Scripture: Hebrews 12:1-13
I know few if any of you care whether the printed sermon title has anything to do with what I actually say, but it always makes me feel better when it does. Today it does not. Where the spirit has led me is to a place quite different from where I thought I was going to be led and which doesn’t really fit with the title “Where the Spirit Leads”, and which caused me to change the scripture as well.
I knew where I was beginning though, which is with a magazine that I subscribe to that arrived in the mail recently. On the cover in big, bold letters was a question: WHY BELIEVE IN GOD? This apparently was going to be the theme for this issue of the magazine, which wasn’t too surprising since it is a magazine that describes itself as being about “Faith…Art…Mystery”. So God is not a surprising word to find on the cover of this magazine. But the question, “why believe in God?”, was a little jarring to me, and frankly a little off-putting.
Why believe in God? Is this a question that implies that if you do believe in God, you need to be prepared to give an account of yourself, to justify yourself in some way? Does it imply that believers need to explain why they believe in God, need to be on the defensive? Oh, you believe in God? Do you have some good reasons why you believe in God? I say good reasons. What is a good reason to believe in God? Does God have to be useful in some way? Does God have to do human beings some good? Do we have to have a reason to believe in God?
Or maybe this is some exercise in rationality or logic. We’re going to put all the reasons why one should believe in God over here on one side of the blackboard and on the other side we’re going to put all the reasons why one should not believe in God and then we’re going to see which side of the blackboard is more convincing—the pro-God side or the anti-God side.
You can see that I was a little put off by the question. Somehow it just didn’t seem to me like this was the right question, at least the way it’s phrased anyhow. I wasn’t sure whether any possible answer was going to be helpful, convincing, or even very interesting. But…this is a magazine that I have found not to be simplistic in its approach to matters of faith, and the people who had been asked to respond to the question of why believe in God, in a sort of symposium style, were all poets or writers of fiction or movie makers, artistic types, so I thought maybe this discussion would be more subtle and more nuanced than such discussions often are. I decided to read on.
It turns out that the editors had been inspired to solicit responses on this question by a handful of books that have been published recently that apparently make the anti-God argument. These books have attracted a good deal of attention. Some of the authors are well-known. One of the books, “God Is Not Great” by Christopher Hitchens, was nominated for the National Book Award in non-fiction. The editors of Image, which is the name of the magazine I’ve been referring to, asked a dozen or so writers to respond to the question “why believe in God?”, not so much as a counterattack or a refutation to these books that attack faith, but more as a response in the spirit of: “here are some other voices on this subject”.
Nevertheless, it does turn out that in a certain sense the question of why believe in God does have a kind of defensive tone to it, a little bit as though religious belief is under attack and needs some people to speak in its defense. I still wasn’t interested in getting caught up in some combat over whether believing in God is reasonable, rational, useful, or a good thing for the world, but I am interested in knowing how people, especially people who aren’t theologians, think about God. I was still skeptical, but I read on.
There was something that I noticed early on in what these writers had to say. Several of them made a point of mentioning that their attitudes toward God, toward believing in God, were influenced by people who were inhabiting their imagination, again maybe not surprising since these were people who have an active imaginative life. In any case, several of these folks imagined people sort of looking down on them as they wrestled with their belief in God or renewed their decision to believe in God.
One person confessed that in order to believe in God, he had to deal with people in his imagination, friends or colleagues, who he respected but who he knew were not people of faith and who he suspected would probably look down on him for being a believer, who would not understand how an intelligent person could sign on to this believing in God business. And I’m guessing that this one writer is not completely alone in this. Maybe certain significant people in your life would think less of you for believing, or maybe it is some alter ego in your imagination looking down and judging that this believing side of yourself is the superstitious side and a side that really ought to be done away with. In order to believe some people may need to get past these people who hang around in their imaginations, shaking their heads in disappointment and disbelief at every sign of belief in you.
Another of the writers, however, had different kinds of people in her imaginative world. She said that in responding to the question of why believe in God that this was something that had just always been there, that she could not remember a time when she did not believe, that she had inherited it, that it was in her blood. And though she admitted that there had been times in her life when she had had occasion to ask questions of God or about God, although there had been times when she had found herself questioning God, when that happened the people who would come to life in her imaginative world were people from her past, maybe parents or grandparents or Sunday school teachers, but people who would put their arms around her, give her a hug, and maybe say something like, “It’s ok my dear. It’s ok to ask your questions, but don’t let whatever is troubling you, don’t let it cause you to leave God behind.”
For this person, questioning God or even arguing with God was one thing, but actually not believing in God was something else altogether, and almost not possible. Not to believe in God would have felt like a betrayal, a betrayal of people she loved and people who had loved her and lived inside her. I’m making this up now, you understand, the details that is, because the person who wrote in the magazine didn’t actually say all this, but this is how I interpreted what she was alluding to: That whenever her thoughts turned to God, and especially if doubting or disbelieving thoughts started to creep in, Grandma Ellie would appear or someone like that, and would just wrap her up in a big hug and maybe just say nothing more than Sssshhhh.
I’m not suggesting that these two kinds of experiences are the same as what yours or mine might be, or that our experiences ought to be like the ones I have just tried to describe, although as I said, I suspect these kinds of experiences are not totally unique either. But they did give me cause to reflect, reflect on who does inhabit my inner world, the world of my imagination, and to ask how my believing is affected, for good or ill, by people who sometimes appear to me unbidden.
There is an interesting phenomenon these days, that although polls still show that somewhere upwards of 90% of people say they believe in God, so long as the question doesn’t get at all specific about what the nature of God is, but although the polls still show a 90-some per cent belief in God of some kind, there is also a sense among many people of faith that religion is under siege in our society, that somehow our culture, our society has grown hostile toward and contemptuous of religious belief, and of course the books I referred to earlier feed in to that sense of what’s happening, and whenever, for instance, the word “Christmas” is replaced by “holidays”, then people who would exploit such things seize on that as evidence that there is some sort of plot afoot to undermine religion.
Personally, I am not much troubled by such things. But I do admit, I do have to confess that sometimes I do feel like faith is under attack, not so much from without as from within. I am troubled, my faith is troubled, by the arrogant certainties of believers more than I am troubled by the less-than-fully-informed challenges of non-believers. One doesn’t necessarily expect non-believers to be deeply appreciative and understanding of forms of believing that don’t fit their stereotypes.
In fact I sometimes feel like attacks on faith are very often beneficial to the cause of religious faith. The god that an atheist or agnostic doesn’t believe in is very often the same god that a thoughtful person of faith does not believe in. And believers benefit by that reminder more than unbelievers. Believers benefit any time we are challenged to reach out for the Holy One who is beyond all our temporary certainties, beyond all the gods who might be products of our wishes or servants of our desires.
One of the writers in the symposium said that “atheism is wasted on non-believers”, by which he meant, I think, that there are plenty of false gods all around and that believers have more of an interest in rejecting false gods than non-believers; after all, their quest to be at one with the God they do believe in depends on it.
But I do know what it feels like to have my faith attacked from within the community of faith. There are people—we all know this; it’s almost trite to say it—there are people who have killed in God’s name, oppressed other people in God’s name, taken God’s name in vain by using it in all sorts of unjust and unloving ways. Those people may be sort of shadowy presences lurking in the background when we think of ourselves as people of faith, causing us to be defensive about our faith, causing us to want to qualify our faith or explain ourselves. I am a person of faith, but I don’t believe this and this and I don’t share that attitude that you may think people of faith have, and I don’t have the kind of rigid certainty that some other people of faith claim and want me to have, and so forth. You know what I mean.
I don’t know whether that is true for you, that you are haunted by unwelcome images of what being a person of faith is all about. I don’t know whether that’s true for you. I know it has sometimes been true for me. Not only so far as my belief in God goes, but also so far as my being a Christian goes. When I became a Christian as an adult, I did not think I had settled once and for all all my beliefs about Jesus, but I did know that Jesus would be central to my faith and I believed that would always be true, whatever form my beliefs took. But it has taken me years, and I’m not sure the process is over with yet, to get some notions out of my head, so that when I say Jesus I do not hear echoing around in my head the voices of people who have used Jesus as a threat or a weapon or a judgment on what will happen to you if you do not believe in Jesus in a certain way.
I have had, and if I’m honest I think I have to admit that I continue to have, some pretty negative associations with people who speak Jesus’ name a lot, and for a time it was sort of hard to come to the point of saying the name of Jesus without being apologetic about it and feeling like I needed to explain myself. It has occurred to me that maybe one thing that led me into the ministry all those many years ago is that I knew it would give me a chance to explain myself and to keep on revising how I explain myself week in and week out.
So my thought for this morning, instigated by these little magazine pieces, and then by the scripture which occurred to me because of them which speaks of our being surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses…my thought for this morning is first that it is important for us to be aware of who it is that peoples our imaginations when we think about matters of faith. I’m not sure, but I suspect that we all have such people who appear in our psychic world from time to time and who have an effect on how we think and what we feel and what we believe about God and Jesus and lots of other topics. Those ghosts or angels can be positive influences or negative ones, and it would be good if we could at least be aware of their presence.
It would also be good if we could summon into our consciousness those people we really want to be there. The religious origin of Halloween, of course, is All Saints Day. It’s purely coincidence that I happen to be thinking along these lines on the Sunday before All Saints’ Day, but it is appropriate. It occurs to me how good it would be if we could summon the saints into our minds and hearts and souls, not the official saints of the church, but our personal saints, the particular people we need, living and dead, who will give us strength to be the people of faith we would like to be, who will help us to be courageous, justice-seeking, peacemaking, and loving. I pray that you and I will be surrounded in our efforts to lead faithful and faith-filled lives by such a great cloud of witnesses. Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 28, 2007