August 27, 2006 - Faith as a last resort

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
27 August 2006
John 6.56-69
Faith as a last resort
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

We were all gathered—this would be about four decades ago—in our great gothic sanctuary, which even on Sunday mornings was grey and dim, for communion the night of Maundy Thursday, when dark recesses seemed to rise endlessly beyond the high arches. Our congregation took communion only four times a year, lest we overconsume Christ’s body and blood and take him for granted. This being the first time I would take the bread and cup, I was seated with other members of my confirmation class, rather than at the usual place with my family.

I was joining the church as a full member, though joining things had never much inspired me. I did join the Cub Scouts and, briefly, the Boy Scouts, but it was just something to do. The idea of joining in order to feel that I belonged did not occur to me. On that Maundy Thursday, however—I was in the eighth grade—I was joining the church, and this time I was feeling something. What I was feeling, though, was still not the excitement of joining, not the safety and happiness of belonging to the church community. I think, looking back, that while it probably mattered to me to belong, I already did feel that I belonged. I felt generally accepted, cared for and protected, which are signs of love, and I was sure the church community loved me, as my own family did. So I belonged already, and was loved.

Still, I was excited. The excitement, I can say now, came from being admitted to the mysteries of the faith. I had sat some dozens of times in pews alongside my parents, passing the trays of bread cubes and cups of juice to or from them, and as long as I had conscious memory I wondered what happened and what it felt like and what it meant to take the body and blood of Christ into my mouth. When I chewed that morsel, how would it feel? When I swallowed that juice, would it taste a little sweet and a little sour, the way it the grape juice usually does, or would it taste a little salty, which I somewhat hoped and somewhat feared it would?

Here came the first tray, the bread. I took, and ate, in remembrance of Him. Then, just before the usher approached with the tray of tiny glasses, Bruce Chapman, probably the brightest intellectual light of our confirmation class, spoke to me out of the side of his mouth. I didn’t, at first, catch what he said. Or I did, but I thought I must have misunderstood.

“What?” I whispered, the first time he said it.

“Something to wash it down,” he repeated.

“Oh.”

And thus, after the years of anticipation, the mysterious glory of the moment drained away—down the hatch, so to speak.

We had spent several weeks of communicants class learning from our teachers about what the church believes and how the church works. We learned why, on Sunday mornings, we do the things we do, and we were encouraged to begin thinking about how to live our lives after the pattern of Jesus, who did and said everything in love. I attended to these matters as a young adolescent would, I suppose. I more or less trusted my elders to be teaching me important things, and I agreed to assent to whatever formulas and instructions they thought should matter to me.

What really got to me, though, was the idea that I was being admitted to the mysteries, and my friend and classmate Bruce Chapman popped that bubbled without even, I’m certain, thinking about it. It was all suddenly reduced to a cube of white bread and grape juice. The mystery drained away; the spirit of life, seeped out and up into the great gothic ceiling of that old stone church.

But still, there was my dad. From conversations I had with him many, many years later, I came to understand his sense of the proximity of Jesus alongside him in the pew, during communion, as palpable to him as that of us, his family. Sitting in church with him, when I was a child, I did not know what his thoughts were, but I did see him, as I can vividly remember him still, with his eyes closed, his head bowed slightly, his hands clasped together, and his whole face engaged in a great, concerted effort to hold himself in the presence of a vast spiritual force, as if that force were a hurricane that might, if he were less determined, might blow him away. He held himself in the presence of that spiritual force from which he sought help and succor.

I don’t think Dad would ever have called it a mystical state, but I know that nothing else happening around him registered in his consciousness. We children could fidget in the pew, which at any other time annoyed the daylights out of him, or a friend would walk past in the aisle, which always drew his animated greeting, but Dad was not even aware. Somewhere behind that scrunched up face there was a meeting of a soul with the maker and sustainer of its life. It’s funny, about my father, that he could be oblivious to of some very serious realities about life going on around him, but he at the same time presented himself to God with a moral honesty that would terrify most of us into avoidance and denial. At the time, as a child in church with my family, I could not have explained all this to myself, but I could see the face, which is apparently all I needed.

So while I lost the sense of mystery and spirit on the night I was formally introduced to the mysteries, long memory would not over the years let my yearning to engage the mystery of life die. What’s difficult still, though, is living in the world—including living in the church—where mystical things are treated as matters best left to certain special and separate holy people or are treated as odd and ridiculous altogether. It is not a sign of our times, any more than fear, rage, lust or greed are a particular sign of our times more than that of any other time. We see Jesus’ disciples, in fact, telling him that they would rather reverence the old, ordinary spiritual experiences of their forebears than to have any new spiritual engagement with life of their own, just as, today, we see followers of Jesus insist on the old, ordinary spiritual experiences of nineteenth century revivalism. The details have changed, but the attitude is identical. We can have a fresh, energized relationship with God that connects with us in our reality, but, so often, we would rather not.

Jesus offered a present and vital spiritual engagement with life, which he symbolized in the offering of his body and blood, but it was too hard for his disciples. It is, of course, very hard for anyone. It was too hard for Bruce Chapman, and he could only comment on the surface realities of the symbols of our faith before him. It was too hard for me, and it took only the innocent comment of my friend to distract me from the mystery of the most powerful force in human life. And it was probably too hard for my dad, during most of his days. Yet upon arriving in Sunday worship early enough to afford him a few minutes quietly in the pew before everything started, he turned to the Place, to the Mystery, and to the Holy One for which he had found no substitute. Like the rest of us, he would spend his days going away from the source of life, trying to find life in the many satisfactions falsely promised us by the culture, and then he would in this moment find himself saying to the Holy One meeting with him behind his taught and straining face, “Lord, to whom can I go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Jesus was teaching his disciples that they did not need to have the same faith as their forebears. In fact, not only did the disciples not need to have their forebear’s faith, they could not have it. In case the disciples hadn’t noticed, he pointed out, those forebears were dead. Through their relationship with Jesus, they would have to work out with God their own modes of spiritual blessing. To listen to him, it should be easy, but it was difficult, they said.

I have been listening to Bill Moyers’ recent programs on “Faith & Reason.” He interviews all sorts of people, including agnostics, who find believing in God too hard to accept. It is really worthwhile to learn from them, and I don’t mean that as a way of sharpening our critique of the agnostics’ godlessness. It actually improves my faith to learn from agnostics. Their critique our Christian faith is often well founded and deeply affecting. It is like learning from Karl Marx the critique of religion as an opiate of the masses. When we honestly accept the fact that Christians in power have used our religion to subdue, and even subjugate, the less powerful, we can clarify our spirituality in those aspects with which it is misused. Agnosticism, and even atheism, are useful for our self understanding as Christians.

What is interesting is that a couple of the agnostics I’ve been listening to had once been atheists but changed their minds. We don’t have the evidence, they say, to claim that there is no God. Personally, that’s all I need. Give me just enough evidence to wonder if there is a God, and I will work as hard as I have to in order to believe.

Or to put it in Peter’s words, “Lord, to whom can we go?” After Jesus had heard the objections about how hard it is to have faith in him, he said, “Okay, it sounds as if even you, my close friends and followers, are ready to leave the movement.” But Peter had thought it through. Jesus’ agnosticism about his own spiritually worn out religion was too convincing to let Peter go back to it. There were options, Gnosticism among them, but while a tired form of Judaism had become too attached to lifeless practice and belief, the thrill of a new religion wasn’t enough of an anchor to trust during the storms of life. The old, the new and the various all proved to be inadequate, and so difficult as Jesus’ offer of faith was, it was the only one left that gave Peter hope. It came off as a rather backwards compliment, but it was honest of Peter finally to affirm, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words…” As a last resort, faith in Christ looked as if it might work, and Peter told Jesus so.

I’m with Peter on this one. I am so very interested in the other spiritual solutions to the vagaries of life, not to mention solutions to the inexplicable horrors and the unacceptable injustices. And to tell the truth, I’m glad people of other traditions are working on them. I am glad that we have brilliant and sensitive Muslim teachers of goodness and peace. I am glad we have the Dalai Lama, with his disciplined approach to the alignment of the human mind, and that we have the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, with his unwavering attention to working out how to live in our world of such anger and violence. I am glad we have Rabbi Lawrence Kushner asking the questions of why we have evil and of how good we have to be. I am glad we have New Age crystal gazers, and I am glad we still have old fashioned nineteenth century Christians, even if some of them do keep hounding the rest of us into accepting their monolithic truth.

I love to visit each of these along their particular journey, and yet, like Peter, nothing compels me to go on their path to faith to the exclusion of my path with Christ. Technically, I suppose, that could change. When I exhaust the imagination of Christ for the making of joy and goodness, when I encounter the evil against which Christ has no power to hold forth, when I sink into such tangled skeins of moral confusion that Christ cannot realign the threads of integrity, when I see warfare raging with such heat that Christ may speak no word of peace, when I peer into darkness so deep that Christ cannot enter with light, then I may see if there is a path elsewhere to which Christ himself, because he loves me, would lead me. Until such a time, Christ has for me the words of eternal life.

The words of eternal life are apparently often difficult words. Perhaps you find them difficult, too. They are always words that demand your full spiritual intention, and you realize you are inclined to foreswear them, but you can only, perhaps like Peter, believe the words, because they give you hope of life. Amen.