Last week at orientation on KPU’s I was hosting the
Multi-Faith Centre table as the Christian Reformed Chaplain. On the Richmond
campus a few years ago the MFC created an “I believe in…” board, where students
write what they “believe in” on a small card and pin it to a large board. We
decided to take up that same project on both the Richmond and the Surrey
campuses this year. At the end of a day of orientation we have a large board
filled with objects of belief, representing something of the diversity at
Kwantlen. We’ll continue the project next week during “Welcome Week”, but
orientation alone resulted in lots of different answers. I believe in…: myself,
opportunity, God, respect, family, food and eating, and Jesus Christ, to name a
few.
What does it mean to “believe
in” Jesus Christ? And especially,
what does it mean to believe in Jesus Christ in the context of so many other
beliefs, from the trivial examples of “food” to the incredibly vague examples
of “opportunity”? Not only that, but there are certainly religious traditions
at KPU and in Surrey who aren’t represented on the board; think about the major
world religions of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. What does “belief in
Jesus Christ” mean alongside this myriad of differing traditions?
Jesus is the one who shows us what God is like. He is the
Son who is so utterly dependent on his Father that that relationship of
dependence is the ultimate thing that controls his life, a life of love,
compassion, even to death. And we are invited into that relationship. Jesus
invites us to stand where he stands, to pray “Our Father who art in heaven”.
And this invitation is so powerful, so moving, so completely reconciling, that
the invitation itself has made its
way into the way Christian’s talk about God: the Holy Spirit. So to “believe in
Jesus” means to inhabit and dwell within the beauty and assurance of Jesus’s
invitation to stand with him, beside him, and have him stand and dwell within us as we pray to the Father, the
source of Life, in the power of the Holy Spirit.
But can we do this alongside other traditions? How would we do this alongside other
traditions? Jesus says to Nicodemus in John 3: “The wind blows where it wills.
You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is
going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit”. There is a mystery about the
spirit who invites us into relationship with God. God has shown us himself in
Jesus, but Jesus himself wasn’t entirely predictable. He refused final definition,
a figure on the move. So it is of those born of the spirit. We might be tempted
to label non-Christians cleanly and easily as “wrong” or “misguided”; and as
Christians we do certainly need to make judgements about right and wrong, about
true and false. But an important part of that act of judging is to be open to
the spirit working in us and working beyond
us.
I hope this can open us to a simultaneous posture of
confidence and humility. Confidence in God’s revelation in Christ and our
participation in it through the Holy Spirit, but also humility in recognizing
that the very spirit in whom we have salvation also is free to work and blow
where it wills. I certainly seek bear witness to God in Christ, but part of that seeking is watching and
waiting for the Lord in quiet confidence and assurance.
Belief in Christ is never a “finished task” in itself, let
alone face to face with other traditions. And certainly the Christian task is
not to water down our faith to make it palatable for everyone and anyone; the
distinctiveness of the gospel in Christ is
the gospel. But the gospel is clearly so much more than the mere truth that
“Jesus is God”. If Jesus himself is
the truth, then the Christian task is not necessarily to convince others of our
faith but to combine our words with our actions, not only actions of service,
but also our acts of prayer and acts of receptivity to the life of the Spirit
which blows where it wills.
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