August 12, 2007
11 Pentecost, Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
There’s a scene in Alice in Wonderland where the White Queen tells Alice that she is “one hundred and one, five months, and a day.” Alice laughs and says she can’t believe that; “One can't believe impossible things." The Queen protests, "I daresay you haven't had much practice. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
There’s a lot about this whole religion thing that seems pretty impossible. Even the White Queen would have her work cut out for her. Creation from nothing. God born as fragile baby. Jesus wholly man and yet wholly God. Resurrection from the dead. The Kingdom of God. We build our faith on these sorts of contradictions and impossibilities. In fact, our reading from the letter to the Hebrews today defines faith in just that way: It is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
But having assurance and conviction about things that are not seen and are only hoped for isn’t easy. It seems counter-intuitive in this modern age when we want so much to understand the world around us and to know everything we can as quickly as possible.
On my family’s recent vacation we went to the beach in northern Ocean City. We printed out Mapquest directions to get there, but when we stopped to get gas we missed some small turn and ended up going about an hour out of our way. Holden had to go home for work for a couple days in the middle of the week, and he borrowed my step-sister’s portable GPS -- or Global Positioning System -- to make the trip. The maps and digital voice of the GPS allowed Holden to make the trip in half the time it took us to get there. Needless to say, my husband who hates asking for directions bought one as soon as he got home. Some great mind has figured out a way to connect us in our car to the cadre of satellites orbiting space so that we can effortlessly get to the beach, or to Shrine Mont, or wherever we need to go.
We are so good at figuring things out nowdays. We send astronauts and robots to the moon and beyond to explore the reaches of space. Our scientists are learning how to heal people by changing the structure of their genes. I can sit down at my desk and jot down thoughts and zap them almost instantly through cyberspace to someone around the world. We can even split the previously invisible atom.
In so many ways we have made the things we have hoped for happen; we have seen the unseen. And so maybe we don’t allow much room for assurance and conviction in things that remain impossible-seeming, things that we can’t figure out. We aren’t content to not see, to not understand. We want scientific proof and tangible evidence to back up what we believe. And that makes the mystery of God, the intangibility of faith, hard for us.
In ancient times people pointed to gods to explain things they couldn’t understand. Booming thunder and crashing lightening bolts might be warnings from an angry god. Different gods were responsible for the different seasons and their accompanying weather patterns. I think we worry that if we are capable of figuring out these things that previously seemed unexplainable, then the reality of God, or maybe our need for God, is somehow threatened. In the 1800s, Darwin was attacked by the Church for his theory of evolution. In the 1600s the Church condemned Galileo for suggesting that the earth was not the center of the universe. The Church has a long history of being afraid of progress; of assuming that knowledge will destroy faith. But, seriously, if God can’t stand up to our figuring out how things work, then we have a pretty small God. There’s no threat to faith in our discoveries; the only thing threatened is our limited and incomplete human understanding of God.
I’ve been reading a book by Madeleine L’Engle recently called The Irrational Season. The title comes from a poem about Christmas that is included in the book:
This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
There’d have been no room for the child.
It’s not Christmas, obviously, but I think the irrationality of God becoming human and the willingness that Mary showed to welcome the mystery of God are relevant any time of year. As L’Engle puts it: “How dull the world would be if we limited ourselves to the possible.” A God worth believing in can’t be small enough for us mortals to comprehend, can’t be domesticated enough for us to easily believe in.
At our parish retreat at Shrine Mont last weekend, the adults gathered to share stories of our joys and our journeys. And one thing that many of us shared was that feeling of something so much bigger and greater than ourselves. Our periodic, and sometimes fleeting, awareness of an extraordinary God, and a feeling of our being connected to that Something Bigger. Times when we have felt especially close to God who is more than the words on the pages of these books in the pews, more than whatever image might appear in our head when we pray, more than a convenient explanation for the things our best scientists cannot yet explain.
Madeline L’Engle calls these moments of connection to God “glimpses of glory.”
Not too long ago, I was putting Sophie to bed and read her a kid-Bible version of the loaves and fishes story. I was telling her that when we go to church and eat bread together, it’s kind of like those 5000 people that were gathered together with Jesus way back when as he turned that small amount of food the little boy brought into enough food to feed that huge group. In church, God is taking the normal, home-baked bread that Barbara Schnorenberg makes us and somehow turning it into holy food that can give us an entirely different kind of strength and life than regular food. And God is taking us normal, flawed, distracted people and somehow making us into God’s beloved people, the Church. And then, because I always struggle with trying to explain to a 3 year old the relation between God and Jesus, I went on to say how lucky we are that God became Jesus so that we could see him and feel him and start to understand what God is like. And Sophie, with that child’s mix of wisdom and contrariness, said, “But we can’t. We can’t see him or touch him. Jesus lived really a long time ago.”
And it’s true in the world’s way of truth that we can’t touch and see Jesus. And yet somehow even knowing that God was once that tangible and visible helps me now. Helps me to somehow know that in a way that I cannot possibly understand, God is in me, in you, in all of us. Working in us and through us and in the world around us. And because of that, sometimes when we are paying attention, we are lucky enough to have one of those “glimpses of glory.”
Amen.
ER