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The God in Whom We Believe
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| 12/24/2005 |
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, 2005
The Rev. Timothy B. Safford
Christ Church in Philadelphia
Let me begin with a story. Just before Thanksgiving, I was up at the Princeton Seminary studying, and stayed in the Continuing Education dorm where all others studying take their meals together. One evening, I sat at the table with a bunch of older, retired Presbyterian preachers there for a conference. A young seminary student from Thailand was dining at the table, and asked the distinguished group, “did you ever lose your faith in God, in Jesus, and what did you do to get it back?”
The table sat silent. Pastors get asked this question a lot, but we never like to answer it, as if to admit that if faith within us ebbs and flows, would lose credibility rather than gain it with our flock.
Into the silence, the student from Thailand persisted, seeking an answer. “You see,” he said, “I came to study here, in the United States, last September. A year ago, my village was destroyed in the Tsunami, and the church washed away. I am the preacher there. We lost our faith, so I was sent here by my church, hoping to find faith again so I can take it back. If the faith of your people is lost, and your own faith, how do you get it back?”
More silence.
He was not daunted. “I have just talked to my home. The elder of the church said, ‘Don’t come home, stay there. We are leaving. It’s all still gone. We aren’t going to rebuild the church. Our faith washed away in the waves.’ I don’t know what to do.”
“When I was 23 years-old, and in the Navy in World War II,” a sagacious retired Presbyterian preacher started saying, not lifting his head, “I had nearly lost my faith from the inhumanity and terror of the war.
“I had an atheist bunkmate, made so by the War, and he always challenged me to explain the little belief I had left, and when I couldn’t, he said that I was stupid to believe in something I couldn’t explain.
“So, one day on shore leave, I called my Daddy in Alabama and asked him what to do, that I was empty and God had abandoned me, and that I no longer had the faith that so sustained me. And my Daddy said, ‘Go and find George Buttrick and ask him.’”
(George Buttrick was the legendary preacher of Madison Avenue, before coming the minister of Harvard University).
“So I knocked on the door next to his church, and George Buttrick opened the door and asked, ‘May I help you?’ He didn’t know me; I was a sailor on leave in New York City, and he probably thought I was in some sort of trouble. ‘Dr. Buttrick,’ I blurted out, ‘I have lost my faith. This war has destroyed it. I have killed so many, and I have seen so many killed. I can’t explain the horror and love God, so now, I don’t believe in God who could allow such things. I don’t believe in God’
“And George Buttrick looked at me, and I will never forget what he said. ‘Come in, son, and tell me about the God you don’t believe in. I probably don’t believe in that God either.’ With those words, a spark kindled my faith again.”
As we gather here, I believe that preacher from Thailand is preaching in that devastated village. I wish we could hear him, for I suspect his words will have a power that mine do not. I am fairly certain that he is preaching not about a God who sends Tsunamis, but a God who gives strength and grace to rebuild. He probably preaches of a God who does not cause suffering, but who suffers with us in changes and chances of life, for God lived here with us.
The message and mystery of Christmas is that God is not distant, but near; not nebulous and indescribable, but flesh and blood and as knowable as any newborn child. For on Christmas, we remember one thing, that God came to live among us, as one of us, so that all we are, God knows, and all that we can be, God hopes for.
And, though I am imagining more now, I suspect the preacher in Thailand is comforting his people by reminding them that the angels, in announcing this miracle of God being born as a human, came first to the shepherds out in the darkness on the edge of town, and not to the power elites at the center. For the manual laborers, fisherfolk and farmers of his village know that they are like the shepherds, and if there were room for the shepherds around the manger, and if they were first to the stable, they would not be pushed out by those mightier who came later. And this baby was not to be a king of palaces and finery, but a carpenter first, a fisherman second, a healer, simply, a revolutionary full of the power of God. He was to be far more like the shepherd than the wearer of fine wool.
I know most of you only relate to shepherds and sheep in the same way I do—when I set up my crèche scene! Then just remember that when God comes to you, as Jesus came into the world on this most holy of nights, God does not come to the parts of you that are well-lit and full of power, but to the darkness of your life, the places along the edges in you that you don’t know yourself so well. Tonight, the angels speak to those places in you, saying, come from the darkness and let the light overwhelm you.
Certainly, the Tsunamis of our own life causes our faith in God to wax and wane, ebb and flow. It does so in us all. And at our lowest points, when the changes and chances of life have removed God from our lips and lives, so many of us, in the struggle to find our way back to the loving mother God who waits for you and me, the far off child, to return, we remain in the far country, refusing to come home, for we can only focus on a God in whom we don’t believe,--the God who causes pain, or didn’t catch us when we fell, or who didn’t come through when we were desperate.
So, simply ask on this holy night, Who is the God in whom you can believe? Those shepherds probably thought it was a fools errand to leave their sheep and come to see God. What had gone done from the lately. But when they found a vulnerable child, in a barn, in a feedbox, they knew that there was a God in whom they could believe.
I’ve made a list:
God In Whom I don’t Believe
| God in Whom I Do Believe
| Created the universe
| Still creating the universe. | | Exclusive | Embracing | | Vindictive | Forgiving | | Violent | Peaceful | | Quick to anger | Quick to love | Harsh in judgement
| Compassionate in judgement | Takes sides in conflicts
| Judges fairly
| "Making a list, cheking it twice"
| Gives freely, abundantly
| Triumphant above the clouds while we struggle below
| In the midst of pain and suffering, binding us in the broken places
| A male father
| Beyond male and female, yet loving like a mother and father
| A mighty warrior
| A vulnerable child
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So, many give up too soon on God for all they have is a God given them, not a God discovered. This God, usually handed down like old china that nobody really cared for in the first place, is difficult to believe, or even imagine. So, too many of us quit.
But Albert Einstein framed the problem well of finding meaning in life. In 1932, he said, “Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntarily and uninvited for a short stay, without knowing the whys and the wherefore.”
If you can pursue the whys and wherefores without God, you are better than I at life. The yearning for a life full of meaning and purpose is not quenched when God is abandoned. But life has no meaning if the universe that has birthed us for this brief interval we call “being human” has no meaning. If it’s an accident, then we’re an accident, just the outcome of the strange swirlings of cosmic dust and cold gas. If “all that is” that we seem uniquely blessed to perceive and apprehend, able to appreciate its beauty, and to enjoy uniquely, has no purpose, then all of us, not just we religious folk, are simply to be pitied, for our being simply becomes nothingness.
Yet, if our being has a source, a ground, a place in the universe, then we sing in harmony with the very purpose of the universe, and we have a place in the heavenly chorus. We religious folk—I speak for Christans but I believe this true of Jews and Muslims, and even those who begin their prayers, “To whom it may concern,”—we Christian folk believe that the one whom our earthly history has taught us to call God is the very ground of our being, the very source of our existence, and this earthly pilgrimage, absurd as it may seem, is a journey home along the river of life to the very headwaters of our being where our meaning and purpose is found. It is difficult to find life’s purpose, is it not, where Tsunami destroys, and hurricanes lay bare the injustices of life, and where pain and randomness that can destroy us all gets some of us like a coyote picks a sheep from the edges. But when we journey in faith along, then the journey itself, no matter, how long, or hard, will have meaning. We pray for God’s promise, that we will find our way home. And there is room for you, which is why we say, “Whoever, you are and wherever you find yourself on the journey of faith, you are welcome here, as you are, to receive the blessings of God so freely given.”
Tonight, all of you who are here just because its Christmas and someone brought you along, or you just wanted to sing a few of the old carols, or, you don’t know why you’re here, please accept the most sincere invitation to join us on the journey of faith, to come to Bethlehem and see, and from there, begin. W.H. Auden had it right in his Christmas poem when he had the shepherds say, “O here and now the endless journey begins.” And in our invitation, feel free to tell us about the God in whom you don’t believe, because we probably don’t believe in that God either. On this journey home, together, with Jesus Christ as our guide, let us find the God in whom we believe, and who believes in us as precious in this place.
Amen.
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