Faith and God

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

January 30, 2011

 

Reading:  from Faith:  Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, Sharon Salzberg, New York:  Riverhead Books, 2002, pp. xiii-xv.

One day a friend called to ask if we could meet for tea.  Knowing that I was writing a book on faith from the Buddhist perspective, she was confused and wanted to talk. "How can you possibly be writing a book on faith without focusing on God?" she demanded. "Isn't that the whole point?" Her concern spoke to the common understanding we have of faith—that it is synonymous with religious ad­herence. But the tendency to equate faith with doctrine, and then argue about terminology and concepts, distracts us from what faith is actually about. In my understanding, whether faith is connected to a deity or not, its essence lies in trusting ourselves to discover the deepest truths on which we can rely.

For some this will be a very different approach to faith. Many link faith to narrow-minded belief systems, lack of intelligent examination, or pain at having one's questions silenced. Faith might evoke images of submission to an ex­ternal authority. Historically, the idea of faith has been used to slice cleanly between those who belong to a select group and those who do not. To fuel their own embittered agen­das, fanatics harness what they call faith to hatred.

I want to invite a new use of the word faith, one that is not associated with a dogmatic religious interpretation or divisiveness. I want to encourage delight in the word, to help reclaim faith as fresh, vibrant, intelligent, and liberat­ing. This is a faith that emphasizes a foundation of love and respect for ourselves. It is a faith that uncovers our connec­tion to others, rather than designating anyone as separate and apart.

Faith does not require a belief system, and is not neces­sarily connected to a deity or God, though it doesn't deny one. This faith is not a commodity we either have or don't have—it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.

The Buddha said, "Faith is the beginning of all good things." No matter what we encounter in life, it is faith that enables us to try again, to trust again, to love again. Even in times of immense suffering, it is faith that enables us to re­late to the present moment in such a way that we can go on, we can move forward, instead of becoming lost in res­ignation or despair. Faith links our present-day experience, whether wonderful or terrible, to the underlying pulse of life itself.

A capacity for this type of faith is inherent in every hu­man being. We might not recognize it or know how to nur­ture it, but we can learn to do both.

Sermon

When I was about fifteen, I was a pretty good debater, and I’d had lots of exposure to the Bible.  I went with my grandfather on a visit to his cousin Elmer, who was himself being courted by some Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Like the people in my family and the church I grew up in, Jehovah’s Witnesses are very good at reading the Bible and using proof texts.  It turned out in the course of our conversation that their proof texts were quite different from the ones I was accustomed to.  In fact, they were using their particular proof texts to construct a version of Christianity that was entirely foreign to my grandfather and me.  I was of an age that my appetite for conflict was whetted—after all, I was a debater, so I was motivated to study hard until the next week, when we’d go back and have another round of debate with these folks.  But the next morning my grandfather called up to me and said, “We can’t go back there.  My faith was never so shaken as it was last night.”

I wonder if that was really faith?  My grandfather clearly had a set of beliefs, but I would now incline to call it belief rather than faith.  Forrest Church offers this distinction between the two:

Saint Paul named the three great virtues:  faith, hope, and love.  If fear is love’s opposite, the opposite of faith is belief, and the opposite of hope is certitude.

Faith is confidence, a basic trust in being.  Belief is a set of propositions that true believers claim make it possible for us to possess faith.  In fact, belief diminishes faith’s compass.  It may even kill faith.  We believe something, or in someone, and it disappoints us or they disappoint us and we lose faith….  Faith, which says yes to mystery, wonder, possibility, and change, should never be sacrificed to belief.[i]

The confusion between the two starts in our translations of the New Testament.  Karen Armstrong points out that when we read that Jesus used our English word faith, the Greek language in which the New Testament was originally written used the word pistis, which means

“trust; loyalty; engagement; commitment”  Jesus was not asking people to “believe” in his divinity, because he was making no such claim.  He was asking for commitment.  He wanted disciples who would engage with his mission, give all they had to the poor, feed the hungry, refuse to be hampered by family ties, abandon their pride, lay aside their self-importance and sense of entitlement, live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and trust in the God who was their father.[ii]

When St. Jerome translated the Greek into Latin, he used the word credo, meaning “I give my heart.”  That in turn became a the basis of a creed, a set of propositions which defines the beliefs we hold in common, a set of statements prefixed by “I believe.”

I want to think of faith instead in the memory of the child who is taught a bedtime prayer. You may have learned this one, as I did:

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

God bless Mommy and Daddy and John and Grandma and Grampa.  Amen

There is such simplicity there, such trust.  The trust grows from the security the child feels from the care of parents, and then extends to trust in the Lord, in God.  This is the kind of faith Jesus was talking about, as when he said, “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  [Luke 18:17]

Somewhere around four or five or six, children begin to ask questions like “What is God?” or “What is Heaven?” or “Where was I before I was born?”  As parents, we struggle to explain the mystery in terms that have meaning and integrity for us, but inevitably we have to invoke images, containers for our own more mature but also more confining conceptions of how to explain these ultimate mysteries.  The simplest and still perhaps most compelling image is in the word Jesus used, “Abba,” Daddy.  From this we derive the invocation in the Prayer of Jesus, “Our Father.”  But this, too, is confining language.  Earthly daddies are inevitably imperfect, they have their biases, perhaps they become angry, perhaps even violent; maybe they are absent too much of the time, and a kind of diffuse longing substitutes for their presence.  So “Daddy” points toward someone who can be wonderful, but also someone who cannot be perfect.  Might we add “Mommy” to our description of what God is like – representing perhaps a kind of forgiving caring, unconditional love, that Daddies don’t always exhibit?  That would certainly round out what we mean, and there are those who would prefer to speak of “Father/Mother God” when imaging the divine.  And the first creation story in the Jewish Bible says that both man and woman are created in the image of God.  But mothers, too, are imperfect, as are all human beings, so even that broadening of the parental image becomes too confining.  These images are succeeded by others, of God as King, ruler of the universe, Lord of All.  But those images –which resonated more in a world of all-powerful, divinely anointed kings and emperors – have lost much of their power in our more democratic age.  God is not like a president – we don’t elect God!  Besides, there are good kings and bad kings, and, like parents, even the best of kings are imperfect and all too human.  Some of the seers of the Bible picture God as a bearded old man on a great and mighty throne, surrounded by uncountable numbers of angels singing praises, all powerful, all seeing and all knowing.  It is a powerful image, but it, too, is confining and inevitably evokes associations with human elders, themselves also imperfect.

I recently had a conversation with our son David that involved serious questions about theology, morality and meaning in our lives.  At some point he asked me “Do you believe in God?”  I replied that the question seemed to call for a simple yes or no answer, something like Bill Maher’s challenge to his guests that “Either you’re an atheist or you believe in a talking snake from the Garden of Eden.”  This is also the fundamental question asked by the so-called “new atheists”  -- Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.  Indeed, it was in reading The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris that David was drawn to these big questions.  The word “God” has come to be so encumbered with images – the God who authorizes terror against unbelievers, the God who insists on unquestioning belief, the God who watches over each of us and protects us from harm in any possible circumstance – that it is rather easy to caricature, attack and undermine any specific expression of what it would mean to believe in “God.” 

I don’t mean that images, concepts, and words about the ultimate do not matter.  We cannot express anything outside of them.  We just need to remember that they are images, pointers toward the ultimate, and not themselves the real thing.

Martin Buber tells of an encounter with a “noble old thinker.”  Buber had the proofs of a book in his hand, and his host asked if he would read it aloud.  Buber recalls:

I did so gladly. He listened in a friendly manner but clearly astonished, indeed with growing amazement. When I was through, he spoke hesitatingly, then, carried away by the importance of his subject, ever more passionately. "How can you bring yourself to say 'God' time after time? How can you expect that your readers will take the word in the sense in which you wish it to be taken? What you mean by the name of God is something above all human grasp and comprehension, but in speaking about it you have lowered it to human conceptualization. What word of human speech is so misused, so defiled, so desecrated as this! All the innocent blood that has been shed for it has robbed it of its radiance. All the injustice that it has been used to cover has effaced its features. When I hear the highest called 'God,' it sometimes seems almost blasphemous…."

"Yes," I said, "it is the most heavy-laden of all human words. 1 None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it…. If I took the purest, most sparkling concept from the inner treasure-chamber of the philosophers, I could only capture thereby an unbinding product of thought. I could not capture the presence of Him whom the generations of men have honoured and degraded with their awesome living and dying…. We cannot cleanse the word 'God' and we cannot make it whole; but, defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care.”[iii]

“God” is not the name of God, it is a symbol we use, inadequate at best, distracting at worst.  The question to me, I told my son, is not whether I “believe” in God. I cannot not believe in God as I understand that concept.  “God” is a word that we use – quite imperfectly in our own all too human way – that points to that which is beyond all words, that which underlies everything, what the theologian Paul Tillich referred to as the ground of being.

Perhaps we could answer the child’s question “What is God?” by saying that God is what comes before everything, and is in everything, and remains after everything.  So faith is that simple trusting that we experienced when we could say “Now I lay me down to sleep….”

Sharon Salzberg, who provided our reading this morning, speaks of faith as

the ability to move forward even without knowing, … not a definition of reality, not a received answer, but an active, open state that makes us willing to explore.  While beliefs come to us from outside – from another person or a tradition or a heritage – faith comes from within, from our alive participation in the process of discovery.[iv]

The writer of Hebrews in the New Testament says that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  [Hebrews 11:1]  Where do you find that faith?  How do you tap into your own deepest experience?  How do you open yourself to “alive participation in the process of discovery”?  To what do you commit your life?  How do you nurture your faith?  It is faith that holds us up when we fall into despair.  It is faith that orients us to the present and to the future when the past is too much to bear.  It is faith that helps to heal the unbearable grief when a loved one dies.  Faith is the foundation of the possibility of openness, of trusting.  My grandfather may have relied on a set of fragile propositions, beliefs that gave his life meaning.  My grandmother’s faith was different, perhaps best expressed in that old Gospel hymn, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” 

May our love go everywhere, may our hope find fulfillment, and may our faith be strong.

Amen.

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