Faith's Curious Dynamic
Sermon
SERMONS ON THE GOSPEL READINGS
Series I, Cycle A
You know that old saying, "Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true"? We see examples of that again and again in life. During the war in Iraq, Hampton Sides, a journalist who had been slated to be "embedded" with one of our frontline Marine battalions, gave an interview on NRP (National Public Radio). At almost the last possible moment, Sides decided not to go with the Marines, but instead to report from Central Command in Qatar.
The interviewer asked Sides when he began having doubts about going in with the Marines, and Sides said that it was when he was receiving training about the use of his gas mask. Knowing that nausea is often one of the first symptoms of a chemical attack, he had asked the military trainer what to do if he threw up in his mask. The trainer didn't have a clear answer, and that's when Sides' second thoughts erupted.
Then the interviewer asked how Sides' fellow journalists, who were going with the troops, reacted when they found he had dropped out. He said they understood completely. He went on then to say that the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has created a "curious dynamic" in this war: "We are trying to prove to the world that Saddam Hussein has these weapons. We want him to have these weapons. He better have them, or else in some ways it invalidates the stated purposes of the war. And ... if he has these weapons, [we have to believe] he would use them"1 - which, of course, is exactly what we don't want him to do.
That's a curious dynamic indeed, where you both want and don't want the same thing. Life itself has plenty of curious dynamics like that, though we are more apt to identify them as mixed emotions, contradictions, or paradoxes. Any war brings more of them to the fore, but that war especially had yielded a bumper crop of conflicting feelings. For example, many of us who strongly supported our troops weren't convinced we should be fighting this war at all.
But think of some other curious dynamics:
´ When your son first graduates from college, and applies for a good opening in a job some miles away, you may find yourself both hoping he gets that job and afraid that he will, because you won't see him as often.
´ Or you are pleased to see your daughter becoming a responsible young woman but are sad because you won't have the little girl around the house any longer.
´ Or maybe you are eager to get married and start a family, but concerned that once you do, you won't be able to pursue every whim or opportunity that comes along.
´ Imagine what it is like to be one of those people waiting for a heart transplant. On the one hand, you are hoping for a heart to become available, but on the other hand you don't want someone to have to die so that you can get a heart.
´ Or how about the fact that Christians have been identified as those waiting expectantly for the Second Coming of Christ, but actually hoping that it doesn't happen in their lifetime.
´ Or consider that of all the twelve disciples, Peter always seemed to be the one with the strongest faith. It was he who spoke up when Jesus asked what identity they had seen in him. Peter stated confidently, "You are the Messiah." Later, when Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter was the one who drew his sword and was ready to fight to the death for Jesus. But that same evening, Peter denied Jesus three times. He was one big contradiction. Did he want to stand with Jesus or didn't he?
Well, what are we to make of all these contradictions - these curious dynamics - of life? Do they mean that we are people of weak moral fiber? Do they mean that our faith has fled or that like Peter, it's been overwhelmed with fear or perhaps even sin?
Consider a couple of verses from Lamentations. As you might surmise from the name of that biblical book, it is a collection of funeral dirges - not for individuals but for the city of Jerusalem after it had been destroyed in 586 B.C. by the Babylonians and its citizens forced into exile. But amid the dirges is a short passage that seems a departure from the gloom of the rest of the book. Here it is:
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
- Lamentations 3:22--23
This eruption of hope in the bleak landscape of defeat and destruction occurred because though the people of Judah and Jerusalem had sinned against God and lost much, God had not forsaken them. They had hope because the prophets had told them that God would yet redeem them.
But beyond all of that, did you notice that there is a curious dynamic in these verses, too? On the one hand, they speak of the steadfast love and mercy of God, which of course means that those things are unchanging. On the other hand, they say that these same mercies that do not change are new every morning. That's very curious indeed.
In other words, even God himself operates through seeming contradictions - or what we might better describe as paradoxes. The verses are actually saying that the unchanging love of God is a constant element in our existence that is so adaptable that it can helps us through life's curious dynamics.
The author of these lines experienced the undergirding security of God's constant love. He also recognized that with each passing day, his circumstances changed. That which sufficed for yesterday was not always sufficient for today's needs. But the unchanging love of God was fresh with each new day, and that provided him with security amid the vicissitudes of life.
We should also note that Jesus was no stranger to paradoxes and contradictions, too. There is, for example, Jesus' enigmatic comment, "He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 10:39). There is also that part of his Sermon on the Mount we call the Beatitudes. They are filled with contradictions. Consider just a couple of them:
´ "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."
´ "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account."
And now recall that the word "blessed" is often translated as "happy" or "fortunate." So now you've got: "Happy are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."
Really? Those in grief will be happy?
How about this one: "Fortunate are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account"?
Really? Being slandered and persecuted is a mark of good fortune?
Those statements seem to defy logic!
What we come to understand is that Jesus is talking about the ultimate outcome of people who cling to God in faith. Things that seem to be diametrically opposed, become, under God's hand, the poles of creative tension in which we live out our faith.
You see, faith too has a curious dynamic about it. The language of faith is not all about cheerfulness and certainty. It is not presented in the Bible as a sure thing once acquired. Faith seems to embrace a good deal of ambiguity. I like the definition presented by novelist Doris Betts that faith is "not synonymous with certainty ... [but] is the decision to keep your eyes open."2
This is All Saints' Sunday, and one of the things that made those who have gone before us in the faith "saints" is that they were not turned away from God by life's ambiguities. Here's an example: A little less than a century ago, G. K. Chesterton, a British journalist who became widely known for his detective stories and his writings in defense of Christianity, published a book in which he explained how the seeming contradictions about Christianity are actually what convinced him to embrace the faith. By age sixteen, he was an agnostic, and as an adult, he began to read the arguments of many critics of Christianity, writers who were themselves agnostics or atheists. He discovered the oddest thing, however. Instead of cementing him into his position of doubting Christianity, these books actually caused him to doubt his doubts. He said, "As I read and re--read all the non--Christian or anti--Christian accounts of the faith ... a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind - the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing." He went on to explain that many of these critics attacked Christianity for opposite things - for contradictory reasons. One attacked Christianity for being too hard on family life and another for forcing family life upon us. Another said it was too pious and another not pious enough. Yet another said it was too pessimistic while another described it as too optimistic, and so on, with accusation after accusation.
At first, this caused him to consider that Christianity must be even weirder than he'd thought, but then one day another explanation altogether occurred to him: "Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad - in various ways." He gave the following example:
Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation ... would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while [black men] considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the center.
"Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad," Chesterton concluded. The very contradictions that critics thought discounted Christianity actually, as Chesterton saw it, validated it.
Chesterton further explained that Christianity was not merely the sensible thing that stood in the middle of extremes. In the case of pessimism and optimism, for example, it was not that Christianity occupied the compromise position between them, but that it embraced both optimism and pessimism "at the top of their energy, love and wrath both burning." The supreme example of this, Chesterton said, was Christianity's claim about Christ, that he was both fully and completely human and fully and completely God.3 That's a contradiction if there ever was one, but Christianity's life comes from the tension between those positions, and that's also where faith lives.
Now faith and reason are inexorably linked, and faith does not defy reason or go in an opposite direction. Faith and reason walk together for a good bit of the way and go the same direction, but after a certain point, faith goes on alone, reaching further than reason does. Reason takes us only so far. Faith goes beyond it, but in the direction reason points.
But now, as we talk about the role of contraction in faith, we need to add one more piece to that explanation. As we enter that realm were faith reaches beyond reason, where faith has to go it alone, as it were, and where we are dealing with the deepest questions of life, the operating principles of reason become less useful. God's truth is not limited to what reason can grasp. As author William Johnson writes, "Faith is the breakthrough into that deep realm of the soul which accepts paradox ... with humility."4
And so, as we find ourselves both wanting and not wanting the same things, or both believing and doubting the same things, or both wanting explanations and accepting that some things cannot be explained, we can take heart that God too embraces contradiction. In fact, he operates there. The Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton once wrote, "I have become convinced that the very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me; if only because someone so complicated and so prone to confusion and self--defeat could hardly survive for long without special mercy."5
For us, faith is what's lived between the poles of certainty and doubt. Faith is found in the tension between the opposites. Sometimes we are drawn toward one pole and we are confident in our faith. Other times we are drawn toward the other pole, where we can barely contain our skepticism and doubt, but that's the nature of faith, and contradictions are an integral part of it.
We can only thank God that he too maneuvers in the realm of contradiction, with unchanging love and mercy that is new every morning.
____________
1. Sides was interviewed on Fresh Air, broadcast on NPR March 24, 2003. I listened to the interview again on the Fresh Air website to get the quote accurately.
2. Quoted by Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 169.
3. All of the Chesterton material is from the chapter "The Paradoxes of Christianity," from his Orthodoxy, (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1908), pp. 81--101 in my 1990 reprint by Image Books.
4. Quoted by Henri Nouwen in the introduction to Parker J. Palmer, The Promise of Paradox (Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1980), p. 13.
5. Ibid., quoted by Palmer, p. 17.
Stan Purdum
The interviewer asked Sides when he began having doubts about going in with the Marines, and Sides said that it was when he was receiving training about the use of his gas mask. Knowing that nausea is often one of the first symptoms of a chemical attack, he had asked the military trainer what to do if he threw up in his mask. The trainer didn't have a clear answer, and that's when Sides' second thoughts erupted.
Then the interviewer asked how Sides' fellow journalists, who were going with the troops, reacted when they found he had dropped out. He said they understood completely. He went on then to say that the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has created a "curious dynamic" in this war: "We are trying to prove to the world that Saddam Hussein has these weapons. We want him to have these weapons. He better have them, or else in some ways it invalidates the stated purposes of the war. And ... if he has these weapons, [we have to believe] he would use them"1 - which, of course, is exactly what we don't want him to do.
That's a curious dynamic indeed, where you both want and don't want the same thing. Life itself has plenty of curious dynamics like that, though we are more apt to identify them as mixed emotions, contradictions, or paradoxes. Any war brings more of them to the fore, but that war especially had yielded a bumper crop of conflicting feelings. For example, many of us who strongly supported our troops weren't convinced we should be fighting this war at all.
But think of some other curious dynamics:
´ When your son first graduates from college, and applies for a good opening in a job some miles away, you may find yourself both hoping he gets that job and afraid that he will, because you won't see him as often.
´ Or you are pleased to see your daughter becoming a responsible young woman but are sad because you won't have the little girl around the house any longer.
´ Or maybe you are eager to get married and start a family, but concerned that once you do, you won't be able to pursue every whim or opportunity that comes along.
´ Imagine what it is like to be one of those people waiting for a heart transplant. On the one hand, you are hoping for a heart to become available, but on the other hand you don't want someone to have to die so that you can get a heart.
´ Or how about the fact that Christians have been identified as those waiting expectantly for the Second Coming of Christ, but actually hoping that it doesn't happen in their lifetime.
´ Or consider that of all the twelve disciples, Peter always seemed to be the one with the strongest faith. It was he who spoke up when Jesus asked what identity they had seen in him. Peter stated confidently, "You are the Messiah." Later, when Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter was the one who drew his sword and was ready to fight to the death for Jesus. But that same evening, Peter denied Jesus three times. He was one big contradiction. Did he want to stand with Jesus or didn't he?
Well, what are we to make of all these contradictions - these curious dynamics - of life? Do they mean that we are people of weak moral fiber? Do they mean that our faith has fled or that like Peter, it's been overwhelmed with fear or perhaps even sin?
Consider a couple of verses from Lamentations. As you might surmise from the name of that biblical book, it is a collection of funeral dirges - not for individuals but for the city of Jerusalem after it had been destroyed in 586 B.C. by the Babylonians and its citizens forced into exile. But amid the dirges is a short passage that seems a departure from the gloom of the rest of the book. Here it is:
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
- Lamentations 3:22--23
This eruption of hope in the bleak landscape of defeat and destruction occurred because though the people of Judah and Jerusalem had sinned against God and lost much, God had not forsaken them. They had hope because the prophets had told them that God would yet redeem them.
But beyond all of that, did you notice that there is a curious dynamic in these verses, too? On the one hand, they speak of the steadfast love and mercy of God, which of course means that those things are unchanging. On the other hand, they say that these same mercies that do not change are new every morning. That's very curious indeed.
In other words, even God himself operates through seeming contradictions - or what we might better describe as paradoxes. The verses are actually saying that the unchanging love of God is a constant element in our existence that is so adaptable that it can helps us through life's curious dynamics.
The author of these lines experienced the undergirding security of God's constant love. He also recognized that with each passing day, his circumstances changed. That which sufficed for yesterday was not always sufficient for today's needs. But the unchanging love of God was fresh with each new day, and that provided him with security amid the vicissitudes of life.
We should also note that Jesus was no stranger to paradoxes and contradictions, too. There is, for example, Jesus' enigmatic comment, "He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 10:39). There is also that part of his Sermon on the Mount we call the Beatitudes. They are filled with contradictions. Consider just a couple of them:
´ "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."
´ "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account."
And now recall that the word "blessed" is often translated as "happy" or "fortunate." So now you've got: "Happy are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."
Really? Those in grief will be happy?
How about this one: "Fortunate are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account"?
Really? Being slandered and persecuted is a mark of good fortune?
Those statements seem to defy logic!
What we come to understand is that Jesus is talking about the ultimate outcome of people who cling to God in faith. Things that seem to be diametrically opposed, become, under God's hand, the poles of creative tension in which we live out our faith.
You see, faith too has a curious dynamic about it. The language of faith is not all about cheerfulness and certainty. It is not presented in the Bible as a sure thing once acquired. Faith seems to embrace a good deal of ambiguity. I like the definition presented by novelist Doris Betts that faith is "not synonymous with certainty ... [but] is the decision to keep your eyes open."2
This is All Saints' Sunday, and one of the things that made those who have gone before us in the faith "saints" is that they were not turned away from God by life's ambiguities. Here's an example: A little less than a century ago, G. K. Chesterton, a British journalist who became widely known for his detective stories and his writings in defense of Christianity, published a book in which he explained how the seeming contradictions about Christianity are actually what convinced him to embrace the faith. By age sixteen, he was an agnostic, and as an adult, he began to read the arguments of many critics of Christianity, writers who were themselves agnostics or atheists. He discovered the oddest thing, however. Instead of cementing him into his position of doubting Christianity, these books actually caused him to doubt his doubts. He said, "As I read and re--read all the non--Christian or anti--Christian accounts of the faith ... a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind - the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing." He went on to explain that many of these critics attacked Christianity for opposite things - for contradictory reasons. One attacked Christianity for being too hard on family life and another for forcing family life upon us. Another said it was too pious and another not pious enough. Yet another said it was too pessimistic while another described it as too optimistic, and so on, with accusation after accusation.
At first, this caused him to consider that Christianity must be even weirder than he'd thought, but then one day another explanation altogether occurred to him: "Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad - in various ways." He gave the following example:
Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation ... would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while [black men] considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the center.
"Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad," Chesterton concluded. The very contradictions that critics thought discounted Christianity actually, as Chesterton saw it, validated it.
Chesterton further explained that Christianity was not merely the sensible thing that stood in the middle of extremes. In the case of pessimism and optimism, for example, it was not that Christianity occupied the compromise position between them, but that it embraced both optimism and pessimism "at the top of their energy, love and wrath both burning." The supreme example of this, Chesterton said, was Christianity's claim about Christ, that he was both fully and completely human and fully and completely God.3 That's a contradiction if there ever was one, but Christianity's life comes from the tension between those positions, and that's also where faith lives.
Now faith and reason are inexorably linked, and faith does not defy reason or go in an opposite direction. Faith and reason walk together for a good bit of the way and go the same direction, but after a certain point, faith goes on alone, reaching further than reason does. Reason takes us only so far. Faith goes beyond it, but in the direction reason points.
But now, as we talk about the role of contraction in faith, we need to add one more piece to that explanation. As we enter that realm were faith reaches beyond reason, where faith has to go it alone, as it were, and where we are dealing with the deepest questions of life, the operating principles of reason become less useful. God's truth is not limited to what reason can grasp. As author William Johnson writes, "Faith is the breakthrough into that deep realm of the soul which accepts paradox ... with humility."4
And so, as we find ourselves both wanting and not wanting the same things, or both believing and doubting the same things, or both wanting explanations and accepting that some things cannot be explained, we can take heart that God too embraces contradiction. In fact, he operates there. The Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton once wrote, "I have become convinced that the very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me; if only because someone so complicated and so prone to confusion and self--defeat could hardly survive for long without special mercy."5
For us, faith is what's lived between the poles of certainty and doubt. Faith is found in the tension between the opposites. Sometimes we are drawn toward one pole and we are confident in our faith. Other times we are drawn toward the other pole, where we can barely contain our skepticism and doubt, but that's the nature of faith, and contradictions are an integral part of it.
We can only thank God that he too maneuvers in the realm of contradiction, with unchanging love and mercy that is new every morning.
____________
1. Sides was interviewed on Fresh Air, broadcast on NPR March 24, 2003. I listened to the interview again on the Fresh Air website to get the quote accurately.
2. Quoted by Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 169.
3. All of the Chesterton material is from the chapter "The Paradoxes of Christianity," from his Orthodoxy, (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1908), pp. 81--101 in my 1990 reprint by Image Books.
4. Quoted by Henri Nouwen in the introduction to Parker J. Palmer, The Promise of Paradox (Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1980), p. 13.
5. Ibid., quoted by Palmer, p. 17.
Stan Purdum
