An Open Letter To A Young Friend - An Auction Sermon on Faith and Uncertainty
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 06 February 2011 00:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
{player 2011-02-06-9am-sermon.mp3}
Dear Arthur,
Is it possible I’ve known you all your life – or most of it? I’ve always loved your humor and your quick mind, and right now what I am remembering is riding with you when you were little on the train from Concord into the “Gah-den” and a Celtics game with your Dad, and there was no American professional sports team I could name without you knowing its second name: Boston Celtics, Atlanta Falcons, San Diego Padres; I couldn’t stump you.
I’ve watched you grow up and I have followed your and your sister’s lives with interest, and I’m proud to know you, and I’m proud to know your family. Thank you for signing the membership book as you left for college, and thanks for pledging to the Capital Campaign. At the risk of embarrassment, I’ll say that your family has been so important to any success I might have had in my ministry here, and I’ll always be grateful to all of you. So I’m glad this last Auction Sermon belongs to you; a gift from your parents, I suspect.
You have a Big Brain, as we say in my family, a mind for mathematics and statistics and what you call behavioral economics. You’ve assigned me the topic of “uncertainty”; “spiritual uncertainty,” you hasten to add, comforting my anxiety immediately lest I worry I have been assigned a lecture on probability theory. “As Unitarian Universalists,” you write to me, “we search for truth where many faiths choose the comfort of certainty… I have come to appreciate uncertainty in the last several years,” you say, “and I think this has helped me to see the world around me more clearly and to understand better people with differing views and faiths.”
And then, speaking for yourself, you tell me, “There was much more comfort in the voice of the sixth grader that said, ‘There is no God’ than the voice of the young man (I am now) that says, ‘I don’t really think there is a God, but I couldn’t truly deny the possibility.’ How do we balance the comfort of truths in which we place faith or certainty, with the need to be able to also embrace the uncertain that we might find truth?”
I commend you on the maturity and depth of this observation and this question. My journey took me a lot longer. I left a Christian ministry thirty years ago because when I read about Jesus saying, “No one comes to the Father but by me,” I took offense at the certainty and exclusivity of the phrase “no one”, and I had come to a point where Father was not nearly so personal and not nearly so limited. Long-time members here know that the phrase, “I allow for the possibility” began to creep into my sermons years ago, as when I say at Christmas about the Virgin Birth and the Wise Men and the trip to Bethlehem, “I allow for the possibility.” Who am I to be certain?
And I say at Easter, in the same tired joke, let’s all sing, “Jesus Christ is Risen Today,” just in case. One member here recently sent me an Excel spreadsheet in which he had analyzed my sermons that are on-line and had placed on a graph the number of times I had used the words “Jesus,” “God,” and “Buechner” in any given month. The words “Jesus” and “God” had spiked during December and April (just in case), but Buechner was fairly consistent for the rest of the non-summer months.
Here is the best definition of faith I’ve ever heard, told to me by Walter Cook, a teacher at Bangor Theological Seminary in Maine. When I knew Walter, he was an old man and retired, and this was a story of when he was a little boy, growing up in upper New York state, working with his grandfather in the apple orchards. Walter says, in those days, in order to keep the harvest fresh, with a lack of refrigeration, apple cellars were dug, and the bushels of apples were stored deep in the ground, a cellar dug, a ladder down into the cellar, bushel baskets carried down the ladder. And Walter remembers one day, working with his grandfather, and his grandfather has disappeared down the ladder, into the darkness, totally out of sight to this young boy, who is hovering around the hole at ground level.
When Walter asked his grandfather if he could come down into the cellar, too, his grandfather said that he could. “Just jump,” his grandfather said, “I’ll catch you.” And Walter says what a little boy he was and how dark the hole seemed, and who knows how deep, and yet he knew the voice, and he loved and he trusted his grandfather, and so he jumped. And that, Walter said to me, is the best definition of faith he knew. William Sloane Coffin says that he loves “the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.”
So let me begin with young Walter, there in an apple orchard, looking into the deep, hearing a familiar voice, and then jumping into the darkness. “First you leap,” says Coffin, “and then you grow wings.” And he continues, “The leap of faith is not so much a leap of thought as of action. For while in many matters it is first we must see, then we will act; in matters of faith, it is first we must do, then we will know, first we will be and then we will see. One must,” he concludes, “dare to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty.”
As a graduate of Georgetown, you may have studied one of the foremost Christian theologians, Thomas Aquinas, and his own definition of faith. In case you were in a math class instead, Aquinas said faith is three things: believing, believing in, and believing into. What is faith for a Unitarian Universalist? It is, first of all, believing. One scholar says that in the sense that the word “belief” is used here, belief “implies some content - something that is known… something about which we have faith.” This is somewhere on that spectrum between certainty and uncertainty. We can’t see it, we can’t touch it, but we believe it’s there, like a grandfather down in an apple cellar.
In this sense, if you ask me if I believe that God parted the Red Sea or if I believe that Jesus rose from the dead or if I believe in the teachings of the Koran, then you will see me start to fidget. Faith for a Unitarian Universalist is not just believing; it is also doubting. Doubting is very big for us. You, Arthur, have said it is big for you. Buechner says, “doubts prove we are in touch with reality.” Those who do not doubt may be caught on a definition of believing which has everything to do with content, with a set of beliefs we are simply handed. Take this. Believe this. Certainty.
We Unitarian Universalists would rather agree with Diana Eck. “For many people,” she writes, “religion is a rigid concept, somewhat like a stone that is passed from generation to generation. We don’t add to it, change it, or challenge it; we pass it along. But religious traditions,” she concludes, “are more like rivers than stones. We do not know how we will change the river or be changed [by it] as we experience its currents.” The faith we have here among us at First Parish is more like a river than a stone, more uncertainty than certainty.
What is belief? What is it to believe? It is, I think, this particular way of being in the world that says I can both change something and be changed by it. It is living with openness, receptivity, and a willingness to see connections. A life of belief is a life of hope. Coffin says, “If faith puts us on the road, hope keeps us there.” Buechner says, “We are moved… by the men and women we meet whose lives seem to reflect a greater faith than our own, and by great works of music, painting, literature; these are the expressions of faith. We are moved by those precious moments when something holy seems to break through into our lives, [those moments] which both heal and summon us.” This, Buechner says, makes faith a wager. “We can only hope that … such faith as we have will be enough to keep us going, just as, through thick and thin, it has been enough to keep us going until now.”
What do Unitarian Universalist believe? We believe we can change the world and we believe we can be changed by it. We believe meaning is found in the most extraordinary places and often in the most unlikely of people and events. We believe our fate is not sealed. We believe that faith is more like a river than a stone. If Thomas Aquinas is right, that faith is, first of all, believing, then we Unitarian Universalists believe.
Part two: faith is, he says, believing in. The Christians frame this in terms of a belief in God and especially a belief in Jesus Christ. Since many Unitarian Universalists would say that they do not “believe in” God, and many more would say that they do not “believe in” Jesus Christ, where does that leave us? The orthodox Christian would say that the word of God has to come through the person of Jesus (“No one comes to the Father but by me”), and so they would say, of course, that they believe in Jesus.
I respect that. But I cannot accept it for myself. The transcendent, for me, has to be more than this. I can take much of what Jesus teaches and say to myself, “yes, I believe that.” But I cannot accept all the Christian teachings. Does that leave me without faith? I hope not. In the same way, I can find meaning in many of the stories of Abraham and Jacob, and I can say to myself, “yes, I believe that.” But I do not believe in the Hebrew notion of a judging and punishing God. Does that leave me without faith? I hope not. I can love and appreciate the silence and the meditative discipline of Buddhism, and I can say to myself, “I believe that,” but I don’t believe the emphasis of a religion ought to be on the self alone. Does this leave me without faith? I hope not.
We Unitarian Universalists have not chosen the easiest path in this business of religion. We have not put ourselves in the hands of a deity in the sense of “believing in.” But if I am asked what I believe in, I will have to say that I ultimately believe in you. I believe in you, Arthur, and I believe in the others in this room, too. This is the “change and be changed” part of religion, I think. When I say I believe in you, I do not deny the evil that exists in this world, the horrible things that we do to one another. But I believe in redemption. I believe that goodness will triumph over evil. I believe this. I will make mistakes. You will make mistakes. I will hurt you. You will hurt me.
But fundamentally, I believe in you. And I think this is a religious statement. I think this is a statement of faith. If a religion can be built upon the fall of humanity, the sin of humanity, the expulsion from Eden, can a religion not also be built upon our goodness, our worth, our triumphs? Former U.U.A. President Paul Carnes says that we Unitarian Universalists are people who can be led right to the edge of the abyss, can stare down into it, and still give thanks for the ground upon which we stand. Do we believe in something? I should say we do.
Finally, Aquinas says that faith is a believing into. This is the third part of his definition: believing [which we may have thought was the content of faith], believing in [which we may have thought was the object of faith] and now believing into [which, for me, is the movement forward, an opening, a journey, a pilgrimage, a hope.]
Parker Palmer, in his book THE COMPANY OF STRANGERS, talks about the spiritual pilgrimage “always taking us into new lands where we are strangers to others and they are strangers to us. Faith is a venture,” he says, “into the unknown, into the realms of mystery, away from the safe and comfortable and secure.” “Believing into” takes us outside ourselves “into the distant, the unsettling, the strange.” This is his argument for the public experience of worship, coming to places like this where we may need to meet the stranger, and that, he says, can be the beginning of life.
And now I am imagining Bucky McKeeman, there in the reading, metaphorically peering into the refrigerator of his life, looking for leftovers and what he will make of them. What pulls them together, he wonders, those vegetables, this pasta, those memories, these worries. It is faith, he thinks, a secret ingredient, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” “First you leap,” says William Sloane Coffin, “and then you grow wings.” Arthur, you are on life’s great journey, and I am so proud to have been a part of your first leap.
As always,
Gary