Far More                                July 27, 2003 * Ephesians 3:14-21 * John 6:1-21

Do you ever wonder why Christianity has lasted as long as it has?  With stories like feeding five thousand people with five loaves and two fish and walking on water and words like:  . . . and to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge . . .one has to wonder. Think about it: how does one know something that is more than we can know? How does one do something that is more than we can do? Many have attempted to explain the miracles of the Bible, others have resorted to intimidation simply saying that either you believe these things or else, well, you just don't have enough faith. Somewhere between the rational explanation and blind faith is the truth we can never really know until we, well, until we just know. You see what I mean? There was an interesting statement in Christian Century this week referring to the time forty years ago when there were those who thought that if the Christian faith could be delivered from its arcane and outdated myths and language, it would be made clear and acceptable to reasonable modern folk. Now Johnston McKay says: What we had insufficiently understood is that to clarify Christian faith in the way we thought it could be clarified is to a considerable degree to falsify it. We had not realized that religion is about things that are natural, clear, simple and unambiguous.

This sort of thing has been going on since the very beginning. How do we do Christianity if we can't even agree on what it is? Some famous writer, I don't know if it was Chesterton or Twain or Lewis said that we don't know yet if Christianity works because we haven't really tried it yet. Yet here we are, sitting in a church, calling ourselves Christians as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The church not only still exists but is a place of hope. And, foolish and clueless as we might be, this may be the single greatest evidence that God exists because the church could not have survived all these years as a human invention empowered only by the willfulness of humankind. We have certainly influenced what the church has become. Divided, corrupt, more concerned about survival than sacrifice, the church has more than its share of failures to confess over the centuries. Yet there are countless stories that are never told of blessing and love lived out in the community of the faithful. Christianity is complex of course. Some say it is defined by the church, others say the church and Christianity are not necessarily the same thing. It is hard to know how to even speak of it. Buechner as some of you know has described the Church as visible and invisible. The visible church, he writes, is all the people who get together from time to time in God's name. Anybody can find out who they are by going to look. The invisible church is all the people God uses for his hands and feet in the world. Nobody can find out who they are except God. He goes on to write: Think of them as two circles. The optimist says they are concentric. The cynic says they don't even touch. The realist says they occasionally overlap.  

My guess is that whatever we want to call it, Christianity or Church or religion or God or spirituality, it is far more than we have experienced of it, far more than we have made it, and far more than we can even imagine it might be. And furthermore, this far more is why Christianity still exists. It is the same far more that will be accomplished abundantly through us, far more than even we could ask for. The writer of the letter to the church at Ephesus said it all in his benediction: Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask for or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen. Christianity still exists because Christ is alive and where Christ abides and lives and loves, there is where Christianity is. The question for those who care is not whether Christianity exists or should exist but is Christ alive in me and in us?

Whatever you think of these stories this much we know, where Christ is present, the hungry are fed, fear is overcome, comfort and healing are abundant and generous. Love is real and situations and people are changed and redeemed. 

The psalmist says plainly that only a fool says there is no God but as early as the first generation Christians were asking and wondering if it wasn't foolish to believe in this Christian God. The words of Paul to the church at Corinth are challenging: For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing (but)God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation to save those who believe. What is more foolish, to believe that God exists or to believe that God does not exist? Neither statement can be proved. And what of this Christian story, this Christ who died but lives, this Christ who suffered for love, this Christ who is God's Son, human and divine, for some the most profound paradox of all. What kind of God is this who reveals self in paradox? As Alice said, Curioser and curioser

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Oddly enough, curiosity plays a role here. There comes a time in every life I am guessing where one either decides they already know everything and they don't want to know anymore and furthermore they don't want to have what they have decided they know already, disturbed or challenged, or they decide that the more they know the more they don't know and want to know more. In short it is the difference between staying open and closing down. Once again it becomes clear that the life of faith requires being open to what we do not know yet, even that which in the words of the author of Ephesians, surpasses knowledge. Keeping an open mind about things we cannot yet comprehend is an important factor in the process of believing seemingly impossible things.

You may remember when Alice protested that she couldn't believe impossible things, the Queen told here that she simply hadn't had enough practice. Faith is a practice. It keeps the door open to what is as yet inexplicable. It does not do so without doubt or question but with serious expectation and delicious ambiguity. Ambiguity is another place where we find division among us. Some can't live with it and some can't live without it.

Buechner had something to say on this business of doubt and faith. He wrote: Somewhere along the line Paul Tillich said something to the effect that doubt is not the opposite of faith but an element of faith, in other words goes hand in hand with it. I have faith that there is an all-loving, all-powerful god in spite of the fact that I have no sure way of knowing that there is. Not knowing for sure means that I might be wrong. That is where doubt comes in. The possibility of being wrong is what keeps us humble and honest. It protects us from our potential arrogance which is a terrible thing in a human being and can cause much harm. It is also what makes faith lively, an on-going existential struggle between the known and the unknown, between what we think we know and what we hope for. As Buechner put it: At least doubts prove that we are in touch with reality, with the things that threaten faith as well as with the things that nourish it. If we are not in touch with reality, then our faith is apt to be blind, fragile, and irrelevant.

Faith and doubt both require the courage to remain open to far more than we know so far, far more than we have the sense to ask for, far more than we can even imagine. Faith is not an arrogant certainty and doubt is not cynicism. Faith and doubt are essential parts of the healthy conversation between people and God. If we are not open to God, Christ will not dwell in our hearts through faith, rooting and grounding us in love, not because Christ rejects who we are but because we reject who he is. Furthermore if we are not open to being wrong about God, we may never know God for the simple reason that, if we are wrong, we have decided to know a God who doesn't exist. And so our question expands: What is more foolish, to believe in God or to not believe in God or to believe in a God who doesn't exist?

My suggestion is simple: Stay open every day to the conversation that God wants to have with you. Do not assume anything. Do not settle for anything. Get up everyday and listen humbly to the silence within, doing what is good, causing no one harm, and offering yourself in kindness and generosity to the world and your neighbor. It is in the offering and the listening, the opening of your heart and soul to God, where I believe that we will begin to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth and as the conversation grows and becomes who we are we may discover, quite to our surprise that life is far more than we had settled for, far more than we could have imagined or ever asked for.