Help us, O God of grace, to receive the gift of your love. Amen.
Why is it that some people have such struggles when it comes to faith while others seemingly cannot not believe? I’m sure we can all think of people that fall into both categories – some seem allergic to the idea of faith and utterly reject it and others, even if they don’t particularly want to believe in anything, do it as naturally as taking a breath. And, of course, these are not the only two options out there – it’s a continuum. Each of us is somewhere along that spectrum of belief.
What causes us to be in different places when it comes to belief? Is it something in our DNA? Is it what our parents did, or did not, teach us? Does our IQ score or net worth influence it? Are past hurts and traumas from religion a factor? Might our culture pull us in one direction or the other? Perhaps.
One factor that has a large gravitational pull towards skepticism is the fact that we live in a disenchanted world. I spoke about this some in Advent, and I’m probably going to keep referring to it because as I continue to read and talk to people, this seems to be the fatal flaw in the modern understanding of faith – that faith no longer belongs in our world. Faith and religion are seen as antiquities from a bygone era and have outlived their usefulness. We’ve lowered our expectations of what is probable and possible – so prayers are ridiculed as words without any impact, Sacraments are viewed as rituals that might change our attitudes but have no tangible reality, doctrine is seen not as something that binds us together but as principles that are imposed upon us. And this all happens because we’ve shrunk the world down to what is currently observable by our scientific instruments, we’ve reduced all meaning down to our experience of it, we closed our imaginations to things bigger and beyond us. This is our modern landscape, and there’s no sense in pretending it’s not. Disenchantment makes faith harder for us all.
To be sure, there are many reasons why we come to faith, and just as many reasons why we do not. This means there is no simple way for us to help in bringing our family, friends, neighbors, and classmates to faith. There is not a pamphlet that will address all of their intellectual concerns, there is not a proof that we can give for the scientifically verifiable existence of God, there is not a particular painting, sermon, piece of music, or sunset that we can introduce people to with the predictable outcome that they will be moved to faith.
Which begs the question – what do we even mean by faith? Faith, and I’ll use “belief” to be the same thing for this sermon, is not about our thoughts or intellectual commitments. Faith is not our opinion about which story we chose to live by – the story of Jesus, or Buddha, or Muhammad, or success, or being a nice person. Nor is faith something that we do – faith is not about our generosity, forgiving, charity, or spiritual disciplines. This means that faith cannot be evaluated based on how often we pray the rosary, or read Scripture, or come to church, or serve at Rowan Helping Ministries, or how much money we give. Sure, those things might be the results of faith, but they are not proof of it.
Believing is not about what we think, nor is it about what we do, rather belief is a relationship with the God who is. And because we are talking about a God who is beyond us, faith is always a gift iniatied by God. The relationship of faith always comes from God towards us. Faith is not about our efforts of reaching toward God; faith is God’s gift of being known to us. This relationship is mediated through the experiences that we have, and therein lies the reason why different people respond differently to the gift of faith – experiences have to be interpreted.
We all know that we can experience the same event and walk away with vastly different interpretations of what happened. An example that social scientists like to use is called the “Invisible Gorilla Experiment.” Now, logic would tell you that if a gorilla walked up and down this aisle while I’m preaching, you’d notice it. But experience says otherwise. The experimenters told some people to count the number of times a basketball was dribbled, and others were given no such instructions. Then, in the middle of a basketball game, a person in a gorilla suit walked across the court. Of those who were told they’d be rewarded for correctly counting how many times the ball bounced, when asked what they thought of the gorilla, half responded “What gorilla?” This is a way of pointing to the fact that though the gift of faith can be obvious to some, others of us can be so bogged down in other tasks and worries that we don’t even notice it.
And, because we all have access to the same news and yet vote differently, it shows us that having the same set of facts doesn’t guarantee that we’ll reach the same conclusions. This experience gap is even larger when we aren’t starting from the same set of facts. When we apply this to faith, we see why it is the gift of faith is received so warmly by some and rejected by others. We are influenced by our situation, our lenses, our assumptions, and our past experiences. This does not change the fact that we have all received the gift of faith, that God has reached out to each of us and all of in love, but it means that we will all receive it differently and respond differently.
If we want to more fully embrace this gift and share it with others, how might we better attune ourselves and others to this gift? Here, we turn to St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church. We heard, “When I came to you, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God with lofty words or wisdom… but nothing except Christ crucified… so that your faith might not rest of human wisdom but on the power of God.”
So often though we rely on human wisdom when it comes to faith. We evaluate belief through the lens of what we think is logical or reasonable. And we know this is a faulty approach. For one, our logic is always susceptible to bias and ignorance. We are easily manipulated when it comes to how we understand the world around us. If you want to learn more about this, pick up the book Thinking: Fast and Slow by Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Our thinking is never pure. If we turn faith into an intellectual argument, something you either agree with or not, then, well, just look around and you can see the results – religious affiliation on the decline, church attendance decreasing, and a world that seems to be growing harsher and more fragile by the day.
This is a fatally flawed approach to faith, which is why it seems like faith is dying. Approaching faith only through our minds, only through the lens of logic and reason is like trying to evaluate the beauty of a symphony by its volume, or trying to measure love. And love really is the best way to understand faith. As we heard – our faith rests on the power of God, and God’s power is the power of love which is exemplified in the Cross of Jesus.
There’s a story of a mother who, when she held her first child, said that she now knows a love that is greater than evolutionarily required. There is far more beauty, and goodness, and love in this world than is required simply as a function of evolution and philosophy. We all have yearnings and hopes that make no rational sense – we long for justice even when that would put us in a position of less power. We desire community, belonging, and meaning – and why? Sure, there are scientific ways to understand brain chemistry and social evolution, but we all know that such answers are ultimately unsatisfying because they don’t connect to the depths of our longing for these things. Logic and reason suppress the sort of wonder that make faith dance. To be sure, there is a certain intellectual beauty and resonance to our faith, but it is like the shimmering of a star – it is the result, not the cause. At its core, faith is the gift of God’s love toward us.
The way this love is most fully seen is in the low places. One theologian has said that “God’s office is found at the end of your rope.” Well, if through distractions, power, denial, and pleasures we refuse to acknowledge just how needy and vulnerable we are, we’ll have a harder time embracing this love that defies explanation. If we’re constantly clutching onto our reputation and success, it’s hard to open our hands and receive the gift of being known and loved. If we’re white-knuckling our way through life, we will find it that much harder to notice that love that is more than evolutionarily required.
This can be a challenge – to be loved is to be known. We open most Sundays by praying, “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid.” That is scary and vulnerable. We live in such a judgmental world, and we are so hard on ourselves that we often resist being fully known because that opens us to criticism and pain. But the God who is love meets us not with judgment, not with commands to “do better and try harder,” but with the love that created all things and which is working to make all things well.
This is one of the reasons why Jesus died on the Cross – to make it clear just how totally and fully God is with us and for us. God goes to the absolutely lowest places to show us that, even there, love wins. And it’s often easier to receive that gift of faith in those low places where we don’t have bank accounts, job titles, to-do lists, awards, or the illusion of health to distract us.
Everything about our culture goes against the grain of lowliness. None of us want to be considered losers, failures, or rejects. But it’s only when we come to our limits that we begin to truly receive the gift of faith. Only when we stop striving to be loved do we realize that we are already loved. Only when we stop trying to make up for our mistakes can we see that we’ve already been forgiven. Only when we stop searching for God do we realize that we’ve already been found.
God is not an idea and faith is not something we produce, rather faith is a gift that we’ve been given. It’s a question of how we acknowledge the gift and then if we use it as God intends, if we push it off to the side and insist “I’ve got this under control.” The truth of the matter is that none of us are in control, and it would be so great if we could see that before a tragedy makes it obvious. Faith is not something we have, it is something we use. We use faith to forgive, to be generous, to be brave, to do justice, to hope, to love.
This Sunday, you might have noticed, is Septuagesima, meaning that we are roughly 70 days from Easter and are closing in on Ash Wednesday. Lent is typically a season for examining our faith. Give some time to planning for a holy Lent this year – how might you plan to let go and be caught by God’s grace? What would let you focus more on the Cross of Christ as the way of life and love? How can you attend more to your relationship with the God who is? What might open you more fully to being loved by God? How can you invite others to come and see this love? Let’s start planning to get lost in Lent so that, come Easter, we might be found in wonder, love, and praise.
