Faith is Risky Business

One of the many transitions from childhood to adulthood is discovering that life is uncontrollably precarious, albeit life can hardly be described so simply as supposing there are actual stages such as childhood and adulthood. There remains, however, this discovery that even our parents are mortals. Moreover, in some sense, life requires some sort of faith in so far as living requires trust in much that is not seen or known by us, and faith as such is risky business. We will hardly ever know if the next piece of earth on which we place our foot will collapse beneath us.

As we live with faith in the midst of change, our frameworks and stories according to which we experience relationships, events, and statements often change over time. Our paradigms of believing and understanding will likely change with time and experience. As the tides of life cast us to and fro, what we once held as true may change or be nuanced in various ways. This may sound terrible and undesirable, but I think it may not be too dissimilar from a child maturing and learning to use a language. A child learns the alphabet, some words, grammar, and eventually crafts a high school book report. The high school kid writing that book report has changed since learning the alphabet. Writing the letters of the alphabet all in a row is no longer the primary concern; the child has since discovered new paradigms according to which it makes good sense to write the letters all jumbled and out of order with periodic gaps between the letters. Change can be a good thing, though it remains a bit disconcerting.

It is not at all uncommon for churchy high school students to go to college and then drop out of church. This may very well happen for a variety of reasons, and I will not suppose that I can sum up in a few jots the depth and breadth of why this happens. However, it strikes me with little surprise that it does happen. When I went to college and began studying philosophy of religion it was as if I was encountering a different language that seemed to undermine my previously known language. In retrospect I realize that it may have been a bit like suddenly learning to write my name in cursive after knowing only how to print my name. In any case, it felt at times like the piece of earth on which I was placing my foot crumbled, but as it did, it made me all the more curious. I wanted to know why it felt as though the ground seemed to collapse. Ideologically, I began moving from childhood to adulthood. The world appeared more complex and precarious than before. Not only were my parents most assuredly mortal, their teaching was not infallible in the least.

In the midst of all the change, then, I began asking myself, “are my frameworks and stories according to which I live malleable, supple, and robust enough to live through these changes, these newfound languages?”

To live through change, faith, lest we slip into despair, is a crucial ingredient.

As risky as faith may be, faith is immeasurably rewarding. Memories of packing up a trailer and moving from Paso Robles to Pasadena come to mind. Esther and I hadn’t a clue what in the world we were doing, and similarly when we married each other, we had hardly more than a few hints about what we were plunging into. Even now, as Esther and I move from Pasadena, we are stepping into a shadow-filled corridor. To marry, to move, to live in relationship requires rather irrationally large and perhaps even seemingly naïve amounts of faith, but as enormous and risky as faith may be, to be in relationship is deeply rewarding. Moreover, just how rewarding it is cannot be known; it cannot be even imagined until the risk is taken.

I would feel nothing short of cliché if I were to compare such faith to living into the story of Jesus; however, though there may not be worthy analogs between the sorts of risks I have mentioned, nonetheless, living into the story of Jesus involves both risk and reward, though the sorts of risks and rewards involved will likely not be the same as winning the state lottery. Rather, Jesus calls us to risk our very being that we might discover what it means to be.

In a letter to Mme Fonvizina, Dostoevsky exclaimed, “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” This may sound like nothing other than a resounding irrational leap of faith; however, I think it is not merely that. Dostoevsky, of all people, knew of the risks and unpredictable turns life can and will take. He knew. There may very well be times when what was previously known with such conviction crumbles beneath our feet, like sand slipping through our fingers. He knew. He also knew that whatever happened he was completely transfixed, taken captive by Christ, and nothing could change that, even a paradigm of judgment that counted Christ outside the truth.

Dostoevsky’s declaration of devotion to Christ is not childish naïveté; this is experience speaking. This is a declaration of tenacious faith in the midst of uncertainty; however, in the midst of whatever degree of darkness and ambiguity, there is a single core trust according to which other steps are taken no matter how brittle and thin the ground may be, no matter how bleak the grayish hue of light makes our circumstances appear. 

War(s) on Terror

College football and the NFL are in full swing, and America is wrapped up in all sorts of war and rumors of war. We hear the name Syria, but it is only the current name among others. There were others before, and unfortunately there will be others after. This is not a statement of cynicism; rather, it is a descriptive statement about America's identity being shaped by the politics of war.

Stanley Hauerwas has often made the rather absurd and presumptuous claim that the church is an alternative to war (e.g. War and the American Difference). But what does being an alternative to war have to do with us Christians other than being kind of sad because some people die in war? If Christianity’s essence pertains to having hope and Jesus in our hearts, then the church hardly has anything to do with war and being alternative to war.

But what if the church entails more than being a collection of persons who just so happen to have similar inward commitment to and experiences of the person named Jesus? What if the church is more than being a morass of individuals seeking introspective enlightenment?

In Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenged the supposition that religion and particularly Christianity pertained only to individual inwardness. He refused to be satisfied with Christianity being relegated to such a small and rather superfluous realm of human experience. Rather, he asserted that God is at the center of life, and Christianity has at its core utmost appreciation for bodily existence.

Of course, I rather like Hauerwas and Bonhoeffer. I tend to read them quite a bit. However, it is not simply that I have acquiesced to their ideologies. Their theologies have captivated my imagination only because I was first captivated by the Jesus I encountered in the Gospel of Matthew. The Jesus I encountered there is not meek and mild. Rather, he is tenacious, unrelenting, hurtling directly into precarious territory not with a spear but with forgiveness even, and especially, for perceived enemies. And he called people, particularly the people of “Israel”, to join him, to be such a people of peacemakers in a violent world, in a land occupied by foreign powers, in a region riddled with conflict. In such a landscape, Jesus calls us to do the daring, costly, and shockingly bold thing of being peacemakers.

A few weeks ago, I got caught up in a conversation about violence and praying for our enemies, and my conversation partner said in passing, “But maybe it was easier back then.” She was, of course, referring to the social-historical context of Jesus’ first century listeners. I must say that it most assuredly could not have been easier for people back then, especially the people to whom Jesus was speaking. He was not speaking peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation to theologians in their armchairs. He was speaking to people living in a war-ridden world with rebellion and execution frequently on the airwaves.    

The world we hear reported on the news today is also constantly ruptured by violence and tragedy, and similarly in the late 1930’s Bonhoeffer knew all too well the cost of forgiveness and the dire need for it. When he was thirty-two years old, he gave a sermon in the little village of Gross-Schlönwitz. His sermon was entitled “Loving Our Enemies,” and in it he said,

“This is what Christ did for us. He did not become confused by our evil; he did not let himself be overcome by it. He overcame our evil with good. Let’s repeat how this happens: not by feeding the other person’s evil with our evil, the hatred of the other person with our hatred. Rather, it happens when the evil hits emptiness and finds nothing on which it can ignite. How do we overcome evil? By forgiving without end. How does that happen? By seeing the enemy as he or she truly is, the one for whom Christ died, the one whom Christ loved. How will the church-community win victory over its enemies? By letting the love of Christ win victory over our enemies.”

Until we learn that war does not vanquish evil but leads to sin and death, we will be forever caught up in the false story that war is necessary for peace. War, however, is not the road to peace. Forgiveness is, and peace is a road of righteousness. But in a world of war, righteousness is a road that may very well lead to death; however, there are some things worth dying for. Moreover, until the church learns that its life involves more than individualistic inwardness, it will continue to stand by quietly and do nothing; or even worse, it will misuse its voice by condoning war as it has often done.

To say that the church is an alternative to war may sound a bit idealistic. Peace rather than war is nice; it’s desired, but it sounds hardly more than cute. “War is the real world.” However, what if it were the case that war was easier to wage than forgiveness but that the future made by forgiveness and reconciliation was the only future worth hoping and working for?

Journey to the Center of Middle-earth

I began seminary by parsing Greek verbs, and I concluded seminary by visiting the sick and dying. I began seminary by reading, reading, reading. I concluded seminary by being, being, being. For me seminary began with the comforts of home, namely books and essays, and it concluded with much unknown to me, namely the living texts of people’s lives filled with joy and tragedy. It began with studiously working in the library, and it concluded with being present and available for people in unspeakable circumstances completely out of my control in the hospital.

I have not yet found the words to sufficiently express my gratitude for making it from one point to the other, from the comforts of home to the dark corridors of the unknown. But I am indeed grateful for those wizards and lords involved in taking me from one point to the other. In the coming weeks, I will no doubt spend more time reflecting on what in the world happened this summer, but what I can say for now is that this hobbit shall not return home the same.  

Near the beginning of my CPE (clinical pastoral education) experience, the image in Ezekiel thirty-seven of dry bones receiving life proved to be a helpful image for encapsulating what CPE had begun doing for me as a budding pastor and theologian, and this image remained with me throughout the rest of my CPE experience. I was around death and grieving more in those early weeks than ever before. CPE cast me into a host of variegated experiences that opened my eyes to sides of life I had never encountered before, and consequently it added experiential dimensions to my theology and in some sense gave life to the dry bones of my rather academic theology.

In his sermon, ‘A Divine and Supernatural Light’, Jonathan Edwards asserted, “there is a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness.” CPE has given me invaluable experiences that I will carry with me, that have changed me, and it has added dimensions to my theology moving me from opinions and rational judgments to having a sense of God’s paradoxical holiness, tenacious grace, and immeasurable love known to us in the Incarnate Son of God.

CPE has begun giving me this sense by drawing me into the world and rooting me in the soil of the earth, the soil of particular human lives, however broken those lives may be. Indeed, it is in the brokenness and tragedy of people’s lives that my theology has become all the more incarnational, and as my theology has become more embodied than before, I have begun to see that my theology has at its heart the deep love of God pulsating and embracing the feeble human lives in that valley in such need of resurrection, that valley where my once skeletal theology has encountered drug addicts, alcoholics, terminal patients, loving wives, grieving daughters, immeasurably strong mothers, and courageous medical staff. As I have encountered their lives, God has breathed life into mine and has revealed to me what I would stake my life on, namely that nothing can separate us from the love of God known to us in Christ.