Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given on Sunday, May 21, 2000

Community Sunday Annual Meeting,

First Unitarian Church, Portland, Oregon

Writer Tom Brubeck was part of a bombing crew that wreaked devastation on Cologne, Germany, during World War II. Thirty years later he was drawn back to the city, perhaps in response to dreams, to memories. He found these words scratched on a cellar wall:

"I believe in the sun even when it isn’t shining."

"I believe in love even when I feel it not."

"I believe in God even when God is silent."

Brubeck said this was the first time he had put a face on the enemy. He was humbled by his encounter with this unknown person who suffered, this person of faith.

Where does this kind of faith come from? Is it foolishness, or is it wisdom? What, in fact, is faith?

First let’s talk about what faith is not. Faith is not belief. Belief is about doctrine, about dogma, but faith goes much deeper than that. Belief clings, faith lets go. Belief is sure and therefore divisive, for if I am right, you must be wrong. In fact, my rightness depends on your wrongness. Faith, on the other hand, gives up preconceptions and opens into the unknown.

Faith is not a means to an end. I worry sometimes when I read these articles about how prayer and church-going are good for your health. For example, there is this study out of Dartmouth Medical School that showed that a patient’s religious commitment helps him survive heart surgery. Of the 232 patients studied, none of the deeply religious died, compared to 12 percent of those who rarely or never went to church. The article said that religion was "means for enhancing recovery." Not really. In the first place, this is a dubious study, because connection doesn’t mean cause, but more than that, how is such a claim really helpful? Can a doctor really prescribe faith? It’s not exactly something you can bottle and sell. A person can’t say, "I think I’ll go out today, Mabel, and get me some of that faith stuff. I mean, I’ve got an operation on Tuesday." That’s just not how it works.

Faith is not rational. Now for those of you who are strongly rational, strongly left brain, strongly empirical in your approach to truth, this inability to come at faith rationally may be a hindrance. "Prove it!" some folks say, and people of faith throw up their hands. As the scripture says (Hebrews 11:1), speaking of faith, it is "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." It is simply an underlying certainty. In speaking about the existence of God, theologian Karen Armstrong explains, "Trying to prove the existence of God is like trying to eat soup with a fork. A fork is a perfectly wonderful utensil for many kinds of food, but useless for soup. In the same way, reason is a magnificent instrument for natural science, medicine, or mathematics, but is of no use for God. This is why Kierkegaard speaks of the "leap of faith," the decision to give one’s self to that which is impossible to grasp logically. It is truly a leap into the unknown. This leap of faith precedes understanding. You do not understand and then give yourself. You give yourself, and then understanding comes.

Faith cannot be received from another, no matter how loving or godly that other person may be. Since the Sacred is revealed uniquely in each of us, in each incarnation, so my God will not be your God, and my faith will not be, cannot be, your faith. Only the God in the depth of your being will be real.

Parker Palmer, Quaker educator, writes of the death of his father and what he came to see as a result of that loss. He describes his father as "more than a good man," and he says that the months following his death were a wintry season. But then a certain clarity began to emerge. His father had been there to rely upon, to cushion life’s harsher blows, and now Palmer realized he had to rely upon himself. As time went on, his faith began to mature. He writes: "I saw a deeper truth: it never was my father absorbing those blows but a larger and deeper grace that he taught me to rely on."

So if faith is not the same as belief, is not just a means to an end, is not amenable to reason, cannot be garnered from another, just what is faith, and how do we invite it into our lives?

I think the crux of it is this: faith means acknowledging a higher order than we can know, than we can comprehend, and giving ourselves blindly to that order. We can’t do a deal with faith—we can’t say, "I’ll have faith if this or that happens, or if I receive this or that." We can’t expect justice as a result of faith—we have to give up the innocent but childish notion that if we’re good, everything will turn out all right. Faith is not warm and fuzzy—it is hard and clear and clean, like a diamond. To come to faith, we have to admit that our perspective is so limited that we really cannot know the answers to our ultimate questions. I’m reminded of a cartoon I once saw. It was a picture of two fleas crawling among the giant hairs on a dog’s back. The hairs look like old-growth forest. One flea peers around a hair and says to another, "Do you think there really is a dog?"

Let’s talk about doubt. Some people feel that doubt is the enemy of faith, that if they doubt, they will lose their faith. Actually I see doubt as the only path to faith. If you have not questioned your faith, then is it really something of your own, or something you’ve borrowed, unthinkingly? Until faith has gone through the fire of doubt, until it has been burned down to its essence, it’s not worth very much—and when life throws you a curve ball, that kind of faith will likely strike out. My two boys, Kash and Madison, are young adults now, and they love to tell me that they’re atheists and that religion is merely superstition. Once I told Madison a long story about a mystical experience I had, and when I finished, he was silent. I thought he might be in a state of awe. He finally spoke. He said, "Mom, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard." They are trying to push my buttons, of course. They don’t understand that doubting is exactly what they should be doing as young adults, and I’m so pleased that they’re asking the questions. They will have to come to their own faith—I never thought they could adopt mine. It is interesting, though, that my son who has just become a father has also just decided to join a Unitarian Universalist church.

The writer of the Gospel of Mark tells the story of a father who brings his epileptic son to Jesus, begging Jesus to "have pity on us and help us." Jesus says to the father, "All things are possible to him who believes." The father answers honestly, out of the anguish of his heart. He says, "I believe; help thou my unbelief!" The key word here is not belief, but help, notes scholar James Carse. "Help thou my unbelief." The father may doubt that Jesus can really help—after all, the disciples had already tried and failed. But the father disregards the odds, and from the depths of his heart, he cries out, he cries out as though his very life depends on it. The issue in faith is not whether there is a God you can call out to—the issue is whether or not you are willing to call, no matter what—that you will give up everything to call.

Sometimes it is heartbreak and tragedy that makes it possible for us to give ourselves in faith. When the bottom falls out and we’re in free fall, that’s when we may be most likely to open ourselves in spite of our doubt, in spite of our hard hearts, in spite of our need to control, and just call out for help. And the call can’t be what we call the "gimme prayer": "Oh, God, give me what I want—and now, please, if you don’t mind." No, it’s more like, "Oh, God, I ache. Oh, God, I hurt. Oh, God, I need. Help me, please—please, please help me!" We don’t know what’s on the other side of the door, but we have to knock just the same. When knowledge is not enough, we turn to faith. Faith lodges in a deeper place than knowing.

I was in getting some dental work done recently, and my dentist, who was new to me, asked me what I do. A bit reluctantly, I said, "I’m a minister." He was a young man, full of enthusiasm and obviously skilled—but as I soon found out, he was hurting over a broken relationship. As soon as he put all this apparatus in my mouth, plus his fingers, he started talking, talking about, as he called her, his "X." He went on and on, and I just listened and once in a while made some gutteral sounds like, "Uh, ah,um." He talked about his romantic failures—how women seemed to always break up with him. He became angrier and more and more agitated—he was working in a fury, with instruments digging, water flying. At this point I began to be concerned about my teeth, but of course I couldn’t say anything. I knew he was thinking what we all think when we lose someone—there’ll never be another, this is it, I’ll be alone forever. I did that when I was twenty and broke an engagement. Gee, I thought, I guess I’ll be alone for the next 70 years. We lose faith in ourselves, in the possibility for happiness. When my dentist finally finished and I could talk, I could see that he was looking at me the way people look at ministers—he wanted me to say something wise. I just smiled a crooked smile with my numbed mouth, and said, "You know, I bet the next time I see you, you’ll have a new girl friend." And my teeth were just fine.

Sometimes the heartbreak is so extreme and we feel so helpless that we don’t know what to do or to say. Yesterday I was at the bedside of a young man who is dying, a man who has a wife who adores him, and three little children, ages 10 and 6 and 3. I told him that he had done well with his long illness, that he had shown great courage, and that I admired him. I told him that his wife would be all right. I told him that his children would remember him and that they were old enough to know that he loved them very, very much, and that that is the main thing children need from a parent. The mother and the children made a book of memories for their father, and one of the children wrote, "If you die, Daddy, I think it will be because God wants you to be his assistant, you are such a good man." A child’s faith. I told him that he would know when he was ready to die. And I told him that mostly people die well, die peacefully. He said he wondered what was on the other side. I said I didn’t know—but my guess, my best guess, was that it was like the love of his wife, only magnified a million times. I said that I think that’s all we can know of God, is the love that we see in people on this earth. So I said all that. But I felt so helpless. Sometimes all we can really do is to be with, to witness, to not turn away. And finally, to let go.

We are forced to fall back on faith when we ask those hard questions, and we can’t for the life of us find the answers. Perhaps it is only in the questioning itself, when we confront the awe and the mystery of life, when we are absolutely not in control, that we become humble, and we soften, and we open. In Pascal’s Mystery of Jesus, the Lord says, "If you are seeking me, you have found me."

I am reminded of a story told by Elie Wiesel, the concentration camp survivor who eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize. In his famous book Night, he recounts that as a boy, he asked of himself a series of simple questions: "Why do I pray? Why do I weep when I pray? Why do I live? Why do I breathe?" And he became anxious and restless when his only answer was, "I don’t know. I don’t know." Later Wiesel found a master teacher called Moshe the Beadle, who "explained to him," he said, "with great insistence that every question possesses a power that does not lie in the answer."

The poet Rilke says it this way:

"I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one

but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I’ve been circling for thousands of years

and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?"

We circle and circle round, and we don’t know. Who are we? Why were we put on this earth? Yet we are obliged to live as though we actually know what we’re doing. We fall in love, we marry, we have children. All acts of extreme faith. We start down a road and we don’t know where the road will lead. Oh, yes, we plan the journey—we think, in five years, this, in ten years, that—but our maps and compasses are in fact illusions, imaginary guides that we create to comfort ourselves. We will go where the world and time and circumstance take us. We step into the unknown. If we are faithful to the moment, that is our best hope for the future. That is all we can do—and yet it is everything: be faithful to the moment.

Let’s talk about our church for a minute. I never expected the growth that we have experienced here. I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t go for it. It’s as though you think you’re going to birth one baby and you have triplets instead. And so we have worked and planned, and we have come to a vision that I think is worthy. We step into the future, not knowing what is there, but knowing what values we rest in. Knowing that we want to open the doors of this church to all who would come, knowing that we want our children to have proper space to learn in, knowing that we want to have a strong voice for justice. Whoever thought that we would be worshipping here instead of in our historic Salmon Street sanctuary? Circumstances have brought us to this point, and we are trying to be faithful to those circumstances. There are people, a few, who say to me, "We can’t do this! This vision is much too large, too difficult for us." Well, just watch us do it. We are a people of faith, and we will meet the challenge that our day has put before us.

But what happens when the going gets tough? What sustains us? In our church, I think we are sustained by history, by tradition, and by our values. And ultimately we are sustained by the spiritual depth of our people. What about the individual? What sustains us as we seek to stay on the road, when the way gets dark, when the storms begin, and the rain falls in torrents? What keeps us going? What makes a man write on the cellar wall, "I believe in God, even when God is silent."

Each person would give a different answer, for I do think that each one of us experiences the Mystery in a different way. For some the key is scripture. For some, meditation. For others, art or perhaps nature. For still others, ritual. Just as we all differ in personality and temperament, we also differ in the way we relate to the Mystery. My spiritual director is a Catholic nun, and she seems to have a direct line to the Holy. Now this woman is a Ph.D., speaks several languages, and heads up a philosophy department at a university—so she is no piker, intellectually. She is rational. But God seems to speak to her directly—about many things, large and small. She says she prays all the time. She told me a story once about one of these conversations with God. She said she was driving home one day, and a voice told her to go to Pendleton. She thought that was an awfully foolish thought, and so, like many of us, she doubted God and kept on driving. Then, with even greater insistence, the voice told her to go to Pendleton. Not understanding, but deciding to obey, she turned her car in a new direction and finally arrived at the woolen mill. There she found, on sale for ridiculously low prices, beautiful oversize pieces of clothing that would fit her sister, who was quite large and had trouble finding clothes. She bought a stack of these garments for almost nothing and drove home. I have no doubt at all that this story is absolutely true.

Now when I hear a voice that says, "Go to Nordstrom’s, go to Nordstrom’s," it has absolutely nothing to do with God. More than likely, it has to do with my ego. So we’re very different this way. In fact, when my spiritual advisor asked me if I feel comforted when I pray, I told her I did not. I didn’t tell her that my praying becomes actually boring at times—even to me, so it must be boring to God. "Do you ever feel the presence of God?" she asked. "Well, no," I answered. So what is my faith based on, if I can’t feel it? I would say it’s based on simple pragmatism. I have decided—and that is the key word, decided—to give myself away. It was a conscious decision made in a time of great suffering and great doubt, and I have never turned away from that decision. I don’t think I could, actually, it’s so much a part of who I am. So does my faith "work," so to speak? Well, all I can say is, I have been blessed beyond measure. I know I am in the place I should be, doing the work that is mine to do. I am increasingly more able to love. Opportunities have come to me that I would never have dreamed of. Does this mean that I never hurt, never experience longing? That I’m never fearful, that I never feel alone? Of course not. In my praying I beg a lot. But in my best moments I know that it’s all part of the bigger picture, part of that larger order that I cannot see with my mortal eyes.

The good news is that we don’t have to wait for some catastrophe to wake us up. We don’t have to feel anything special. We don’t have to have a mystical experience. We can decide, we can just be intentional, about faith. We can say "yes" to the Mystery, and then just let go. See where the Golden Thread leads us. Lean into the questions, and hold them close to our hearts, for they will somehow lead us home. You see, it is when we give up on the answers that we reach out to the Beloved, who longs to commune with us, who thirsts for our company. We push through with our angry, anguishing questions to the love which is at the heart of the universe.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Holy One, we come today, not asking for answers, but asking for the right questions, that we might strengthen our faith. We are so fragile, so uncomprehending. Give us the assurance of your presence, and the assurance that when we knock on the door that it will be opened to us. Hold us in the arms of love, we pray, while we strive and search. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go now and live your questions, for they will lead you to the Sacred. Go in love and peace.

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! Welcome to this house of worship. May you feel free to bring all that you are, your longings, your doubts, your questions, into this community of faith. Come, let us worship together.

Copyright 2000 by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.