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wpAITH AS. ADVENTURE" \ae BETHANY PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Gendsié |12;!-4 A\\* « LAFAYETTE, INDIANA
ni JOHN M._BUCHANAN

February 25, 1973
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Our religion is so staid, so comfortable, so much a part of the general status quo,

that the words faith and adventure just don't seem to have much to do with each other.
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We take our religion with varying degrees of serlousness and live It with varying levels

of commitment, but one thing it is not for most_of_us Is an adventure.\\ Adventure assumes

an element of danger and risk, striking out into an unknown situation \ Adventure means
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the possibility of excitement, new experiences, new faces, new relationships\ More eften
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+hen not adventure means moving from one place to another ;\ when | think about the word |

connect it to being put on a train to Philadelphia when | was seven years old, or traveling

across the country alone when | was sixteen: L_-retate—+4+—te—spending-24-exciting—pet
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one; dependent-en-my~ sett —-whtte-on

~this <omner- anew definition of edven duce

thadeitp .\ | relate it to packing my family in the car and going on vacation.\ But mostly
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you and | experience adventure vicariously, that is To say - second handed, in movies and

books and in the private world of tantasy.\ And for most of _us it takes a bit_of _imagina-

tion to relate +he idea of adventure with the Idea of religious faith in any way whatever .
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We have not been helped much by the Church and its institutional Lite.\ Theteesemesteors
mvek egertement gene rated on mest Chercles . in Fact, me ervfic ef The tn ote Coben chor hag

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We have been thinking thiesmeeth about a positive concept of salvation, focusing on

the idea that God wants us +o become whole men, complete, fultitied.\ We've thought about

Jesus' imperative to his disciples, "You must be perfect". | wetve talked about Jonathan
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Livingston Seagul!, and the paralytic whom Jesus told to get up and walk. We've concluded
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that God has said "Yes" to life In Jesus Christ and that we may say "Yes" to our lives.
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We've recalled that the Biblical idea of salvation is to be delivered from something;

‘in the Old Testament, from your enemies;\in. the New Testament, from sin and death. \ But
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+hat in both Instances being saved also means to become something you were not before.

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Man's response to God's gift cf salvation - whether we mean his saving of Israel at

—— ———

the Red Sea, or his saving of all men in Jesus Christ - fs faith \ Faith is man's answer

to God's gracious activity.\\ Faith is the act of seizing, claiming, celebrating and living
——~_—_ —_—-§_— iii —T

the salvation God has given.\ And that stance - the stance of faith, |! am suggesting - is

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essentially an adventure.

And yet | know, even as | say it, that | have some convincing to do\ Because the

fact is that faith for us means a kind of passive assumption that everything will be 0.K,

someday: | or it means giving intellectual assent to certain theological concepts \or, in

the words of a schoolboy quoted by Leslie Weatherhead Wraith is believing what you know to
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be untrue. CPae-Ghrte+-ensignesttep Rea2s | )

Faith as adventure? Let's look.

Faith is first defined in the Bible by the venerable patriarch Abranan | Jews and

Christians know him as the "Father of the Faith.\ His credentia!s? \ He wasn't much of a
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Sine
theo log ian:| Abrahan sensed that God wanted him to gather up his belongings and his
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immediate family and pack off into the desert.\ It meant cutting all ties with the familiar
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and comfortable status quo.\ It involved making a hard decision and then carrying it out

with only God's promise that there was a future out there for him somewhere | That promise =

wevtd \p< yhor Ws werd
that there fe a land oesb=bese for seu - that your family wii become a great_nation -

was Abraham's salvation Nand his willingness to say "Yes" to the adventure, to pack up and
One writer ;

g0, is the primal Biblical model of faith.\ Jemes-Wheeten put it this way:\"Faith for

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Abraham was no mere exercise in believing impossible or unlikely things \ For him, faith

was trust translated into specific action at considerable cost." "T i",

October S172 P= 6)

Centuries later a similar incident happened involving Jesus Christ and a crippled
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man, and again faith is expressed in terms of edventure. \ 1 ‘ve always been intrigued by
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this story - so let's think for a moment about it.

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The scene is the pool called Bethzatha in Jeresalem, a very beautiful setting
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@Pecheologists believe they have recovered in deep excavations beneath Jeresalem's church
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af St. Anne. | The pool was surrounded by ballistrades and five porches - and its waters
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which were fed by an underground spring were believed to have curative povers.| When the

Spring began to flow the waters became troubled and turned a rusty red color \ Pagan

superstition had it that a focal detty was responsible for troubling the waters and that

The first person into the pool fatlowing the disturbance would be healed of whatever phys

sical problems he h d toh \TA + lated the P D int Ange!
p e é happened to have e Jews translated the agan Deity Into the Ange

of the Lord and retained the belief in the heal ing power of the pool.
And so it was that the five porches around the pool were filted with people, crippled,

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old, sick=waiting, some alone, some with their families, for the disturbence.| And when

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it happened we can Imagine the frantic scrambling and limping and crawling to, get into the

water,

some ~ the severely crippled, for instance, never had a chance \ Always pushed aside
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at the last minute, they never made {+ to the water in Hime \ One man, the Gospel] of John

relates, had been there for 38 years.\ We can admire his tenacity and yet we can deduce

that if he hadn't made it in all those years the odds were that he wasn't ever going to make
——

it.

Along cama a stranger,a kind and loving man from Nazareth, known as a heater And

‘ kind
Wes bead of offering te help the crippled man into the water he asked a rather “mete and fn-
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appropriate question: "Do you want to be noated"?| Welt, of course the man wanted to be

nealed - he had invested 38 years of his life pursuing that very goal.

And yet, perhaps that's not the whole truth about this ran.\ There was, after ali,

something to be sald for lying on the porch \ It wasn't posh, by any means. \ But it was

secure and safe.\ It was cool in the shadows and a man could count on the sympathy of

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passers-by for food and alms. \ 1 think ifs at least a possibility that somewhere in the

course of those 38 years this man had made a bargain with fate, that he had made his peace
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with the status quo, that he had long since given up any real interest fF making It to the

pool on time, even though he went through the motions every time the disturbance occurred.
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| think fFts at teast possible that this man had settled in for the duration and was dis~

2=iSing the truth about himself by engag ity in the ritual of waiting beside the poo! «\ 1

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think Jesus saw that immediately and when he asked the man ff he wanted to be healed he
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mean, "Do you really want to be healed?"
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Jesus told the man to take up his pallet and waik, which Is what he aig. \ and if

we're correct in our deductions about him, it would have been a great adventure with lots

of danger, risk and uncertainty.

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To have faith, to grasp and live one's salvation In the Bible is to change - to change
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one's attitude and self assessment and one's pehavior.\ 14 is to leave old attitudes, oid

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behavior patterns, and sometimes old places, behing and strike gut into something new.

Te smimenanihammanend”

Abraham and the man beside the pool had to_part ways with the status quo and do something

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they weren't sure they wanted to do.\ And lfm suggesting that they are two_prototypes of
the word faith.

And yet everything in us seems to resist that kind of radical deporturdl Things may

not be as good as we wish, but the status-quo always appeers preferable to the unknown,

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the new, the adventures mo. \\ am reminded of a story my father told me and insisted was
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true, afthough | donft think it vos \ In any case if involved a Railroad engineer with

whom he worked and who every day of his life a‘ bologna, sandwiches for tunch | And every

day he would complain about the bologna sandwiches, how tired he was of them, how he hated

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the taste of bologna \ One day, the story went, my father asked why he didn't tell his

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wife and suggest cheese or peanut putter) And the_crusty old engineer toid my father to

mind his own pusiness:\he had been making his own lunch for years.

True or not, it jliustrates the way we use rituals to hidathe truth about ourselves
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and toavoid the threat of adventure ~ even in matters so insignificant as 4 new choice of
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sandwich.

Think. for a minute about Marriage and Fant ty.\ We are unaminous In two assertions:
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one, that marrigge and family are the most important relationshipswhich we experience

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and that a priority {tem for all of us is to have Joyful, healthy, satisfying marriages
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and fanilies\\twe, we can agree that both marriage and family are under considerable pres-

sure today from a culture that is rapidly changing But the third assertion, which ought

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to foljow - namely, that we heed To give loving and nuturing attention to marriage and

family relationships is not one about which we generate much steam. \ And why? \Because to
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work at a marital relationship - to really try to_make a family a joyful, life giving
entity involves a certain:element of risk and danger.\it can be an adventure. \ It might

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mean joining a group, attending a class, seeking professional peip\ it might mean changing

attitudes, schedules, behavior patterns:\it might mean altering familtar Ideas of what it

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means to be a man or woman it might possibly mean being honest about one's own feelings

it might even mean altering traditional and comfortable definition of roles\ But} don't

see it happening \ | see a fot of ritualized hiding from reality | see a lot of hand
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wringing about the family and a lot of complaining about marriage - and that's alj.4 It's
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almost as if we prefer t#tmisery of the status quo rather than the potential adventure

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of growing as men and women.
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Or think about the whote matter of personal goals in litah The philesopher Wil Liam

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James once observed that people conteact "the habit of inferiocity to our fuJ| self", |

and asa result the human individual tives usually far within his linits:\ne possesses

powers of various sorts which he habituaily falls to use| He energizes below his _ maximum

and he hehaves below his eetimn" | That's true of most of us, | think. \ there Is no one
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here who doesn't have a dream, a goal \s skill Il to be re tined \ courses to be taken \ travel
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To be experienced Ae vocation to be chosen) or perhaps just a stack of books to be read.

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But the status quo with all its dead weight sets in| We go through the motions of

pursuing the goal, but it's become a ritual with us\, White | was in Divinity Schoo! | bre

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a student, a middle-age man with five children, who quit his job as a Civil Engineer and

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moved into cramped student housing in order to become something he had always wanted fo be -
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a minister of the Gospel \ sis future was vaknown: Yrhe risks and dangers of his adventure

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were daily matters with him and his family. But | haven't known many like him.

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Or think finally about our experience of religious faith Tisett\ wets itted
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to the Church, more or toss.| ane yet, when we're honest, we can admit that we wish our

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faith had more meaning, more vitality, more undergirding power.\ And sometimes we use the
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rituals of religion to hide from any real adventure of faith.
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“Tiet idea es cate per rated teyslang on @ Wee Lope patehap— Car tom. series

A wie vee c wets C

Linus

¥: fe: Peet ss Sop geet rd tha andres of seve rat Smet? cheldren 2h ey Bit Lah Peeled Flew
drags his biankeF around with Aim as a source of security — when-ft_Is in the washing

cgrtien Py th the fordles and aes sfc, ammy adetis — omeet. fh TE Aca G fe fig tek

machine he” experiences severe anxiety: end when it seems to be lost he Is in a mild panic.

Life seems iImpossibie without it\ One time Lucy, the eternal protagonist, tells him
ife seems Imp ou @ y pb g

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"Linus, you can't depend on that blanket forever. \Sooner or later you'll find that out."

-&

And the next picture shows Linus with the blanket over his head extending all the way

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jo the floor.

Welt, the comfortable rituals of institutional retigion sometimes serve the same
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purpose as Linus's blanket. \ trey provide a sense ot security: ‘Niro polaeas se to avoid any

adventure of faith, any step inte the unknown. | bbbe—e ae eee Sproat
betre. meets —fed time ~ Seine reed. ; aresas - Same PeaeEr> we eee Fad anc faopek

| would suggest that prayer will continue to be an empty

ritual until we risk something - until we risk exposing our discomfort and enbarrassnent:|
Leann ee

shar. wf Gd Our or Auinls ¥de Deer — eee says 7 Cee bor age — Perera dota
Ca came Brea ot Saipan tome CCST wrestling with God ourselves:

struggling with he dangerous idea that there is a God who hears us and has something to

——

say back to us,

De we dare to engage in_honest Bible study - or are we content with the empty ritua{
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of adorning our sanctuary with it, and listening patitely as the minister reads the text

Ye wobistied
for the day? Do we dare the adventure of honest sacrifice ~ or are we willing TO rere eee

wits Abn oued G feu Pewnes @ wark
wemmininan: OF Comfortable stewardship at friodeiters weet?

Fada oe ibm adventure ="
Do we dare to take Jesus Christ serfously? \ To do so means to grow. \ i+ means to

feel more: =a oe meets it involves becoming sensitive to the
bet al — ne neal

hurts of our brother and sisters:\it beads inevitably to a stance of commitment to the
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welfare of others and involvement jn the world where The common welfare is determined.
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God calts us to that. \in Jesus Christ he calls us away from the status quo and To a
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life of adventure. \! found recently a series of smal! reflections that attempt to para-

phrase Jesus! teachings: [the one on Life says it all:

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[Net not the night find you still waiting

to live, sti!) teo cautious to invest your
erin: MLE

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life, still not ready te begin the task of

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beconing \ For life waits not, it hurries by
and whispers "Come along! '\you can either join
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the celebration or simply stand and stare
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as all your todays become yesterdays, al.|
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your Tomorrows race along the horizon
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into Twilight and leave you with @ torn

parcel of memories wondering what might

have happened if you had really dared

to be alive”. \ capita Nialagmnt Ae Hom lolchefepsirmera hewn)
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That's what God said to Abraham back on the dark edges of nistory\ That's what Jesu.

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said to that pathetic man who had been avoiding life for 38 years.\ and it is precisely
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what he says to us. [rake up your pallet and walk You are saved .\ God really cares how

you live and that you live to the fullest extent of your possibilitios.\ Be open to the
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adventure of faith."

How do you answer? AMEN

Father, the status quo is so very comforting, and we're not anxlous to experience
the risks of a new adventure. And yet, we confess to an emptiness = a sense of incom-
pleteness. Give us courage to dare: give us spirit to walk into an unknown future:

help us to hear your Son who kaeps insisting that we "pick up our bed and walk". AMEN

—-*

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