage and encourage.

With that in mind, think of what we are soon to say, I believe in God, as not so much a work of the mind as a matter of the heart. It helps me when I pray the Nicene Creed, when I say “I believe in God,” to think “I set my heart on God … I set my heart on Jesus Christ … I set my heart on the Holy Spirit.”

We may have long forgotten, I think, that the creed speaks to us of matters of the heart, not simply of matters of the mind and will. In today’s second reading, St. Paul reminds us of why.

The reading we heard today from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians includes words on which to set our hearts. Hear those words again: "By grace, you have been saved through faith, and this is not our own doing; it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast."

During this last quarter of my life, I’ve thought often that the hardest thing to accept about God’s relationship with you and me is not one or another of God’s marching orders to us, those strong verbs of God’s word such as “be, do, give, forgive, feed, clothe, go, sow, pray, judge not, fear not, love God with all your heart, love your neighbor as yourself, love your enemies, be reconciled, take up your cross, find your life by losing it for my sake…”

Those are not the hardest things. The hardest thing to accept about Gods relationship with us is that God loves us unconditionally, that we are saved by grace through faith, not by our own doing, by gift of God, not by our good works. That God loves us unconditionally is so hard to imagine. Can we trust God that much?

I wonder at times if I may not want unconditional love. The most secure grip the devil has on me has not to do with any doubts I may have about the Trinity or the Incarnation or the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit … nor with any sins I have committed through my refusal to allow gospel imperatives to direct my life. The devil’s last and best hope is my shred of pride that suggests I have done or can do something to earn God’s love … and so should others. Perhaps I don’t want God to love me unconditionally. For, if God does, then I know that is how I will need to relate to others … loving others as God has loved me.

I studied theology at a Jesuit university in Rome for four years during the early 1960s. The classrooms were large … more like lecture halls. One of the professors used to begin his course in this way. He paced back and forth on a raised platform. Behind the platform, a blackboard covered the entire wall. After a few trips back and forth, while studying the blank blackboard, he took a piece of chalk and, with one loud pound, made one white dot on the enormous blackboard. Turning, then, to the students, he said, “The white dot is what we know about God. The blackboard is what we don’t know about God. What we know about God is little. But the little we know about God is precious.”

With the passing of my years, I find that I focus more and more on the white dot. I tend to think of that as setting my heart on less, but more so. The less, however, is indeed precious. I set my heart on God who, in Jesus, became one of us. I set my heart on Jesus who is for me a window into the heart of God. I set my heart on the Holy Spirit who keeps me from turning that window into a mirror. I set my heart on God who has saved me as pure gift, not because of anything I have done. I set my heart on God who in Jesus has said, “Love one another as I have loved you.”

It is not by good works that we are saved. God saved us before we did any good work. At the same time, however, St. Paul, in this same reading we heard today, reminds us that, though God’s gift of salvation is not the result of any of our good works, God has created us for good works … that good works might be our way of life … not in order to earn God’s love but in response to God’s love.