April 6, 2003
By Jack Price

Series: Stages of Faith (Growing Up in Faith)

(Conjunctive faith)

God is spirit, and those who worship must worship in spirit and truth.  The impact of these words on the lips of Jesus is multiplied when we hear them spoken to us by the risen Christ, as Professor Marcus Borg calls him, "The Post-Easter Jesus."  The Samaritan Woman at Jacob's Well encountered Jesus and, by the time their conversation was finished, hope had begun to grow in her.  She had been ostracized within her own community for having had multiple husbands and living with a man who was not her husband.  She was a Samaritan, a people ostracized as racial and religious outcasts by the Jews to their south and to their north.  She was surprised at first to be asked by a Jew to drink from her water bucket.  Then she was confused when Jesus offered her living water.  The conversation got personal when Jesus revealed knowledge of her situation.  She tried to pigeon-hole him as a "holy man" and to change the subject by asking him in an inflammatory theological question:  "Who is right, we Samaritans who claim this mountain as the holiest place or you Jews who claim it is Jerusalem?"

Over the last few weeks, we have been looking at the ways people grow and worship in spirit and truth, how faith develops throughout our lives.  Author James Fowler defines six developmental stages of faith beginning practically from birth.  Faith is much deeper than any religious system or religious belief.  Faith is the act of placing deepest trust; the often sub-conscious process by which we test our ultimate life choices.  As we grow to adulthood, many of us stay in stage 3 or stage 4 with regard to faith.  Stage three is characterized by receiving identity and direction from one's group:  from family or community.  Stage four is characterized by viewing that original system of meaning more objectively and critically, and by finding identity and direction from within the self. 

Then, just about the time we think we have gotten it all worked out in matters of faith, life challenges us to let go of long-held beliefs, comfortable philosophies, and familiar ways of being human -- to let go and grow, to expand thinking and expand living.  Life's meaning and a sense of the Ultimate is much bigger and interconnected than we can imagine. 

Jesus challenged the Samaritan woman that her theological question about where to worship God was really pointless.  True worship is a matter of Spirit and Truth.  Characteristic of stage 5 faith development is that truth is not the province of your perspective or of mine.  Though not all perspectives are equally true, all truth is organically connected to and connecting the many different perspectives, truths, and systems of people.   Stage 5 faith describes the emergence of a desire to embrace the truth of "both-and" more than choosing "either-or," of seeing the many dimensions of true simultaneously.  There is a deeply held feeling that the truths of life " are organically related to each other."  People in stage 5 attend to the interrelatedness of reality and trying to avoid forcing new or different perspective into "its own prior mind set."  Truth from the perspective of stage 5 faith is discovered through a kind of "dialogical knowing [in which] the known is invited to speak its own word in its own language, [in which] the multiplex structure of the world is invited to disclose itself."   

The United States is engaged is a military conflict in Iraq.  The deeper conflict is played out each day as coalition troops seek to press toward military goals while trying to protect civilians and ancient sacred structures against the critical eye of world public opinion.  Military leaders develop and give procedural directives to soldiers in the field, thereby taking responsibility for how this conflict is navigated.  Many nations around the world, for many and varying reasons, condemn our nation's choice to act unilaterally and militarily.  As a result, divisions have arisen that may cause significant problems for us in the years to come.  Within the Middle East, Arab and Islamic regimes feeling attacked by our actions and the promise of greater division and terrorism.  Americans are divided in the tension between supporting what clearly seems to be a just action of force to liberate a suffering people from the evil power that continues to brutalize them, while also questioning if there was a viable alternative to such action in the first place.  Truth has many facets and many faces.  The ability to see them simultaneously is the ability to be somewhat detached.  Detachment becomes more challenging when the loss of life increases the depth of passions.  Appropriate detachment rather than disinterested distance is a feature of the observer.  More importantly, in terms of faith, it is a feature of the depth of that observer's faith - that truth indeed has many faces.

Many of you are familiar with the Enneagram, an ancient Sufi circle of basic life energies that drive our behaviors.  There are nine faces within the circle, each with its own energy source.  Every person tends to connect most closely with one of these in terms of internal life energy.  The ability to stand within energies other than your own is the ability to "walk in another's shoes."  Rohr says the ancient Sufis believed anyone who could stand within all the nine energies simultaneously could actually look at the world with the face of God.  This is the perspective of stage 5 faith.

This weekend, members of this congregation have engaged in an Open Spaces retreat, individually and as a body seeking to discern the tug of God's Spirit for our lives as we make plans for the coming year.  The process of sharing ideas, engaging imagination, and making commitments is one of giving shape and structure to our dreams.  We are seeking "Spirit spaces," placing our lives in the flow of God's Spirit moving in the world today.  Faith's imagination is taking shape in part through the forming of groups within our congregational life to put these dreams into practice.  Both to celebrate the emerging shape of our ministry for the coming year and to give those of you who were not able to attend the retreat a chance to participate in the process, these new work groups are now going to introduce themselves to you.  Then, you are invited to get up and go investigate any groups that sound interesting to you, and possibly sign up to join them.  Then, you will be invited to return to your seats to conclude our worship. 

This Saturday, the Adopt-a-Neighborhood group invites you to a block party.  This will be a chance to get to know people in a neighborhood we hope will soon be involved in adopting a church.  You all are invited.  The aim of the party is more organic than programmatic.  The goal of the ministry is to develop program, direction, and procedure out of relationship.  Stage 5 faith recognizes that meaningful ministry flows out of relationship, thrives in the organic connecting of people, and expresses itself in different facets and through many faces.  Life becomes rich with meaning when we open ourselves to the Spirit's movement.  Spirit enlivens this community when we open the space for her to flow among us.  Let us live by faith.