“From Faith to Conviction”
A Sermon for February Focus Month:
Peace, In Our Lives and in the World
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
February 11, 2007
READINGS: ANCIENT AND MODERN:
The first reading is from the Book of James:
Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers.
Those who look into the perfect law,
the law of liberty, and persevere,
being not hearers who forget
but doers who act – they will be blessed in their doing.
The second reading is from "What Are People For?" by the contemporary poet, philosopher, theologian and sage, Wendell Berry:
Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health. It heals with grace.
It preserves the given so that it remains a gift
By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.
SERMON: “From Faith to Conviction”
W. E. B. DuBois wrote, “The prayer of our souls is a petition for persistence, not for the one good deed, or single thought, but deed on deed, and thought on thought, until day calling unto day shall make a life worth living.”
Last week we talked about peace in terms of moving from fear to faith, recognizing that it’s not a transition that can occur only once and then we’re set for life. We can see that it’s a transition that needs to occur over and over – maybe daily, maybe even hourly. We move towards peace by practicing peace. We move towards faith by practicing faith. Practicing faith and peace are both about knowing that we live in a broken world, accepting that joy is a possibility and then by doing what we can to promote joy within a context that begins within ourselves and goes on to include those around us in our homes, communities and our world. Practicing faith and peace is about recognizing that we are a part of something awesome and mysterious that brought us into and holds us in being.
Moving from fear to faith is about recognizing repeatedly that we aren’t in control of our own lives, let alone the world around us. Yet we are still free to respond to what happens to us and to our world in ways that are more humane than otherwise; more loving than not; more a foundation for peace than the fuel for further conflict; more hopeful than desperate. Moving from fear to faith is a transition that I don’t suppose can ever be completed in a lifetime – certainly not in a lifetime that exists in these early years of this 21st century. They may all have been, but we certainly live in an age of fear.
Wendell Berry wrote, “Good work finds its way between pride and despair. It graces with health. It heals with grace. It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.” As we look this morning at the possibility of moving from faith to conviction, there are a few questions I’d ask you to consider about this day: Have you told someone that you love them, someone who might need to hear it, someone who you might need to let know? Have you told someone that you’re sorry, today? Have you let someone know that you forgive them? Have you let someone know today that you care what’s happened or is happening to them? Have you said something kind and decent and loving to yourself or to any else? “Good work preserves the given so that it remains a gift.”
As we work toward the goal of world peace, recognizing that even our faith in it and in ourselves must be constantly practiced in order to maintain integrity and cause for hope, how can we possibly have confidence? How can we possibly hold conviction? How can we have certainty enough to move us beyond a self-absorbed faith? How can we have belief enough to first give birth to hope and then to sustain its growth from blossom to fruit?
Peace, like a river, must float into and out of our lives freely if it is to heal both our lives and our world. From the breakfast table to the Shop Rite parking lot, from the board table to the knockoff sweatshop, if our faith is to lead to conviction and commitment, we will need to place ourselves in its healing stream so that we might direct it were ever we find its absence.
We had the most wonderful Men’s Group meeting here yesterday. The theme we’d agreed upon was a discussion of fear. It was so uplifting to hear the guys’ willingness to be vulnerable with each other. We talked about experiences and conditions that provoke short term or life long feelings of fear. We spent as much time though, talking about reasons for hope. I came away from our meeting with my convictions strengthened by two discoveries and the relationship between them that occurred to me in our discussion.
The first is that, while fear can often be used for manipulation, it can also be a powerful, motivating factor for good. Not only is it a psychological defense mechanism that helps to keep us safe, but that it is often a response to the knowledge that each of us will one day die. That makes our life times and each day in them an opportunity to engage in the world – in all its brokenness and its potential – in ways that help to fulfill the potential and to diminish the brokenness.
To be in the world of the 21st Century is to be in a world of incredible brokenness. Brokenness is brought to bear by religious traditions, originally spawned to promote connections, which have now lost touch with the evolution of a globalized world community, lashing out in violent efforts to preserve what is already quite dead, incapable of meeting the requirements of a common humanity. Brokenness is brought to bear by an imperial world power that would impose its visions of order and commerce on those who would have nothing to do with them. Brokenness is brought to bear by a world economy, blind to the limits of the environment and of the human spirit to dwell in slavery amidst great and rising expectations all around. Brokenness is brought to bear by social systems of privilege and fear that promote oppression and so even more brokenness.
To be in the world of the 21st Century, at the same time though, is to be in a world of incredible and seemingly limitless opportunities for the fulfillment of the human spirit; its capacity for exploration, experience and expression; its capacity for connection and caring, support and sympathy, determination, and love – opportunities local and global.
So often, the global picture of brokenness stops us in our tracks. It’s so enormous! How can anyone of us mount a response that can end the war in Iraq, or end the centuries long hatred between the children of Sarah and the children of Hagar? How can anyone of us end the ruinous depletion of our planet and the theft of its resources from our fellow human beings? How can anyone of us end racism, homophobia or any of the other oppressions?
Individually we can not. But we are truly a part of something much larger than ourselves. And when we give ourselves over to that mysterious largeness to be instruments of its peace, when we take the time and energy and resources available to us to find the places where the woes of the world intersect with our lives, our gifts and potentials, when we join together with others of good faith, then we are doing what we can to bring peace to our world, even though there will always be still more things we could do. And that’s the first piece of what I took away from our Men’s Group yesterday.
The integrity of the spiritual path, which by the way is what calls us into this religious community, calls us as well to find our points of connection even within global brokenness, and to do what we can in our individual and common lives. It calls us to promote the justice and peace that our world so desperately needs. Not because we have to, but because we can; not because we have to, but because we want to, because our wholeness is dependent upon the wholeness of our world. The medieval Persian Sufi poet Saadi wrote:
To worship God is nothing other than
To serve the people [and the planet].
It does not need rosaries, prayer carpets, or robes.
All peoples are members of the same body,
created from one essence.
If fate brings suffering to one member
The others cannot stay at rest.
If fate brings suffering to one member of our global community, the rest of us cannot stay at rest, because it brings suffering to us all. It is in the realization of this oneness that our salvation can be found. Faith in ourselves is essential; faith in one another is just as critical. It must be planted and tended very carefully. Our vineyards, it seems at this time, have been planted more often with land mines and so peace is going to require an entirely different approach of cooperation, respect and unity to produce the fruit we are so hungry for. It is within our doing, but love – especially from a distance – can be such a demanding labor. What can sustain us as we cultivate the new vintage that the world is waiting for, relying on us for?
So here is the second hopeful piece that I came away with from our Men's Group yesterday. We all want to live lives of meaning and meaning stems from the narratives of our lives, the stories, the relationships. There is an old Jewish Prayer:
Grant us the ability to find joy and strength
Not in the strident call to arms,
But in stretching out our arms
To grasp our fellow creatures
In the striving for justice and truth.
One of the pieces that the guys talked about yesterday was how important it is to love our partners, our children, our grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, even our neighbors’ children. How important it is to reach out our arms, to hold one another, to share the stories that give our lives meaning, to sustain those stories and the lives connected to them from generation to generation.
We are called to love one another. So often, especially with world peace, the fulfillment of that call is an enormous challenge. And what would our lives be without challenges to spur us on and to grow our souls? But there is another kind of love too, or at least an experience of love that is different at other times. That love, which at times comes to us as unearned love or unconditional love is, in my mind, a gift of grace that is there for the mere acceptance of it.
It’s a love we may very often experience in the presence of a child, a dog or cat or some other beloved pet, in the presence of a stranger whom we have allowed to touch our lives, or in some other way where the experience of love comes to us easily. Some people might experience this kind of love in a larger sense: as the love of Christ, or the balance of yin and yang, the ecstatic mystical experience of the Sufi or the Kabala or of Neopaganism. However we might experience it, the love I'm talking about is one that seems to come to us quite naturally, as though it is flowing freely through us, as a part of some larger stream -- perhaps as a gift of the stream of life.
The gift is many-fold. It is a joy merely in accepting its experience. What could be more wonderful than a bouncing a grandchild on one’s knee – a fate I assure you that one day even I will relish for myself. And yet there is more, if we are willing to accept it there can be more. The more comes from recognition that our love is indeed part of a larger love, part and parcel of the stream of life. If we let it, I trust it will hold us – through all kinds of travails, brokenness and challenges.
The late William Sloan Coffin wrote, “God is love, as scripture says, and that means that the revelation is in the relationship. God is love, means God is known devotionally, not dogmatically. God is love, does not clear up old mysteries; it discloses new mystery. God is love, is not a truth we can master; it is only one to which we can surrender. Faith is being grasped by the power of love.”
It is when we let go of our arrogant notion that we can fix all that is broken, when we yield or submit or surrender to being a part of this larger love, it is then I suspect that we move our faith towards conviction. It is then we move from being hapless victims of fate, to agents of transformation and peace in our lives and in the world.
We need all those babies and pets, and those relationships that come along and allow us ready access to love and to joy, in order to remind us of the bigger picture that we are laboring for in less grace filled, but perhaps even more committed, moments. For the love of God; for the love of love.
We are not in control; I’m sure of that. And yet we are called to faith, called to conviction, to do everything we possibly can to promote peace in our lives and in the world. Fear may in some ways be a gift that can spur us on to do the most with what we have. It may encourage us to develop our faith. But I suspect it is the grace that flows from a never ending fountain of life and of love that can move our faith toward the conviction that might allow us to transform our lives and our world, through the brokenness and the violence, with love, to a peace that more fully expresses the abundant oneness of all things.
Have you told someone that you love them today? Have you said that you are sorry? Have you offered forgiveness?
There is an old Muslim Prayer:
Save us, our compassionate Lord,
From our folly, by your wisdom,
From our arrogance, by your forgiving love,
From our greed by your infinite bounty,
And from our insecurity by your healing power
And so, may the prayer of our souls also be, “…a petition for persistence, not for the one good deed, or single thought, but deed on deed, and thought on thought, until day calling unto day shall make a life worth living.” May we be doers of the word – in our lives and in the world.
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