Love and hope we understand, but
faith….? For a word that we Christians use all the time, “faith” can be so
easily misconstrued:
“Jesus says that if you have faith, you can
move mountains—and by the way, if the mountains don’t move, then your faith was
inadequate,” we hear.
“Can I be a part of this church if my
faith doesn’t stretch around all of the doctrines mentioned in the Creeds?” we
wonder.
“If I had faith, then I wouldn’t be afraid of
dying, but I am terrified. God, please give me the faith not to be terrified,”
we beg.
“Faith? What bunk. Faith is just a
pair of rose-colored glasses dipped in our own power of positive thinking,” we
hear.
What is Christian faith? It’s not a standard against which we are
judged. It’s not a formula for getting what we want from God. It’s not merely an
anecdote to fear. It’s not an uplifting Facebook meme. Faith is what takes us
into the depths of things, what leads us into the heart of God. Faith calls to
us because its very nature is to speak to the suffering and the hope that we
all experience as part of living in this world. German theologian Dietrich
Bonhoeffer sat in a Nazi concentration camp, surrounded by suffering,
surrounded by absurdity, surrounded by the seeming absence of our Loving God,
and pleaded, “I don’t want to go through this affair without faith.”[1]
In the same way, a young mother facing a terrible cancer diagnosis asked me just
this week how God could do this to her, to her husband and children. Angry and
confused by God’s seeming absence, she begged for peace, for the faith to go
on. The Christians to whom the letter to the Hebrews was first addressed were
also suffering persecution, searching for God’s presence, needing to find a
sense of God’s plan beneath the seeming absurdities of their lives. They, too,
needed faith. All of us, when we admit it, know deep down that we are, like
Abraham in our second reading, “as good as dead.” Our lives are short. We are
vulnerable. We are not in control. Suffering and hope wrestle in our hearts and
bodies. We all long for the faith to see our way forward.
Richard Lischer has written a
beautiful book about the death of his only son Adam from cancer. Lischer writes
about a God who is “transcendently close,” so close to us “that we cannot see
him, and so woven into the fiber of things that he remains hidden, like the key
that is ‘lost’ in plain view.”[2]
To find this God who is in all things, yet more than all things, who is weaving
us and our world from within, we need eyes that can peer into the depths of our
suffering. We need eyes that can see God in the human flesh of Jesus Christ,
eyes that can see God’s presence in suffering and pain, eyes that can see God’s
very being in the bread and wine that we take into ourselves in the Eucharist.
Lischer learned to see that God as he watched his son die of cancer. He writes:
“[W]e loved Adam’s flesh—the graceful body with its underlying sinewy strength,
but also the small tumors on his side and his pale white head—because what his
body was losing in mass it was gaining in transparency. The sacred presence had
always been there, of course, as it is in each of us, like stars on a
cloud-filled night, but we had never seen it so clearly as when he began to
die.”[3]
The author of our lesson from Hebrews
is writing, too, about this strange mystery of transparency, the peeling back
of layers. In Hebrews, faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the
conviction of things not seen.” In Hebrews, though, faith is more than just
seeing. Faith is not something that we have, but something that we live; it is the
motivation to endure, even in the face of hardship and persecution. Clarence
Jordan, in his “Cotton Patch Gospel,” translates our verses from Hebrews as
follows: “Now faith is the turning of dreams into deeds; it is betting your
life on the unseen realities. It was by such faith that men of old were
martyred. And by so relating our lives,
we become aware that history is woven to God’s design so that the seeing event
is a projection of the unseen intent.”[4]
By defining our surroundings by the divine light that shines through them, we
are living in a faith and a hope that allows us to act, ourselves, as a sign of
Christ’s Kingdom, and we are transformed. Transformed in our response.
I was finishing up my sermon this
week, happy with my interpretation of our epistle, when I flipped on the news,
hearing once again about the newly aggravated terrorist threat throughout the
world. I heard that Al-Qaeda has invented an explosive device that can be
surgically implanted in the body of a willing suicide-bomber and thus brought
easily on board a plane. And I thought, “Oh dear. Talk about power hidden
inside the unseen depths. Talk about martyrs with the faith to obey God’s will
no matter what. For it is indeed faith that is driving them to blow their
bodies to bits for what they believe is God’s hidden plan for the world. Oh
dear.” Our epistle even talks about abandoning this world for a “better
homeland” in heaven. That is what those suicide bombers are doing. It is
tempting to say that faith-turned-violent is a Muslim issue, that we Christians
wouldn’t do such a thing. But that isn’t true. Christians have resorted to
violence to bring about what they perceive to be God’s will time and time
again. How do we keep our hope from becoming a violent one? How do we keep our
conviction from becoming aberrent? How do we keep suffering from turning us toward
vengeance?
According the author of Hebrews, what
keeps us on track in our perceptions are the stories with which we frame our
faith, the stories of the “great cloud” of witnesses who have preceded us. In
chapters 11 and 12, the author of Hebrews points to witness upon witness to
God’s hidden design, faithful witness upon faithful witness. Moreover, at the
center of all of the stories of faithful witness, he points to the story of
Jesus, “the perfecter of our faith … who endured the cross, disregarding its
shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.” Jesus, who
sees good in the souls of sinners, who advises us to give all that we have for
treasure hidden in a field, and who teaches us to forgive our enemies, becomes the
framework for our own lives. With the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as
our framework, it is love and grace that must guide our lives and our
testimony. A faith truly nourished in Christ will strengthen us to tend the
sick, lavish time on the dying, lift up the poor and insignificant from the
shadows, and speak truth even in places where it is held as foolishness.
When I was a timid teenager, my
mother gave me a poster to hang in my room. It was a cartoon drawing of a stout
little medieval knight, completely covered in armor from head to toe, including
a metal helmet that covered his entire face. He was standing resolutely, sword
drawn, in front of a huge green fire-breathing dragon. While large, the dragon
was far from frightening, however. Her long-lashed googly-eyes looked down with
demure affection at the knight. Above the cartoon, in gothic script, were the
words, “Have Faith.” I remember getting some kind of encouraging boost from
this poster, as I compared my fears to a goofy, googly-eyed dragon.
Thinking about
the cartoon in light of today’s lesson, however, I wonder if I might have found
more authentic Christian consolation if I had read the poster differently. Both
the dragon and the knight are vulnerable creatures. Their encounter opens them
both up to possible harm. As they eye one another across the gulf which
separates them, the armor-encased knight draws his sword, seeking a faith that
will shore him up in battle, a faith that will protect him and make him the
victor. The dragon, on the other hand, is seeking the faith to love, the faith
to hold back her fire, just in case the little figure across from her might
become her friend. Instead of identifying with the armor-covered knight, ready
to engage a world that is only frightening in my imagination, what if I had identified
with this dragon? According to the author of our epistle, faith looks down on a
frightened man waving a sword and remembers the promise recorded in scripture
of the lion lying down with the lamb. Faith looks down on a man hidden under a
suit of armor and sees a vulnerable child of God. As Christians, we don’t clad ourselves in
protective armor or shield our eyes from what is around us. Instead, we look
into the unseen depths for the God whose Love is witnessed in Creation and in
Holy Scripture, and in that faith, we persevere. In that faith, we engage our world.
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