The Faith I Don t Have Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray December 14, 2014

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1 The Faith I Don t Have Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray December 14, 2014 Reading: Child-Like Faith by Donna Featherston I was raised in a religion where child-like faith was held up as the shining example of how to believe in God: accepting, unquestioning, following. So when I wasn t able to conform, I turned away thinking I d just leave the whole mess behind me. Now, I m a mother I don t know how many kids you ve been around but accepting, unquestioning and following doesn t describe any of my children. As my kids were growing up, I was pummeled with questions daily. And my children who are (rightfully) not satisfied with my often insufficient answers plunge ahead asking, answering, pondering on their own with their bright minds and hearts, aided by technological miracles I could never have foreseen when I was their age. I find myself looking back at the faith of my youth looking for what interfaith leader, Eboo Patel, refers to as resonance. What am I hearing that resonates with me? In the Bible Jesus talks about child-like faith. He says "Permit the children to come to Me; do not hinder them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it at all." Mark 10: 14-1 I can see that as a child, I was given only one interpretation of what child-like faith means. What does it mean to look at the world with the eyes of a child? Children have a remarkable ability to be in the present moment. Have you seen a kid crouched over a bug in the driveway, marveling over its antennae? Have you heard peels of kid laughter over the most silly of jokes or when someone passes gas? Have you felt the warmth of an unsolicited hug? Have you cried when reading a book both because the words moved you to tears and out of gratitude that someone else could express your own feelings so perfectly? I ve come to see these experiences in the present moment as the Kingdom of God. And I ve also come to see that my faith is evolving and when I am open to listening or looking with an open mind, I am often able to find that thread that resonates with something deeper in me, something that enriches. Sermon: In his book Blues Ain t Nothing but a Good Soul Feeling Bad, Sheldon Kopp shares this story from the Hasidic tradition of Judaism: 1

2 Once several members of a Hasidic congregation had become helplessly lost in a dense forest. They were delighted when unexpectedly they came upon their rabbi who was also wandering through the woods. They implored, Master, we are lost! Please show us the way out of the forest. The rabbi replied, I do not know the way out either, but I know which paths lead nowhere. I will show you the ways that won t work, and then perhaps together we can discover the ones that do. What a great story for exploring our theme this month of Faith. For I will readily admit, I don t know all the ways that faith works in our lives, gives us hope, keeps us strong, leads us in our living. As Director Anne s Together Time story showed, there are many paths that work, but that does not mean there may not be some paths that lead to a dead end. Last week, I argued that even if our definitions and understandings of religion are nontradition, non-typical, we must not completely leave behind the language of faith, because doing so allows the language to become so narrowly defined that it cripples our ability to bring morality and religious conscience to bear on the structures of injustice and inequality that are systemic and in need of change. In other words, making the language of faith only about personal sin, personal salvation, personal belief, disempowers it from being a much-needed critical and moral voice against systemic and structural injustice in our society. It leads faith toward an ever-narrowing dead end. One of the reasons it is important to grow more comfortable expressing a diverse and nuanced understanding of faith as Unitarian Universalists is that it keeps alive in the collective awareness of people and society the fact, the reality, of religious diversity. It helps the words or language of faith be heard with more complexity, the more they are used with diverse meanings. There is great beauty and even wonder in understanding the expression of faith not as only one thing, but a complex expression of the rich diversity of humanity and the many ways we understand, make sense of and experience our lives as spiritual beings. There is a well-used story about the person who says I don t believe in God, to which a friend responds, Oh yeah, tell me about the God you don t believe in. The person explains, I don t believe there is some male figure up in the sky, with a long white beard, who watches over me and intervenes in my life. Oh, says the friend, I don t believe in that God either. So, today let s imagine the person says, I don t have faith. And the friend responds, Oh yeah, tell me about the faith you don t have. Well here is my answer. Let me tell you about the faith I don t have: First, I don t have blind faith. Faith does not require shutting one s eyes, or mind, to the world around us, to the teachings of science, to the needs of our world, to the truth right 2

3 before our eyes. Faith doesn t call us to close our eyes, stop our ears and ignore the world, nor ignore our own suffering. Rather than faith being blind, at its heart, faith is a choice. Let me say more about this. To say that faith is blind suggests it cannot see the realities of life. Yet, I would submit that all people, from skeptics to believers of all kinds and traditions, have some faith, faith in something, whether it be God, Truth, Beauty, Spirit of Life, Love, Justice, Gratitude some principle or ideal that is held highest and foremost in one s life. However, take any one of these and you can find much in our world that would contradict your highest beliefs and principles: many examples of suffering that make the notion of God seem preposterous; many different notions of truth that question whether there can be just one capital T truth; much ugliness that seems to contradict beauty; much evidence of disconnection, fear, violence that questions the power of love in our lives. And of course the persistence of injustice sufficient to make us all lose hope. Yet, this is exactly where faith comes in -- not as blind, but as a powerful, meaningful, critical choice. The words of poet Adrienne Rich come to mind. She writes, My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed. I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. The world can be a harsh and troubling place. Faith is a choice about how we will live in response to the challenges of the world. With open eyes to see what fear and war, what discrimination and greed have sown, we choose to hold to and live our faith, our values, in our lives. We choose to believe, we choose love, we choose justice as our guide. In this way, faith is not about shutting our eyes. It is about not giving up on what we hold dear despite how dark the world can appear. I have found myself in moments of despair, seeing so much needless violence, so much lost and I question whether or not love is the guiding force in our world, and then my faith comes in to tell me, perhaps it is not, or perhaps it is, but the question that matters is how will you live? What choice will I make? Faith is the voice or that presence, or that hope that wells up and says, again and again, Choose Love. There is a hymn in our hymnal that reads, what we choose is what we are, and what we love we yet shall be. It is easy to get discouraged when our ideals so far exceed reality. Our faith, far from being blind, is what we choose to hold most dear, what we choose to value above all else, what we choose to have guide our actions and the work of our hands in the world, And it is this choice that makes us and shows us who we are. Second, I don t have faith that faith alone is enough. Within Christianity, there is a longstanding theological conversation over whether faith alone is sufficient, or whether what matters is our works, how we live. Well, no matter how you come down on this argument, this is not the faith I have. 3

4 In his book, Heretics Faith: Vocabulary for Religious Liberals, Fred Muir defines faith as belief and values plus action. Together they make up faith. He looks to examples of people who profess a set of beliefs yet whose actions have no correlation to those beliefs. Some people don t even see a relationship between their faith, their beliefs, and their actions. At the same time there are people who are totally invested in their works, in their actions, but never take the time to consider or reflect on the deeper values that inform their acts. Muir says that faith is about acting on our values. These days faith has become too narrowly defined as only belief. When someone says, I have faith too often we take that to mean a belief in God. But what we need is a broad understanding of faith that includes not just belief, but our core values, and more than this, how we live them. The foundation or basis of faith is the meeting between our values and our action. Here s another faith I don t have: I don t have an absolute or unquestioning faith. As Donna expressed in her reflection, I do not have a child-like faith, if what one means by this is absolute, unquestioning, complete trust. However, if by child-like you mean the way children incessantly ask why?, the way they marvel at new discoveries, challenge rules and what they ve been told, and the way that each day they learn something new, then Yes! that is the faith I hope to have. The faith I hope we all can have. A faith that is full of wonder, sometimes critical and always asking difficult questions. Faith that deepens and changes and grows as one s experience and knowledge of life, of the world, of self deepens and grows. Faith ought to be questioned, for it is made stronger by doubt. Absolute faith cannot be as strong as faith that has been challenged and refined in the crucible of experience and doubt. I think some of us think that all believers, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish, to name a few, have an unquestioning faith, and while some might, many hold doubt right along side faith. The Christian theologian Frederick Beuchner says, Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don t have any doubts, you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving. Ants in the pants of faith -- that to me sounds like a child-like faith, a faith that is awake, alert! This is a lot closer description of the faith I have. And finally, I don t have a faith that acts like a shield or protector. My faith is not one of walls that separate, but one that invites engagement, even struggle. My faith is not one of escape, nor a reason not to engage the world. Do you know the familiar phrase, Let go and let God? This is not a saying that I like. And yet, there is some wisdom to it. This wisdom is a reminder that there is much outside of our control. Seeking to control outcomes of everything, to wish to know the 4

5 future before it happens, or feeling the weight of the world heavy on our shoulders, can be a recipe for driving oneself crazy, a recipe for stress, for burnout, for misery. On the other hand, here is what I don t like about this phrase. To view this as absolving us from any responsibility to our neighbors, a message to focus solely on your own personal life while ignoring the rest is not any faith we should aspire to. The faith to aspire to is an invitation to courage. An invitation to keep showing up, to keep making our best efforts, even when we cannot see the full road ahead of us. It is letting go of the outcomes, without letting go of the good works needed of us. Martin Luther King, Jr. described it this way: Faith is taking the first step even when you can t see the whole staircase. This kind of faith is what gives us the courage to keep acting on behalf of our values, the courage to keep greeting each day, even when we know it may be a day we wish we did not have to face. This is a form of faith that is not a protective shield preventing harm, but a faith that gives us strength to meet the challenges of our lives and our days. It doesn t ensure protection, but it ensures we can live with ourselves and our decisions. It reminds me of a few lines from a poem by David Whyte, named Self-portrait. He writes: It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods. I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand. I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of sure defeat. This is faith -- not sheltering, not protective, but offering the strength to say this is where I stand, the power to live with the consequences of love, and to live and keep moving forward in in the face of defeat, this is the faith we need. Thinking back to the Hasidic story of the congregation lost in the dense forest, I could not begin to give every definition of faith, name every path that each of us might find to give us courage, hope and a faith filled life. Yet, this does not mean there are not some paths to avoid. Definitions that lead down ever narrowing roads toward a dead end, or that will disappear, or become distorted in the face of challenge and crisis. The paths that I have found lead to dead ends are the paths of blind faith, unquestioning faith, faith as a shield, and faith as belief alone. Instead, let us find our way to paths that grow wider as we learn and discover more, that grow wider in their complexity, but that also grow clearer as we all make the effort to understand the values and principles that give us hope, that give us strength, that guide our living. 5

6 In the end the work of our lives, the journey we are all on is about discovering and then naming and sharing the paths we discover, paths that lead us from feeling lost, to finding clarity and strength, from confusion to commitment, from fear and despair to hope and renewal. May we all continue to find and walk these paths of faith together. 6

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