Musings

Raw Faith

One of my church members, Dan, suffered a big health setback lately – and he already had plenty of physical challenges.  But when I went to see him in the hospital, he said, with a smile on his face, “Jim, I’m in a medical decathlon.  I’m entered in all the events!  And I’ve decided to enthusiastically embrace the inevitable.”  He’s looking forward to reading good books while on dialysis for hours on end, three times a week.  He has been sorely tested, but he still has faith, inspiring all who visit him. 

Dan has raw faith.  It’s not faith in a set of beliefs so much as it is a faithful approach to living.  I think Jesus had raw faith, too.  Jesus didn’t base it on some delicate structure of dogma or belief in the historical factuality of certain events.  His faith was a trust in his relationship with God, which led him to love and serve courageously. 

Christian faith is the emulation of Jesus’ faith.  It doesn’t depend on whether or not the resurrection was an historical fact.  That’s a matter that can be argued, but faith is beyond all that.  I believe that the story of the resurrection of Jesus is a powerful, life-changing myth.  The story resonates with my faith, and inspires it, partly because I don’t have to accept it factually.

It’s okay to believe it literally.  But the less our faith depends on belief in the unnaturally miraculous, the stronger our faith becomes.  When the theory of evolution came along, it was a lot harder to take the Biblical creation story at face value.  This frightened Christians who believed their salvation was at risk if they stopped believing that the world was created in six days.  But their objection was more a sign of the weakness of their faith than of the godlessness of science. 

Faith isn’t about facts.  The facts in front of Dan are ones could lead to despair, yet the man still has faith.  There are plenty of Christians who don’t think Jesus literally rose from the dead, and for many of them, their faith is even stronger because it has been liberated from dependence on the factuality of a highly implausible event.  Raw faith, devoid of evidence for its validity, is the toughest kind of faith.  It enabled Jesus to face the otherwise frightful facts before him on the cross.

 

“For we walk by faith, no by sight,” said St. Paul (2 Cor. 5: 7). 

Christian faith is a positive approach to life, a willingness to love and serve, despite or even because of visibly hopeless circumstances.   It’s the kind that remains, even if angels don’t swoop down to rescue us physically.  It’s the kind that gets us through the emotional, financial, and medical decathlons we enter, whether we like them or not.  It’s the faith that keeps us going  -- even when we think we’ve lost it.....

Working It Out

Each of us has to work it out in her or his own way.

Some of us go through years of therapy to get there.  Others become fitness fanatics and try to run or swim or weight-lift it out.  Others plunge into artistry, trying to paint or sculpt our way through.  Sometimes we go through nightmarish addictions to get there, nearly destroying ourselves in the process.

But one way or another, we must do it.  Somehow we must resolve the mighty struggles raging within us.

God went through it, too.  The Bible, in all its verbose majesty and travesty, might be reduced to the following short, mythical synopsis of God’s inner struggle: 

Before the beginning, God was alone, and desperately lonely.  So he decided to create a friend, and a world to sustain this friend.  But as soon as he created humanity, God was ambivalent about us.  God was afraid we would get the better of him, get too clever and take his place.  God wanted to keep us below him, but intimacy requires the risk of being an equal, or even being a servant, to one’s friend.  We wanted to go farther than God would allow, and this angered God, who kept changing the rules and limits he placed on us in an ever-more-frustrating attempt to manage us.  And God’s anger was so great that he hurt us in ways that far outweighed our alleged crimes.  He heaped terrible pain and loss on Job, who had been a loyal friend to him, punishing Job for no good reason.  Job complained bitterly to God, whom he had loved and honored.  God hated himself for what he had done to Job and to so many others.  So finally God could stand it no longer and gave up and became a human being himself, a human being who suffered the full weight of God’s anger, so that God would know what it was like to be cursed by God.  And as a human being he realized he needed to become better than the God he used to be.  As a human being, he became more God-like than he had been when he was God.  And as a human being, he showed other people that they could rise to a higher level of divinity, as well. 

He suffered and died, and then he was reborn as a new God, a God of mercy and forgiveness and compassion.  And this is the moment we celebrate at Easter.  Easter was the time when the old-fashioned God of vengeance and jealousy and ambivalence and rage was buried in the tomb, and then emptied it, reborn as a new form of divinity that would dwell in every human heart.  The God who died on the cross was reborn out of the tomb as the God of unconditional love, the God who rejoices in us just as we are, the God we can’t embarrass no matter how foolishly we behave, the God who is not afraid to be our friend no matter how clever or ridiculous we may be. This is a reborn God who decommissioned his thunderbolts and dried up his floods and quenched his hellfires. A God who died on the cross as a domineering male, and rose up as both male and female.  A God who died on the cross as a tyrant, and rose up as a servant.  A God who died on the cross as a rage-o-holic, and rose up as a gentle friend. 

We all have to work it out somehow, even in the strangest of ways.  At Easter, we celebrate the moment when we leave our inner turmoil behind, when we rise from the death of bitterness and resentment and frustration and disappointment, and take up the new life of peace, patience, kindness, hope, and creativity.  God got there at Easter, and so may we!  Have a Passionate week, and see you on this holiest and happiest of Sundays....

Koan of Love

Last night, at my church's Bible study, we had a conversation about Jesus' words in his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5:  "Love your enemies."  What kind of love, we wondered?  When I said I didn't think that Jesus expected us to have warm, fuzzy love for our enemies, one of our group members loudly said, "Whew!"

While we associate love with hearts and romance, there's much more to it than that.  Jesus loved his enemies but I don't read in the gospels that he sent them Valentine's cards or heart-shaped boxes of Mrs. See's candy.  Indeed, he often gave his enemies doses of strong spiritual medicine with no sugar to help it go down.  He loved his enemies simply by being willing to engage in dialogue with them, even if the dialogue was tense.  His love for them took the form of his trust in their ability to change their behavior.  On the cross he asked God to forgive his enemies, saying  “they know not what they do”.  Implied in his dying phrase was the trust that one day, they would know what they had done, and do differently.

Sometimes love is easy, and sometimes it's a conundrum of conflicting emotions.  I can be deeply bonded to someone, and engaged in a struggle with them at the same time.  The struggle is made harder if I expect that love must always be accompanied by a soft golden glow emanating from the heart.  It helps to remember that even when it isn't easy, it still can be love.

And even when love's effulgence is bright and warm, there is more to its story.  Love can be so astoundingly joyful that it is excruciating to contemplate its loss to conflict, betrayal, or death.  Sometimes we avoid love altogether, because we can't bear the thought of losing it once we get it. Or our fear of loss leads us to over-react to any threat to love, no matter how minor, making it hard to love at all.

Jesus' challenge to "love your enemies" can be read as a "koan"  -- one of those absurd Zen phrases intended to shock the consciousness out of its usual constructs and open the door into the deepest meditative state.  The definition of an enemy is, in short, someone you don't love.  So Jesus is asking us to do the absurd.  And yet, this challenge is supremely worthy of engagement.  We can't love our enemies, but if we try to do so anyway, this attempt to do the impossible is, paradoxically, a demonstration of love.  And while it might not be the softest, warmest, fuzziest kind, it is a love that can take us a lot farther than we thought it could go.  Jesus' admonition still inspires people to refrain from returning evil for evil, and leads them to resolve conflicts as non-violently as they can.

Jesus shocks us out of our assumptions about love.  He ushers us outside the bounds where we thought it only could be found.  If we follow, who knows how far love will lead us, and what surprising shapes it might take?