Easter 6
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Over
the course of a lot of years of
being a pastor, many, many people have expressed to me a longing for what they
call “a deeper faith.” I honor
their hunger and desire. I have said
it myself. But what many people call
“deeper faith” I have come to think of as “living faith” because faith
is dynamic and active and current. There
are three things I can tell you today about the quest for a living faith with
the hope that what I have to say might awaken or strengthen yours.
First, living faith is nurtured mostly by our questions.
Second, living faith comes fresh within the events and contexts of each
unfolding day. And, finally, living
faith is evidenced not by what we believe, but by how we live.
Living
faith is nurtured mostly by our questions. While
it may be true that some older people develop what I have heard described as a
“hardening of the categories,” still, in my experience, it is usually the
seniors among us who are most open to questioning the verities of our faith.
Surely it is the case in this congregation.
That is not surprising to me because those older among us have had the
most years to notice discrepancies between what traditional religion has taught
them and their own lived experiences. I
have detected that, for the most part, people in the evening years of their
lives are less dogmatic than those who are younger because life has happened to
them! While I am claiming middle-age
as long as I can, that surely has been true for me.
When
candidates for ordination to the ministry are brought before our presbytery for
examination, even if I was blindfolded I could tell by what they say how old
they are. The statements of faith of
younger candidates almost always are bathed in certitude and self-confidence.
I shudder when I remember that I was no different when it was my turn
twenty-eight years ago. A living
faith, a faith growing deeper, knows that God is not captive to our ruminations
or pontifications about God. That is
why I love the stanza in one of the Pentecost hymns of the church that says of
God, “You call from tomorrow, You break ancient schemes…”
I never stand in the way of the candidates’ ordinations, but I pray
that they get over themselves quickly so that they can open themselves not only
to the living God but to life that is always more ambiguous and complex than
their carefully crafted theologies can accommodate.
Remember
the story of Job whom the Bible calls a righteous man, how he was greatly
suffering, and his “friends” came with answers at the ready as to the cause
and remedy for his predicament? But
the answers did not ring true to Job’s experience of either life or God.
His suffering was a profound question to him and surely in his distress
he wondered why, but Job found more solace in the not-knowing than in all of the
pat and pietistic but unpalatable answers the religious traditions represented
by his friends could provide. It was
the mystery that caused Job to cling to God with hope because all of the easy
answers offered a God too small and capricious to love or trust.
In
our information-saturated society, we seek answers in order to consolidate our
control. The more we know, the more
we can manage. But God cannot be
domesticated or managed. Do you
recall the answer God gave Moses when Moses inquired about God’s name?
God said, “I Am Who I Am.”
As if to say, “If you want to know me, then you are going to have to abide with me.
You cannot get to know me by resume, but by relationship.”
I
like the way author Allan Ecclestone puts it:
“It is a function of the Spirit, as Jews and Christians have known
the Spirit, to enter searchingly into a person’s life, and there to put
questions, now like a breath, now like a wind, and now even with gale-force, to
try all things it finds there, to question their fitness to endure…It is a
delusion to suppose that the disturbing questions will, if ignored, go away, if
suppressed be forgotten, or that by hiding ourselves like the naked Adam we can
escape them. It is no less delusive
to expect that we shall get comforting answers to our questionings.
To live with our uncertainties is not simply a necessary part of our
education at all levels; it is the very truth of faith.
To endure the sifting process of interrogation is the hallmark of
discipleship.”
(Alan Ecclestone, The Night Sky of
the Lord)
Translation:
Living faith is nurtured more by our unanswered questions than by
questionable answers.
Living
faith renews and deepens itself within the events and contexts of each unfolding
day. In
the stretch of time during Katy’s illness and after her death, people said to
me with some regularity that my faith was changing.
Well, yes, at least the content of it. Faith
is not a once and for all commodity that can be packaged and preserved.
Faith is a gift given to us by God for the purpose of engaging a
relationship with us. It is not for
the purpose of giving us answers so that we think we do not need God.
It is not for the purpose of devising grandiose theologies that we can
substitute for God. It is not for
the purpose of allowing us to think we can vacate our minds and live contrary to
reason or responsibility with the assumption that God will take care of
everything. Faith is given as a
means and medium of a relationship with God.
As we accumulate more and more life experience, as the circumstances of
our lives change, and as questions born of suffering arise, faith necessarily
must grow and deepen lest our perceptions of God be unable to keep pace.
We
think we know God and then six million Jews die in the holocaust.
So maybe God is other than we thought.
We think we know how prayer works and then our child dies anyway despite
the most fervent prayers ever uttered. So
maybe prayer is other than we thought.
One
day a belligerent young man is reputed to have said to Mahatma Gandhi, “You
have no integrity! Last week I heard
you say one thing. Today you are
saying something different. How do
you justify such vacillation?” To which Gandhi answered him, “It is simple,
my friend: I have learned something since last week.”
Once
when Albert Einstein was monitoring an exam for graduate physics students, one
of them complained that the test questions were identical to those on the
previous year’s test. “That’s
okay,” Einstein replied. “The
answers are different this year.” In
our fast-paced world, indeed they are!
How
many times did Jesus say to people, “You have heard that it was said…,
but I say to you…”?
A new day requires new understandings.
Fresh circumstances require fresh perspectives.
All theology is tentative and contextual.
Creation still is unfolding. God’s
Spirit still is teaching. We still
are learning.
Faith
is God’s gift to us of finding divine Presence in our lives as we actually
live them and experience them, just as Jesus says we will.
Living faith comes fresh within the events and contexts of each unfolding
day.
Living
faith is evidenced not by what we believe, but by how we live.
How we live is telling.
How do we treat other people? How
generous are we? How vulnerable?
How hospitable? How just?
How compassionate?
A
pastor friend tells the story of being disappointed with an older woman in his
congregation who did not show up at a meeting of the town housing commission on
which they both sat. “How
could I,” she asked, “when I was
hosting a card party at my home that very night for all of the people who were
planning to oppose the group home?”
That is living faith.
Abraham
Lincoln presented to his cabinet a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation and
asked them to vote with regard to whether or not he should deliver the address
and sign it into law. There was an
unanimous and resounding “nay.” The
President rose slowly to his feet and said, “The
ayes have it.”
That is living faith.
In
an effort to keep the sermon tethered to real life, I want to read to you part
of a note I received yesterday from a young woman who is known to several of us
in this congregation, a wonderful young woman who has persevered through a feast
of losses and despicable situations in her life, but who now is tiring.
She has received considerable help from our church but currently is
living with her two boys, for safety reasons, in a shelter in a neighboring
county. She said in her note, and,
unfortunately, what she says speaks for a lot of people:
“I
really am getting weak. I am not
sleeping and I am crying a lot. I
feel that there really is no way for me to escape the past and to move forward.
I feel that I always will be alone and especially on the holidays it is
tough. Also, even when I do find an
apartment or when someone will hire me for work, it seems impossible that I am
going to be able to fill the apartment with living items.
My car is a whole other situation. The
windshield has been cracked for about a month and continues to spread, it needs
brakes, and it needs a whole new exhaust system.
I am scared even to drive it. I
feel like I am stagnant in between Point A and Point B in my life and that Point
B is too far-fetched for me to reach. I
want to be educated; I want to have a career; I want to have a decent place to
lay my head at night and raise my boys; and I want to have a safe vehicle.
It doesn’t seem as though I am asking for much.
So many people take for granted what they have…like a family who helps
them out with emotional support and to pay for their schooling, to help them buy
a car, and to get started in life, as well as a place to go for the holidays.
I am not asking for anything more than what many other Americans have in
their lives. My boys and I are
thankful to have a warm meal at the soup kitchen each night even as we dream of
many families who sit around a dinner table in their homes with loved ones, or
who go out to eat.”
“This
is my reality and it isn’t pretty, but it is the truth and it is real.
I was born into poverty and that is where it seems I will remain my
entire life. There is no escaping
it. There is no point in me
believing that I deserve a better life or in trying to be positive anymore and
looking on the bright side of things. It
has been five weeks now since we had to leave our apartment in
The
deepening of our faith that so many of us desire does not happen as the result
of some new “spiritual program de jour”
on which we might periodically embark. The
deepening of our faith that so many of us desire occurs over time as we live our
gospel convictions with courage and at no small risk to our prior plans for
ourselves. We trust - this is the
faith part- that God’s heart and mind and soul are on display in the life of
Jesus and so, abiding in the power of the same Spirit that was in him, we, too,
set out to live gospel lives in our day as Jesus did in his..
We are not promised success, at least in the way the world accounts it.
Neither was Jesus. We are promised that we shall not be orphaned or
abandoned by God and that God will abide unabated with us as we try to love our
neighbors, and our enemies, and seek justice for all.
It strikes me, too, that if people like the woman whose note I earlier
read are not to feel orphaned, it will be because people like us, the body of
Christ, the church, takes them in.
Surely
the story of the Easter resurrection is meant to proclaim to those who dare to
live as children of God that “nothing,
not even death, is able to separate us from the love of God.”
So
what is there, then, to hold us back?
Amen.