Faith Explored rather than Explained

 

What did you come up with on your sheet for the word faith yesterday?  Maybe somewhere in the cobwebbed corners of your soul, you recalled from Confirmation this scriptural gem, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1).  Here are a few of my favorite quotes about faith:

 

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars. Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.  Barbara Brown Taylor

 

Franciscan Blessing:

MAY GOD BLESS YOU with discomfort, at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears, to shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger, and war,
so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain to joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in the world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done, to bring justice and kindness
to all our children and the poor. Amen.

 

Now it is your turn, add questions, quotes, random thoughts on your sheet with “FAITH” written at the top.  Where did faith show up yesterday in surprising ways?  Did faith fill you with living water like in John 4 ~ Phontine and Jesus?  Or did faith feel like an empty bucket right now?  Keep playing and praying with the word “Faith” as we begin this month of February.  Amen.

Faith, Hope, and Love

 

As we begin the month of love, with Valentine's Day around the corner, we focus on the final words of Paul’s ode to love as the mission/vision/purpose statement for the church in Corinth and our church today.

 

There are, in the end, three things that last: faith, hope, and love.  But the greatest of these is love.

 

Today, I invite you to take each of these words and reflect on your experiences and encounters.  How would you define faith, hope, and love separately?  What do faith, hope, and love feel like?  Is there someone who embodies each of these words in your life?  How do these three interact and overlap?  Is your faith strong or running on fumes?  What is the dashboard of your soul saying about your level of hope and your trust in love?

 

Author Kathleen Norris once wrote, “This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.”  As much as we may desire/demand a concrete, never-changing definition or description of faith, hope, and love are fluid, constantly in flux ~ just as relationships continue to evolve/expand.   Any attempt to confine these words soon eludes our intellectual efforts.  Norris continues, “But in order to have an adult faith, most of us have to outgrow and unlearn much of what we were taught about religion.”   Wait, is there something you need to unlearn about religion today?  Consider how this connects to the story of Phontine at the well with Jesus yesterday ~ those two breaking down boundaries and biases.

 

So, get out three separate sheets of paper.  Write “faith” at the top of one sheet; “hope” at the top of another; and “love” at the top of the third.  What have you gleaned from hymns, sermons, prayers, and the glimpses of God that left angel dust in your hair through your life with each of these words?  Who inspires and infuses your faith ~ sets your soul ablaze and alive to flourish?  Where is hope knocking on the door of your heart to live this year differently?  How does love walk through the door of your life without knocking, without RSVPing, with arms wide open, taking you into an unexpected bear hug? 

 

I pray this exercise might help you rewind and review your experiences and encounters with each word.  Norris writes, “Faith is not discussed as an abstraction in the gospels. Jesus does not talk about it so much as respond to it in other people, for example, saying to a woman who has sought him for a healing, “thy faith hath made thee whole” (Matt. 9:22, KJV). And faith is not presented as a sure thing. Among Jesus’ disciples, Peter is the one whose faith is most evident, always eager. Then, in the crisis of Jesus’ arrest and trial, Peter is the disciple who denies him three times. I do not know the man, he says, and weeps. The relentlessly cheerful language about faith that I associate with the strong-arm tactics of evangelism fails to take this biblical ambiguity into account. I appreciate much more the wisdom of novelist Doris Betts’s assertion that faith is “not synonymous with certainty ... [but] is the decision to keep your eyes open.”  Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith  May your words mix and mingle with Norris’ thoughts as we live with and into faith, hope, and love this week and month.

Prayer

 

My knowledge is imperfect now; then I will know even as I am known.  Please pray these words with me.  God, I don’t know everything, even with the internet at my fingertips.  Reconnect me with my humanness, which is to say, my humble/made of soil and stardust truth in my soul.  My knowledge has gotten me where I am, but might not help me get where I want to go.  So, help me find places where my curiosity and creativity can be shared openly in this art project of life.  God, You know me fully.  My blessedness and brokenness, my faithfulness and fragility, my boneheaded-ness and beloved-ness.  I don’t know how You can love my worries and warts, but I trust that You do.  Let Your love sketch on my heart, soul, words, and life.  God, pick up the crayons and color my life with Your presence to infuse the ways that I show up.  God, continue to create within me a desire to be part of what You are up to in these days.  And when my brain starts bossing and bullying me (wants to tell me it is foolish to be playful or naïve to be loving) help my shy soul softly say to my brain, “Don’t worry, I’ve got it from here, because Your love, God, has me, holds me, heals and helps me.”  May it be so, in all manner of things today, may Your love be so.  Amen. 

Be Child-Like...Not Childish

 

When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, and reason like a child.  But when I became an adult, I put childish ways aside.  Now we see indistinctly, as in a mirror; then we will see face to face. 

 

Go back and look at your drawing from Monday.  Look at the words you wrote inside your heart.  Where have you lived those words this week?  Look at the words outside the heart.  Did you have experiences of the Eternal this week that helped draw those words closer to you?  Were there any experiences that caused the initially objectionable words to inch closer to your heart?  In many ways, our inner child never tires of coloring on the canvas of life.  Our inner child loves to play and participate in this beautiful, if broken, world.  Our inner child knows that laughter is a prayer.  Our inner child knows that a cookie with milk is communion.  Our inner child knows that God is found in trees and birds and snails that have so much to teach us, if only we stop scrolling and staring at our phones.  Lacy Finn Borgo tells us that there is a difference between being childish and being childlike.  Childish is throwing temper tantrums (note how often adults do this at meetings and on social media).  Childish is always wanting your way.  Childish is thinking that the world revolves around you.  Child-like is to be lost in wonder, love, and praise.  Borgo writes, “Children possess a natural, unique to them, connective consciousness. It has not been chosen or even cultivated through hours of meditation or psychedelic trips. Instead, the plasticity of the developing brain offers connective wonder through a lack of previous experiences and an innocent openness to the world. God has wired each and every one of us for this.”  How can you let loose your inner child today?  What if you went back and read 1 Corinthians 13 with the whole box of crayons to permit your inner 5-year-old artist who loved to color before the art teacher started grading your effort?  What if you went and gazed at a lake with awe, noticing every inch?  What if you built with Legos?  What if you did what you loved to do when you were ten years old?  Let loose your inner child, who still has something to teach and tell your adult self.  May this experiment help you see deeper into the mirror of your life, where all the versions of yourself (from your earliest memory to today) are reflected in how you show up and speak up in such a time as this. Amen.

How do you know what you know?

 

Our knowledge is imperfect, and our prophesying is imperfect.  When the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. 

 

Yesterday, my inner defense attorney objected to the idea that “love never fails.”  Today, my inner know-it-all feels exposed.  I don’t know what I don’t know.  On Sunday, I spoke about the question, “How do we know what we know?”  Stop, what is the foundation of your explanations and exhortations?  We live in a Google-dominated world where we are convinced that we have it all figured out.  Brian McLaren says we are attracted to leaders who are confident even when they are not competent.  We like strong people, because we don’t believe Jesus saying that the peacemakers will inherit and usher in the realm of God.  We have tried for centuries to bomb our way to peace.  Even though it has never worked, we still go back to that as our first, last, and only resource.  Einstein was right: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  Faulkner was right, the past isn’t dead and isn’t even the past.  Today carries the brokenness of yesterday because we keep clinging to our way, rather than God’s way. 

 

As a recovering perfectionist, who is still in process, I shudder at the idea of the phrase, “when the perfect comes”.  Another word that could be faithfully substituted into the above translation is “whole”.  “When the whole comes, the incompleteness will pass away.”  This echoes the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kin-dom/realm come, here on earth, fully, completely, wholly and holy”.  N.T. Wright says that the goal of religion is not to get your soul to heaven, but to get heaven into your soul here on earth to spread out from you to others.  The pathway to heaven isn’t only through your intellect.  You don’t need to write volumes of Church Theology arguing every point.  You need to let love be written in your life every day.  Karl Barth, who wrote 12 volumes of a book called “Church Dogmatics” (talk about thinking your way through faith!), was once asked to summarize those million words he had written.  He said, “Jesus loves me (and everyone), this I know for the Bible tells me so.”  May that truth challenge you, be lived in you.  May God continue to sketch, draw, and color in your life today.  Amen.

Failure of Love

 

Love never fails.  Prophecies will cease; tongues will be silent; knowledge will pass away. 

 

I hope you still have your drawing from yesterday, pull that out, and let’s dive in/dwell with this phrase.  If I only read Paul’s words with my rational brain, my inner defense attorney yells, “Objection!!  Of course, love fails!  Read the headlines, look at the number of marriages that come crashing and crumbling down.  Look at how people bully each other and the violence we cause to one another.  Then, I look at my heart, and wonder if those are not an example of love failing, but our human failing to love.  I know this may feel like I am playing games with words, but for love to be love, there is always freedom to choose to go ways I cannot control.  I cannot stop someone from hardening their hearts.  In the book of Exodus, we read that Pharaoh had a “hard heart” when he enslaved the Israelite people.  Pharaoh feared that the Israelites would become too numerous and overthrow his power.  On January 4^th, we heard how fear caused Herod to commit infanticide in response to the fear of hearing the Wise Ones say there was a new king of Israel.  Love will never force us to do something.  Love will never belittle or bully the belovedness of another.  It isn’t love that is failing; it is humans.  We have free will.  I can choose to show up with words of love or anger; with hope or with trying to score points to put Uncle Gus in his place; with peace or letting my words lash out like a whip; with joy or jolts of sarcasm meant to demean/dehumanize another.  While, yes, some Christians will claim that God told them to be a brash bully, we know that great truth of the hymn, “they will know we are Christians by our love.”  The church is not judged by our attendance numbers, not by our budgets or balance sheets, not by the number of likes this post receives on Facebook.  It isn’t that love fails, but that I fail to love.  That isn’t meant to shame or blame or rain guilt on you.  Because God pours out God’s love lavishly on you every day.  Jesus said that God is like a Gardener who scatters seeds into hearts that have thorns/thistles and dry ground that is harder than a rock (see Matthew 13 ~ Parable of the Sower).  Today, may your heart be open to receive God’s love that is unceasing and unconditional.  Today, may you let that love nourish you.  Today, may you let that love escape from you.  Not because it is popular or profitable, or promotable.  But because love never fails as a pathway for the faithful.  Let this truth be drawn in your heart and lived in your words this day.  Amen.

Written on the Heart

 

As we begin our fourth week of living and seeking to embody the words Paul wrote to the church in Corinth that was in conflict ~ living through divisiveness and anger ~ I invite you this morning to get out a piece of paper.  As you slowly read these words, I want you to draw images that come to mind.  If you think, “But, Wes, I am no Van Gogh!”  Please be assured that this is not about creating a museum masterpiece; this is about letting a different part of your brain process these powerful words. This is about allowing the poetry of these words to awaken your sacred imagination in a new way.  If you still feel reluctant or resistant, draw a heart.  Then, which of Paul’s words warms your heart?  Write those inside the heart.  Then, are there words or phrases that are like sandpaper to your soul?  Write those outside the heart, or try to rephrase/rewrite what Paul is saying.  There is no grade on this project, just like there is no grade on the art project of life.  This allows your heart to be expressed through your hand in a sketch that is your soul’s response.  Read and then draw with me.

 

Even if I can speak in all the tongues of earth – and those of the angels too – but do not have love, I am just a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy such that I can comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge, or if I have faith great enough to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give away everything I won to feed those poorer than I, then hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind.  Love is not jealous, it does not put on airs, and it is not snobbish; it is never rude or self-seeking; it is not prone to anger, nor does it brood over injuries.  Love doesn’t rejoice in what is wrong, but rejoices in the truth.  There is no limit to love’s forbearance, to its truth, its hope, its power to endure. 

Love never fails.  Prophecies will cease; tongues will be silent; knowledge will pass away.  Our knowledge is imperfect, and our prophesying is imperfect.  When the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.  When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, and reason like a child.  But when I became an adult, I put childish ways aside.  Now we see indistinctly, as in a mirror; then we will see face to face.  My knowledge is imperfect now; then I will know even as I am known.  There are, in the end, three things that last: faith, hope, and love.  But the greatest of these is love.

 

Sit with your drawing today as a reflection and response of the Artist/Composer/Creator God who is still sketching in your life and mine.  Amen.