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Monday, August 13, 2007
Faithfulness: Truth You Can Touch
Genesis 15:1-6; Galatians 3:1-9
In every wedding I perform, the bride and groom give each other a ring and say, "This ring I give you in token and pledge of our constant faith and abiding love." Sometimes, while we're planning the wedding details, they'll ask me about the "faith" part. I assure them it doesn't mean some doctrine or other, or even belief in God. What's at stake is faithfulness to your partner through thick and thin, come hell or high water. In short, and for the long haul, they're saying, "You can count on me!"
This week's message mines the fact that one Greek word gets accurately translated both as "faith" and "faithfulness." So, might all those controversies over faith vs. works just be making mountains out of molehills?
Listen to the GODcast!
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My patron saint Frederick Buechner tells a story on himself, how he once misread a "word from the Lord" only to find out later that he'd got it absolutely right after all.
I remember sitting parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter's illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST. What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God? I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany. The owner of the car turned out to be, as I'd suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen. * An old Portuguese proverb says, "God writes straight with crooked lines." It's really faith that ever finds those lines in the first place, and faithfulness that traces them for others to find in the midst of what we like to call real life.
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* Telling Secrets (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, pp. 49-50)posted by Jack Buckley at
3:55 PM
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