Scriptures: Isaiah 2:1-4; Luke 1:68-79
In a few moments the children will be doing their Christmas program, and they’re going to fill the preaching slot this morning. I don’t want to compete with them, and couldn’t even if I wanted to, but their program inspires me to say just a few words.
The themes for worship this Advent have focused, and will continue to focus, on some of the contrasts of faith that seem to come into sharp focus during Advent and our need to hold together both sides of the contrasts, rather than giving in to the one side or the other. Two weeks ago it was darkness and light, and I suggested that we need not only to recognize the darkness but in various ways to honor it, seeing it not as something just to be overcome but to see it also as a place of growth and as a meeting place with God. Last week it was hope and the often disheartening nature of the world we live in, and the need to understand hope in a way that does not deny but affirms those feelings of discouragement.
Today I am led to reflect, for what may be obvious reasons, on our need for a faith that is both childlike and, well not-at-all childlike. I use the term childlike for lack of a better term. What I think we usually mean when we say that, and what I am meaning today, is a faith that is pure and innocent and trusting and unclouded by questions and struggles of the soul, a faith that comes straight from the heart and doesn’t have a lot of buts and ifs and maybes. We use the word childlike to describe a faith that is like that, though I feel a need to point out that as best I can remember my own childhood and as I think about children I have known, including my own, the faith of real live children is often filled with questions, and although the language may not be sophisticated, the questions are essentially the same ones we continue to ask all our lives. Still, even if it’s not a very accurate term, there is that image of a faith that is childlike.
For many, maybe most of us here at Sojourners that image of a childlike faith is an image of a faith we don’t possess. As I say, many children probably do not possess a childlike faith. A grown-up faith, which again may or may not be the faith of actual grown-ups, a grown up faith tends to be filled with doubts and questions, tends to be complicated by all sorts of questions and life experiences, tends to consist of a kind of braided combination of belief and unbelief, tends in other words to be somewhat messy. A grown-up faith tends to believe that if we are to know God at all it will have to be in the midst of all these questions and doubts and sorrows and losses.
That’s where I am most of the time, and I have no problem embracing that kind of faith. But I am thinking this morning that, as Jesus is reported to have said, a childlike faith is very much to be desired too. A childlike faith is not a loud and strident proclamation of the Truth. It is a faith where, in spite of all the complications of our lives, all the questions and troubles and turmoils, a faith where in spite of all that and more, God is sure and love is pure. And I am thinking that as I continue to work on my own faith, I need to go for both. Even if the two kinds of faith sometimes seem inconsistent with each other, I need to go for both—a faith that is willing to live the questions, a faith that is not afraid of ambiguity, a faith does not ask us to turn off our minds or shut down the turbulence in our hearts, but also a faith where God is sure and where love is pure. The latter kind of faith is much harder and much rarer, but it is worth working toward and praying for. In that sense too I think we need to embrace the contrasts of our faith. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 14, 2003