Sermon: House of Faith

Texts: 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14

Date: May 22, 2011

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

            Oscar Wilde once wrote, “The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them.”   When I read that, my first thought was “YES!” and then my second thought was “Wait, what exactly is a verity?”  Just in case you’re in the same boat, I looked it up for us.  A verity is “A true principle or belief, especially one of fundamental importance.”  You can shorten the definition of verity to “Truth,” but why use one word when ten will work as well? 

            Listen again to Wilde’s insight: “The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them.”   This idea appeals to me because parts of the gospel lesson points to a paradox with which I have wrestled my whole life of faith.  Jesus says, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”  These familiar words are often read at funerals as a comforting promise of an eternal home.  But I think they also point to the wideness of God’s welcome, in a way similar to another of Jesus’ sayings in the gospel of John, that he has “sheep that are not of this flock.” When I hear “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places,” I automatically think of people of other faiths, and imagine how each living faith has a wing of God’s house.  I experience this truth whenever I gather with the delegates of the Interfaith Council whom I have come to love and respect. 

            Then, just a few sentences later, Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”  I experience Jesus as the way, the truth and the life.  This is one of the verities of life for me.  The ring of confidence in this declaration is enormously appealing.  But it seems pretty much the opposite of thinking of God’s house as expansive enough to include many faith perspectives.

            For me these verities, these truths, are most definitely acrobats on a tightrope in my mind.  I suspect there is greater truth in trying to hold the two ideas together in some sort of balance than there would be in deciding to side with either a too-inclusive or too-exclusive view of the truth of one’s chosen faith.  My train of thought on this led me to reflecting on the balancing act itself as much as the poles between which we balance.  I harvested a few ideas out of some excellent articles in past editions of the Christian Century that I want to share with you.

            I suppose it would be fair to name the tightrope on which we are balanced “modernity.”  We might not have been doing the same kind of mental acrobatics in an earlier era.  Herbert Fingarette puts it this way: “It is the special fate of modern man that he has a "choice" of spiritual visions. The paradox is that although each requires complete commitment for complete validity, we can today generate a context in which we see that no one of them is the sole vision.”  This is a relatively recent development.  In an article titled “Protestantism and the Quest for Certainty,” sociologist Peter Berger writes, “Throughout most of history human beings have lived in situations in which there was general consensus on the nature of reality and on the norms by which one should lead one’s life. This consensus was almost everywhere grounded in religion and it was taken for granted.”  It wasn’t so very long ago that birds of a feather flocked together, and you didn’t find competing spiritual visions in the same neighborhood, or you could ignore the minority voices that might be trying to make themselves heard.  But times have changed.  Now there is less consensus and it is pretty difficult to take the truth of one’s vision of reality for granted.

Berger points out that “certainty is now much harder to come by. People may still hold the same beliefs and values that were held by their predecessors in more uniform situations, but they will hold them in a different manner: what before was given through the accident of birth now becomes a matter of choice. Pluralism brings on an era of many choices and, by the same token, an era of uncertainty.”  The trouble is, we don’t like uncertainty.  We human beings, by and large, yearn for certainty.  This is why religious visions that offer absolute truth or absolute certainty never have a shortage of converts.  There is always some subset of the population that become fanatics over a religious vision because it satisfies that inborn hunger for certainty.  At the other end of the scale dwell the nihilists who decide one can’t believe in anything because there are too many competing claims for truth.  Most people are neither fanatics nor nihilists, Berger notes, but somewhere in between; but everyone is “caught in the dilemma of reconciling… nostalgia for certainty with a social reality in which such certainty is very hard to come by.”

            Berger observes that the yearning for certainty is such a powerful force that it drives religious people to seek certainty in some source, if you can no longer get it from a general consensus of the society in which you live.  “First, one can seek certainty in the institution of the church. This has always been possible, in different ecclesial forms. The most impressive offer of this type has been, for a very long time, that of the Roman Catholic Church.”  It is a powerful attraction to be in an institution with definite borders and doctrines, and a hierarchy that leads up to an individual considered infallible on some points.  But it’s not for everybody, even such a grand church has its failings.

Second, Berger notes, “one can seek for certainty on the basis of an absolute understanding of the biblical text. This, of course, has always been a Protestant specialty, especially in its evangelical variants. Here it is not the institution but the text which is infallible—or, in the more appropriate language, inerrant.”  American Protestantism has a long tradition of this, asking in many contexts “What does the Bible have to say about it?”  Unless one has a pretty rigid interpretive framework, however, the chorus of voices in the Bible itself makes this a tricky source for certainty.

And third, says Berger, “one can seek certainty on the basis of one’s own religious experience. This answer to the quest for certainty runs through almost all Christian communities, from the great mystics to the most recent flowering of Pentecostalism.”  This is a mainstay of revival movements.  However, the possibility of individual and group delusion calls this as a sole source of certainty into question.

All of these traditional sources of certainty have been undermined by the sciences and by our pluralistic context.  That doesn’t mean everyone has given up the quest for certainty, but it becomes more and more difficult to fend off modernity’s challenges.  Those who are defending traditional sources of certainty in traditional ways have to put an awful lot of energy into shoring up their mental fortresses. 

An era of uncertainty may be uncomfortable, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing from a religious point of view.   Berger calls up a very positive value in Protestant belief: that we live by faith alone.  This principle of sola fide—understanding and accepting that we live by faith, not by knowledge—not only accepts the fact of uncertainty, but affirms that it is good. It provides the posture in which one can live with uncertainty without succumbing to a corrosive relativism.  A church can support those who are trying to live by faith without claiming infallibility for itself, its leadership, its doctrine, its methods of biblical interpretation, or its rituals. 

            In Peter Berger’s article he shares a personal observation that I found fascinating.  “Some time ago,” he says,  “I made a discovery that somewhat surprised me: I found that I could communicate much better with people who disagreed with me but who were uncertain about their position than with people who agreed with me but who held our shared views in a posture of certainty. This was so in matters of political or other secular relevance, but also, emphatically, in matters of religious belief. This led me to a fantasy of a sort of ecumene of troubled souls (I like to call them "the uncertainty-wallahs").”  Uncertainty-wallahs—what an engaging idea!  A “wallah” is a term borrowed from the Hindi language defined as “a person who is associated with a particular work or performs a specific duty or service.”  In India you might encounter a tea-wallah or a book-wallah.  In the United Church of Christ, I daresay you encounter lots and lots of “uncertainty-wallahs.”  It might not sound like a work to which one should aspire, but maybe it could be conceived of as not simply a description of current reality but a kind of calling in a world where there are plenty of seekers.

            Berger mentions a colleague, Adam Seligman, who has coined a more elegant term than “uncertainty-wallah: he calls this religious posture "epistemological modesty."  It is a mellow synthesis of skepticism and faith that, in principle, can he found in any religious tradition.  As this concept was being discussed in an interfaith gathering of uncertainty-wallahs, a Talmudic story was offered by one of the participants from Israel.   A group of rabbis were arguing over the right interpretation of a biblical text. Rabbi Eleazar, who had interpreted the text one way, was one of the authorities cited, as was Rabbi Yochanan, who had interpreted it differently. The rabbis could not agree. In the group there was also a mystic, an adept of the Kabbalah. He said that it was possible for him to enter into an ecstasy that would take him directly before the throne of the Almighty; he offered to do so and to ask God himself to give the correct interpretation. The group agreed, whereupon the mystic took off in his ecstasy, stood before the throne and addressed God: "King of the Universe, we cannot agree on this text. Can you give us the correct interpretation?"  God, who of course was himself occupied in the study of Torah, shuffled his papers, shook his head, and finally replied: "Well, Rabbi Eleazar says so-and-so, but Rabbi Yochanan says so-and-so, and then there is Rabbi Amitai who says so-and-so..."

            Berger notes that he’s not altogether comfortable with the story in that as a Christian he believes God probably has a definitive answer.  But he does appreciate the spirit of the story, as do I.  The story playfully suggests that there are things more important to the Creator than certainty.  Keeping faith in the context of the community is of high value.  Helping human beings live by faith together, learning to cope with a lack of certainty, is a valuable service of a church.

            In the epistle reading, the author of 1 Peter offers an invitation: “Come to [Christ], a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house…”  This is such a beautiful metaphor for a church.  We are built on faith that God is our firm foundation.  We may never see the foundation directly; but we trust it, just as we trust the concrete foundation of this church without the great majority of us ever having crawled underneath to look at it.  We get glimpses of God, and we trust the testimony of others who have built their lives on faith.

            We join ourselves to the cornerstone, Jesus Christ.  We see in Christ the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  We know the difficulties and delights of following Jesus along an ethical path that makes life rich and meaningful.  It is possible to give our hearts completely to the Way of Jesus without denigrating other paths to truth—it’s that acrobatic balancing of truths.  I like the way Herbert Fingarette wrote about it:  “The paradox is that although each requires complete commitment for complete validity, we can today generate a context in which we see that no one of them is the sole vision. Thus we must learn to be naïve but undogmatic. That is, we must take the vision as it comes and trust ourselves to it, naïvely, as reality. Yet we must retain an openness…,” that is, an openness to the wisdom of other visions. 

            That idea that a complete commitment is needed for complete validity came into sharp focus last week when I was at a meeting with representatives of the School of Theology and Ministry at Seattle University and several people who had long experience in interfaith dialogue.  One person said that she had been in several interfaith discussion groups in which the Muslims and Jews were articulate and passionate about their faith, but the designated Christians were inarticulate and hesitant to speak with passion and conviction about the Way of Jesus Christ.  There was a lot of head nodding around the table at that point.  Perhaps Christian reticence comes from being part of the dominant religious culture and not wanting to offend, or from a tendency to want to synthesize all the faith’s good points into an interfaith blend, a religious smoothie of some sort.  At any rate, Christianity in this country needs people who are respectful of others but still able to say clearly and unapologetically what it means to join your life the cornerstone, Jesus Christ, and be built into Christ’s house.  What does Jesus mean for us, individually and as a church?  What would you say if a stranger asked you?

            We don’t have to figure that out all alone, thanks be to God.  We join our lives together as a house of worship like so many living stones.  We join our lives together to become a sheltering community of faith.  We come with faith fully formed or faith in a nascent, budding form, and cement ourselves together.  Harvey Cox writes that “on occasion students come to me and ask what church to go to, adding, "but I'm afraid I don't believe in God." I never tell them what church to go to, but I do say not to worry about believing in God. I tell them that if they become part of the life of the church, then they will begin to see how the word is used and what it means. Believing in God, I say, is not something one decides in the privacy of one's room, but something one comes to in a living community, which for Christians is the church.”  Cox understands that we don’t need all the answers when we join our lives with others in faith; a beginning of faith or a deepening of faith follows our commitment to the living community of Christ.   We come to rely on each other so that in those seasons when our faith is week, we can lean on those whose faith is strong.  Some days we pose the questions and others we suggest the answers.

            I’ve been playing this week with this image of being joined together as living stones into a spiritual house.  I’ve been pondering the mortar that holds us together.  Is the ingredient list as simple as the one word “love?”  Or are there other ingredients in the mortar?  What do you think holds us together as we form ourselves as a community of Christ?  Integrity; forgiveness; compassion; seriousness of intent coupled with a lightness of spirit; curiosity…a recipe for church mortar could go on and on. 

            In this day and age I’ve wondered about what I consider to be a key ingredient in the mortar that holds us living stones together in this spiritual house: time.  There’s an Old Testament story about the injustice done to the Israelites who were held as slaves in Egypt when their overlords stopped supplying the straw needed to make the bricks, but held them to the same production and quality standards for brick making.  I can relate to the slaves’ outrage—how can they possibly do what is required without the provision of this essential component?  How can we possibly build a spiritual house that provides support and shelter for the spiritual journey without significant time spent on behalf of the living stones?  As I’ve observed the youth group over the last 5 or 6 years it is clear that the young people who have gotten the most out of the fellowship are the ones who have been here week after week, cementing their relationships until they have built a shelter that withstands all the storms of adolescence.  Yet their time commitment is more the exception than the rule in our harried age.  The margin of free time many people perceive they have is unbelievably small, and activities from team sports to gardening squeeze out time that in an earlier era might have been spent in the spiritual community.  It’s one feature of the challenge of our era.  Is time an essential element in being cemented into a spiritual house?  Or am I just being nostalgic for something (time) that is as hard to come by as certainty?  What do you think? 

            I do think we can build a spiritual house without the mortar of bygone years, certainty.  In fact, I think there is a definite role for churches like ours to play in the religious landscape as uncertainty-wallahs who nevertheless relish a zestful commitment to Christ and a strong allegiance to our faith community.   We come together, built on the unshakeable foundation of the world’s Creator, drawn by the magnetic pull of the radical love and courage of Christ, and cemented together by commitment to our fellow bricks in this spiritual house.  We are persistent  in our welcome of others who find comfort and exhilaration  in our quest for truth without certainty.  We are building a spiritual house whose shape is still evolving. 

The mortar that holds our house is a weird and wonderful mixture of shared laughter and tears, reams and realms of ideas and ideals, tuna casserole, song, prayers, questions, bread, hugs, Kleenex, candle wax, coffee, baptismal water, announcements, pronouncements, weeds harvested in our very own garden, votes, and tiny cups of whatever purpleish juice was on sale poured out for communion and made sacred by our dedication to Christ and each other.  Long may we cohere, holding all the paradoxes of faith together.

This sermon draws insight and quotations from the following essays: “At Home and Not at Home: Religious Pluralism and Religious Truth” by Robert N. Bellah; “Many Mansions or One Way? The Crisis in Interfaith Dialogue” by Harvey Cox; and “Protestantism and the Quest for Certainty” by Peter Berger.  All are linked at textweek.com for the week of May 22, 2011 (Easter 5A).