"Faith is..."

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS
August 7, 2016
Sermon Text - Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

When I was a little girl, I adored the Scholastic Book Club flyer that I received at school each month. One year - I must have been about eight years old - I opened up my book club flyer to find this awesome packet of activities for the Winter Olympics. There was a booklet with information about the different sports, feature pieces on the athletes, information about all the countries that would be competing. And, best of all, a sticker chart so I could watch the Olympics on the TV and keep track of all the medals as they added up. I was in nerd heaven.

As a child, the Olympics felt like they were all about dreams and hope and the best of humanity. For one shining moment every four years, the world came together around one flame and cheered for the best of the best. We admired the beauty of the human body and spirit. We heard stories of bravery, perseverance, sacrifice. We learned about other nations, traveled to far off places, and were encouraged to dream our own dreams about what might be possible.

Of course, the Olympics have always been fraught with controversy. They aren't as peaceful and dreamlike as I thought when I was a child. And the Olympics the Rio are no exception. Problems with the displacement of people who live in poverty, financial corruption, environmental concerns, drugging  and cheating by athletes...it's all there. It turns out the Olympics really are a microcosm of what it means to be humans….and that means the good and the bad.

And, yet, in the midst of all the icky parts of the Olympics, individual stories of courage, compassion, strength, beauty, resilience still reach out to our hearts….and encourage us to dream. This past week, one particular story caught my eye. Maybe you heard it, too. For the first time, there is a special team of refugees, sponsored by the IOC. Ten athletes from around the globe who have been displaced from their home countries were chosen to compete together as a team. One of the athletes is 18 year old Yusra Mardini, a swimmer originally from Syria. (1)

Two years ago, Yusra and her sister made the perilous journey from Syria to Germany. One one leg of the journey, from Turkey to Greece, the overcrowded boat they were on started to take one water. Yusra and her sister, both swimmers, jumped out of the boat and proceeded to push it through choppy waters for hours, eventually steering the boat’s 20 passengers to dry land. Yusra said that when she was swimming in the frigid Aegean Sea she really thought she might die in the water - an irony for a confident swimmer, she thought - but what kept her going and distracted her from the fatal nature of the task at hand was a little boy on the boat. The youngest passenger, who was six years old, kept looking to her for reassurance, she said. So she kept treading water and making funny faces at the little boy to ease his fears.

The image of this young woman, only 16 years old, relentlessly pushing and straining to bear the weight of 18 other humans is almost unbelievably heroic. And yet, it's real. This is the strength of the human spirit, which has the capacity to look outside itself to and act in unbelievably courageous ways.

Of course, from another angle, you could say that the human spirit is also to blame for the very predicament Yusra was in. The seemingly never-ending war in her home country was what drove her to the uncertainty of the ocean. Her home was bombed. Her training center was bombed. Her friends were killed. Whatever it is within us that causes us to lash out at our kindred in violence and hate was on full display in Syria and she was left with no choice but to flee.

We humans are a complicated bunch. Capable of so much goodness...and capable of so much evil.

In our own country, it feels as if we are a bit at sea these days. The presidential election….watching it unfold continues to feel like a terrible nightmare. The things that are being said are just surreal. I continue to pray - daily - that we as human beings can get in touch with the God-given-goodness within each of us and can learn to choose love over fear. But some days I have to just pray for myself - that I can somehow manage to hold on to my own faith in humanity in the midst of all the ugliness.

It feels a bit like treading water in the middle of a very cold sea. Uncertain where the shoreline is and whether we will all make it to the other side or not. It’s not a great feeling.

Into this midst of this time of uncertainty, we hear the ancient words of scripture from the author of the book of Hebrews. It is a love song to faith and it begins like this: “Now faith is the assurance of things open for, the conviction of things not seen.”

For many years, I thought of faith primarily as being about what I believe. So I thought that I was a person of Christian faith because my belief system lined up with the belief system taught by the Church. I thought that this particular verse in Hebrews was about suspending doubt and choosing to believe, in an unthinking, unquestioning way in the doctrines of the Church as I understood them. I thought I needed to believe without seeing, without understanding.

But at some point, that became untenable for me. Luckily, I stumbled into churches where people taught me that wasn't the only way to understand the concept of “faith.”

I've said it before and I'll say it again, without the work of Marcus Borg, I probably wouldn't have stayed Christian. He helped me understand Christianity in new ways and gave words and structure to what I was pondering in my heart when I was lost at sea a bit in terms of my own understanding of God.

In The Heart of Christianity, Borg devotes a whole chapter to “faith.” He says faith has been understood in at least four ways throughout the course of Christianity. First, there is faith as belief. Like what we were talking about a moment ago. (2)

But Borg points out that faith is more than belief. He names three other ways Christians have understood faith over the centuries. The second way is faith as trust, “a radical trust in God.” Borg says “faith as trust is like floating in a deep ocean.” Kierkegaard came up with this metaphor back in the 19th century. Faith is like floating in 70,000 fathoms of water. “If you struggle, if you tense up and thrash about, you will eventually sink. But if you relax and trust, you will float.” Borg says, “It’s like Matthew’s story of Peter walking on the water with Jesus - when he began to be afraid, he began to sink.”

It's also like 16 year old Yusra and her sister out there in the sea. If they had focused too much on the terror at hand, it might have overtaken them. But they put their trust in - I don't know what - their bodies? Their God? The face of a six year old boy? Yusra said that she knew she might die when she decided to make the journey, but she also knew she was likely to die if she continued to stay in Syria. So she just floated and kept swimming. And, she was one of the lucky ones, she made it through.

I think it’s important to name that not everyone is so lucky. We all know that so very many have had the same courage, strength, stamina, trust that Yusra had...but they still perished. I don't think that trusting in God means that our lives will always be protected. I think what it means is perhaps best understood when we pair faith-as-trust with the third understanding of faith that Borg names.

Faith can be belief and it can be trust. It can also be fidelity, faithfulness. It is “loyalty, allegiance, the commitment of the self at the deepest level.” It's not just about our own commitment to God but about a radical and unshakable sense that God is fully committed to us. Faith as fidelity is about naming, as the Apostle Paul did, that “nothing can separate us from the love of God” and that “whether we live or whether we die, we belong to the Lord.”

Faith as fidelity is knowing, even when you’re in the midst of the frigid sea and you’re not sure if you’re going to live or die, that you are never alone. God goes with us through every storm, every ocean, every terror. God’s devotion to us can not be shattered. Whether we live or die, we belong to God. We live and move and have our being in the one whose name is Love. And there is nothing that can ever separate us from that Love.

Borg’s fourth way of understanding faith is faith as vision, as a way of seeing the world. Richard Niebuhr taught that there were essentially three ways of seeing the whole - first, “seeing reality as hostile or threatening;” second, seeing all of reality as basically indifferent and neutral; and third, seeing reality as essentially “life-giving and nourishing.”

Now I'll be the first to admit, when I'm at sea and languishing in despair….When I'm watching people on a screen scream hateful things at immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, people of color….I have a hard time in those moments seeing the world as life-giving and nourishing. I really do. This does not come easily to me.

Borg says this way of seeing the world, this faith-as-seeing is a little like Jesus reminding us that God sends rain on both the just and the unjust. Even those people who scream hateful things and seem to me to be the embodiment of evil are somehow loved by God. I don't understand it, but I experience it as true.

And right before Jesus reminds us about the rain falling on the righteous and the unrighteous, do you know what else he says? He says, “You have heard that it was said; ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

But, dang it, Jesus, I don't want to! And I'm not sure if I can. How can I pray for people who are so far off track? So filled with hate? So abhorrent to me?

Of course, how can I not pray for them? What else is there to do but love them? (While simultaneously calling them out on their unacceptable behavior and working to change systems that allow them to exercise their power over those who are the most vulnerable, of course).

This is why I need faith. This is why the author of Hebrews penned a love letter to faith. Because we need faith if we are to survive while lost in the midst of a cold, unforgiving sea.

In the face of where we are right now as a society, it is all too tempting to shake our heads and say, “The world these days, it is a mess.” It is all too tempting to be swept along by the rising tide of anxiety.

But our faith both promises more and calls us to do more. Our faith - our beliefs, our trust in God, our sense of God’s faithfulness to us and our faithfulness to God - and the vision of a world that can be better, that can be more filled with grace and goodness of love….that faith holds us tight when we fear we might sink. That faith buoys us along when the waters of anxiety threaten to consume us.

That faith compels us to know, at our deepest level of being, that we are beloved. Period. That we are made for love. Period. And that our greatest task in the face of hatred is to love.

May it be so.

Footnotes:
(1) I read several articles and watched several videos about Yusra Mardini. Some were from the New York Times and the BBC. I compiled this version of her story from using those sources.
(2) All the quotations about faith in this portion of the sermon are from The Heart of Christianity by Marcus Borg.