What is faith?

I have a paragraph about sermon titles below but it is only peripherally related to the sermon. I wanted to think about what faith actually is. I don’t think very many of us hold to Mark Twain’s, I think, aphorism, “Faith is believing what you know isn’t true.”

So what is faith? In the end, I think I ducked the question a bit. The sermon came out of the Epistle reading, James 2:1-10, 14-17 which isn’t where we usually go to talk about faith but rather actions. But, no matter how much Martin Luther and others have tried to make Paul and James disagree they really don’t. What I ended up talking about was how what we do shows what we have faith in. We don’t use that phraseology very much. I don’t talk about the faith I have that my excellent car will work, I just get in and go . . . but that can still be a form of faith . . . and so can a lot of other things.

It’s another question for a sermon title! How completely not surprising. I can’t remember exactly when I realized how many of my sermon titles are questions, but it was a long time ago. At first, I was kind of worried about it. As I think about it now, I’m not sure what I was worried about. Whatever the worry was I realized I had stumbled upon something very important; important to me and simply important. If sermons don’t answer questions, at least now and then, are they doing any good? One of the parts of the good news I am called to preach is the answer to some questions. I don’t always have comprehensive answers. It is very possible some of my answers were wrong (I’m under no illusion that I have been given the burden of perfection).

“What is faith?” St. Mark’s Presbyterian (to download, right-click and select “Save Link As . . .”)

Blessings,