Text — John 10:22-30

How do religious beliefs matter?  By “religious beliefs” I mean the ideas, concepts, the articles of faith, what we call “doctrine” — the mental furniture that makes up what we call a religion, such as the Christian religion.

How these things matter is interesting because you could make the case, and many people do make the case, that these things really don’t matter, or don’t matter very much, and that “religious belief” is a rather empty concept.

For example, if you gathered all the people in the world who say “I believe in God” they would never agree on what that statement means.  They would certainly never agree about what people who believe in God are supposed to do with that belief.

The same would be true for people who say “Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”  There’s a lot of disagreement on what that means or what we’re supposed to do with it.  Christians disagree over questions of capital punishment, war, economic justice, women’s rights, and many more issues.  Christians can’t even agree on how to read our own Bible.

A line of W.C. Fields comes to mind.  “Everyone has to believe in something.  I believe I’ll have another drink.”

But religious beliefs do matter in another way, in spite of these divergent results or outcomes.  I think of it this way.  If you’re thirsty, not in the way that W.C. Fields was thirsty, but if your body feels dehydrated, you feel motivated to do something about it.

This happens to me when I forget to bring a water bottle in the car on a trip.  When that happens, I don’t look for a hardware store, or a post office.  I look for a place that is set up for and has a reputation for providing water — maybe a rest stop on the highway or a place that sells refrigerated, bottled water.

Religious beliefs and the organizations that keep these beliefs going — churches, synagogues, mosques, temples — are sort of like the rest stop, or the oasis, or the watering hole.

We come to church for a lot of reasons, but under all the many reasons we’re here because of a kind of thirst.  In the Bible, when people’s lives are sort of dry or barren or desperate, they often show up at a well.  That’s a very common Biblical motif.  Thirst is a Biblical metaphor for what humans need most, not just to survive, but to flourish in the deepest sense. 

We need to know that our lives matter — that we’re not just dust that returns to dust.  Life is struggle.  We need to grow up, to get through school, to find a place in world, to fit in, to belong somewhere, to matter to other people, to find people we can love and who can love us.  This isn’t easy.  It takes a lot of trial and error.  We fall into a lot of holes along the way. 

And to endure, and persevere through all this, we need for life to have depth and mystery.  We need beauty.  We need honesty.  We need to face our vulnerability.  All of this is wrapped up in what we call “God.”  Life isn’t a flat, two-dimensional surface, but more like a deep pool of water with other creatures swimming around with us.  Some of them might be dangerous, but some of them will be our friends.

Religious beliefs, things like the Apostles Creed, or the Bible, or the sacraments of the church — these mysteries that make up what we call the Christian religion are like that pool of water or fountain we seek out when we’re running dry.

They don’t give us formulaic answers.  Religious beliefs can’t be demonstrated to be true in the way that 2+2=4 is true.  Religion isn’t about getting the right answer to a question so you can get into heaven, and if you get the wrong answer you go to the other place.

The religious life is about quenching our thirst.  It’s about a way to access the mystery we feel — the mystery we really need. 

Many images and stories in Christianity and Judaism are about drinking water, crossing — crossing the Red Sea, getting water out of a rock, Jonah going underwater and getting swallowed by a fish, Jesus getting baptized, Jesus and the woman at the well.

I think of religious life as a way of swimming out into the water and drinking the water while you swim.

A good example of this is the way we do Bible study here at First Church.  The method is very simple.  We read a chapter out loud and talk about it.  That’s the method.  We don’t have a study guide.  We don’t have an appointed leader to explain what the passage means.  We don’t try to reduce it to a formula. 

We just let our collective imaginations loose.  We swim in the passage.  We look for whatever seems interesting, and usually we find a lot that’s interesting.  We talk about the different motivations of the characters.  Are the characters noble and brave or egocentric and afraid?  We find a lot ourselves in the Bible.

The reason we’re reading the Bible and not a psychology book or a biography or a novel — although we sometimes read those too — is because the Bible has the greatest capacity to satisfy our thirst.  It has a proven track record in doing this.  It never runs dry.  We can never exhaust it.  It keeps delivering.  It takes us to the most important things in our lives.  And it brings us together as we do this. 

This is how religious beliefs work.  The doctrine of incarnation — God becoming flesh in Jesus — makes us think about how God becomes flesh in our own lives.  The concept of original sin is a kind of shorthand for how we can be our own worst enemies.  In a wonderful sermon Sandra preached two weeks ago, she told about how the line in the creed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body” led her to talk about taking her father’s ashes to the beach in New Jersey where she picked up a few small pieces of bone from the ashes and put them in her pocket.

These beliefs don’t answer our questions.  They don’t settle anything.  What they do is challenge us and change us.  They lead us to new ways of thinking. They enrich us.  They help us find each other.  They don’t run dry.  They satisfy our thirst.