I sat next to a man from Finland on our flight home from London a week ago on Saturday.  We all were scrunched into the seats across the center section at the back of the plane with little legroom, no elbow room, and a tiny table that folded out awkwardly.

As soon as we leveled off the man ordered an individual bottle of red wine.  He put down his table, poured the entire bottle into his plastic cup, placed the cup on his table, and then, before he could take a sip, he spilled it all over his lap and the floor.  The flight attendant brought him another free-of-charge.  He poured that one into the cup, placed it on the table, bumped it when he reached for something and spilled it all over his lap and the floor.  All I could think of was singing a few verses of “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb.”

When he acquired a third bottle of red wine, I nudged over to Sally on my right as far as I could, and took out a book to read.  I thought that it might serve as a buffer between him and me, or at least something absorbent if his third bottle of red wine went the way of the first two.

It was this book, The Case for God, by Karen Armstrong, which I am finding fascinating.  He looked over at it and asked, “What is it about?” 

I answered, “It is a history of the ways people have thought about God, not only Christians, but also Jews, Muslims, and others.  I am a minister of a church in Chicago.”

He then confessed that his English was not very good; his Russian, Polish, German, and Spanish were better.  I confessed that I am an American and only speak English, so our conversation would be an effort.

He said, “In Finland the younger people are getting away from the church.  Religion is not very important to a lot of people. What do you believe?”

“What do you believe?”  I looked at my watch, and we still had eight hours to go.  Did he want the long version, with all of the footnotes about detailed interpretations of Genesis, an understanding of the Virgin Birth, and what we might mean by the “bodily Resurrection”?  I judged not.  He did not want to know what I believe about a variety of doctrines, what tenets of Christianity I hold dear and what I reject.  Not “belief” in terms of propositions but “belief” in terms of “faith.”  In what truths do I have faith?

If I say to you, “I believe in you,” I am not talking about dogma and doctrine; I am saying that I have faith in you.  I trust you.  The man in the crimson-stained pants was asking me, “What do you trust to be true?”

That distinction between one understanding of “faith “ as “trust” and another as “belief” in certain propositions actually is one of the exciting parts of Armstrong’s book.  She says that when Jesus criticizes his disciples for their lack of faith, he is not passing judgment on the clarity of their understanding of certain principles.  Rather, he is saying that they are lacking in trust and commitment to their shared mission.

When he calls them to believe in him, he is not asking for them to affirm his divinity (“true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father,” as it later is clumsily stated in the Nicene Creed), but to be loyal to the task.  Give all to the poor, feed the hungry, do not be tied down by family requirements, give up a sense of pride and entitlement, live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, trust God as a loving parent, and spread the Good News to everyone, not just the respectable among us.  It is faith such as this that will move mountains and change the world. (Armstrong, p.87)

When the Bible was translated from Greek into Latin by St. Jerome in the 4th Century, Armstrong explains, fides, “loyalty,” became credo, from cor do, “I give my heart.”  When the text was translated into English in 1611, the King James Version, both fides and credo became “I believe.”  But even then, “belief” meant “loyalty to a person.”  It was not until a century later, and we Protestants had a lot to do with it, that “belief” began to be used to describe intellectual assent to certain propositions.  And then we began to divide ourselves according to what beliefs we ascribed to.  Fundamentalism in the 19th Century was based not on trust in God but an acceptance of five essential doctrines.  And you were either “in” or “out” depending on whether you said “yes” or “no.”

So, back to the man sitting in the puddle of merlot, he asked, “What do you believe?” and in that he did not want doctrine but my basic orientation in life.  What do I trust to be true?  This is what I said.

I believe that life is good.  I cannot prove it, and most days evidence seems to contradict it, but I still believe it.  The psalmist sang, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it,” in response to his sense that God had saved the people from a terrible enemy. (Psalm 118)  But what if our hearts can sing that even before the day has begun?  What if, even before our feet hit the floor as we get out of bed, we say, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it”?  Then it becomes a statement of faith, not an evaluation of how things have gone.

One of the strongest affirmations we have in our century is from Anne Frank.  Many of us have read her diary.  Some of us have been in that house in Amsterdam and looked behind that swinging bookcase to where she, a young Jewish girl, hid out from the Nazis during World War II.  It must have been a hideous existence, and yet she writes, “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.  I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.”  What faith beyond proof!  “In spite of everything,” she says, life is good.  She refuses to cave in to confusion, misery, and death, even when it all swirls around her.

Moses calls all of the people of Israel together and presents the covenant with God to them.  “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.  Choose life . . .” (Deut.30:19)

What do I believe?  That given the choice, we choose life over death.  It is only then that we are not mocked.  It is only then that life really matters. 

If we believe that life simply is neutral, without meaning or significance, then we can carry on day to day but nothing really matters.  There is no history.  There is no sense of life moving in any particular direction.  We just put in our time on earth and then die.  Maybe that is the way it is; I cannot prove otherwise.  But I choose to believe that life is good; not to is to commit the sin of ingratitude.

Now, I cannot be like Brian hanging on the cross singing, “Look on the bright side of life.”  Ah yes, one of the funniest scenes in the history of film, Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, where an average bloke, Brian, is taken for the messiah and ends up like the real messiah, crucified on a cross.  Looking down from his lofty perch, he begins to sing, and soon has all of the others crucified around him singing, “Look on the bright side of life.”  No, I am not that naïve.  But to live life as if it were imposed suffering followed by death . . . I cannot believe that. 

“In spite of everything,” to take inspiration from Anne Frank, I believe that life is good.

There are some other beliefs that follow from that affirmation.  I told the man that this earth, this planet, is a gift entrusted to us for safekeeping, and if we cherish it, it will sustain us.  The charge to Adam and Eve in the second chapter of Genesis must be understood as a bequeathing of the world for safe-keeping, for stewarding, not for ravaging, for exploiting.

So, as we watch the oil spew up from a mile under the Gulf of Mexico and no one has any idea of how to stop it, we see it not only as an environmental disaster but also as a sign of our sinfulness.  The arrogance of thinking that nothing will go wrong as we tinker with the earth is a sin.  The Dust Bowl of the 30’s, the pesticides of the 50’s (when the DDT fogger came down the street we kids would run out and play in the cloud because, after all, it was good for the environment), Three Mile Island of the 70’s and Chernobyl of the 80’s, Exxon Valdez and now the sludging of the gulf.

I told my Finnish seatmate that I believed that part of life being good is our responsibility to nurture the earth so that it might sustain us.

And then, I said, “I also believe that we ought to love one another.”  Here it is in today’s scripture, the very heart of the Good News that Jesus commanded us to do.  Not suggested, not added to the to-do list, but commanded as first and foremost.  “As I have loved you, you should love one another.”

The verbal brutality of the way we talk to one another in our society these days is toxic.  The disregard, the aggression, the hatred, the insanity is tearing us apart.  It is sinful.  And we know so dreadfully well from our own national history that verbal brutality leads to physical violence.  We see it in our neighborhoods, we see it along our borders, we see it played out on the national stage.

If we love one another then we cannot possibly talk that way to one another.  Disagree, yes.  Contend, yes.  Criticize, yes.  Chastise, yes.  Jesus did all of that, both to those who opposed him and those who followed him.  That all can be part of love.  But not the vulgarity that rules in conversation these days.

The man was ordering a fourth bottle, having successfully negotiated the third, so I added a fourth belief.  I believe that the common good must shape our personal needs.  There is such a dynamic as the “common good,” a notion that we are all in this together, and that my individual decisions must take into account the existence of others. 

What does the scripture say about us being our brother’s and sister’s keeper?  I believe that.  I believe that the Golden Rule rules, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  All of the world’s religions have a saying similar to that because there is a basic truth to it.

Imagine if banks lived by the Golden Rule?  Imagine if businesses were run with a recognition that we must take care of one another?  Imagine if people in government, local, state, and national, ran to serve the public good instead of coveting the spoils of getting reelected. 

Faith requires a lot of imagination, of imagining that things could be different than they now are, seeing an alternative to the sin of selfishness that prevails, to a future that one can believe in, commit, to, work for.  As long as there is greed in banking, an absolute devotion to the “bottom line” in business, and personal kickbacks for pubic service, the Church has work to do, and it appears that we will be employed for a long, long time. 

So, the man from Finland got more dumped into his lap than just two bottles of wine.  He got my answer to his question, “What do you believe?”  And that was the short version; we still had seven and a half hours to go. 

Life is good.  The world is a gift entrusted to us for safekeeping.  We must love one another.  The common good must shape our personal needs.  I cannot prove that any of that is true; I just stake my life on it being true.  And I do not ask you to agree with any of it.  But I do ask you, “What do you believe?”  What would you have said in plain English to the man crammed into the seat next to you on a long flight home?  Amen.