by Brent Gavin Was, Intern Minister

A sermon given February 2, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

I do not know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true. A woman went into a field and she sowed seeds. Some fell on the path and were trampled, some fell amongst the briars and were choked. Some fell on thin soil and grew, but then withered in the hot sun. Some, however, fell in the good soil, and it grew and prospered and yielded thirty and sixty and one hundred fold. Those who have ears to hear, Listen!

This is a story of faith. Anyone who has planted anything knows this. We do what we can. We water enough, monitor pests and fertility. We do all of this, but then, it is out of our hands. Maybe the soil is lacking, maybe it rains too much, or maybe we have a bumper crop. We can learn more about what the plants need, we can provide everything imaginable for the soil, but in the end, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I know that no matter how hard I try, I can not make a tomato. My body is not capable of that. But I have faith that, more often than not, that little flake of a seed will find itself where it needs to be and it will produce thirty and sixty and one hundred fold. When we surrender to not knowing it all; when we realize that we can understand very little about how our world works; when we do all of this and still get up every morning to face another day with an uncertain conclusion, we are acting on faith. And that is the best we can do.

Faith is sticky business. It all comes down to believing in something that we can not explain. Unitarian Universalism is a religion of reason. We are a church of the Enlightenment (with the big E). Most of us—90% or so—were not raised UU; we came here mostly because the faiths we were raised in were not satisfactory to us. What we were required to believe was not reasonable. We are not alone in these thoughts. The history of theology and religious philosophy is filled with people debating with what and why to believe. Aquinas, Kierkegaard, William James and everyone’s favorite, Blaise Pascal, pondered this. Pascal wrote in the mid-17^th century his famous Wager. When faced with the decision to believe in God or not to believe in God, knowing full well that there is no way to prove God’s existence or non-existence, what are we to do? He complicates the issue, saying: "reason can decide nothing here . . . The true course is to not wager at all . . . Yes, but we must wager." To not decide, to not deal with this, is to delude ourselves.

Pascal was a scientist and a mathematician. He went to his roots to answer this probability theory, and by looking at the chance of God’s existence and the consequences, the price of not believing, his numbers told him that belief is better. Having faith is the rational, the reasonable choice in life. If only it were that simple.

Last year, I went to a minister’s retreat and we read the 30^th Psalm together in a prayerful, contemplative setting. It is a good psalm that sings of despair and elation and the kindness of God. We read it aloud several times, then went around the circle reflecting on how the text spoke to us. We sat, fifteen UU ministers in prayer together, for two hours. It was amazing.

As I read and listened to the deep beliefs of these people, I felt their faith. And as it usually is, I felt their faith keenly through my own lack of faith. I hadn’t given myself to something else. I sensed the beauty and the joy of being held by something unreasonable, something that didn’t make sense, but all those little voices in my head said danger, danger! Those voices trained in college, in my polite, non-emotive family, in a society that tells us over and over again that we must have faith in only ourselves drowned out my want of faith. But I sat in wonder and saw these educated, well-adjusted professionals baring their deepest needs. I wanted some of that. Sitting there, an image flashed in my mind. Remember the television show "X-Files"? It was about a couple of FBI agents that investigated aliens and paranormal activity. (Obviously, it was pre-Ashcroft FBI.) One of the main characters, Agent Fox Mulder, had a poster behind his desk. It was a picture of a flying saucer with a large caption proclaiming: "I want to believe."

My time came to speak, and I wanted to believe. I want to believe, and I did one of the scariest things I have ever done, I admitted it. I said out-loud what I saw in the X-Files poster and I wanted to believe too. And the man sitting next to me, a man I know to be a believer, he put his hand on my leg softly, and squeezed ever so lightly. He felt my loss, my lack and my desire to surrender. As our exercise ended, we prayed aloud for the person next to us, and the man with his hand on me prayed for me, and warmth flowed from his hand. The warmth of love and faith. I don’t know if the temperature actually rose, but it doesn’t matter. For me, it did.

Now what did I want to believe? That Jesus died to cleanse me of my sins? No. That the same God as seen by an ancient, nomadic desert tribe is present in my life? No. That I am in an everlasting cycle of life, death and reincarnation? No. I can’t believe all that. It is too neat for me. All of the loose ends are explained in ways that seem far too human for me to believe that an infinite other had anything to do with it. My need, my desire for belief is much simpler, perhaps just more selfish. I just don’t want to be alone anymore.

When I first got to Portland, I was thinking a lot about God and the infinite. I thought a lot about why I was here and how far I was from all things familiar. I was walking down Hawthorne and something seemed to drape itself over me like a sheet, or even a shroud. Being so alone in that moment opened up a sense of the deepest loneliness I have ever experienced. I felt how alone we are inside our heads. No one can see the world like each of us does. No one has the same experiences that you do. We are born and die alone, inside our own consciousness. That is the human condition. And I walked down the street thinking, "that’s it, I am alone, and I will always be alone. How could there be a God, and if there is, how would we ever know it?" So I cried. Walking alone down the street on a beautiful October morning, tears welled up and trickled down my cheeks.

But being in Portland, I sat down with a cup of coffee. I was feeling pretty low, and it struck me. I remembered that image of the X-Files poster. "I want to believe." And life was crystal clear. I knew I felt terribly alone and I didn’t want to feel that. I couldn’t imagine going through life, having a family, bothering to farm feeling so alone. "I want to believe." So I thought, "What is stopping me? I don’t want to feel alone, I can’t confirm or deny that either I really am alone or if I just feel that way, so why not? What do I have to lose? Simply my loneliness. I am going to try not to believe that I am alone." So, I am trying. I am feeling and growing and testing and experimenting. I am trying. With reason and faith, I am trying to believe because I want to. Because I need to.

In our church, we are often fearful of faith. I have been. I find myself going back to Marx and Engels writing on religion as the opiate of the masses. Religion just distracts us, keeps us complacent, explains away all of our oppression and suffering. But if we read their essay on religion, we see that their critique is not so simple. They do criticize the church deeply, but not for spreading mistruth. Their critique centers on the fact that the church distracts people from this life, the current suffering, the world that we have agency in, for visions of a paradise in the after life.

When my grandmother died at home a couple of years ago, her Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor came to the house and said a prayer with my family over her body. He said we should be thankful that Helen left this hateful, sinful, ugly world to take her place next to God in heaven. How dare he say that over my dead grandmother! We are in paradise. It doesn’t get any better than this. Our Universalist ancestors gave that to us. Our faith need not distract us from the here and now, as Marx and Engels feared. We need not see death as an escape from a hurtful world, as that pastor would have us believe. Our faith, our Unitarian Universalist faith, has the potential to connect us to each other, connect us to the deepest sense of love, compassion and obligation to ourselves, each other and the very Earth that is our home. Our faith can teach us that we are not alone, we have the ability to be the good people that we can be and we have the responsibility to share through word and deed our love of life in all of its many forms. This is the faith that I seek. This is the faith that I need in my life. Don’t we all?

Faith is simply a beginning. It is not some turnstile where we check discriminating intelligence at the door. It is a place where we let go of, or I dare say surrender, our doubt, our cynicism, and our apathy. Marcus Borg, the prominent New Testament scholar at OSU, calls this "Post-critical naiveté." Like this sermon started, I don’t know if it happened this way, but I know it is true. How many stories do we have that are true, but not factual? How much of our understanding of the universe is based on theories and laws grounded in other theories and observations of fallible, mortal human beings? Remember numbers are just one theory of keeping track. What if we are wrong about numbers? We can’t even account for 90 - 99% of the mass of the universe, so we call it dark matter. Is faith in physics reasonable? (At the divinity school we are having more cross registrations from MIT physics students that ever before.)

Faith is not something that keeps us from thinking; that keeps us from using our human faculties. Faith is something that frees us of human limitations. Faith is something that fills those gaps that human reason and intellect can not explain. Faith, like Garrison Keillor’s rhubarb pie, gives shy people the strength to get up and do what needs to be done. It lets us approach each day hopefully. It helps us see that even against insurmountable odds, we need to keep trying to do what is right. We need to keep planting each spring, counting on a life sustaining harvest in the fall. We need to bring children into the world and care for them and nurture them, our children and the children of others, because we have faith that we have a future and it will be bright. Faith lets us stand together before the awesome array of military might assembling in a far-off desert and say we might not have all the answers, but we know this is not the right one!

Having faith can seem like a choice, for those of us wedded to the reasonable world. I began my ascent (or descent) into faith by choice, or so I have thought. I felt I had to choose to believe, because that was the reasonable thing to do. I have had to point out "I am surrendering consciously," because I have been too scared to admit that I just need something more than this world, this rational, scientific, linear world of reason, can provide. But I think, for most of us, it is not really a choice. We need to believe. We are smart enough to figure a lot of our world out, but we are not smart enough to have all the answers. The challenge comes because our spirits, our souls, are deeper than we know what to do with. We need answers. We need some of those loose ends secured. We need to believe in something, for too much doubt, too many unanswered questions, leave us adrift, wandering aimlessly though our lives, alone. I want to believe because I need to believe. For me, the consequences of disbelief are too much to bear.

But faith is not some chore, not simply the reasonable conclusion of Pascal, nor the needful loneliness I have felt. There is a more joyful form of faith that speaks volumes to us. It is the bright faith of that farmer sowing seeds in our parable. It is the bright faith when we look into the eyes of a once or future love and taste delight. It is the bright faith we feel when we gather as a religious community, inspired with truth and love. It is this faith that stirs our inner most being. Bright faith is the eager, love-filled delight in possibility. The vibrancy, energy, the courage we need to leave our comfortable ways, to stop surrounding ourselves with the familiar and convenient, arises in bright faith. It enables us to step up, step out, and see what we can make of our lives. With bright faith we act on our potential to transform our suffering and live a different way because we have faith that there is a different way. This is the faith of hope.

That is the kind of faith I want. That is the kind of faith we all need. It is a faith that lets me get up every day and try again. We are all flawed people, with pasts that are not always proud, and futures that are far from certain. We all have ugly thoughts sometimes, and I know I don’t always behave like I know that I should, but I have faith that it is going to be okay. That I can try harder. Our world situation is perilous; armies are massing far away, and legions of the young and poor and oppressed here in Oregon have crushing new burdens on their shoulders because too many of us have abdicated our responsibilities. But faith shines through the darkness. Faith doesn’t make things better, but it lets us try harder in spite of the obstacles. I have faith that life and love and God are worth striving for; every day that I live I have the chance to do what is right. Each of us here has a beautiful inner being just waiting, begging to be introduced to the world. I have faith that we don’t, we can’t know much about the really important things, that we have little control over ourselves and the world, but that in the end beauty and love happens, as does pain and suffering, but through it all, we are not alone. We do not live in vain. There is meaning that we can not always see, truth we cannot always feel, and love we can not always taste, but it is there, faithfully present for each of us.

Having faith is simply learning to see this promise through different eyes. Eyes open to the mystery and wonder of infinite life that we will never understand, but can immerse ourselves in, be delighted by, and sit with reverently. Without faith in something—ourselves, goodness in human kind, the holiness of the earth, God—life has seemed to me Dark. The darkness scares me, like I think it scared Emily Dickinson before writing the poem we read before. Darkness comes, that is inevitable being alive, but we, with faith, have the ability to learn to see. As we learn to see, either the darkness alters or something in the sight adjusts itself to midnight and life steps almost straight. In faith, we will learn to see. In faith, our eyes will adjust to the world around us, in good times and in bad. In faith, we will live our lives as well as we can, and follow its step, almost straight. Amen.

PRAYER

God of Faith, God of Light, guide us through our darkness, guide us through our doubt. Remind us that life and love are greater than we can know. Remind us as we suffer and rejoice, as we bury those we love and welcome newborn children, that your ever-loving arms are waiting to cradle us tenderly. May we be open to receive your grace flowing endless towards our heart. In the name of all that is Holy. Amen.

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Copyright 2003, Brent Was.  All rights reserved.