ON FAITH

(a sermon preached at the Unitarian/Universalist Fellowship, Flagstaff)

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (01/8/06)

Texts: Genesis 3:1-13, Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-10.W

When I was a small boy learning to swim, my grandfather took me down to a cove at the beach to practice. The water near the shore was chest high with a sandy bottom, but it soon dropped off into a darkness. All I could see were the tendrils of kelp lazily waving in the deep. They looked like the arms of an octopus from the Black Lagoon.

As he sat on a small jetty, my grandfather encouraged me to swim out beyond the shore. I didn’t want to go swimming beyond my depth. I wanted the security of touching bottom. A former Norwegian mariner, he laughed and said, "Oofdah, you’re never safe until you’re beyond your depth. Else, you’ll be running aground."I had a sense he was right but didn’t know why. I wondered how I could be safe if I couldn’t touch bottom. Well, now that I’m approaching his age at that time, I’m beginning to understand what he meant.

If we keep paddling in the shallows, we’ll never go anywhere. We’re always safer beyond our depth. Some people stay in the shallows. They crave security. The uncertainties of life are so emotionally overwhelming that they’ll grab for any security they can find no matter how flimsy.

In my backpacking days I was often tempted to reach out for a branch or root while climbing a precipitous trail, especially if I were stupid enough to look down. Of course, the roots or branches often give way. If I sought the security, I’d lose my balance and fall. As my father used to say, "Always look up."

Seeking security, many people confuse faith with ideologies and theologies, sets of doctrines, lists of morals, or, worse yet, social and economic values. Craving certitude they feel safe only when they can touch bottom or grab for an ideological twig. Living within the boundaries of doctrines, they paddle in the shallows, staying safe in home port, never going beyond the perimeter of their fears.

Fundamentalists are a prime example, but these rigidities of belief seem to afflict everyone. Some might even be lurking right here amongst the Unitarians and Universalists. They all crave to live without doubt. The most egregious are the fundamentalists because they claim faith and have no faith, believing their own lie that ideology is faith. Roman Catholics and Mormons also replace faith with doctrine.

Jean Paul Sartre said that bad faith is believing one’s own lie. Well, the fundamentalists are guilty of bad faith. They’ve believed their own lies.When people claim to know the truth, that their ideology is the final truth, they shut off further investigation and thought. Talking to them is akin to speaking with a steel wall.

The politically correct do the same thing. They shut off conversation as though certain phrases or words are the only way to think or speak. In my lifetime I have gone through five or six generations of political correctness and am always about a generation behind the currently correct. If we live by what we think we know, we’ll never go anywhere. Saint Paul said it best, "We walk by faith, not by sight."

I remember in my freshman logic class in college that the professor took us through the four traditional tests of truth, and all of them in one way or another were found wanting. Waving his cane in the air, he said, "No matter what anyone says, ‘The truth has to be interesting.’" The fundamentalists and the ideologues are cognitive drags. They are not interesting. They’re boring.

Faith is not a theology or an ideology. It is a process, as in an assembly line. The assembly line determines the product. The product is the doctrine or conviction. The assembly line is faith, not what a person believes, but the way that person believes. Faith is not a what but a how.We live by faith and memory. Knowledge, belief, or conviction are products of our memories.

I doubt that many here read Saint Augustine, he pointed out in his Confessions that knowledge of the world and ourselves is a function of memory. Just as memory is the way we experience the past, so faith is the way we experience the present and anticipate the future.We don’t remember raw data but recall the past by means of metaphors which are ways we perceive. Faith is a metaphor by which we experience the present and anticipate the future. These metaphors are the sextants of which my grandfather spoke.

Most of us don’t realize the depth of metaphor in our experience. Our only literal thinking is either mathematics or symbolic logic, where the symbol stands for itself and nothing else. Everything else is metaphor which is the way we process our experiences, anticipations, and recollections. Most often we think of metaphor as a literary illustration and device, but the linguists have pointed out that our experience of life is always governed by global metaphors.

The best analysis I have read on this point is George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Physicists speak of elegance. Botanists and biologists study communities, some monarchial and some democratic. Some people have to defend themselves as though they are at war, living with a military metaphor. Others justify themselves as though they live in a court of law.

The Bible said it best in the Epistle of the Hebrews, "By faith, Abraham went out, not knowing where he was to go. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a foreign land." "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." In other words, life’s journey is much like a mariner’s journey with sextant, compass, and fathom line taking a fix on the stars, holding one’s direction, and checking to make sure of the depth. Today, the Global Positioning System has replaced the sextant and a fathometer the fathom line. Mariners feel safe when they’re beyond their depth, when the fathoms are deeper than their keels.

The substitution of morals, doctrines, or social values for faith is, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "cheap grace." As substitutes for faith, they are frauds, knock-off faiths, manufactured in the sweatshops of anxiety. If we live only by what we know, we are trapped in the past.The story of Adam and Eve illustrates this point. They were tempted by the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which meant they wanted to know everything before they began. The fruit was good for food, a delight to the eyes, and made one wise, in short, the classic Greek virtues of goodness, beauty, and truth, the sum of all knowledge. They wanted to live by knowledge rather than faith.

As a result, they fell from grace because they wanted to commit a deicide, a killing of God by making God irrelevant. They wanted the security of controlling their destiny which means that the opposite of faith is security, the security of knowing everything. In short, they wanted to live without doubt and, and such, wanted to live without faith.

Doubt is often thought of as the opposite of faith. Actually, it can be the growing edge of faith. No thoughtful person can live without doubt. Doubt makes us explore more deeply the meaning of faith. More often than not, people doubt dogma, doctrine, correct ideas, not faith. Faith is the way we experience, not ideas about that experience. In astronomy it’s called the Parallax Principle. What we observe depends upon where we stand. With each passing day we stand in a different place just as the world changes every day. We never experience anything the way we experienced it before because both we and the thing we’re observing have changed.

Belief is not a settled and mixed set of ideas, but an ongoing exploration of the meaning of our experience. The metaphor for faith used by both the Epistle to the Hebrews and Saint Paul is a journey, not a destination. Faith as a pilgrimage is more a process than an idea, more of a how than a what. Process is the way people think, the way people experience life, with what kind of metaphor they perceive their experiences.

I am a Trinitarian and a Calvinist, a minority. As a Christian, I believe the metaphor of God’s grace toward us in Jesus Christ and thus the faith of grace. One of the names of the Christ Child in the Gospel of Matthew is Emmanuel, which means God for us. He was God’s presence amongst us and gave us a metaphor of God’s grace toward us, a metaphor by which we process our recollections and our anticipations, shaping our memories and our faith. Amen.