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 "INCREASE OUR FAITH!" Luke 17:5-10; 2 Timothy 1:1-14
When I was taking preaching classes in seminary, one thing the professors told us more than once was to be sure to NOT use Mother Teresa as a sermon illustration. Not because she wasn't an amazing, incredible, hero of the faith, but because she was too perfect. "Use someone that average mortals can relate to," we were told. And so for twenty years now, I've tried to steer away from mentioning her very often in my sermons.
Too perfect indeed! Now this book comes out, ten years after her death, called Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. The title comes from the words that Mother Teresa heard Jesus say to her when she was called to the sisterhood. Her answer to that invitation was "I will never recuse you." And when she was near death, her last words were these: "I have never recused you." She was on the cover of Time Magazine at least once. That same magazine named her as one of the one hundred most influential people of the last century. She won the Nobel Prize for her work in And yet in this new book which is a collection of her journal writings and her work with a spiritual director, she outlines what she calls the absence of God in her life.
If she who dedicated her life to serving the poor had this much of a struggle with her faith, maybe we should just pack it in. Or, maybe we should talk about what it means to have faith. ----------------------------------- Having faith doesn't mean that we will never have any doubts. The opposite of faith is disbelief, not doubt. Doubt and faith can coexist, within the same human being, within the same conversation. Doubt is a gift, in fact - a gift because it saves us from a superficial, self-help, self-centered spirituality.
Mother Teresa's writings, when you look at them, show that she experienced two levels of doubt. The first level is more a sense or feeling of God's absence, what "the dark night of the soul." The second level was when she doubted the existence of God, a feeling which for her was less frequent but far more painful. It's almost like the second one grew out of a prolonged period of the first one: if I can't feel God, is God there at all?
God has given us the gift of doubt by default because God has given us free will - the ability to choose whether we will believe in God or not. And even if we have believed in God all our lives and have served as faithful followers, God's gift of free will remains with us. And that means we have to choose over and over again, daily, sometimes hourly or more frequently than that, whether we will believe and whether we will serve.
Some days it's easier than others. When things are going our way and the weather is great and our finances are in balance and our family is okay and all's right with the world, it's easy to have faith. It's easy to believe that God is right there, sailing along with us, and to believe that God is giving us good things because somehow we deserve it. (whether that's true or not) But during those dark nights of the soul, when we question what is happening in our lives, or perhaps even why we are still alive at all, even a little faith is harder to come by. We begin to believe that God is giving us bad things because somehow we deserve it. (whether that's true or not) In times like that, the choice to believe becomes much more difficult indeed. ------------------------------------------------ When you and I were babies, maybe all the way up to about the time we started school, one of our favorite games to play with someone was "peep-eye." It was almost magic for us at that age: someone we loved was there, then all of a sudden they were gone, even if it was just behind a pair of hands. Then, just as suddenly, their hands flew open and we could see them again. We could have done that for an hour if our parents would have let us!
Educators like Erik Erikson tell us that playing peep-eye is one very early and very basic way that we learned how to trust. One of our most primal fears is the fear of abandonment. And believe it or not, playing peep-eye with Mom or Dad or Uncle Eddie was a way that we learned early on that those who love us will go away, but that we could also trust that they would be back before we know it.
The fear of abandonment is so primal, in fact, that it never quite leaves us. We still get that terrible feeling deep in our soul when we think someone we love may not be coming back. And when that particular someone whom we feel has abandoned us is God, the sense of abandonment can be more frightening still. Sometimes it does indeed seem that God is playing a high-stakes game of peep-eye with us.
The key for us in those times, I think, is to remember that what we are experiencing is less likely a loss of our faith altogether, but more of a "free-will experience." We get to trust that just because God seems absent doesn't mean that God is absent. Nor does it mean that God is playing games with us. Very simply, the time when we are experiencing doubt is another opportunity to choose instead to practice faith over fear. ------------------------------------- Neither one of our readings this morning says that God expects our faith to be a furnace on full blast twenty-four seven or it's not really faith. Both of our readings, though presume faith: they take for granted that some level of faith is already present. The disciples didn't say to Jesus "GIVE us faith," they asked Jesus to give them more faith. And Paul, writing to Timothy, referred to "the gift of God that is within you," not the gift that God might give you sometime down the road.
Friends, I think it's safe to say that if God had not already given us some measure of faith, we wouldn't be having this conversation. The flame may glow brighter on some days than on others, but we have it on good authority that, because of our baptisms, and with the fuel we receive around this table today, the flame is eternal. It's like the changing of the seasons. At certain times, like right now as we head into fall and winter, our orbit takes us further from the sun, where the temperatures are colder and the nights are long. But at other times, we find that our orbits take us much closer to the source of light and warmth. In either case, though, thank God, the sun is always there. And that is the good news of the gospel.
Even Timothy had to rekindle his faith. Even the disciples didn't think they had enough. Even Mother Teresa used her free will not only to struggle with doubt, but to express those doubts. The letter to the Hebrews says that faith is "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." That kind of faith is what underlies the dark nights of the soul. If we have only this much, Jesus said, we'd be amazed at what could be done. The faith that we have never goes away. But it needs to be rekindled from time to time. Let's find the courage we need to wrestle with our faith, to express our doubts, and to freely choose over and over again to love and to serve the One in whom we believe.
Amen. ---------------------------------------------- Thanks to Blair Monie, Pastor of Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church in |
