Scripture: Matthew 14:22-33
I think probably you will not mind if the sermon this morning is a little on the short side. It’s a day of some transitions. As you’ve heard, by the end of the day, the pews will be gone from the sanctuary, which in itself will be a significant change and which will be just the beginning of other significant changes to come. By next Sunday there will be chairs in the sanctuary and things will look quite different. I won’t be here to experience all the goings on and the first Sunday with the new chairs, because Ava and I are going to be in transition too. We are going to be transisting ourselves to Santiago, Chile and then to Easter Island very shortly, a belated 10th anniversary gift to ourselves, and so my mind is partly some thousands of miles away already, and to the extent my mind is still here, it’s partly thinking about the imminent changes and how like Rip Van Winkle I will be returning to a kind of new environment in the church in a few weeks. My mind is in several different places today, and I’m afraid I can’t quite claim that it’s stayed on Jesus. It’s partly on Jesus though, enough for me to have a few words to say about the scripture and the church of Jesus and the faith of Jesus.
But first let me say just a few words, because I feel like I need to (need to for me, not for you), about another place my mind has been this week and continues to be today. Karen Wilcox and Jeanine Woodruff had a commitment ceremony yesterday. I’m aware that not everyone knows Jeanine and Karen. We are a community very much in flux these days, not just because pews are leaving and chairs are coming and other physical changes are around the corner, but also gratefully there are a number of people visiting or who are relatively new to the church community and we don’t necessarily know each other, but we’re still small enough to think that we should and hope that we will. We like to think of ourselves as a family, and I’m quite confidant that I speak for others when I say that I hope that as we change and grow we will never outgrow our ability to think of ourselves in this way.
All of which is to say that Karen and Jeanine’s commitment ceremony was very much a family event. Those of us who do know them and who have benefited from their partnership, I know were very happy for them and privileged to be part of that important day in their lives and in our lives. And it wasn’t only the sort of happiness of the occasion but that deeper sense of joy involving appreciation and thanksgiving and gratitude for their relationship and for our relationship with them. Alongside that in my head and spirit in stark contrast is the anti-marriage amendment that I am angry we even have to deal with and that I know will be looming large by the time I get back, not that it hasn’t been already, and I know that although it’s been the subject of announcements and prayer concerns here that we haven’t had any real discussion among us and we need to, not only to be fully informed but to process how we are dealing with this on a feeling level. Yes, there will be chairs when I get back. On an entirely different level, there will be some activity around the amendment and some needed discussion among us, and I am anticipating that as well, and my head is partly there today too—with Karen and Jeanine…and on the amendment.
Now as to what I had thought I might try to say this morning, there are some things that have been on my mind in connection with my preaching over the last two weeks that I feel like I didn’t quite get said and I do want to come back to them today just to sort of wrap up this train of thought that I’ve been on here in September.
A couple of weeks ago, when I was thinking about the September 11 anniversary and preparing for my remarks on that, I ran across a commentary that now I can’t find anymore but that I remember as saying something about how the attacks had shown the true face of so much of what passes for religion in our world and that the faith communities, all faith communities of whatever stripe or persuasion, had a lot of work to do to demonstrate that religious faith is not somehow tainted in its very nature by fanaticism and intolerance and is not in its nature unloving. I remember agreeing with that point of view, sort of, but I didn’t go that direction in my remarks two weeks ago and wanted to come back to it today.
It’s not that I agree so much with the idea that all religion is colored by actions of people who do violence in the name of God or that a few extremists present a credible version of whatever faith they claim to represent. When people misrepresent their faith in especially hurtful, offensive, and attention-getting ways, it may be necessary for others to speak up and act up to make it clear that that’s not what faith is about. But I’m also concerned about some of the less obvious things. It’s one thing to say that not all people who are religious fly planes into buildings. If that was all there was to it, the argument would be pretty easy to make. But there are other, quieter kinds of violence connected with religion. It is arrogant, aggressive, and in my view a kind of violence when religion, any religion, holds itself out as the only path to heaven, to salvation, to communion with God in this life or the next life. The idea of winning the world to Christ is essentially a very aggressive idea, and is no less so because it is justified on the basis of trying to bring salvation to people’s souls. It’s not necessary that this attitude be carried out in crusades, pogroms, forcible conversions, or missionary efforts connected to colonialism—though sometimes it has been. Anytime religion takes the attitude that the world is divided between those who don’t have faith and those who do, and that those who do occupy some kind of a superior position because those who don’t are in danger of damnation, anytime religion lets that attitude creep in, it is a kind of violence. Anytime people of faith look on people who don’t profess any faith as somehow evil, or as enemies it is a kind of violence. Anytime self-styled believers look on people they consider unbelievers with scorn or with pity, it is a kind of violence. When people of faith make some kind of a clear separation between themselves and those they consider unbelievers, whenever believers feel they occupy some superior position by virtue of their faith, it is a kind of violence.
This can be a very subtle thing. It doesn’t mean people necessarily want to do harm to anyone, maybe just feel sorry for them. But behind all such attitudes is an arrogance that faith needs to be rid of. It has always been the case, but especially so in this post 9/11 world, that faith needs to be more modest than that, more modest frankly than it is most of the time.
And that means of course that it is not just the public face of religion that is in question here, how religion may be perceived in the public arena, it is also and more crucially a question of faith’s private face. At Sojourners, I hope that there is no hard and fast distinction between believers and non-believers because we need to support one another in our spiritual journeys without judging whose faith is superior to whose and who gets to feel like they’ve seen a little more light and who is left to feel deficient in faith and who, because of their deficiency doesn’t quite belong. At Sojourners, I hope that there is no hard and fast distinction between believers and non-believers also because there is a little of both in all of us, and just as we need to embrace one another without the labels that separate people from each other, so we need to embrace those different parts of ourselves. If, in our inner being, faith is made up only of beliefs and certainties, then that faith will get expressed as a kind of trumpeting of Truths that assaults people with its firmly held and loudly proclaimed beliefs.
But a faith that is more modest than that on the outside needs to begin with a faith that is more modest than that on the inside. That more modest faith is not made up of certainties. In my view of it certainty is not something faith even strives for. It is something quite different, hesitant to claim too much for itself, hesitant to promise too much if only we had enough of it. For me, Peter, in the passage we heard this morning gives me an image for what faith is like. I know we can imagine Peter striding confidently across the water to Jesus, and Jesus himself implies that if Peter’s faith were stronger Peter wouldn’t be sinking, and maybe so. But that view of faith doesn’t seem very real to me or sound very appealing. What seems real is precisely the uncertainty and the vulnerability that Peter represents, but also the reaching out. For all of us humans that vulnerability is always there and faith doesn’t protect us. But there is also that reaching out. Some of us may feel that we are reaching out toward Christ, toward God. Others of us may be reaching for something we aren’t so sure of, maybe don’t have a name for. And what we may find as a result of our searching may not be Christ in some simple sense, certainly not in some doctrinal sense, but may be other human hands that are also reaching out.
We come to one another and we come to God with hurts and hopes and wounds and fears and dreams, working and praying somehow to shape it all into something loving. There is not much of a place for certainty in all of that. And in that sense it is a modest kind of faith. On the other hand what more could we want faith to be. I don’t believe God wants it to be anything more. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 24, 2006