Bishop Loya: What faith feels like

Bishop Loya: What faith feels like

Learning What Faith Feels Like

The Rt. Rev. Craig J. Loya
Bishop of Minnesota

The Feast of the Holy Trinity
Matthew 28:16–20

Come, Holy Spirit, and fill the hearts of your faithful people with the power of your word. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

You may be seated.

Good morning.

It is such a great joy to be with such an amazing, faithful, vibrant, wonderful congregation. I always love being with you, and I’m so grateful to be here.

I always want to say this—I’m sure I said this the last time I was here—I want you to know that I know what you know. Which is that, in your rector, Lisa, and in your deacon, Rex, you have two of the finest clergy people in the diocese. I love the two of them a great deal.

One of the reasons I was so excited to come here this morning is that the music here is amazing. The music is amazing.

I’m also joined by someone who is brand new to the diocese. Zach Settle recently joined our staff. He is our new Canon for Discipleship, and I am grateful for his presence here. I look forward to working with him and for you to get to know him. He’s amazing, too.

All right.

Rex told me before the service started that I couldn’t wander too far forward because of the camera. So I don’t know if I like my chances. I’m trying to stay between here and not knock over the font. It’s going to be a little test of my homiletic agility, so we’ll see.

Like your rector, I am getting ready to go on sabbatical. I start a sabbatical in just a couple of days, and so I’m thinking a lot these days about fishing.

One of the things I hope to do on sabbatical is learn how to fly fish. I have never fly fished before, but everyone I talk to tells me the same thing. You can’t really learn fly fishing from a book. You can’t really learn it from a video. You can understand the mechanics. You can understand the theory. But eventually you have to stand in the river with a fly rod in your hand and cast over and over and over until you learn what it feels like when you’re doing it in the right way.

One of my hopes for my sabbatical is that I practice so much that I am awesome at fly fishing by the time it is over.

You can’t learn it by simply understanding the theory. You have to practice it until you know what it feels like.

And our Gospel lesson today reminds us that that’s exactly how faith in Jesus works, too.

This is sort of Jesus’ last thing with his disciples. He’s commissioning them to go out and carry on the Jesus project without him.

They’ve gathered together after the resurrection in Galilee. They’re all together. This amazing, unbelievable thing has happened. Jesus has been raised from the dead, and they have seen him.

So they gather together, and he is about to give them his last words before he physically leaves them.

We’re told that when they gather on this mountain, they worshiped him, but some doubted.

There’s actually another way to translate that passage, which I think is much better:

They worshiped him and they doubted.

Not some.

They worshiped him and they doubted.

I love that juxtaposition because they are acknowledging the transformational mystery they are encountering in the risen Jesus, and yet they are not fully convinced. They do not fully understand it.

And that’s okay.

Because faith is not primarily about certainty.

Faith is not primarily about having all the answers.

Faith is not primarily about believing exactly the right things.

Faith is about practice.

Faith is about learning what it feels like to trust God.

When we baptize someone, when we renew our baptismal covenant, we are not promising that we understand everything. We are not promising that we have every theological question figured out. We are not promising that we will never doubt.

We are promising something much more important.

We are promising to use the one small life we are given to join God’s project to heal the world with love.

We are committing ourselves to practicing what it feels like to help God shape our broken, hurting, oppressive world in the direction of love, in the direction of justice, and in the direction of mercy.

That is what we are committing ourselves to do.

That is what it means to follow Jesus.

And we come to believe in deeper ways when we know what that feels like.

So as you look out at the world as it currently exists, it is painful. It is broken. It is marked by massive injustices. It is fearful.

Every week, everywhere I go, people are asking—as I am asking—”What can we do?”

And what we can do is learn what it feels like to join God in shaping the world toward justice, toward love, and toward mercy.

We do that by doing this thing that you all do together all the time.

We saturate ourselves in the story of Scripture and in the story of how God goes about the project of healing the world with love.

We practice it in our relationships with one another.

We encounter this mystery that we can never fully understand whenever we gather to worship, as we are doing right now.

We begin to practice shaping the world toward mercy and justice in the small acts of serving the poor, the marginalized, and the vulnerable—as this congregation does so beautifully and so well.

That’s the way we practice.

So that, little by little, drop by drop, all of us together can become a flood that heals our whole broken, parched, dry desert of a world with the perfect balm of God’s love.

Amen.

10am Service