Text: "I believe; help thou my unbelief" (Mark 9:14-24)
One of the things I have always found to be especially intriguing are the inventive ways children and young people often discover to solve perplexing dilemmas. Here is an example: When my second son, Nathan, was only 6 years old, he found himself faced with a problem not unlike those that may confront any one of us during our lifetime. At the time I was serving as Chaplain and Professor of Religious Studies at Connecticut College. The house we lived in faced the campus. Across the street was an athletic field, and just beyond that a row of dormitory buildings that faced our home. Also facing the campus and two doors to our left was the home of the President of the College, Dr. Oakes Ames. On this particular night in late spring, the final exams had just ended and the students were celebrating with great enthusiasm. As they were wont to do on such occasions, they had generously turned the speakers of their stereo systems around to share their musical appreciation with all of us their lucky neighbors.
Understandably then, my young son Nathan was having difficulty getting to sleep. Twice he had come to me to ask if I might not intervene in the festivities. I allowed as it would probably be to little avail, and that we would just have to try to be understanding. Finally, at 2 am, utterly exhausted and fed up, Nathan decided to take matters into his own hands. As he and his older brother occupied a bedroom directly over ours, I heard him get out of bed, stomp across the floor, and fling open the window facing the celebration. Throwing all caution to the wind, I heard him shout at the top of his tiny lungs: "All right you guys. Knock it off and go to sleep! (Pause) This is President Ames!"
Nathan on that fateful evening found himself on the horns of a dilemma upon which I have subsequently discovered myself on numerous occasions. Perhaps you too recognize the problem. How do you find the courage to speak an authoritative word when you do not occupy a position of authority, and suspect that your presence alone will not carry much weight? Nathan dug deep and came up with an ancient principle, tried and true: just pretend that you are someone else. Notice that he did not claim to be Chaplain Robb. He doubtless suspected-quite accurately by the way-that would not have cut much ice with student revelers. At his tender age Nathan was clever enough to go straight to the top.
Well, in the lesson we heard this morning from the Gospel according to St. Mark, we learn of another kind of dilemma and a unique way of solving it. It is the dilemma that each of us faces when we enter the complex terrain of faith. As Jesus is traveling about, a man comes out of the crowd carrying his son-a boy who has suffered from birth with an acute form of epilepsy. He has tried everything, to no avail. He has heard about this rabbi with miraculous powers of healing, and so he brings the child to him: a father, grief stricken for the sake of his son. And he comes, not really certain why, hoping against hope that perhaps Jesus may be able to do something-anything-- to end this suffering.
He addresses Jesus: "If you can do anything, have pity on us, and help us." "If you can?" Jesus replies. And he sounds weary and slightly annoyed. "If you can? Anything is possible to those who believe." And we feel slightly embarrassed for this man who has approached with temerity and in anguish and now must endure this rebuke, this mini lecture about the marvelous powers of faith. But he is not put off. And he responds with what must surely strike us as one of the most honest expressions of faith in all of religious literature: "I believe; help thou my unbelief." Surely this response strikes a responsive chord, for it is close to the heart of what it means for us to live in faith in these times. Here there is no shrewdness, no manipulation, merely an honest, straightforward confession of what it means to believe and to be disbelieving at the same time. It is just the situation that you and I live with every day.
Faith is not an especially congenial category for most of us today. If we think about it at all, we tend to think of faith in somewhat the same way that plucky Sunday school boy did when he was asked by his teacher how he would define faith. "Faith," he asserted, "is believing in what you know ain't true!" In a slightly more dignified manner Thomas Huxley remarked in the 19th century: "The man of science has learned to believe in justification not by faith, but by verification."
What I want to suggest is that that faith does not really require us to reject reason or what reason is able to verify. Rather it is that what reason is able to verify has only in part to do with how we actually live our lives. One can verify the laws of gravity, one cannot verify precisely whether his or her life, work, or commitments are meaningful. No, if faith holds any validity for us, it is because we have a paradoxical understanding. We believe; help thou our unbelief." We believe, because to live without faith diminishes us, to live without faith condemns us to live in too small a closet the world likes to call "reality."
When you stop to think about it, most of the difficult and important decisions we ever make are decisions made largely in faith, that is before all the evidence is in, before there is any way to verify whether they are the right or most appropriate choice. We attend one school or another, are drawn to one vocation or another, decide to marry or not, to have children or not. None of these decisions are, properly speaking "verifiable" except in the most literal of terms. Not even after the fact can we "know" that another choice would have been preferable except by sheer speculation. We make our way through this life not primarily by way of the things that we can know by way of verification, but more importantly by way of those things we can only "know" by virtue of certain risks taken in faith.
Understood in this way then, faith is not the absence of doubt or uncertainty. Nor is it a kind of information. It is rather a trusting, a relying upon. It involves a certain confidence, but one that is far from that smug self-satisfaction of the religious know-it-all, the kind of character Mark Twain once described in this way: "He had all the confidence of a Christian-holding four aces!" No, the confidence of faith is the confidence of a risking love. It is a confidence that is never completely separate from doubt or uncertainty, or anxiety. It is the courage to act in spite of the absence of proof or verification. It is the courage that says: "I stake my very being on this. If I am wrong so be it, I will discover that soon enough. But neither can I know that beyond a shadow of a doubt in advance, apart from my commitment in faith."
To most of us the real obstacles to faith have little to do with believability. After all we give ourselves over daily to more fantastic claims than we find in most of our religious literature. It is rather the internal obstacles to faith that are more compelling, the inability to identify within ourselves the need to which faith is always addressed. For the encounter with God always requires a ruthless honesty about ourselves that we find embarrassing. The "certainty" about God is always rooted in a more significant uncertainty about ourselves-our motives, our goodness, the ceaseless paradox of destruction and creativity that sleep side by side within us. We dream of a world and a life that is without ambiguity, without anxiety, without care, without the painful choices we all must make between relative goods, or the lesser of evils. In such a world faith would, of course, be superfluous.
It is precisely because we do live under those conditions that faith is indispensable. At the deepest levels of our self-awareness we know, whether we intended it or not that we have hurt others and ourselves. We have given ourselves over to the gods of status and success and security, and that the trouble with these gods is that they are so insatiable, leaving us drained and ruthless and devoid of joy. When we know that even by our best lights we do not always accomplish the good, we are not always recognized, and that we do not always get what we truly deserve. And when we can honestly know we cannot forever blame all this on other things-on bad genes, or bad parents, or bad luck. When we know deeply that we are responsible for the choices we have made and the consequences of those choices, then we are deeply aware of the need for healing, for forgiveness, for hope beyond our power. It is ultimately addresses itself finally to that need that religious faith.
As one of our most profound religious teachers, Reinhold Niebuhr, put it:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we are saved by hope
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness. Copyright AllSouls 2000.