Last weekend I attended a continuing education event called the Wild Goose festival, so-called because in Celtic spirituality the goose is a symbol for the Spirit. Wikipedia describes it as “an art, music, and story-driven transformational experience grounded in faith-inspired social justice—it’s kind of like Lollapalooza or Woodstock for spiritual seekers, however known–all outside, under tents, famous religious speakers (from William Barber to Barbara Brown Taylor to Marianne Williamson), loud music, camping, rain, sweaty, happy, hippy people, great food trucks, and a makeshift bookshop filled with the latest writings on all the things–climate change, border crisis, gun violence, racial inequities and white privilege, LGBTQ questions, the future of religion. It was a good time and I learned a lot, and maybe I was projecting, but the amazing diverse crowd around me (and there were around 3000 of us) seemed wistful and a tad soul-weary. Along with quite the variety of religious types, I also met several people who identified as atheists. When Brian McLaren asked the folks in his workshop why we’d all come, this man from CA responded, smiling at the paradox of it, “I am an atheist, and I come every year to give and to get a dose of hope. It renews my faith to be here among all of you.”

I think that is why some of us are at UCG, too, because we need each other to keep having faith. The road is long and hard sometimes.

So, this week I’ve been thinking about what it means for me to trust life, to have faith. After all, as a preacher, I’m supposed to know a lot about this subject, right? Disclaimer, I only know a little and what I know best is from my own brokenness and experience. So if this sermon does not resonate for you exactly, I understand, and I invite you to consider what or who you trust, where and how you put your faith in God or Life or Earth or teachings or something else. What helps you get through. I think that is how it is—we’re all, in our turn, learning about faith on the fly, just around the next turn, in the beauty and the bane of our lives. We call faith by different names, and it shows up in various disguises, but it is a stubborn, relentless friend and it is never one thing, as Noah and Amanda noted in the song.

Once, a long lifetime ago, this little thing happened that made me think about some of the big things. Probably it was a tiny coincidence, but some people say there’s no such thing. My church member had given me a ceramic carving, painted in bright colors, the curves and lines of which formed the letters of the word “FAITH.” Ministers are gifted a lot of religious art sometimes—treasures like the last supper painted on black velvet, praying hands, framed copies of that poem about the footprints on the beach, Jesus action figures, and the like. I liked this piece, though, it always brightened my day, where it sat in its place on my office bookshelf till one day, no earthquake, no one bumped it–it suddenly just fell off the shelf, hit the tile floor, and cracked right down the middle. The same gifter friend had called just a few days before, in the midst of her life’s most difficult season of deep heartache, betrayal, and anger, to say she’d finally decided that what she’d known before about life really couldn’t be trusted and God was a lie. She was done with her church, she said. Done with believing in or trusting anything. Broken faith.
It’s hard as hell to repair because it is a portal to the heart and when faith is broken by deprivation or trauma, then the door to the heart gets locked for protection. It’s hard to breathe and hard to get in to do repair work, or to get out to ask for help, and sometimes, it is hard to live inside at all. The pain we experience is real, the outrageous injustice continues… Sometimes it is enough to try and break us. As the great poet Gwendolyn Brooks puts it in her work “truth”: we long to “sleep in the coolness of snug unawareness where the darkness hangs heavily over the eyes.” And most days, we move back and forth between the shores like waves—from heartache to hesitancy to hope.

The psalm Talia and Brandon shared is a description of that never-one-thing-nature of trust—back and forth… the psalmist says, “I keep my faith, even as I say, “I am greatly afflicted.” “Pain is all around, everyone is a liar”… and… in the middle of the pain, “how can I say thanks enough for all the goodness that I have received?” Do you experience this hopeless/hopeful back and forth in your own heart and life? I think faith evolves with experiences we have, as we grow and learn. It is both innate and breakable. It is strong, but it wears down. We can injure another’s faith or affirm it. We often help each other get by, without realizing it. Because having Faith is more than a cognitive “believing in God” or “trusting in Christ” or following the teachings of Buddha or a course in miracles, or whatever path of devotion we take. The Hebrews writer describes it this way: “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The word rendered in English “assurance,” in Greek is hypostasis…or, the essential reality of all we long for, hope in, believe to be true and holy and peaceful…faith…is the substantial being, the essence, the real reality of what Life is…who we are, how all of it hangs together. Faith is “the evidence of things not seen,” elenchon in Greek– “a manner of proof” of something that cannot be proven by sight, only experienced.

Faith asks–who are we and how will we act as moral agents in this world? How will we keep enunciating by how we liv– that bad as things can get, there still was, is, and will be, something right and true and compassionate and loving that outlasts, outlives the evil. A hope, an assurance that cannot be proven. I wish it could be. Faith is the proof that cannot be proven.

When my faith has been broken it has been most often that I have just glanced at it quickly and thought it said “fact” and not faith. As in math equation “fact.” Faith is not fact. It cannot be plugged into an equation: Faith+Good Person=long life and painless death. Or Faith+Chemo+Thoughts+Prayers=Cure. People used to tell my friend Jim who had multiple myeloma for 12 long years that if he just had enough faith, he’d be cured. He did, but he wasn’t. Faith is the essence, the substantial nature of all we hope for. The after the sidewalk ends part. The wishful thinking part of our trust that brings atheists to the Wild Goose festival or some of us to UCG. Jesus said once, “if your faith is the size of a tiny mustard seed, you could say to a mountain, move! And it would be flung into the sea!” It is true, but not in the math equation way, in the truth of the heart and soul way, beyond reason. You’ve probably seen some mountains you thought would never move get flung out of the way in your own life. Maybe you’re learning what Alice in Wonderland did when she pushed by the edge of the portal and fell into the looking glass. “Alice looked at the Queen and laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said to the Queen. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

So I guess the end is that I prefer to live and to work as though it matters, as though compassion and love are the essence of Life itself. But I forget how to do that sometimes because my natural spirituality is a cross between Chicken Little and Eeyore. But you know, your man, Thich Nhat Hanh is right again in the bulletin quotation—it takes practice to live a trusting life in such a broken world. And it takes working as hard as we can, persistent and resilient AND it takes resting and renewal and self-care and kindness and holding each other up when we need it. And faith is the essence and the evidence that there is a mystery—call it whatever name works for you—a mystery beyond and holding us when we have done all we can. Faith takes us the distance, beyond the edge of the portal, after the clinical trials, beyond the place where you can hold someone’s hand, beyond the moment when you leave your child at the dorm or in the hospital, beyond where you can invite someone to change their ways or comfort them, make them stop using, control the outcome, make a difference, beyond. Sometimes we travel by faith alone and sometimes others keep the faith for us, at the edge of the portal.

Having faith may make it easier…being hopeful may be better than not being. Living for justice and peace may help us fake it till we make it, to learn, bit by bit, what it means to be fully human, fully divine until we finally are. Later on in his work, the author of Hebrews goes on to list some folks who had faith—Abraham & Sarah, Isaac & Rebekah, and Jacob & Rachel, but then he ends up his list by saying, “But the math equation just didn’t work out for them, the one that said, “Faith+faith+faith=promised land, home, comfort, everything turning out all right.” They only knew it from a distance. Like so many others since.

Anne Frank’s famous affirmation of faith was, is: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
So, let us keep the faith, however we can and whatever that may mean. Let us know that in our deepest heart’s core that we are held gently together in purpose and in peace.

Psalm 116, Hebrews 11:1-3

7-21-19

Shelly Wilson