14 C Faith Hebrews 11:1-3 (4-7) 8-16, August 7, 2022, St. Mark’s
“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for,/ the conviction of things not seen.”
Some say the Age of Faith, the Christian Era, ended during our lifetime. Growing up in small-town Virginia, there is nothing to do on Sundays, but go to church. Everything else is closed./ My grandparents model observing the Sabbath. They do not work, sew or play cards, but spend the day at church and driving to the country to visit relatives. All my friends wear mustard seed necklaces, and most own child-sized New Testament Bibles bound in white leatherette, given to us by our parents at Easter. Vacation Bible School is the high point of summer. In school, we pray to God as routinely as we pledge allegiance to the flag.
But, by the time we finish medical school, God is dead. John Kennedy is assassinated while I take a physics test my senior year in college. Martin Luther King is killed in Memphis when we are senior medical students in that city. Robert Kennedy is killed in California two months later, days before our graduation. People turn their outrage on what they have been taught about God. God does not seem good or answer prayers. We begin to construct our own realities and express our spirituality any way we please. When lightning does not strike, our confidence grows along with our fear. Perhaps we are alone in the universe.
Barbara Brown Taylor1,2 describes organized religion now as only ONE of many choices available in our search for meaning. Peers suggest only the unimaginative still go to church. Those wanting to commit themselves to more relevant causes turn to the peace movement, the environment, or the arts.
All this is over 50 years ago, and the trend continues. Faith in God is no longer the rule. It is one “option” among many for people seeking to make sense of their lives. Moreover, many people have been so wounded by their religion that faith in God is too painful to consider.
Others feel betrayed by a God they believe broke a sacred promise. According to our Sunday school teachers in the 50s, God makes a bargain with us the moment we are born: “Do what I say, and I will take care of you.” So we do, and for years it seems to work. We obey our parents, teachers, and coaches and are taken care of, but one day the system fails. We do everything right, and everything goes wrong. Our prayers go unanswered, our beliefs go unrewarded, our God seems AWOL.
I hear a mother mourning the death of her infant daughter. “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” she says. “I don’t know whom to pray to or what to pray. I try to be a good person; I do the best I can, but it doesn’t do any good. If God allows something like this to happen, why believe?” This mother’s dis/il/lu/sion/ment is emblematic of the post-Christian era, when perceived promises of Christianity lie broken, and God’s existence and God’s omnipotence seem fantasy.///
But down in the darkness below our dreams, in the place where all our notions about God have been lost, there is hope,/ because dis/il/lu/sion/ment is not bad. That is where we find the living God. Disillusion is the loss of illusion, about ourselves, the world, and God. While it is always excruciatingly painful, it is not a bad thing to lose the lies we have mistaken for truth. Disillusioned, we discover what is not true. Then, we are set free to seek truth. The illusion is that bad things do not happen to God’s people. But the story of the people of God does not say that bad things will not happen to us. The truth is no matter what happens, God promises to be with us always, by our side. God is still there in bad times, grieving and caring for us.
We are a resurrection people, constantly undergoing Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter. Our disillusions are Good Friday. They must die. That desert time where God seems absent is Holy Saturday. But we are always promised an Easter experience if we can make the journey through it. God gives us the promise of transformation if we can let illusions go.
Twenty-five years ago, the dearest person in my growing up years, my grandfather, dies. I am beyond despondent. The person who loves me unconditionally is gone. I am alone and lost. In desperation, I return to the church after years of absence, because I must believe I will see my grandfather again. Waiting for me,/ I find the unconditional love of God in a new Christian community. /
Putting one foot ahead of the other is the best way to survive disillusion, because the real danger is not the territory itself but getting stuck in it. We can’t prevent the birds from flying over us, but we can prevent them from building a nest in our heads. Things will change for those willing to continue to heave themselves toward the light. What has been lost gradually becomes less important than what we find. Curiosity pokes its green head up through the asphalt of grief,/ and fear of the unknown takes on an element of wonder.
In my junior year in medical school, I am in a car accident that disables me for life. I drop out of school. My life is in ruins. But, several painful months later, I return to a new class where I meet my future husband, whom I would never have known otherwise.
With each disillusionment, we learn that faith is a wide net spread beneath the most dangerous of our days. To have faith is not a one-time decision, but a daily, hourly choice to act as if it is true. That net, faith, is often the love of God most revealed to us by our Christian community and those we encounter actively seeking a relationship with this higher power. In community, we learn God’s power is not controlling/but redeeming, with the power to raise the dead. This resurrection power is sometimes most manifest in those destroying themselves. For example, resurrection occurs in 12-step work with alcoholics and addicts who are transformed in recovery after years of a living death. As I SEE THAT, THE RED BLOOD OF FAITH RETURNS TO MY VEINS. I see hopeless lives turn into miracles.
But there are also days we refuse to change, and we see others who will not change.
I have a dear friend who often says, “she has a deep and
abiding faith/that comes and goes.” Faith is not being sure where you’re going, but going anyway.
WE HAVE FAITH; WE LOSE FAITH. We find faith again, OR FAITH FINDS US, and God continues to redeem us through it all. And this is God’s call to each of us: to see and share with our neighbor our story of this redeeming faith and love God constantly shows us. Human grief becomes an ax that breaks down the door of human isolation, as we see so many wounded healers reaching out to other wounded ones in need.
Frederick Buechner3 describes faith as “the direction our feet start moving toward when we find that we are loved. Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.”
Every moment of our lives offers us a choice about how we will perceive that moment-- as happenstance or revelation, as a stumbling block or stepping stone. Is that event, that phone call, that person in our life, one more blind accident of time, or is it the veiled disclosure of an ever-present, compassionate God? 12-step friends say that synchronicity, co/in/ci/dences, are simply God’s way of staying anonymous. Faith sometimes may be nothing more than recognizing and assigning holy meaning to events that others call random.
Martin Luther King describes this faith as “taking the first step even when we don’t see the whole staircase.” As we begin to have the slightest awareness of faith in God’s love, we begin to live a life of gratitude. Gratitude gives birth to forgiveness, which is the midwife of more love.
We see through our own life and that of others that reality is not flat but deep, not opaque but transparent. Our life is no longer meaningless/ but overflows/with God’s grace/ and God’s love/ when we have the tiniest mustard seed of faith to believe that it is indeed TRUE.
Joanna Seibert
1Barbara Brown Taylor, “A church in ruins, “The Preaching Life, pp 5-12.
2Barbara Brown Taylor in When God Is Silent, pp 67-71.
3Frederick Buechner in The Magnificent Defeat.