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Genesis

LIVING IN FAITH

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[A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Berkeley on the Second Sunday in Lent, February 21, 2016. Readings (Year C): Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35]

And [Abram] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.

We’re going to talk about faith today. Abram, after all, is one of the great examples of faith in the scriptures. But I want to start out by acknowledging that the topic of faith makes a lot of people, including church people, uneasy. That’s partly because we live in an era that’s pretty much divided between people who aren’t too sure what they believe and people who know too much about it. A lot of people, if pressed on the topic, would probably say something like “Well, I think there’s something important here, but don’t try to pin me down.” And, on the other hand, you have fundamentalists or some evangelicals or conservative Roman Catholics who know exactly what they believe, right down to the punctuation marks. You could easily get the impression that those are the only two options.

So what exactly did Abram believe that got him such good marks in our reading this morning? Well, first a word about the English language. You know, every language carries the scars of the history that it’s passed through. That’s definitely true of the English language of faith: there’s the verb “believe” and the nouns “belief” and “faith.” Because our language got shaped in a period of intense religious struggle—the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the battle between Puritans and Anglicans in the 1600s—”faith” and “belief” have come to refer largely to the business of doctrine. The question is What creed are you willing to recite—or, at times, even die for?

In the process, belief or faith came to be about asserting a particular list of doctrines as true, whether it was the Nicene Creed, or the Westminster Confession, or any number of other formularies. If somebody asks you, here and now, in the English language, “What do you believe?” it’s a good bet that they want specifics. And I suppose the most common response from an Episcopalian begins with something like, “Well, I’m not altogether sure, but . . .”

Well, don’t feel bad about that. It actually puts you right in the company of Abram, who didn’t have any of fancy definitions of faith to fall back on. No, in the case of Abram, words like “believe” and “faith” have to mean something else. And our story is actually pretty clear about what that is. It tells us that Abram has had a long history with God. It’s included taking some big risks—moving lock, stock, and barrel from the place where he grew up to this new country that God directed him to. But all these years have passed, and he’s getting old, and he still has no son to hand everything over to. In that day and age, that world of petty kingdoms and no real rule of law, this was a disaster for which there was no real remedy.

So what does it mean when scripture says that Abram believed God? It doesn’t mean that Abram had a creed to recite. It means that Abram decided to go on trusting God—trusting God because of the sense of companionship, even of friendship, that had grown up between them over the years.

Listen to the text again with that one word changed: “And Abram trusted the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” It’s quite a different text, isn’t it?

Now let me say that the change I just made wasn’t arbitrary. The Biblical Hebrew word in question covers a whole range of English words: “trust” as much as “believe” or “have faith.” We use a form of that word in our prayers when we say “Amen,” meaning “It’s so, it’s worth trusting, yeah, way sure.”

The same is true of the corresponding Greek terms in the New Testament. Neither of these ancient languages had separate words for “believe” or “have faith” in our modern sense of “subscribe to a set of doctrines.” The next generation of translators should probably go back and purge them most places and replace them with “trust.” We need to hear scripture as talking about trust—not theological arguments.

Abram, after all, didn’t have any creeds. What he had was a friendship with God that had seen him through thick and thin for, we’re told, a hundred years or so. It hadn’t been an easy life, but it had been a good one. And Abram had a conviction that, however complicated and difficult and unpredictable life might yet be, God’s friendship was still the thing he could rely on. God might not fulfill all Abram’ss needs and wants in quite the way he wished; but God was still the deep source of strength and hope for his life. It may have been a bit vague theologically, but it was powerful.

It’s the same kind of trust that Jesus demonstrated when he dismissed the threats of Herod. He was ready to go on proclaiming the good news and take the associated risks, even though he knew where they were leading

And it’s the kind of trust that Paul called us to in our reading from Philippians. Other people, he says, trust in earthly things. Well, yes, celebrity, money, power do indeed offer short-term rewards, but if that’s what you trust in, they will end up destroying you as a human being. They are fickle at best and cannibalistic at worst. But “our citizenship,” says Paul, “is in heaven”—another way of saying that our deep trust is in our friendship with God. You have to be, to borrow a Yiddish term, a real mensch—a true human being—to live up to that kind of trust.

So if we are asked about our faith, we can honestly reply that we are learning to trust. It’s not a one-time thing. Abram had to keep learning it over and over. His greatness lay in his willingness to keep renewing his trust and his friendship with God. And this is the kind of faith or trust we hope to grow into, ourselves. It was good enough for Abram and it’s good enough for me.

And, happily, we also had in our readings today the perfect prayer of trust, one that we can keep returning to again and again as we learn to live in faith: Psalm 27. “The Lord is my light and my salvation,” says the Psalmist; “whom then shall I fear?”

And then the Psalmist goes right on to make it clear that life has been no picnic, that we still experience danger and fear. But against all that we set the intimacy and joy of a life that “beholds the fair beauty of the Lord and seeks him in his temple.”

“What if I had not believed that I should see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living!” cries the Psalmist. What if I had lost my bearings altogether? Who would I be then? Instead, he reminds us, “tarry and await the Lord’s pleasure; be strong and he shall comfort your heart; wait patiently for the Lord.”

That is what scripture means when it tells us that Abram trusted God and God reckoned it to him as righteousness.

CREATION AS EVOLUTION

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The hostility of modern Evangelicals (and their Fundamentalist forebears) to the science of evolution is founded less on scripture than on an ancient cosmology from the Hellenistic Era that drew a sharp distinction between the eternal unchangeability of God and the chaotic, unpredictable character of human life and of the world around us. (Think earthquakes and hurricanes, for example.)

This cosmology (often referred to as “Ptolemaic” because it was codified by the astronomer Ptolemy) held good for a couple of thousand years before Copernicus upset it. It envisaged Earth at the center of everything, surrounded by concentric spheres that carried the celestial bodies around us. The closest of these spheres to earth was the one that carried the moon and it served as the demarcation line between the perfection of the heavens above, where all the stars and planets were seen as obeying regular laws, and the radical imperfection of life here below—the sublunary regions of earth, air and sea.

There was a tendency to associate the perfection of the heavens with God’s perfect and unchanging creation and to attribute the chaos of life on earth to some other cause. Among Christians, it could be seen as related to the Fall of Humanity that forced us out of Eden according to Genesis 3. Paul, for example, seems to suggest that humanity’s failure forced the whole sublunary region into its existing distressed and chaotic state (Romans 8:18-25 ).

The Seven Days of Creation, as narrated in Genesis 1, could perhaps be seen as presupposing the idea of a cosmos perfect as it left its Creator’s hand. God did, after all, pronounce it “very good.” One might still ask, of course, whether “very good” necessarily equates to “perfect” in the sense of “beyond alteration or improvement” or whether it just means what it says: “very good.”

The Eden narrative, in Genesis 2-3, however, contains within itself, alongside the possibility of immortal perfection, the possibility of defection, of falling away, of death. Evangelical rejection of biological evolution rests largely on a presupposition that the perfect original creation could not have allowed for such dramatic subsequent change. But the Eden narrative (Genesis 2) actually suggests just the opposite. It says that God did not create the full reality we know as humanity in one moment, but began with the singularity of Adam and only afterward came to recognize that for one such creature to be genuinely human there had to be more than one.

The God of Eden, like other gardeners, seems to work in part by plan and in part by trial and error. Just read the text carefully—literally, in fact. It was such a reading that led to the Four Sonnets on Eden that appeared on this website in recent weeks. They emerged from paying attention to the strong element of change and uncertainty in Genesis 2-3.

It may, of course, have been possible for humans to grow in relationship to one another and to God while still remaining in Eden. Perhaps, in some parallel universe, there are some who did. But we can barely imagine what that would be like, so far is it from our own experience. Perhaps we can get a hint of it from those moments of human joy when we are most filled with love and delight in the creation—including the human creation. That’s the closest we get to Eden.

Christians in the seventeenth century found it difficult to abandon the ancient cosmology with its clear separation of unchanging celestial perfection from our human sublunary floundering. Poets like John Donne and George Herbert could not quite let it go, deeply embedded as it was in the Christian imagination. But, with Galileo and Newton, their successors learned to shift to a different perspective, displacing earth from the center of the universe and losing the orderly symmetry of the old model.

Darwin took this shift to a deeper level, a more concrete and embodied one. This did not prevent the mainstream of Christian theologians from acknowledging the weight of Darwin’s scientific work and that of his followers. Only in Fundamentalism and its progeny did evolution come to be treated as a stand-or-fall challenge to Christian faith. But if Evangelicals would take their direction from the Eden narrative, they might as easily come to a position friendlier to Darwin and to modern evolutionary biology. Here God creates in a less tidy fashion, with an element of the unforeseen and unpredictable. It is not “evolution” in the Darwinian sense, but it leaves ample room for a process like natural selection.

What is more, human and Christian life in this world is an extension of the same reality. We may represent a falling away from one kind of human perfection—that of Eden—but we also represent a new kind of human possibility, that of coming to know good and evil. Whatever humanity may become beyond and with this knowledge will be different from what we could have become before or without it.

Is one kind of existence better than the other? I would not venture to judge in a case where I know only one of the sides being compared. But there is an old Christian tradition that says our fallen and raised humanity will prove the better of the two. It is the tradition of felix culpa, the “fortunate fall,” which brought about the new and unforeseen wonder of Mary’s motherhood and the union of God and humanity in Jesus.

Thus God will gain some lovers who abide

and some who come back wiser to God’s side.