Faith. If only I had more.
Have you ever heard yourself saying
that? Or somebody else saying it?
Let me ask you something. If you
had more faith (assuming you want more), what would you do with it? What would
it do for you?
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| Marc Chagall, Abraham and Sarah |
Once upon a time, according to
Luke, though not in today’s gospel, the disciples asked Jesus: “Lord, increase
our faith.” And he answered them, “If you had the faith of a mustard seed you
could say to this mulberry tree, ‘be uprooted and planted in the middle of the
sea,’ and it would obey you.” Another version of that story appears in
Matthew’s gospel. Jesus is provoked at his disciples for having so little
faith. They have tried unsuccessfully to perform an exorcism. After Jesus
upbraids them and takes over the project himself, the disciples ask Jesus why
they weren’t able to cast the demon out. “Because of your little faith,” he
said. “For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you
will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and
nothing will be impossible for you.’”
So is that what we want if we want
more faith? To be able to do the impossible? Or is faith something else?
The writer to the Hebrews clearly
had some idea of faith, and I am not sure that his was exactly what Luke’s
Jesus had in mind. That writer (whose identity we do not know and can only
speculate about, but who was most certainly not St. Paul) wrote out a long,
sustained argument, the longest in the whole Bible. He set out to demonstrate
conclusively that Jesus on the cross had performed once and for all the
sufficient sacrifice that had never been done and could never be done in the
Jerusalem Temple. The writer with good reason takes his time in recounting what
might be called the “faith history” of Israel.
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| Icon of Jesus Healing the Epileptic Boy |
We do not have to guess what was in
his mind. He tells us. Christ is the great High Priest who has made atonement,
unlike any “high priest” that there ever had been. By a single offering Christ
has reconciled humanity and God. Sins are forgiven. There is no need for any
more sacrificial offerings for sin. Christ’s sacrifice is thoroughly effective.
“Therefore,” states the writer, we have confidence to enter the sanctuary (that
is, the presence and life of God) by the blood of Jesus. And we can approach
with a “true heart in full assurance of faith, simply because all the barriers
to our being with God and living in God have been removed by Jesus. But there
are some precautions. (How could it be
the Bible and there not be?) We must know that if we willfully persist in ego-driven
behavior after having received knowledge of the truth, we will effectively be
acting contrary to the indwelling God. Still, the author calls his audience to
remember the struggles they have been through, the abuse, the persecution. He
exhorts them not to shrink back, but to live in full confidence that the loss
of nothing is nearly as great as what God has promised. This, he says, is how
the righteous live and have always lived: by faith. He begins calling the roll
of those who in the holy history have been examples of faith: Abel, Noah,
Abraham, Sarah. “All of these,” he says, “died in faith without having received
the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.” They were, he
says, like foreigners on earth. They knew that they belonged to a different
land, a different reality. They could have looked behind and moaned
sentimentally about all that they had lost and left behind, and could even have
returned. But they kept pressing on towards a better country, a future with
God, a heavenly country. And indeed God had prepared a city for them.
What is his point in all this? It’s
to get his Christian audience to take heart! He wants to inspire them to keep
on moving, going, growing; not to give up; to follow the examples of their
forebears, not to mention the example of the pioneer and perfecter of their
faith, Jesus, who pressed on through cross and shame and suffering to be seated
at God’s right hand in glory. “You can do it!” he says. “Lift your drooping
hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet….” Faith
is the quality, very closely related to hope, that keeps people from giving up.
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| Sojourner Truth |
But that’s not the only thing that
faith is. Not, at least, according to the Bible, which is something of a
textbook on faith and faithfulness. Faith is not essentially about believing a
set of doctrines or teachings, though it has come to mean that for a great many
people. To have faith means to put your trust in somebody. It is essentially about giving your heart to somebody,
even at the risk of having it trampled and trashed. Faith can be believing
something that you have no evidence for, only a hunch about, or less, or more. Faith
can be practicing piety like saying your prayers and going to church, or it can
mean the things you believe or the persons you follow, whether they are
religious or not. Faith can be virtuous or it can be pig-headed. It can make
life sweet when it works like a charm, and it can be a bitter disappointment
when faith turns out to have been sadly misplaced.
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| John Chapman, known as Johnny Appleseed |
Are you still sure that you want
some faith? Or more of it? Some of you will tell me that you have all the faith
you need and that what you have works perfectly fine for you. I’m sure you do,
and I rejoice that it works well. Others may say that you don’t get what it is
all about. Faith is about as appealing to you as a root canal. The truth of the
matter is that we can’t live very well without faith. By that I do not mean we need to live a particularly “religious”
lifestyle. I am talking about faith as a
matter of trust. I am thinking even more specifically about faith as a
quality of taking risks, like Abraham
and Sarah, the practice of striking out occasionally into the unknown, for
which you have no guarantees, and in which you have no charts or road maps. It
is true that a great many people—you may be one of them—have an aversion to
taking risks, and who can convincingly argue that they do very well staying on
the safe side of things. I’d be lying if I didn’t say to such folk that I’d
like to rattle their cages a bit! But this gospel we proclaim is not one that
we can use to slam the timid and retiring—or anyone else—suggesting that
somehow they count less than the brave-hearted. Yet, the writer to Hebrews has
a point. People did not get to be models of faith by hedging their bets and
pulling punches. The way of God demands some element of cutting loose and
letting fly, for God’s sake! No one in the entire roster of faithful people
gets to be in the Bible because he or she sat musing on the possibilities of
adventure, vacillating about whether or not to join the innumerable caravan
moving into the future with determination, analyzing to death the pluses and
minuses of getting balled up in the hard stuff that comes from a challenging
God.
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| St. Seraphim of Sarov |
If we, two thousand years later,
were to add to Hebrew’s gallery of faithful heroes and heroines, we would
quickly see that faithfulness is not a matter of particular content, nor of a
particular vocation. We would find all sorts of people who have lived
faithfully, from the hermit, St. Seraphim of Zarov, to the wandering Johnny Appleseed, from the cloistered Julian of
Norwich to the activist Dorothy Day to the courageous mystic Sojourner Truth. Whoever
you are, you can be faithful.
Are you one of the many people who
have stopped believing that? Have you been jerked around by the Church to the
point you have spiritual whiplash, and only want it to stop? Do you find
yourself wandering away from faith, convinced that the requirement of being
faithful means to forfeit your intellect or in some cases your sense of common
decency like many who set themselves up as paragons of right and do nothing to
stop this cruel rampage against humanity now picking up steam? Some of us are
slow to wake up and realize that there is more to life than conforming to
social expectations (be they set by your parents or by gangs in the ghetto or
Vogue magazine or Oprah), totally unaware that life is a many-layered thing,
and that some of the best layers are invisible to the naked eye, known to make
the heart quiver, and the spirit do a somersault. It is just this kind of
insight that nearly everyone on the Hebrews all-star line-up exhibits. Our
author says that they knew their true native land was somewhere besides the
front porch. They listened to a Voice that called them away from the familiar
towards another country, a heavenly one.
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| Dorothy Day |
My own take on most of the people
on the Hebrews list is that they were not in fact motivated by a dream of an
afterlife. Most of them did not know what that was, including Abraham, the
prototype of faithfulness. But they did have a notion of “heaven,” if by
“heaven” we mean where God is and if heaven and therefore God is everywhere
including as close to you as your nose or your forehead or your buttocks. Being
faithful is not dreaming of some airy-fairy world. When it comes right down to
it, being faithful is taking the presence of God in your own life quite
seriously.
We need people of faith, real
faith, as never before. We are facing issues and battles today of unprecedented
proportions. We live in a society where there are now more guns than people,
where those who could do something about it choose weak-kneed responses and
cynically offer their thoughts and prayers as if consolation of victims were a
way to stop violence. It is just a matter of time before the next catastrophic
environmental disaster like poisoned water or a gigantic oil spill will be the
news for a day or two. The planet heats up and people either refuse to believe
it, or believe it and refuse to alter their behavior. Meanwhile we let the
religious crazies, at home and abroad, hijack our faith traditions and dictate
the terms on which we decide to be faithful or not. We are looking at every bit
as dangerous a time as Hebrews ever saw: a slow collapse of social
institutions, a debasing of education, the triumph of anti-intellectualism, a
fickle electorate that is run largely by fear, cynical so-called leaders who
lie big enough and long enough and steadily enough that hosts of people find it
easier to believe the lie than to pull up stakes, like Abraham, and hit the
road for the One who is True.
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| Martin Luther King, Jr. |
The real enemy of faith is fear. The
question confronting us is, “So what are you afraid of?” Whatever may be
holding you back from running a risk or taking a stand or making a witness is
just something that puts you in the category with every other human being. We
can either shrink back, dither, or take heart. Martin Luther King once said, “This
faith transforms the whirlwind of despair into a warm and reviving breeze of
hope. The words of a motto which a generation ago were commonly found on the
wall in the homes of devout persons need to be etched on our hearts: ‘Fear
knocked at the door. Faith answered. No one was there.’”
A sermon preached on Hebrews
11:1-3, 8-16.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010
