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Finding Our Way Home: I Believe
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 18, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Ezekiel 34:11-16 Acts 16:25-34
"What do you do when you are not sure? That's the topic of my sermon today," proclaims Father Flynn with a thick Brooklyn accent every evening to his theatre-going congregation in John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize winning play Doubt. "I want to tell you a story. A cargo ship sank and all her crew was drowned. Only this one sailor survived. He made a raft of some spars and being of a nautical discipline, turned his eyes to the Heavens and read the stars. He set a course for his home, and, exhausted, fell asleep. Clouds rolled in and blanketed the sky. "For the next twenty nights, as he floated on the vast ocean, he could no longer see the stars. He thought he was on course but there was no way to be certain. As the days rolled on, and he wasted away with fevers, thirst and starvation, he began to have doubts. Had he set his course right? Was he still going on towards home? Or was he horribly lost and doomed to a terrible death? No way to know. The message of the constellations-had he imagined it because of his desperate circumstance? Or had he seen Truth once and now had to hold on to it without further reassurance?" We are that sailor, Father Flynn means to tell us, adrift on the ocean beneath a cloud-covered sky, the course toward home once set but now obscured. Or according to Ezekiel, we are sheep scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness, lost and wandering over all the mountains and on every high hill, with none, or so it seems, to search for us and on a shoulder bear us home rejoicing. Or in the words of Luke, we are jailors on guard against every threat to the reigning lie, guards under authority and, in fact, confined to our solitary fear of death. This is our human condition. "Alone, away from God, in a far country…a pilgrim," the old theologians say. Or as Father Flynn explains: we are "the lone man, the lone woman, stricken by a private calamity. 'No one knows I'm sick. No one knows I've lost my last real friend. No one knows I've done something wrong.' …You see the world as through a window. On the one side of the glass: happy, untroubled people. On the other side: you. Something has happened, you have to carry it, and it's incommunicable. And when such a person, as they must, howls to the sky, to God: 'Help me!' What if no answer comes? Silence." But why mention this among those of us who have returned to the fold, who have dropped anchor or put into shore, who have secured belief against all present threats and dangerous minds? No doubt in the season just past some here were tossed about on the high seas, but they have certainly set foot back upon the terra firma of this sanctuary; others wandered upon the mountains and on every high hill, but now even these have returned to the valley of the shadow for assurance; and of those who left neither the pews nor the heat all summer long, stalwart guardians of a Truth we still cannot comprehend, it can be said of us that we are nothing less than cheered by this crowd come home! Why mention, then, the human condition to a congregation that appears to be safe and sound and saved? Because, say the old theologians, distance is needed to hear God's address: the distance, Father Flynn would contend, of doubt. There are two kinds of doubt. The first may be dispelled by time or more information. "I doubt the Eagles will make it to the Superbowl this season." Time, of course, will tell. But the doubt we harbor when, with the psalmist, we look to the heavens and cry, "What are mortals that thou art mindful of them?" [a cry met, says Father Flynn, with silence]: this doubt will only be dispelled as the God--whose word we doubt the most--addresses us; as the God from whom we have kept our distance--a necessary distance say the old theologians--draws near! In the meantime, says Father Flynn, "doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen." So at this distance we begin by doing business, in the first place, with the doubt that quits every lesser god of our past to make room for the living God who goes before us. "I had been thrown up on an alien beach" writes another priest named John Carroll. "Sitting in the airport bar on my way to Israel I understood, for the first remembered time, that faith in God could be lost. Or changed beyond meaning. Or outgrown. In any case it could be left behind." Sometimes doubt is the result of the paucity of the God proclaimed to us in our youth: as adults we hie to the nearest bar on the way to holier ground. Sometimes the reasonableness of the world without God raises us from our knees as those who walk not by faith but by sight. Sometimes the times and our troubles expose the three-storied myth of unexamined Scripture to be only make-believe: we move on. For whatever reason, our doubt turns us toward the future with minds open and listening for the living God: the God who summons us anew to leave the known not knowing where we are going. "This kind of doubt," says Robert McAfee Brown "is beneficent. It is the price of new insights, expanding horizons, deeper commitments." I think of the scientist who doubts the reigning paradigm to dare a new presupposition. I think of Martin Luther who, having lost faith in the church's dogma, nailed his ninety-five theses to a church door. I do not mean to abandon the ancient confessions on a Sunday when we begin a series sprinkled through the year on the Apostles' Creed. Rather I would contend with Brown that "One only gets beyond a static, or prematurely closed, or 'blind' faith by entertaining doubt as to [faith's] present adequacy or ultimate finality." How we teach our children in this delightful, imaginative space across the way that the biblical narrative tells the truth, but not by way of a static God or sedimented doctrine; how we tell them the story of Noah's flood without causing them later to rail against a God who sends Tsunamis abroad and Katrinas to our shores, for instance; or how we tell them of him who was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the virgin Mary in such a way that they may suspend disbelief gladly one day-I do not know. This is not entirely in our hands! I only know enough to trust that the distance they later will choose from the faith and the church is the distance necessary to hear God's address anew as adults with children of their own to baptize! There is, in the second place, the doubt read into this holy conversation by which God has made room for us: for our minds as well as our hearts to love God freely. The nature of God's address to us--in the biblical narrative, in the history of the people of Israel, in the story of the church and supremely in Jesus Christ--is such that no "evidence" is coercive, no fact can force us to believe or disbelieve. In other words, with God there is room to doubt! "Without somehow destroying me in the process," writes John Irving in A Prayer for Owen Meany, "how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me." The room God makes for us is Jesus Christ, an expansive Word-made-flesh whose grace has yet to dawn, I sometimes think, on Christ's church. Many in here and many more out there doubt because the church has not been as gracious as God, has left no room for the questions that arise in a mind which refuses to be made up for fear of damnation. Having been raised in a community of absolute certainty where complexity and ambiguity were dismissed, a young person away from home for the first time doubts in the face of contrary claims. "Dear Mr. Corn," wrote Flannery O'Connor to a young poet who had heard her lecture at Emory University in 1962: "I don't know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all, if it is not grounded in this experience that you are having right now of unbelief…. You are bombarded with new ideas, or rather pieces of ideas, new frames of reference, an activation of the intellectual life which is only beginning, but which is already running ahead of your lived experience. After a year of this, you think you cannot believe." We ourselves have known this doubt, the doubt that fears our faith is false: "that we've been had," in Brown's words. Like Father Flynn's castaway drifting in the vast ocean, we think: "The message of the constellations-had [we] imagined it because of [our] desperate situation? Or had we seen Truth once and now had to hold on to it without further reassurance?" At sea one and all, the room God makes for us-giving us the space to doubt-forges a faith that need not fear the scrutiny of other ways of knowing. "If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false," writes the Dalai Lama in The Universe in a Single Atom, "'then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.' No one who wants to understand the world 'can ignore the basic insights of theories as key as evolution, relativity and quantum mechanics.'" I think this is so for the Christian faith as well, intelligent design notwithstanding! We therefore may pray as those set free by the truth we know in Jesus Christ, "Grant us, O God, to welcome all truth under whatever outward form it may be uttered." Or as Flannery O'Connor concludes at the end of her letter, "Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian skepticism (which always says: wait, don't bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read). It will keep you free-not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you." Then finally we doubt because we fear that our faith is true! "In this case," says Brown, "the threatening thing is not that we have hold of a faith that might slip from our grasp, but just the opposite: that our faith has hold of us in such a way that it will not let us slip from its grasp." Why is it so hard to believe? Because it is so hard to obey! "You are trifling with the subject," wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer. "If you believe, take the first step. It leads to Jesus Christ. If you don't believe, take the first step all the same, for you are bidden to take it. No one wants to know about your faith or unbelief…" Obey! "Then you will find yourself in the situation where faith becomes possible." We, of course, hesitate…sometimes all the way to our graves. Nevertheless, the God revealed in Jesus Christ, the same God who has given us room to doubt, the God we meant to follow when we quit all lesser God: this God in Christ has set out, without hesitation, across the water toward us; has left the ninety-nine believers for the sake of the one lost on a cliff; has made the earth to quake and our minds to open wide at word of his coming near. "What must we do?" we ask. "Believe he has come to you" we hear one bright morning-even this one, "to you and your household." Welcome home! Thanks be to God! |