"What Can You Believe in A World Where it's Hard to Believe Anything?"
Let me invite you to share a scripture for a moment: an ancient story from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 9.
And they brought the boy to Jesus. When the spirit saw him, (saw Jesus, that is) immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. Jesus asked the father, 'How long has this been happening to him?' And he said, 'From childhood. It has often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him; but if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.' Jesus said to him, 'If you are able! All things can be done for the one who believes.' Immediately the father of the child cried out, 'I believe; help my unbelief!' (Mark 9:20-24 NRSV)
"I believe -- somewhat. Help me to believe more fully." Sounds like most of us, doesn't it? We live in a very hard time for believing anything. Sociologists speak of "the social construction of reality". That is, that we believe what we believe and view things as we do because that's what most of the society believes and how it views things. But in an age of radical transition, what society believes and how it views things are shattered into hundreds, even thousands, of ideas and opinions, and there is no overriding consensus. We are thrown back on our own insubstantial judgments, our own flimsy philosophies for living in the world.
This is humbling and frightening, because most of us have not been prepared to make such judgments. We have never thought about developing a coherent personal philosophy. We're like the character described in a book about modern existentialism, who found himself afloat on a raft on the high seas in the dark of the night, with no rudder to steer by, and no stars for setting his course, if he had one.
It is no wonder that society today appears to be on the brink of complete disruption, with crime and frustration and confusion wherever we turn. What can you believe in a time like this?
Unfortunately, a lot of the popular religious figures of our time are less than helpful. Some of us, in fact, find their enthusiasm and their neat little formulas, well, nauseating. We wonder if they're even living in the same world we are. They seem to think they have God in a bottle, and can tell us all about the divine properties by reading a label. They lack sensitivity for the way most of us are struggling to understand, to make sense of things. God, for them, is too easy, too manageable, to be true.
Jesus was more realistic. He didn't expect people to have a lot of faith, to live in a cheerfully possessive mode with God. He didn't say, "If you have faith the size of that mountain, you can say to this mustard seed, 'Be cast into the sea,' and it will be done." He said, "If you have faith the size of a mustard seed -- of a tiny little seed so small you can barely see it with the naked eye -- then, you can say to that mountain, 'Be cast into the sea,' and it will be done." There's a vast difference. Jesus knew how hard it is to have faith. He respected our finite limitations, and the fact that our roots are in the sand and the soil, not in the heavens.
Take this story we read about the man with a demon-possessed son. He wasn't a paragon of faith. He didn't know if Jesus really could or would do anything for his son. He was merely a desperate father, anxious for anything that would help his son. "If you are able to do anything for us," he begged, "have pity on us and do it." And Jesus seized on that ambivalence, that sense of uncertainty, to demonstrate how little faith it really takes to get the attention of God.
We don't know much about this man. The Gospel writer wasn't interested in his biography. But we know he lived in a time as inhospitable to faith as our own. His too was an age of competing ideologies and shifting values. His entire world was divided and subdivided by countless cults, philosophies, and mystery religions. His day-to-day existence was filled with the sights and sounds of a scene from Hogarth: lepers and lunatics, beggars and acrobats, saints and murderers. He must have thought, as we do, that it is impossible to believe very much in such a crazy, mixed-up world. "I believe," he said; "help my unbelief."
It was a wonderful response. Was he a man of great confidence in the divine? No. Would he have earned the Jerry Falwell award for outstanding faith or the Oral Roberts prize for being open to a miracle? No. He was only an ordinary man caught in a kaleidoscopic world of shifting values and understandings like our own. He confessed to a partial faith, a faith that wanted to be more. He was trying, and that was the best he could do.
It was enough. Jesus spoke to the spirit disturbing the man's son, and the spirit departed. The little bit of faith the man had, his desperate hope, reached out and somehow made contact with the wonderful graciousness of God, the supreme hospitality of the divine in Jesus Christ, and the prayer of his heart was answered. Do you remember Michelangelo's famous painting of the hand of God extended to the hand of Adam, with their fingers almost touching? That's the way we really live, reaching out in our moments of greatest need and greatest transcendence, and God's hand is always there, ready to complete the connection.
"I believe; help my unbelief." And God always answers that prayer.
We don't have to be regular churchgoers or Bible students or experts at prayer and spirituality. We can be very ordinary people, who seldom think about God and prayer. But in the moment when our lives are brushed by holiness, or we feel desperate in our need, we can get in touch. We can reach out and really become connected to the Great Energy at the center of all that is.
Grace of this kind is always a gift. It isn't something we achieve by our own merit and discipline, and we ought never to brag about it or think of ourselves as religious geniuses because it worked for us. It is God who really makes the connection, God who bends down to us in our need, filling our hungry hearts and illuminating the dark places of our lives. And God often responds to the simple cry of the person who isn't much of a believer, to the outstretched hands of the needy supplicant. That's the good news of the gospel.
Do you know Reynolds Price, the novelist and playwright who teaches at Duke University? Sometime in the early eighties, when Price was in his fifties, he was suddenly stricken by an unusual tumor. It was about ten inches long, and had wound around the nerves of his spinal cord, so that doctors were able to excise only a few pieces of it, and hoped to irradiate the rest. The pain following the operation was excruciating. On a scale of 0 to 10, Price rated it a consistent 9 or 10. He lost the use of his lower body, and had to learn to live as a paraplegic. His whole world, that had once seemed so pleasant and benign, had turned upside down, and he was being crushed under it.
In a book about his cancer called A Whole New Life, Price stresses the fact that he was not a religious person. He had imbibed certain biblical and cultural values from his parents, but had not himself maintained any regular religious habits. Yet, one day early in his painful, disruptive ordeal, he had an extraordinary experience. It was dreamlike, yet wasn't a dream, because he says he was fully awake. He found himself standing at dawn by Kinnereth, the Sea of Galilee, among the still sleeping figures of Jesus and his disciples. The air was clear and lovely, and he said he knew it was going to be a beautiful day. Then Jesus got up and came toward him. Jesus was tall and lean, with dark hair, and had a very imposing manner. He beckoned Price to follow him into the lake. Price took off all his clothes and followed. He says he not only stood in the waist-deep water several feet from the shore, but also hovered above the scene, so that he could see the oblong purple mark on his own back that had been put there to guide the radiologists who administered his therapy. Jesus silently took up handfuls of water and poured them over his head, and again and again, and onto his back, so that water splashed over the purple mark and the rough scar where he'd had the operation. Jesus said, "Your sins are forgiven," and walked away toward the shore. Price followed, thinking, "It's not my sins I'm worried about." Wait, he called, what about my tumor? "Am I also cured?" Jesus paused and turned and looked at him. He was silent a moment, and then he said, "That too." And suddenly Price was back home again in his bedroom.
The agnostic in Price attempted to dissuade him of what he had experienced. Surely he had had a catnap and a little dream. But no, he said, it had "a concrete visual and tactile reality" different from that of an unconscious experience. It was in a class by itself. And it remained central to his hope and faith throughout the next few years of his difficult pilgrimage. Even in the darkest times, when the doctors' faces betrayed their lack of confidence and the pain raged through his body like an unquenchable fire, he remembered it, and believed. Eventually he survived, and the doctors spoke of a miracle. They said he was lucky, they had never seen anything like it. But Price remembered. Time and again he imagined a curative hand being laid over the scar on his back -- the hand that had bathed him in Lake Kinnereth. And he knows, in a world revolutionized by technology, where traditions have been confounded and most of us live in almost perpetual confusion, that something happened to him that transcends all human knowledge and understanding. God touched him in his half-belief, in his yearning for something more than his intellect could comprehend, and made him whole again. A whole new life.
Perhaps you've had a similar experience, and could add your story to his. Or maybe you are where he was when he had that remarkable experience -- in a rough ditch where your life has run off the road, and you feel all alone and don't even know how to ask for help. The beautiful word of the gospel to you is that God is only a yearning -- a heart's breath -- away from you, ready to reach out and make the connection you need. The connection may not completely restore you. It didn't fully restore Reynolds Price. He has spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. But he is a whole person, and he is happy. And God is here, ready to bless you the same way -- the way he blessed the father whose son was ill, the way he blessed Reynolds Price. You don't even have to believe it. You only have to want to believe it, and the God who loves you more than you have ever understood love in your life will complete the connection and give you peace and joy. I know it's hard to believe. But that's the point of our story.
Interview with John Killinger
Interviewed by Orley Herron
Orley Herron: John, we have deep roots. We both were born in Kentucky and we moved away from the good old Kentucky home. I was just talking recently with a leading educator, and the educator said to me, "I wish, Orley, I had peace in my life." And just what you said in your address, "You only have to want to believe it, the God who loves you more than you've ever understood love in your life, will complete the connection and give you peace and joy." And I think that was very, very powerful. John, you speak to so many churches in America. The culture has changed, hasn't it?
John Killinger: Oh, it's changed drastically since you and I grew up in Kentucky. I think some of us don't know where church is anymore, because it isn't the kind of church we once had. I don't know if it's that way with you, but I find myself going, gravitating to those places where I can touch what I used to know, and I'm finding there are fewer and fewer of those places, that Christianity's changed a lot, that the manifestations of it are changing all the time.
I don't know if you've noticed, Orley, but it seems to me that Protestantism as a culture has sort of faded out of existence, and something new is happening and is growing. While it's very disconcerting on one hand, it's also very exciting. I think it means that history is moving on and that God, who has always been God of history and has always brought something marvelous out of what's happened, is at work on some new thing that is just being made, just being born, and we're having an opportunity to be there in the birthing room while it's going on.
Herron: What would you say to somebody in crisis today? What good word would you say to them now?
Killinger: Well, I think if you're in crisis, you know, don't worry. Don't run, don't try to hide. Just hunker down where you are. Be quiet; let the spirit come into you. I think the spirit is not out there somewhere; it's right here. Jesus said, "The kingdom of God is within you," and I think that the God who is never far away from us, is right there to accept and to bless, and to heal when you need him.
Herron: Thank you very much, John.
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