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I want to spend some time thinking about faith this morning.
Faith, if it's well placed, is a real adventure. You put your faith in
your love for someone. It's not something you can prove so you take a
chance on what you do know, you take the leap, and it works, and it is
fantastic. So we've got a gorgeous little boy here, baptised today, a
happy Mum and Dad and a loving home, because two people had the faith
in each other to enter this adventure of parenthood together.
We all know that faith, misplaced, can be absolutely disastrous. I like
the story of Alfred Korzybski, a Polish born American academic who was
the founder of a way of thinking known as General Semantics.
Korzybski was lecturing one day and in the middle of the lecture he said
to his students "Please excuse me, I've just got to have something
to eat." And he dug a packet of biscuits out of his bag, and started
to munch on a biscuit. Then he said to the students in the front row,
"Sorry, how rude of me. Would you like one?" and handed out
some biscuits to the front row.
"Nice biscuit, don't you think", said Korzybski, while he took
a second one. The students were chewing vigorously when Korzybski tore
the white paper from the biscuits to show the original packaging. On it
was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies".
The students were shocked. Two of them put their hands in front of their
mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet.
"You see, ladies and gentlemen", said Korzybski "I have
just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and
that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter."
We take on a lot of things in faith. Not all are good and we spend our
lifetime sorting out the wheat from the chaff.
But the very nature of faith is that it is a leap into the place where
you can't get a guarantee.
Most of life is lived like that but we don't stop to consider it most
of the time. We often become conscious of our faith leaps when we are
faced with a choice that scares us, or when something confronts us with
the fact that we've been awfully right, or terribly wrong. And the thing
is, we live our lives by these faith assumptions, often without even being
aware of it, and they affect a lot of what we do and say.
Christianity is about faith. It's about responding to a God of love and
grace who has gone to great lengths to show us what God is like. The best
possible way for us human beings to understand, was to live among us,
as one of us. How else could we get a clear picture of God's love for
us. How else could we get a real understanding of the kind of people God
wants us to be. How else can we understand that God wants us to live out
forgiveness and grace and blessing.
How else could we understand what God wants from us.
Christian faith is about wanting to get closer to this God who gave us
this mystery of life. Jesus example shows us that it's possible, and good,
and worthwhile, and that there is a sense of God's Spirit, that we can
touch with our lives. But it can only be entered into, in faith.
People who think that Christianity is about a set of dogmas, don't understand
it very well. Christianity is faith that God will guide us through the
messiness and delights of living, so that we become blessing to each other,
an echo of God's blessing of love to us.
Christianity is a vigorous engagement with our spirituality, our beliefs,
our living. We see this modelled in the stories of the life of Jesus:
and he engaged this with everyone around him, carrying God's blessing
in the engagement.
But how can we do this when we have questions and doubts? The best kept
secret in the Christian church is probably that most of us do have doubts
and questions - but people often are a bit embarrassed about them. So
how can you have faith, when you don't have it?
I do remember reading the book by Umberto Ecco "The Name of the Rose".
In it one of the characters tells a friend of a deep concern he has about
his faith and his fellow monk replies with a great long monologue that
so shames him he is silenced in his shame for doubting. But he never really
addresses the issue, never gets to explore it. Fear and shame have silenced
the question - but not taken it away.
In the Christian faith, the questions, and the doubts are OK. We need
questions and doubts because questioning is the instrument by which we
examine our assumptions to see if they have value. If we treat our faith
as though it is a cut and dried formula and we've somehow arrived at the
final answer, we cut ourselves off from all new ideas. We've settled into
the illusion that: "All I believe is absolute truth." And that
simply cannot be true.
Christian faith, is a perpetual seeking for truth, a restlessness to find
the truth behind our perceived universe, the miracle of our life, a deep
awareness that this is a perpetual quest that always seeks the God who
is beyond our knowing, but not beyond our faith and commitment. I think
that's why Jesus responded so well to the chap in Mark's gospel tells
us about, who says "Lord I believe, help my unbelief." He wasn't
being bad, just really, honestly human.
But does that mean that we always have to live in two minds, like the
double minded man James wrote about. I don't think so. Our friend Korzybski
of the dog biscuit once pointed out, "There are two ways to slide
easily through life, doubting everything or believing everything. Both
ways save us from thinking."
We simply cannot prove everything we live our lives by. All of the great
things in life take faith. Having a child, falling in love, taking on
a new job, attempting a degree, a project, attempting A levels. Getting
up in the morning. All require a measure of faith. All require a level
of commitment to the unknown.
My Christian faith invites from me a level of commitment without giving
me an ironclad proof. But like the business of choosing a vocation, giving
yourself in love to another person, becoming a parent - until we take
the risk, make the leap of faith, we can't experience the rewards.
But even then, when the leap is taken, the commitment made, it is an ongoing
adventure, a learning, a growing. If a relationship becomes stagnant,
it dies. If a river ceases to flow it dies. If faith becomes a set of
dogmas rather than an ongoing conversation between what I know and what
I am finding out, it has become a dead letter.
We must be careful not to mix up the absolute truth of God with the idea
that our beliefs about God are absolute truth. As one Christian writer,
John Hutchison put it, "Unthinking faith is a curious offering to
be made to the creator of the human mind." Questioning is the only
means by which we can approach truth and we haven't made it yet - unless
we've become omniscient.
I like the story from Mark 9.
We have James, Peter and John, just coming down after an awesome spiritual
experience that they've totally failed to understand.
We have the other disciples, like us, fallible and failing, feeling a
little foolish, unable to do what they have achieved before and wondering
why, doubting themselves, doubting all they have learned.
We have the father of a very sick little boy with an incredibly shaky
faith. "Lord I believe. Help my unbelief."
And we have the little boy, torn apart by forces he has no control over.
And Jesus responds to them all, not with judgement, but with love, understanding,
and encouragement to go on living.
That is our faith. That is the image of the God we are striving to be
faithful to. God who loves us in our questioning, loves us in our learning,
loves us in our struggles and our failings, and asks us, in all of this,
to have faith, and to live it.
May God increase our understanding, our faith, and our faithfulness, and
bless us in the process.
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