On Faith

I guess in some respects, the church part is easy.

We come to sit and to stand; to worship and to pray.

We can look out these great big windows and see the outside world and wonder about the tree that needs to be trimmed in the backyard, the lawn that needs to be mowed, mulch that needs to be spread.

Or, more regularly, our hearts can be touched by a prayer, our minds intrigued by a reading, our very souls touched by the presence of our Lord found in the Eucharist.

And in other respects, the whole faith thing can be rather difficult.

Is what we read true?

Do we believe all things in the bible exactly as they are written?

Is it inerrant and is every word documentary evidence of God’s habitation in our lives, of God’s role in all things?

Was the world created in six days?

Did Melchizedek truly live 465 years?

Was Eve born of Adam’s rib?

Do we read the Bible as we would an encyclopedia?

Do we read it as literal or do we allow some bit of metaphor, some bit of mythology into the telling of a story, in the lessons we should glean from creation if not the full literal truth of how the universe came to be?

And our faith outside of what we read can be even more difficult or confusing or contradictory, whatever word we choose to describe what can sometimes seem irrational or hard to describe.

What is faith in a world where we perform active shooter drills in elementary schools?

What is faith when we witness or experience the death of a loved one far too early, of one who is far too young?

It is sometimes easier to question God or assume the lack of God’s presence in our own lives when we hurt, when we are made crooked by the realities of our very mortality.

Where is God amidst heartbreak?

Where is God in the suffering of a child?

Where is God in the midst of a natural disaster?

Does God flee through the cracks of our hearts, broken wide open?

Does God float away upon a child’s tears, wiped away and made irrelevant amidst suffering?

Does God recede with the flood waters, leaving destruction and bankruptcy behind?

How can we witness, how can our faith withstand the destruction of buildings and institutions around us and still see God within the ruin, the ruinous nature of humanity made mortal in the garden?

Is this our punishment, is this our payback for sinfulness, is this our God?

Friends, faith is hard.

It is hard and it doesn’t always make sense.

And it is not always easy to describe.

Yet Paul does so beautifully this morning, doesn’t he?

Oh, how I love this!

These are the words of inspiration, of love, perfection and awe.

What is faith in a broken world such as ours?

“(F)aith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

I love that!

I return to these words over and over

What is faith?

“(F)aith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

What is faith?

Faith is hopefulness.

Faith is an understanding of God’s presence in all our lives.

Faith is knowing that God provided for Abraham.

It is knowing that Abraham obeyed God and found shelter in the land promised to him and his people.

God promised Abraham and Sarah an heir and that promise was realized late in Sarah’s life.

Faith is Abraham receiving God’s promise and understanding that from God’s love, more would come.

That Abraham’s people, God’s people Israel would number more than the grains of sand on Mediterranean shores.

And still faith does not derive solely from the evidence placed before us by Paul, faith too is immensely personal, individualized to our own beliefs within the structure of scripture, reason, and tradition, of God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.

As Christians, faith must be structured; it cannot be willy nilly, everything goes.

We are Christians after all.

And still, within our Christianity exists the individualized sense of understanding.

Somehow, this all needs to make sense to us, the reasoning behind sitting in a hot room on a Sunday morning needs to have meaning.

And that meaning is found through the individual compulsion to explore our faith within community, find our place in a pew and amidst God’s law, God’s love.

Faith for some of is scientific, a rules based mechanism that allows us to better understand the world in which we live.

Faith for others is the inexplicable joy felt, the wondrous dance that exists in the grooves and striations of our hearts as we approach God at the table and seek God in the word.

Faith is the incessant questioning without answers, without understanding, that cross our minds as we explore all things, always facing towards salvation.

Faith is as amorphous as it is solid, tangible even though sometimes it is fleeting.

Faith is yours.

Faith is ours.

Faith is God, revealed to us in little and big ways, in sunrises witnessed along the seashore, in the glens and ridges of our everyday lives.

And still, we wonder just who God is.

Now, I stand before you never having spent those three years studying full-time in seminary as many priests did.

I took a different path as by the time I felt the call to the priesthood, I had children to raise and a wife to love; the prospect of going back to school full-time was nigh impossible.

So I put together a course of study from several schools over several years and the church in her wisdom found me fit to serve.

I stand before you living a dream and questioning the sanity of those said yes to my calling, yet here we are!

Now, having taken a different path I do sometimes draw from sources perhaps less than orthodox as I seek understanding for my own faith.

One of those sources is Norman Maclean’s novella, “A River Runs through It.”

It is a wonderful book, so very meaningful, and the movie based on it is just as wonderful.

Someday perhaps we will hold a movie night in the Undercroft and watch this film, but full disclosure, it’s a quiet movie and it runs almost three hours, so you might need to bring a pillow along with the popcorn.

The narrator, named Norman, is the son of a preacher growing up in early twentieth century Montana.

He writes:

As a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow, I early developed the notion that he had done this by falling from a tree. As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God's rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word "beautiful."

This paragraph helps to form the foundation of my faith.

Now, in some circles, this foundation might be seen as heretical as there is a question of whether God could create anything less than perfect.

Yet to my eyes, for God to create something perfect would imply that God could create other gods.

In response, I would say God is whole, God does not need other gods

God does not need an Athena, an Apollo, an Aphrodite.

I also say that God did not create humanity out of a sense of incompleteness.

God is not lonely, God does not need little human shaped playthings to make God whole.

Instead, God so loves God’s creation that God created us out of a desire to share that love and to share in creation.

My faith is that God so loved the world, he wished us to frolic in a heavenly bliss.

Yet, because we are indeed a mess and were gifted with free will, we betrayed God.

Through our God given and stubbornly lived free will, we said no to God’s law.

And God sent God’s only son to free us from the sinful bonds of our past and point us once more to a place of ecstatic sinlessness, of a world gifted to us anew through a love for us and a faith in our redemption.

We, through faith, are on a constant ladder of reconciling with God.

That we experience brokenness and sinfulness is through our inherent messiness.

And yet God perseveres.

God perseveres in pointing us toward joy, in grieving with us, in inspiring us to keep on searching for God when all seems lost, when God seems impossible to find.

That is my faith.

It does not have to be your faith specifically, but I do ask that we wonder about such things together, in community and with each other.

For the beauty of faith is found together, with God.

Holding on to the intangible loving that which can never be proven.

Faith is ours.

Faith is yours.

Faith is God.

“(F)aith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”