Faith is Saying Yes! to Life Rev. Dr. Becky Edmiston-Lange January 30, 2011

Transcription

1 Faith is Saying Yes! to Life Rev. Dr. Becky Edmiston-Lange January 30, Why did Sarah laugh when God told her that at the age of ninety she was going to finally conceive and bear a child? Frederick Beuchner suggests several possible explanations: Perhaps Sarah and Abraham laughed because nobody in their right mind would believe a woman of her age could have a baby - or, maybe they were laughing at God for believing such a ridiculous notion - or, maybe they laughed because they wanted to believe it and if by some crazy miracle it did come true, they would have something to laugh about - a child, an heir. Well, I d like to suggest that there s yet another reason why Sara may have laughed and that her laughter, at least at first, wasn t exactly peals of joy. Think about what we know about Sara. At ninety years old, she has spent most of her life following her husband Abraham around through most of the known world - all at the behest of this God Yahweh. First Yahweh told them they had to pack up all their possessions, leave their home in Ur and move to Canaan. Barely had they settled in Canaan when a famine swept through and Yahweh told them to move to Egypt. When they arrive in Egypt, Abraham asks Sara to pretend that she s his sister, so that he won t arouse the jealousy of the Egyptians for having such a beautiful wife. Sara goes along with the ruse, and what happens? The Pharaoh took such a shine to her that he made her one of his many wives. Well, Yahweh didn t like that one bit - so he brought great plagues down on the Egyptians, whereupon the pharaoh kicks Abraham and Sarah out of Egypt and they have to schlep all the way back to Canaan, by a circuitous route, no less. To be sure, Sara has been childless, and presumably she wanted an heir as much as Abraham. But, let s face it - at the age of ninety she s probably long since given up on the idea! At ninety she s probably looking forward to some well deserved non-nomadic rest, not to changing diapers and chasing after a toddler! And then here, comes Yahweh, saying, Guess what I have in store for you, Sarah! Did Sara laugh because she didn t believe it - or because she did? I think Sarah laughed because she believed it only too well, that she was thinking, Dang! Fooled again. Whatever made me think Yahweh was through with us! I think she laughed because yet again Yahweh was upsetting her plans. Beuchner uses this story to talk about faith. What does faith mean? Unitarian Universalists can be reluctant to use that word, faith, because it evokes, for many of us, an image of blind faith, of having to believe something that can t be proved just because someone tells us we should believe it. The word faith also raises the specter of a creed, as in a statement of faith, a collection of doctrinal statements to which we all must ascribe. And neither of those associations to the word faith sits well with us. After all, freedom of belief is the hall mark of our religion. We say, and we mean it, that we cannot tell you what to believe, that whatever you believe, must arise out of your own experience and make sense to you within the context of your own life. We also insist upon the use of reason in the pursuit of religion. We say that religion must not contradict the best we can know from science and other intellectual disciplines. We have encouraged doubt and a healthy scepticism about any claim to absolute truth. And so when it comes to that word, faith, we are understandably wary.

2 2 But there is a way of understanding faith which is amenable to our sensibilities- an understanding of faith not as a noun so much as a verb; not as belief in a set of intellectual propositions to which one must attest, but rather as the process by which one leans into and makes meaning out of life. Part of our problem is one of language. There s no good verb form in the English language for faithing. All the words for faith which usually get translated into English as I believe really mean something more like commitment, loyalty or trust. We translate the Latin word credo as I believe, but it really means I rest my heart on. The Hindu word sradha which we also translate as I believe means an alignment of the will. In fact, prior to the sixteenth century the word believe itself meant I give my heart to or I pledge my allegiance to. Prior to that time the statement, for example, I believe in God was not an intellectual assertion about whether or not God exists - God s existence was taken as a given - but rather a statement pledging love and loyalty to God. Faith understood this way involves much more than intellectual assent. It involves the emotions, the will, indeed, one s whole self. When we understand faith in this way, it turns the question of faith in a whole different direction. Rather than ask of each other, what do you believe? as a way of talking about faith, we might better ask of each other, on what or whom do you rest your heart? To what values are you loyal? To what vision of ultimate reality and human relationship are you committed? When I first discovered this understanding of faith, it was liberating! All my life - even in seminary - I hadn t ever been able to believe what others seemed to think I should - and here I am talking mostly about standard Christian doctrine. I always had questions; I always had doubts; it never made sense. I thought that if I just studied theology enough, if I just deposited enough information in my brain about religion, then someday I would come to believe, be able to accept the doctrines- but that never happened. And so I d begun to think there was something wrong with me - that I had a hole in my soul when it came to matters of faith. But when I discovered this definition of faith as more than intellectual belief, as a process of investing trust and loyalty in some vision of the good - I suddenly realized that I did have faith - not faith as conventionally understood, but faith which helped me make meaning and which gave direction to my life. Equally liberating about this conception of faith was the idea that if one looked at faith this way - as less of a possession, as in I have faith than as a process - then one could see that faith is not static but that it can grow and change over the course of one s life. And in fact in the last twenty years researchers into faith development have discovered that faith does develop over the life span in much the same way that cognitive capacities develop and that there are certain predictable stages in faith development which are independent of intellectual content.

3 3 These researchers have discovered, for example, that the foundation for adult faith is laid in infancy in our relationship with our primary care givers. It is then that we learn, or don t learn, to trust -trust in our care givers and the environment they provide, trust in our self as being worthy and at home in the world, trust in the larger world as hospitable. The quality of mutuality, the strength of trust, and the degree of autonomy and hope we develop in this stage underlie all that comes later in faith development. If we receive what psychologists call an average expectable environment in infancy, then we are better equipped to venture out and open ourselves to more and more experience, to embrace more and more reality. It is important to note that phrase - an average expectable environment - for let s face it, none of us experiences even the most loving parents as completely trustworthy and reliable all the time at every turn. And so we all learn some mistrust also, some question about ourselves as worthy, and some question about the world as hospitable. Along with the ability to venture out and explore will come the temptation to retreat, to turn our back on what life demands of us. And all our lives long, at each developmental turn, this ratio of trust to mistrust, of openness and the temptation to retreat will come into play again. For every stage of life will confront us with challenges to our primary faith stance. There will be the predictable challenges of maturation - such as the rise of abstract thinking, the awakening of sexuality and the struggle for independence, which we all encounter in adolescence, for example. And there will be the not-so-predictable exigencies of life that we encounter in our life journeys - illness, death of those we love, career disruptions, problems with children, and so forth. Each of these factors will challenge our sense of self and self in relation to the world. Each of these factors will threaten our primary trust in others and our sense of ourselves as trustworthy; each will threaten our ability to remain open to the world. But faith that continues to grow and remain vital throughout life must continue to incorporate more and more experience. Faith that continues to grow must not become a closed system of self-reinforcing perceptions and doctrines. Let me give you a concrete example of what I mean. A colleague of mine, in describing his faith journey, said that as a child he grew up in a very traditional faith, a faith which could best be captured by his mother s oft repeated phrase, God s in his heaven and all s right with the world. As a child, that was a very comforting faith stance - the idea that God was in charge and life is as it should be. But as he grew older he learned more and experienced more about the ways in which the world was not right, with its poverty, injustice, unfairness, etc. When he questioned his parents about how God could let bad things happen to good people, he was told that God knows what is best and God understands all even if we can t. His parents faith in their version of God was unassailable. They simply ignored information and experience that didn t fit into their tidy construction of reality. My colleague, however, couldn t turn his back on his new knowledge and experiences. He remained open to questioning and eventually this led him to reject his childhood notion of God. If he were going to retain a conception of God, his ideas about God would have to change in order to incorporate his new experience. And so he began the stage of his faith journey that eventually led him to Unitarian Universalism.

4 4 This way of thinking about faith that I have been explaining is much more in line with Unitarian Universalism than the more limited notion of faith as purely what we believe intellectually. This way of looking at faith says that it is not so much the specific content of our faith statements that is important as is our commitment to a way of being in the world. Haven t we Unitarian Universalists always said that we need not think alike to walk together in love? And so, for example, we may and we do differ among ourselves about what God or Goddess is or even that God is. But what we share is the understanding that what s important about our ideas about God is how those ideas sustain us in the daily process of living and help us become more loving, more justice seeking, more peace making, and more open to diversity. And think about the central affirmations of our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition - affirmations such as: human beings can know and do the good; human beings are worthy of love; the potential for goodness and joy in the world outweighs the potential for evil and sorrow; the universe is not malevolent toward human desire; and, all humanity is meant to share a common destiny of peace and harmony. These affirmations are not simply a matter of intellectual assertion. No amount of study can convince us of their correctness. And the real test of our faith is to maintain these affirmations despite setbacks, challenges, and failures, to never forever lose hope, to keep saying yes to life no matter what it brings - and not only saying yes but living that yes so that the future of our desire comes ever closer. To say yes to life no matter what it brings. What one of us has not been disappointed in life, in love, in other people? What one of us has not had our heart broken, if not by a lover, then by a true story of the world s misery and woe? Faith is the courage to live in an imperfect world. Faith is to say yes, and keep on saying yes. At its best our faith calls us to a passionate and compassionate embrace of life. When I say that our faith must be passionate, I don t mean that we give up our critical thinking or our questioning. That critical function is part of what it means to stay open to experience. And, after all, fundamentalists can be quite passionate about their faith. But there does come a point in faith development when one s faith stance must become a lived reality. Much as the stream in the Sufi tale gave itself over to its desire to cross the sands, there comes a point when we must give ourselves over to our desire and live the world we want to see into being. There will always be risk involved. When the stream allows itself to be carried by the wind, it doesn t know what will happen. There s no certainty that the stream won t simply lose itself, but its desire to cross the sands is stronger than the fear of this risk. The stream gives itself up regardless. And so it is with us. There is no certainty that by living in ways that accord with our hope for the future of the world that such a future will be assured. Nor does our faith stance mean that circumstances won t conspire to make us doubt the wisdom of our desire. As with Sarah, life will keep throwing things at us which say in effect, here, can you incorporate this new piece of reality; can you enlarge your map of the world and your hopes for the world to include this? We will face the temptation to

5 5 turn our backs on new experience, to retreat into safer, more predictable versions of reality, safer, more predictable faith constructs. Nor does our faith stance mean that bad things, hard things, won t happen to us. People and institutions will betray us; things will happen that strive to convince us that life is brutal and mean. Our spouse of thirty years will walk out on us for a younger, prettier version of ourselves; we will be downsized or outsourced of the only job we ve ever had at the age of fifty five; people we love will die prematurely; our own health will fail. Our task in the face of such realities will be to continue to bear witness to our desire - to not reflect back to the world its meanness and betrayal, to not provide more evidence that life is nasty and brutal, to not give up on love and justice and peace. Whatever life brings, we are called as Unitarian Universalists to continue to witness to the possibilities that life can be abundant, free and bold. Our faith stance doesn t protect us from the exigencies of life. But it has staked a claim on us to say yes, to continue to live in the hope for the possibilities. And it is by living that hope, giving ourselves over to that desire, that we will cross the sands, we will give birth to that child called laughter, we will create the world of our dreams.