Many years ago, and I do mean many…as in forty plus years ago, we lived in a little town in northeast Alabama called Guntersville. John was the rector of the lively little Church of the Epiphany, or church of the epuh-fanny as a local radio announcer once called it on air. The five years we lived there were important to us for many reasons. It is the place where Adam was born and David began school. It was a place of healing for us, and a place of great spiritual ferment. We were touched and changed in wonderful ways that have literally shaped the rest of our life.
But Guntersville also holds a particular power in my life because of something that happened to me one Sunday in church. I don’t remember the particulars of time of year or what combination of kids was squirming around me in the pew, but I have never forgotten what occurred. It was a perfectly ordinary Sunday, and I was feeling fine as best I remember, but gradually, as the service progressed, I was overwhelmed by profound doubt. “What,” I began to wonder, “if all this is just some sort of cosmic joke?” This was no intellectual wondering, no idle philosophical musing. It rose from the very center of my being and I literally felt ill. It was a devastating question that had never before entered my consciousness.
I had, from my earliest memories, loved everything about church, and accepted and taken at face value what I was taught about God. My faith was shaped not only by the people and the parish in which I grew up, but also by summer camp experiences throughout my growing up years. At Camp McDowell, a place affectionately referred to in the Diocese of Alabama as God’s backyard, my faith was broadened and deepened and strengthened by an extraordinary array of adults and people my own age sharing life and God in the woods of north Alabama. For the most part, my faith journey had been a joyous trip…until that Sunday morning at the Church of the Epiphany in Guntersville.
For some reason, this memory came flooding back as I read the first line of the prayer for today. “Almighty God,” we prayed, “whom truly to know is everlasting life.” It’s that little phrase “truly to know” that really brings me up short. It leaves me wondering how can I…or anyone else for that matter, ever “truly know” what we “truly know,” including God? How can we be absolutely certain about anything? And I think my answer to that question is that we can’t. I looked up the word certain and discovered it comes from the Latin word certus which means settled, or sure. As I think about my faith and my life in general, it seems like a lot of things are settled, are sure at this point in my life. But I also know that things can change quickly and dramatically, and what I take for granted can shift into something I never imagined, for better and for worse.
So how do you and I, how do all human beings live with and respond to our felt need to “truly know,” to have the important matters in our lives settled and sure? The verbiage of religious certainty is all around us. It is expressed in all the Abrahamic faiths. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have their preachers who proclaim that there is one way and only one way to be faithful followers of God. Using their holy texts, or in the case of Christians our holy texts, they proclaim with intense certainty exactly what we should believe and how we should act. I don’t know about you, but I find myself rejecting much of their message because it seems too focused on the stuff that doesn’t matter and ignores the stuff that does matter.
Too often that kind of certainty seems dependent on smoothing out the rough places and resolving the inconsistencies, making everything neat and simple without exploring what those rough places and inconsistencies might reveal to us about God and about ourselves. It asks us to push away our very real questions and suppress our doubts rather than engaging with them however painful that may be and to do this without knowing where it will lead…like maybe to a new place that doesn’t feel so settled or sure but nevertheless feels true.
- Take the story of Philip and the Ethiopian official. Did Philip, in contradiction to all the laws of nature, get snatched up from one place and put down in another place, find water where there shouldn’t have been water and then simply disappear? This kind of story can be hard for skeptical or scientific types. I don’t have a clue what actually happened. I’m not particularly skeptical in that way because I do believe that with God all things are possible. But for me, what matters in the story, is what has the power to move you or me to a new and perhaps unsettling place in our lives. It is to wonder what might happen if we gave ourselves completely over to the power of the Holy Spirit to use us as God has need and sees fit.
- And what about that passage from the First Letter of John that seems to imply…it doesn’t actually say it but the implication is that love is only possible if we know God because God is the source of all love? That may be very true for us who profess to belong to the God John is referring to, the God revealed to us in Jesus, but for me it defies both logic and experience to think only people who believe as we do can love in the selfless giving way that Jesus did. I’m betting all of us know people who either don’t care one way or the other or who actively reject even the notion of God, but who do love and live out that love by giving themselves over to others and to the needs of the world.
- And finally, in the gospel, there’s Jesus telling his disciples that he is the true vine and they are the branches. He warns them that if they do not bear fruit they will be pruned from the vine. Then finishes by saying the part with which some of us really struggle, “Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.” With each of the three Abrahamic faiths making basically the same claim that only they are the one true faith and that all others will be cast away to suffer the torments of hell, we’re pushed to make a choice that only one is right and the others are not. Again, recognizing that none of us gets this faith stuff completely right, it defies reason to be forced to make a choice like that.
You know, I don’t remember anything about how I worked my way through that crisis of faith so many years ago. Best I can tell, I just kept on keeping on and gradually came to a new and hopefully more mature place of assurance. What I’ve come to know is that I cannot truly and fully know God in this life because I will continue to get it wrong sometimes, maybe most of the time. What I’ve come to know is that Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life for me and for many other people in this world, and for that I am eternally grateful. What I’ve come to know is this reality does not stop God from reaching out to others in ways that may seem strange to me because of my limited ability to recognize and appreciate the marvelous creativity of that Divine reaching out. My certainty does not rest in the doctrines of the Church or the sometimes confusing and troubling and contradictory messages of scripture but in that absolute Love and Compassion within which there is ample room for everyone.
Everyone.