Proper 4 Luke 7: 1-11
2 June 2013
I read an interesting article in the Times this last week which caught my attention because of the title: “Belief is the least part of faith.” [ T. M. Luhrman, NYTimes, May 30] It was written by a woman who teaches anthropology at Stanford and who maintains, along with many other sociologists and anthropologists of the past, that the role of belief in religion is greatly overstated. “You don’t go to church because you believe in God, rather you believe in God because you go to Church.” This approach is not completely foreign to Anglicanism. We don’t insist on a confession of faith before we let you join; we say, come and pray with us and we will show you how to find God in the midst of it all. Yet, I don’t think we go so far as this.
She quotes W. C. Smith, former Harvard professor of comparative religion, who said this: “The affirmation ‘I believe in God’ used to mean: ‘Given the reality of God as a fact of the universe, I hereby pledge to Him my heart and soul. I committedly opt to live in loyalty to Him. I offer my life to be judged by Him, trusting His mercy.’ Today the statement may be taken by some as meaning: ‘Given the uncertainty as to whether there be a God or not, as a fact of modern life, I announce that my opinion is yes.’ ”
The author goes on to say about her research in American evangelicalism, “people go to church to experience joy and learn how to have more of it.” The evangelical view of the world as she sees it is that: “the world is full of joy, God is good. The world is good. Things will be good even if they don’t seem so now.” “That,” she concludes, “is what draws people to church.” It is secular people who are obsessed with problems of belief, not those who go to church looking for joy. What is actually believed is of very much secondary importance to the experience of community
I am reminded of what the old Anglican spiritual director, Martin Thornton, once said, discussing the old truism of pastoral ministry: “a visiting parson makes for a church-going people.” His comment? “Lamentable if true.” I feel the same way about that opinion piece—it may well be that what people really think and believe takes second, or third or even fourth, place to the feelings of joy the experience in communal worship. Joy is good—I would like more of it. But to say that joyful experiences take priority over what one really believes? Lamentable, if true.
How do we know which or our emotional joyful experiences are the joy of the Lord and which are based on illusions? Does it make a difference as long as we feel good? And if we don’t feel good, what do we do then? Put more energy into it? Try harder? I would hate think that my emotional state at any given time was how I had to evaluate my religion. What do we examine, if not the basis for our belief? As we think about this, let us bring in the Gospel lesson from this morning, for it is an odd vignette.
There was a centurion in Capernaum—a ranking officer in the Roman Army—who commanded a century, that is, somewhere between 100 and 1000 men. He was apparently important and powerful enough to have the wealth that allowed him to be a benefactor to the local Jewish community. He was military through and through—something beyond my experience, though not of that of some of you. He knew the whole business about chain of command: he took orders and he gave them; he understood authority. He had also come to appreciate the seriousness and spiritual depth of the Jewish community he found in his area of command—Capernaum being a Greco-Roman city, mostly Gentile. And somehow he had come to learn about Jesus. He recognized in Him a right to exercise authority. He had heard about the healings and exorcisms and the way he preached and dealt with his opponents. He saw in Jesus this ability to command and his right to be obeyed. So when he put in a request for the healing of his servant, it was like asking his superior officer for a favor. It was within his power to grant or refuse to grant the request—that was not in doubt. If he granted it, he granted it; if not, there was no going over his head. So he asked, through the Jewish community, for the healing of his servant. And Jesus was surprised. To have someone outside the Jewish world recognize his innate authority over matters of life and death, sickness and the demonic was unexpected. Such faith, said Jesus, I have not found in Israel.
But it was an odd faith—all from a distance. It was not at all the kind of close personal embrace and warm friendship Jesus usually commended as the faith he was looking for in his followers. Certainly it was not the joyful, emotional kind of faith the Stanford professor was writing about. What is going on here?
I think, that to help us make some sense here, we can look profitably at a paragraph from Rob Bell, whom I have cited several times in the last couple of months. This is from his book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God. “So when I talk about God, I’m talking about the Jesus who invites us to embrace our weakness and doubt and anger and whatever other pain and helplessness we’re carrying around, offering it up in all of its mystery, strangeness, pain, and unresolved tension to God, trusting that in the same way that Jesus’s offering of his body and blood brings us new life, this present pain and brokenness can also be turned into something new.
“The peace we are offered is not a peace that is free from tragedy, illness, bankruptcy, divorce, depression, or heartache. It is peace rooted in the trust that the life Jesus gives us is deeper, wider, stronger, and more enduring that whatever our current circumstances are, because all we see is not all there is and the last word about us and our struggle has not yet been spoken.”
We tend to operate in our world on the basis of what we see do around us. At some times in the history of our planet people have not had to be convinced that something they could not see was going on everywhere around them. Most everyone believed that. But we have come to know so many things about our world that it is more natural for us to think that we understand what is going on—or at least the scientists do—and it is mostly at the surface—or at least just beneath the surface, which leaves evidence for sociologists to discover—or anthropologists. In other words, we largely live in a “disenchanted” world—a world from which the spirits have been driven. At least the secular intellectuals believe this. That is why anyone taking joy in the Lord is a mystery to them; it is why finding some kind of peace in Jesus is unintelligible. But many of those who care more about their experiences of joy than what is really going on are only a major heartbreak or job loss or depression from losing their grip.
If something more is going on than what we can see, the question is: “What is it?” “Who is in charge of it?” “Who can explain it?” The centurion in our story today recognized that Jesus was the one who knew and had a right to speak of it and an authority to act on it. Where the centurion was in his life, that was enough for him. For us, it is not. We are called to engagement with this Jesus, to accept his authority as the one who is directing what is going on in the depths of our experience and of the reality of the world—even if we cannot often see it.
This seems fundamental to me. We have to move past wanting to feel good and locate ourselves in the truth of the way things are. The difference between a secular person and a spiritual person is not the kind of experiences of joy that are available. Some people seem to find joy and exhilaration at a rock concert. Others, at a gathering of contemporary religious worship. If the proof is in the feelings, then anyone’s feelings are as reliable as anyone else’s—which means nothing has any base in reality. We Christians believe that “all we see is not all there is and the last word about us and our struggle has not yet been spoken.” We believe Jesus is working at the depths of things and the brokenness is being healed, even though it is not always visible—perhaps rarely visible.
Is this a reasonable thing to believe? How could we ever decide? Well, I have worked myself into a conundrum, to be sure. If you expect that the only way out of the trap I have set for myself is now to offer a proof of God’s existence and the reality of Jesus’ as God’s Incarnate Son, I confess that I cannot offer it to you. What I can offer is a way of thinking about it that might be fruitful as well as a conviction that is implied by that way of thinking.
First the approach: the word I want to offer for your consideration is “adequacy.” What is an adequate system of belief for a fully human life? What answers to the deepest human needs and the deepest human desires and the interrelatedness of all of us who live on this planet together? What will account for our experiences of beauty and awe as well as our awareness of evil and experiences of suffering? To my mind, the only adequate way of buttressing a fully human way of life is a belief in the Kingdom of God, as Jesus lived it and taught it, especially in the Sermon on the Mount, and demonstrated it on the Cross and through the Resurrection. The God who is visible in Jesus, to me, is the only believable God, whose existence and love and presence alone constitute the grounds for living a life that does not end in absurdity. I am not saying that Christians only possess truth—I am not saying that a non-Christian cannot live a fully human life. I am saying that if Jesus’ teaching and life and death and resurrection could be shown to be a fraud, then we should have lost our best chance to make any kind of sense of our human life. I believe it because it is credible, based on evidence, and is an adequate base on which to build a life.
The conviction that goes along with this approach to the fundamental question of what is going on beneath the surface of things is this: those who take Jesus seriously and begin a life of active following, verify the truth of his teaching in their lives, which more and more take on the shape of his own life. Indeed, he left behind Him a Church, a people, whose chief reason for existence was to represent Him in this world, with whom He promised to be present, so that He Himself could be truly known in this world.
There are lots of difficulties in this approach and many unanswered questions, but the main bases are covered. We do not live in an absurd world and there is more going on than what we can see. Our own lives have more to them than we have yet attained and we can be a part of what is happening at the depths of things. We don’t just gather to ramp up our feelings so as to go out into a fundamentally meaningless world in which we live just as meaningless lives as everyone else. We can recognize in Jesus the One who makes sense of things and has the right to give the orders. If we follow Him and them, we can come to a place of peace where our lives make some sense, even if the last word has not yet been spoken about them, and we are sure that we are living out of depths that are not always visible. In other words, we shall possess such faith as Jesus had not seen in Israel before he encountered the centurion.