Hilton Head Island, SC – October 25, 2015
The Chapel Without Walls
Hebrews 11:8-12; Mark 4:35-41
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” – Mark 4:40 (RSV)
Religion, Certainty, And Faith
Religion exists for many reasons. In its existence, it serves many purposes. It is the spiritual soil out of which faith is intended to grow. It is a guide, mentor, teacher, traffic director, and disciplinarian.
It needs to be stated clearly that all religions are invented by human beings. God did not create any religion, although He created every person who ever affiliated with any religion. Surely God inspires people in every religion, but apparently He also assiduously refrains from becoming the CEO or Managing Director of any religion. Instead, He closely observes those of us who identify with religion, mysteriously inspiring and guiding us, but never manipulating us.
The primary purpose of religion that I hope you will think about this morning is that religion always attempts to lead people into a life of faith. That is especially true of the Christian religion. One of the primary reasons for its existence is to assist people to make what Soren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, and others have called “the leap of faith.” The first verse of the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews is perhaps its best-known and most influential verse: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
Faith is often described as being either belief or trust. Faith leads us to trust in things that we hope are true, but about which we cannot be positive beyond doubt. It convinces us of truths we shall never be able to prove or quantify or validate visually, logically, or scientifically. Religion is meant to assist us in this lifelong, demanding process.
However, it would be a serious mistake to put our faith in religion itself, as opposed to the faith in God which religion means to promote. Religions make mistakes. Denominations and
congregations and the clergy can disappoint or dismay or even disgust people. After all, for most of their history, all religions supported the institution of slavery, they condoned the execution of or imprisonment of sinners, and they treated women shamefully. For all these sad realities, our faith therefore must be in God, not in religion, or inevitably we shall feel betrayed.
Four months ago a man died whom I greatly admired and whose friendship I greatly valued. He was Father Christian Carr, the long-retired abbot of Mepkin Abbey near Moncks Corner, SC. Father Christian was one of the wisest, most intellectually astute, and theologically perceptive people I have ever known. He was 101 when he died.
The Trappist monks of Mepkin, as all monks, have a uniquely strong sense of community with one another. Nine days before he died, the brothers of the community all gathered around Christian’s bed for the sacrament of the last rites, or extreme unction as it is also known. After the current abbot, Father Stan, gave Christian the sacrament, the monks stood around, not knowing quite what to say, because their feelings for their very old friend were so profound. So Christian being Christian, with the knowing twinkle he always had in his eye, suddenly blurted out, reciting from memory, “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”
Some of the brothers may not have been familiar with those words, but the current abbot was. It is from Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, the words of Hamlet himself. After a brief pause Stan, being Stan, asked Christian (being Christian), “Did you just make that up?” Stan told me that Christian, after a longer and dramatic pause, with that deliciously devilishly glint in his eye, said, “Yes!” And then, no one still knowing what to say, Father Christian looked slowly around at the faces staring down on him, ever the consummate actor said, “I have never had a larger audience!” Then they realized that on his deathbed he was pulling their leg. It was religion at its best. But alas, with religion it is not always so. Religion is human, and thus flawed.
Justin Welby is the Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest official in the worldwide Anglican Communion. He recently wrote an opinion piece in The Times of London. He observed that Muslims, Jews, and Christians are persecuting other Christians, Muslims, and Jews in various places around the world. He wrote, “As a Christian, I believe that religious freedom – the choice of how we follow God and, indeed, whether we choose to follow God at all -- is given in creation….It is a freedom that should apply to people whatever their faith, or to those who are atheists.” Nevertheless, he ruefully noted how badly religious people are treating other religious people. Still, he ended by saying, “Curtailing religious freedom in the name of other religions runs the risk of discarding one of the most important and creative forces in human beings.”
For all its errors, religion can also be a great comfort to people in times of trouble. In the last issue of Christian Century (Oct. 14, 2015), there was an article by Matt Gaventa called Campus life support. He told of being hired a year ago to be the temporary part-time chaplain at Sweet Briar College. Sweet Briar is a small liberal arts college for women located just north of Lynchburg, Virginia and just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I am familiar with it, because I was an interim pastor in Lynchburg eighteen years ago, and I attended a performance there of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. I would take visitors who came to Lynchburg to Sweet Briar on tours around that beautiful area.
Like many underfunded small colleges, Sweet Briar was going to have to close its doors at the end of the semester last spring. Matt Gaventa arrived on campus four days before this very sad news was made public, and he knew about it only an hour or so before all the students heard about it in the auditorium where, years ago, I heard the astonished and stricken Julius Caesar say, “Et tu, Brute’?” For weeks after the grieving students left the auditorium following the funereal announcement made by the college president, Mr. Gaventa was inundated by young women coming into his office. He said the first question he always asked them was, “What are you thinking?” They knew what he meant: Where do I go from here? What shall I do? What other school will accept me?
The temporary part-time college chaplain wrote, “No, the loss of one small college will not register on the scale of great human tragedies. Yet for those whose lives have been made and molded on this campus, those tears were something like a deep wail of grief.” The Virginia Attorney General arranged for Sweet Briar to continue through this school year, but its fate beyond that is highly in doubt. Last spring, after the institutional termination was sorrowfully acknowledged, a student said this in the weekly chapel service, “I haven’t always thought much of hope. I always thought it was a kind of empty, fluffy thing. But now I know what hope means.” Mr. Gaventa wrote, “Hope means that the story’s not quite over, that the future is yet to be written.”
When the world turns upside down, what we want is certainty. How will this all be righted once again? Will things work out? But neither religion nor faith can give us absolute certainty. We must always live with unanswered questions and uncertainty. Although God created us, and He probably wants for all of our lives to go smoothly, He never intended for us to be guaranteed smooth sailing. Not even God can do that. We have religion, we cannot have certainty, but we can have faith.
Tom Miller was one of most stalwart and committed attendees at The Chapel until his death a couple of years ago. He loved to tell and share jokes. He once gave me a poster. It read, “Lost Dog: 3 legs, Blind in left eye, Missing right ear, Tail broken, Recently castrated… Answers to the name of ‘Lucky.’” The owners of that dog couldn’t be certain of getting him back, but with so complete a description, they had reason to hope that Lucky would be found and returned.
I read a small news release about a woman who is a minister in the United Church of Canada. She is in the process of being defrocked, because she is a publicly-acknowledged atheist, but she is protesting. Her congregation is happy with her, and they want her to remain, even if she is an atheist. There is no certainty yet as to what shall happen, but this peculiar situation illustrates that religion has a problem on its hands when its ordained practitioners have rejected faith.
Last week, our co-pastor Bob Naylor referred to the 11th chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews in his sermon. By chance I had intended to use that in this sermon as well, and even the very verses Bob chose. It tells of Abraham leaving the safety and comfort of the land of Haran, where he was living, to go to a place that God promised to him and his descendants. He went in faith, not knowing what the future held, but trusting that God would be with him in the new land.
There is an episode in Mark’s Gospel about Jesus being in a boat with the disciples one night on the Sea of Galilee. A violent storm suddenly descended on them. Jesus was asleep, and the twelve wakened him. Jesus calmed the waters by simply saying, “Peace! Be still!” However, that isn’t “simple” at all for many people in the 21st century. I’m not going to address whether this actually happened. Rather I want to note what Jesus said to the disciples afterward. He asked them, “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?”
The disciples must have considered both of those questions to be very odd. Why wouldn’t they be afraid? They thought the boat was about to sink or capsize, and either way, it was life-threatening. As for having faith, what did faith have to do with it?
But of course faith had very much to do with it! Did they believe Jesus could help them, or not? More importantly, did they believe God was with them, or not? They might indeed sink, and unless they were very good swimmers in very cold water, they could drown, but did they trust God would be with them no matter what happened? Or were they about to allow their understandable fear to take complete control of them?
Even if they were good Jews, which I believe they were, their religious leanings were not going to save them. And if we are good Christians, which I hope we are, our religious leanings are not going to save us when trouble comes. Nor shall we have any certainty that we shall be rescued. But if we have faith that we may escape, if we trust that there is hope for us, if we believe there is a way out, we may discover that indeed we shall make it through our storm.
Samuel Wells is the vicar, or pastor, of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Anglican Church on the northeast corner of Trafalgar Square in London. It is one of the best-known churches in the British Isles. In the movie Chariots of Fire a choir in its rear balcony sang the grand old William Blake poem Jerusalem at the funeral of Harold Abrahams. “Bring me my bow of burning gold/ Bring me my arrows of desire/ Bring me my spear, O clouds unfold/ Bring me my chariots of fire.” Just to think of it sends chills up my spine. Recently Samuel Wells wrote an article called Walking toward the storm (Christian Century, Sept. 16, 2015). He told about a famous championship match of the European Rugby Union in 1990. Both England and Scotland had won all their matches in the playoffs, and so the winner would have a rare Grand Slam.
The championship game was played in Edinburgh. When the English team came onto the field, they were received with hostility and catcalls. The Scottish team, as the hosts, came next. But their captain, David Sole, did not lead his teammates in a fast trot, as is usually the custom in such events. Instead, he marched them out with a measured, confident, even triumphant, walk. The Englishmen were the likely winners, all the sports prognosticators thought, but the Scotsmen strode into the face of the storm, believing that they could defeat their adversaries. And they did. The sight of David Sole quietly guiding his men onto the field of battle was forever etched into the minds of everyone who watched them on television on that memorable day. Even the English were struck by the confidence expressed by that purposeful stride into the athletic storm.
What would it mean for you to walk toward the storm? How would it translate into your life?
What is the thing you most fear? Illness? Loss? Sorrow? Uncertainty? Abandonment? When the storm comes, don’t walk away from it; walk into it.
Did life not turn out as you hoped it would? Walk into the storm of that reality, not away from it. Face it. Name it. Then conquer it, and live with it.
Did something that happened back there that upset your existence forever? Don’t flee from it; confront it and the devastation it has wrought. Hard as it may be, the storm is best calmed by looking it straight in the eye and dealing with whatever its blows and buffetings may produce.
The movie The End of the Affair is based on Graham Greene’s novel of the same title. It is the story of an English man and woman who carried on a love affair in London during and after World War II. In the film, after it becomes evident the woman shall soon die of cancer, the man, an atheist, angrily says to God, “I caught belief like a disease. So You’re taking her --- but You haven’t got me yet. I hate You, God, as if You existed.” Sometimes faith of an odd and unpredictable sort can sweep over us, and we find ourselves relating to God despite ourselves.
The Queen has now been queen longer than any other monarch in British history. Every Christmas she gives an address to her subjects throughout the United Kingdom. Last Christmas she said this: “The teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework. I know that the only way to live my life is to try to do what is right, to take the long view, to give of my best in all that the day brings, and to put my trust in God.”
Elizabeth is, by one of her many titles, the Defender of the Faith. Does “Faith” mean “Religion” or “Christian Faith,” or does it mean “Faith: Trust in God”? Religion cannot save us, nor provide us certainty, but it can nourish faith in us.
“Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?”