Growing Into Faith

Welcome to the weekly Dulen Podcast, a ministry of Dulen United Methodist Church in Falls Church, Virginia. Each week, we share a short reflection on faith and life in community, exploring how God's grace moves among us and through us. We're glad you're here.

Hello, beloved folks. It's me, James, and I am delighted to be with you today. Continuing with our weekly Dueling Moments, I thought I would share with you some thoughts about coming to faith. Starting next week, we're going to do a series about each one of the five membership vows that we each make when we become members of the United Methodist Church. But this week, I thought I might speak more generally about people coming to faith.

What does it mean? What do I mean when I say coming to faith? Maybe it'll be the same thing for you. I encourage you. As always, please feel free to respond to me, push back if you want to, or seek clarification on anything I say.

I always welcome a conversation about any of the topics that we're talking about. So glad that you're joining us both on the weekly video program that happens noon on Thursdays as well as our weekly podcast that drops at noon on Thursdays as well. So and they're both essentially the same audio, one with video and one without. So coming to faith. Some people think it's just an immediate happening, And I've known friends and have friends that I believe in very strongly and have no reason to doubt their experience of faith who tell me that when they came to faith, it was a sudden, immediate experience of God's presence in a way that they were different people on the other side of that experience.

They were changed by that encounter. And that set in motion for them a lifelong journey of faith that happened all at once. When it comes to me, it has been a lifelong journey of coming to faith. When I say that, what I mean is I haven't fully arrived in faith yet. Let me say just a little bit more about that before you think, oh my gosh, my pastor, my friend, this person James doesn't have any faith.

What is he talking about? I do have faith, but I have come to see over a lifetime of having, coming to faith, the journey of becoming as a human being, as spirit guides, would would lead me to say that my understanding of who God is and who I am in relationship to God and how I relate to God and how I live out of that relationship has grown over time. It has changed. My experience of God is different. It's bigger.

It's more vast. It is a mystery. And by mystery, I don't mean that it's undescribable. I mean that it's infinitely describable. It's describable in so many ways.

And so for me, there's no one moment I could point to. I was about 12 years old when I was confirmed in the church. If you don't know what confirmation is, confirmation in a number of denominations, children are baptized as infants, are small people, too small to make their own profession of faith for themselves. So they are baptized, and it is the promise of those who bring them to baptism that they will raise them in the faith, that they will come to know what faith is all about. Confirmation is an opportunity to learn about what faith looks like, what it's looked like traditionally for the church, who Jesus is, what worship is, what the sacraments are, all these pieces come together.

And at the end of that experience of training, a person gets to say either yes or no, I'm not ready. And the yes would be a confirmation of the vows that were made on their behalf when they were baptized as infants. Sometimes they're making them on their own. I've baptized people at the same time they were confirmed. So it's possible it doesn't happen in a specific order, and if for you it hasn't happened in a way that you can fully describe like all of your friends seem to be able to describe, I want you to catch a breath and realize we all experience faith differently.

We all journey in faith differently. We all grow in faith differently. There are different life experiences we have, different ways of seeing God. What might be an adequate description of God for one person may be totally inadequate for the next person. That's not to say that one person is right and one person is wrong.

It's to say that my experience of God has shaped how I continue to be in God's presence. I believe God's present in all of us and around all of us and through all of us, and sometimes even as all of us in acting on this universe, but the way I experience that in my life is shaped by my own personal life experiences. What has happened to me? What choices have I made? And how has that set me up?

What kind of education did I get? Who did I encounter? Who've been my friends? Who have stood by me and showed me a little bit of what God's like? And who has left me hanging?

Maybe showing me a little bit of what God's not like, but leaving me wondering about relationships. This is all a way of saying that you will have your own unique journey of faith. For me, it's very much tied up in Mother Church. Most of my life from the time I was tiny, I was baptized, you know, six weeks old and grew up every Sunday in worship from the time I was small onward, went to Sunday school. And in those days, Sunday school was something you went to pretty much every Sunday and were engaged in every Sunday.

I learned a lot about information about faith, which is different from faith from my experience. I learned a lot of that information. I had a lot of wise saints in my home church, Oakland United Methodist Church in Chesapeake, Virginia. I had a lot of wise saints that showed me about what faith is in the way that they served quietly behind the scenes. My parents gave me a sense of who God was, God is, in the way that they raised me and loved me.

And, you know, no parents are perfect, but I really learned a lot about unconditional love and what it looks like to be nurtured and cared for and encouraged in life. Those all happened as a piece of my growing up, and that all kind of fed into what I see as my faith story. So I I was confirmed at 12, 12 years old. I wasn't ready to say yes, but I didn't know I wasn't ready to fully say yes. And the rest of my life have been a series of yeses and occasional noes to, maybe more often than occasional noes to God as I journeyed along trying to figure out who I am, who God wants me to be, how I can be that person that I was made to be.

It even culminated for me in a statement I often make to people. Just about five, six years ago, I was trying to articulate what I thought my faith was all about. And as I was articulating thinking, I had been journaling about it for a while, how would I summarize faith? And for me, it comes down to this phrase, you, I, you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are. God already loves me.

I'm already infinitely precious to God. I'm unique. I'm a unique part of what God's doing in the universe, and God has chosen to make me me, and I wanna celebrate that as a gift. And so as I celebrate and seek to understand who I am as the gift that I am in this world, I grow in faith and understanding of God. Now there are tools, we've talked a little bit about those tools, but there are tools that have helped me in my journey of faith, studying the scripture.

First in English, because that was the language I had access to. And then to go a little bit deeper and begin studying Hebrew Bible in Hebrew when I was in college, and then in seminary doing more depth work in understanding why the texts were written, how the texts were written, who might have written them, and how they came into being, what kind of a witness they bear in the world, and then continuing to grow in my faith, facing the challenges, moments of my life when I felt like God let me down and struggling with that. Could I could I feel like God let me down? Does God let us down? And then I read the Psalms, and the Psalms are pretty clear.

There are certainly moments when the psalmist cries out without any apology, the feeling of abandonment, of of alienation, of God not being there when that the writer needed God the most, and I could identify with that. That was my own experience of God at various points. Where are you in this? And it was in those moments that I had to go back to the drawing board, and I had to ask myself, who is God for me? I expected these things for God.

Is it that God has let me down or that I put false expectations on who God is? And I had to go around and around with that for at at those kinds of points in life, some people lose faith. And I can't tell you that I haven't been on the edge of doing so a couple of times in my life. I'm very fortunate that, you know, I skirted that edge and then was able to come back and find a new way of seeing, a new way of understanding, a bigger picture of who God is, perhaps less limited by my own limitations as a person. So coming to faith doesn't look the same for every person.

For me, it's been a lifelong journey moment by moment by moment. Some moments clearly saying yes to God, some moments clearly saying no to God, and some moments just muddling through not really sure whether I said yes or no to God. It's not so much an eitheror as an ongoing relationship that is sort of like the give and take, push and pull. It's a feeling, but it's beyond a feeling. It's a relationship that encapsulates my life.

It's all around me. It's in me. I really do believe that Jesus, when he says, the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God is among you, within you, around you, near to you, that he is suggesting to me that I have access to this kingdom of heaven right here and right now in aspects, not in its entirety, but I have access to it and I am open to it more and more if I can hold myself open and stand back long enough to let God's love ambush me where I am, usually when I least expect it, because when I'm expecting it, I've got my defenses up, but in those moments, God shows up. God shows up. I'm interested to hear stories of how God shows up for you.

You're welcome to share them. You can send me an email if you'd like. I am going to be later on interviewing those of our leaders at Dulen United Methodist Church who are willing to be interviewed. A couple have already said they'd be delighted to be interviewed and talk a little bit about how they came to faith, how they came to Dulen, and how Doolin currently feeds their faith. So they'll be a part of this broadcast and podcast on the regular coming up sometime in the future.

That's something to look forward to. Remember my friends, you are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. If you enjoy it, I encourage you to share it with others, encourage them to subscribe. If you're watching us on YouTube or Facebook page or on the website and you're enjoying it, I encourage you to share that with your friends as well.

Whether you watch or listen, you truly are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are. Until the next time.