Experiencing God: Crisis of Belief

"Experiencing God:  Crisis of Belief"
Acts 14:1-7

As a large part of the message this morning, I want to share the story of how Rosaria Butterfield heard God's invitation, and how she became a person of faith.  I don't know Rosaria.  I found her story on a website of people whose lives were transformed when they became a Christian.

I'll read a piece of Rosaria's story, then stop and make some comments based on one of the "seven realities" Henry Blackaby writes about in chapter 5 of Experiencing God.  Here's how Rosaria starts out her story:

The word Jesus stuck in my throat like an elephant tusk; no matter how hard I choked, I couldn't hack it out. Those who professed the name commanded my pity and wrath. As a university professor, I tired of students who seemed to believe that "knowing Jesus" meant knowing little else. Christians in particular were bad readers, always seizing opportunities to insert a Bible verse into a conversation with the same point as a punctuation mark: to end conversation rather than deepen it.

Stupid. Pointless. Menacing. That's what I thought of Christians and their god Jesus, who in paintings looked as powerful as a Breck Shampoo commercial model.

As a professor of English and women's studies, on the track to becoming a tenured radical, I cared about morality, justice, and compassion. Fervent for the world-views of Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, I strove to stand with the disempowered. I valued morality. And I probably could have stomached Jesus and his band of warriors if it weren't for how other cultural forces buttressed the Christian Right...

After my tenure book was published, I used my post to advance the understandable allegiances of a leftist lesbian professor. My life was happy, meaningful, and full...

I began researching Religious groups and their politics of hatred. To do this, I would need to read the one book that had, in my estimation, gotten so many people off track: the Bible. While on the lookout for some Bible scholar to aid me in my research, I launched my first attack on the unholy trinity of Jesus, Republican politics, and patriarchy, in the form of an article in the local newspaper about Promise Keepers. It was 1997.

(Inside, though) I was a broken mess. I did not want to lose everything that I loved. But the voice of God sang a sanguine love song in the rubble of my world.

The article generated many rejoinders, so many that I kept a Xerox box on each side of my desk: one for hate mail, one for fan mail. But one letter I received defied my filing system. It was from the pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. It was a kind and inquiring letter. Ken Smith encouraged me to explore the kind of questions I admire: How did you arrive at your interpretations? How do you know you are right? Do you believe in God? Ken didn't argue with my article; rather, he asked me to defend the presuppositions that undergirded it. I didn't know how to respond to it, so I threw it away.

One of the "Seven Realities" that Blackaby brings up in chapter 5 of Experiencing God is that God's invitation to join him always leads to a crisis of belief that requires faith and action.  In other words, God is going to make you think.

But it's not a kind of thinking where you're sitting in your barcalounger ruminating and cogitating about some philosophical religious falderal.  Instead it's the kind of thinking that forces you to ask some basic questions about two fronts of your life.  First, belief in God.  Do you believe in God and do you believe God?  Notice that question doesn't have to do with God.  It has to do with you.

So, if you are serious about asking yourself that question, and answering it, that will bring you to the crisis of belief that Blackaby mentions in this chapter.  Do you believe or not?  And notice the two different shades of questions that I asked:  Do you believe IN God?  And, Do you BELIEVE God.  You ask yourself those two questions, and you will very much find yourself in a crisis of belief.  If you say, "Yes" to both of those questions, then what does that mean for your life, how you're going to live, the choices you make?  If you answer "No," then what does that mean?  They are two very basic questions that you can't avoid.

They were questions that a perceptive pastor asked Rosaria, not to get into an argument with Rosaria, but for her to understand she's not going to get away with little self-reflection about where she was at with God.  So, let's hear some more about this crisis of faith that came upon Rosaria.

Later that night, I fished the (pastor's) letter out of the recycling bin and put it back on my desk, where it stared at me for a week, confronting me with the worldview divide that demanded a response. As a postmodern intellectual, I operated from a historical materialist worldview, but Christianity is a supernatural worldview. Ken's letter punctured the integrity of my research project without him knowing it.

With the letter, Ken initiated two years of bringing the church to me, a heathen. Oh, I had seen my share of Bible verses. That Christians who mocked me...were happy that I and everyone I loved were going to hell was clear as blue sky. That is not what Ken did. He did not mock. He engaged. So when his letter invited me to get together for dinner, I accepted. My motives at the time were straightforward: Surely this will be good for my research.

Something else happened. Ken and his wife, Floy, and I became friends. They entered my world. They met my friends. We did book exchanges. We talked openly about sexuality and politics and faith. They did not act as if such conversations were polluting them. They did not treat me like a blank slate. When we ate together, Ken prayed in a way I had never heard before. His prayers were intimate. Vulnerable. He repented of his sin in front of me. He thanked God for all things. Ken's God was holy and firm, yet full of mercy. And because Ken and Floy did not invite me to church, I knew it was safe to be friends.

I started reading the Bible. I read the way a glutton devours food. I read it many times that first year in multiple translations. At a dinner gathering my partner and I were hosting, my friend J cornered me in the kitchen. She put her large hand over mine. "This Bible reading is changing you, Rosaria," she warned.

With tremors, I whispered, "J, what if it is true? What if Jesus is a real and risen Lord? What if we are all in trouble?

J exhaled deeply. "Rosaria," she said, "I was a Presbyterian minister for 15 years. I prayed that God would heal me, but he didn't. If you want, I will pray for you."

The "what if?" questions that Rosaria was voicing to her friend is the crisis of faith that Blackaby says we will experience if we are seriously entertaining God's invitation to join Him.  All the years of Rosaria's dealing with Jesus by not dealing with him are now up for question.  The crisis of faith is now fully engaged.  What if she was wrong all those years?  What if she was wrong about Jesus?  What if what she read about Jesus in the Bible is true?  All of us have to answer that crisis-creating question.  God will not allow us to do otherwise.  We all have to go through the crisis of faith in order to experience God.

Here's more of Rosaria's story:

I continued reading the Bible, all the while fighting the idea that it was inspired. But the Bible got to be bigger inside me than I. It overflowed into my world. I fought against it with all my might. Then, one Sunday morning, I rose from my bed...and an hour later sat in a pew at the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church...

I fought with everything I had.
I did not want this.
I did not ask for this.
I counted the costs. And I did not like the math on the other side of the equal sign.

But God's promises rolled in like sets of waves into my world. One Lord's Day, Ken preached on John 7:17: "If anyone wills to do [God's] will, he shall know concerning the doctrine..." (NKJV). This verse exposed the quicksand in which my feet were stuck. I was a thinker. I was paid to read books and write about them. I expected that in all areas of life, understanding came before obedience. And I wanted God to show me, on my terms, why I was a sinner. I wanted to be the judge, not one being judged.

But the verse promised understanding after obedience. I wrestled with the question: Did I really want to understand (my sin) from God's point of view, or did I just want to argue with him? I prayed that night that God would give me the willingness to obey before I understood. I prayed long into the unfolding of day. When I looked in the mirror, I looked the same. But when I looked into my heart through the lens of the Bible, I wondered, Am I a sinner, or has this all been a case of mistaken identity? If Jesus could split the world asunder, divide marrow from soul, could he make my true identity prevail? Who am I? Who will God have me to be?

Remember, I said earlier that the crisis of belief comes at us from two directions.  The second direction, the second crisis of faith has to do with belief in yourself.  The heart of this part of the crisis of faith has to do with the question, Are you doubting that you can do what God is asking you to do?  Do you know who you are, and what you're here for, and if you don't, how are you going to find out?

And here is another question that fits in here:  Do you believe in yourself as much as God believes in you?  We talk a lot about how important it is to believe in God.  But we don't talk enough about how God believes in us.  If God didn't believe in you, He wouldn't ask you to join Him in His work.

Believing in someone is to love them.  I found this version of 1 Corinthians 13--the love chapter--that I really like.  1 Corinthians 13:7, in the "Easy To Read Version" says:  "Love never gives up on people.  It never stops believing in them, loses hope, and never quits."

Believing in someone doesn't mean you believe they can do anything they set their mind to.  Believing in someone doesn't mean they look up to you, although that may be a part of it.   To say you believe in God is saying more than you know God exists.  To believe in God is to have confidence in God, to esteem God, to trust God.  Aren't we saying the same thing to someone when we say we believe in them?  In other words, we love them.  And that's what God means when God believes in us.  Even if we don't believe in God, God always believes in us.  And there's the crisis:  do we believe that?

Here's the last little piece of Rosaria's story:

Then, one ordinary day, I came to Jesus, openhanded and naked. In this war of world-views, Ken was there. Floy was there. The church that had been praying for me for years was there. Jesus triumphed. And I was a broken mess. Conversion was a train wreck. I did not want to lose everything that I loved. But the voice of God sang a sanguine love song in the rubble of my world. I weakly believed that if Jesus could conquer death, he could make right my world. I drank, tentatively at first, then passionately, of the solace of the Holy Spirit. I rested in private peace, then community, and today in the shelter of a covenant family, where one calls me "wife" and many call me "mother."  (Rosaria Champagne Butterfield is the author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert.)

That's what it all comes down to--working through the crisis of faith God's invitation to join him ultimately brings, with all the questions I've brought up.  That crisis demands at one point, faith, and then action.  Because, how you respond to God and God's invitation reveals what you truly believe about God.  What has your response told God what you think of Him?  As you think about that question, watch out.  You might be headed towards a crisis of belief.