I recently saw John Patrick Shanley’s film, Doubt that he adapted to the screen from a play he wrote. For the week after I watched it, not an hour of the day went by without me thinking about it or at least about its discussion of doubt. A common perception is that doubt is the opposite of faith. I believe, however, that faith is bigger than doubt, and that faith actually contains doubt within it. Certainty seems to be the opposite of doubt. We can describe faith as doubt and certainty. I’d like to explore these matters in a series of posts. What do you think of my description of faith as certainty and doubt?

Both the play and film open with a haunting sermon from Father Flynn, which I will quote in its entirety. I find great comfort and challenge in these words.

What do you do when you’re not sure? That’s the topic of my sermon today. You look for God’s direction and can’t find it. Last year when President Kennedy was assassinated, who among us did not experience the most profound disorientation. Despair. “What now? Which way? What do I say to my kids? What do I tell myself?” It was a time of people sitting together, bound together by a common feeling of hopelessness. But think of that! Your bond with your fellow beings was your despair. It was a public experience, shared by everyone in our society. It was awful, but we were in it together! How much worse is it then for the lone man, the lone woman, stricken by a private calamity? “No one knows I’m sick. No one knows I’ve lost my last real friend. No one knows I’ve done something wrong.” Imagine the isolation. You see the world as through a window. On the one side of the glass: happy, untroubled people. On the other side: you. Something has happened, you have to carry it, and it’s incommunicable. For those so afflicted, only God knows their pain. Their secret. The secret of their alienating sorrow. And when such a person, as they must, howls to the sky, to God: “Help me!” What if no answer comes? Silence. I want to tell you a story. A cargo ship sank and all her crew was drowned. Only this one sailor survived. He made a raft of some spars and, being of a nautical discipline, turned his eyes to the Heavens and read the stars. He set a course for his home, and, exhausted, fell asleep. Clouds rolled in and blanketed the sky. For the next twenty nights, as he floated on the vast ocean, he could no longer see the stars. He thought he was on course by there was no way to be certain. As the days rolled on, and he wasted away with fevers, thirst and starvation, he began to have doubts. Had he set his course right? Was he still going on towards his home? Or was he horribly lost and doomed to a terrible death? No way to know. The message of the constellations—had he imagined it because of his desperate circumstance? Or had he seen Truth once, and now had to hold on to it without further reassurance? This was his dilemma on a voyage without apparent end. There are those of you in church today who know exactly the crisis of faith I describe. I want to say to you: Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

I’m coming to this fairly late, but I love the idea of Advent Conspiracy. Check out the video and be inspired to celebrate a more meaningful Christmas.

$10 billion to supply everyone with clean water? That’s it? Why can’t we do this and do it soon? Come Lord Jesus.

From Saturday’s Denver Post:

That tens of thousands of people came to a Weld County farm on Saturday to collect free potatoes, carrots and leeks could be one of the most palpable signs of a depressed economy.

The Miller family, which owns 600 acres of farmland outside Platteville, decided to hold a free food day because they had tens of thousands of pounds of extra produce at the end of their fall festival. Any day now, a deep freeze would ruin it, so the family let people come to the farm today to collect what they could haul.

They expected between 5,000 and 10,000 — but instead found themselves inundated with cars and people with buckets and wagons and barrels ready to harvest whatever was available. They estimated the crowd at more than 40,000 people.

“Overwhelmed is putting it mildly,” said farm owner Chris Miller. “People obviously need food.”

Leviticus 23.22 says, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God.” (NRSV)

The following is the sermon I preached at Pasadena Covenant Church on August 31, 2008. The biblical text is Ephesians 2. [1] Audio of the sermon is available here.

Do you ever feel like you’ve been a rut and the mundane “blehs” of life surround you and then all of a sudden, you’re filled with awe and wonder? You encounter something new or something you’ve seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted countless times and then, surprisingly, you wake up to a deeper mystery surrounding you. What has evoked that awe in you? Is it a piece of music like a Sufjan Stevens song? Standing before the vastness of the Pacific Ocean? Hearing children laugh? What about a movie like WALL-E? Or a favorite book or story such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? Maybe a mathematical formula? Perhaps seeing a perfectly turned double play in baseball or watching Michael Phelps set records these past Olympics? Or is it a favorite meal whose flavors remind you of home? Isn’t it amazing to experience those moments when we feel God’s grace like a cool breeze, when we can sense that there is something special to this life?

I grew up in Sanger, California, a small farming community plopped between Fresno and the Sierra Nevada mountain range. My family spent a lot of time in those mountains. It was a great way to grow up, having granite domes and giant sequoia trees just an hour’s drive away. As a kid, I didn’t think the mountains to our east were all that special—seeing them was as much a part of our daily lives as homework or the street in front of our house. I even worked in those mountains during a couple of summers in college at a Christian camp. The tall trees were beautiful, but they were just the backdrop of my life. Then, one time when I was home from school, my dad and I went on a drive up to Sequoia National Monument. As we drove past trees I must have seen hundreds of times in my life, I felt like I was seeing them for the first time. Here were these behemoths shooting up out of the ground, topping out at a couple of hundred feet into the air. Their bases were fifty feet around or more. They began to grow around the time Jesus was born in Bethlehem. I couldn’t help but stare out the window in awe of these magnificent wonders of God’s creation. If you’ve never seen the giant sequoias, I’ll try to give you some perspective: Pasadena city hall is the tallest building in the city at 163 feet. The General Sherman tree stands at 276 feet. It had a branch that before it fell off was 100 feet tall. What powers of imagination does God possess in order to make trees like that? As we drove through the forest, I felt like I was the first person to ever see them. I remember saying to my dad in shock, “Do you see these trees? They’re awesome.” He just laughed and said he felt the same way the first time he saw them after he moved to California from North Carolina. When I saw those trees that time, I understood the words of the poet E.E. Cummings who wrote, “now the eyes of my eyes are opened.” [2]

The following is the sermon I preached at Eagle Rock Covenant Church on August 17, 2008. The biblical text is John 20.19-23 [1] Audio of the sermon is available here.

In the halls of my childhood church we had a bulletin board filled with prayer letters and pictures from of all the missionaries our congregation supported. I didn’t realize until much later how much this board shaped how I understood the idea of missions. I remember one missionary we supported in particular. She grew up in our congregation and would send my family personal letters that we read aloud at dinner. She served in Afghanistan, giving basic medical care and teaching classes to women and children. Because it was the 1980’s her letters were filled with stories of the war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. More than once her team had to escape from attacks on their city with shells exploding behind their Jeep. After the Soviets left, she told similar stories of the civil war that brought the Taliban to power. Oddly enough, the one story that sticks in my head, came from a letter she wrote to my family when I was nine or ten. She wrote something she thought my brother and I would enjoy. She said in her report that the first snow of the year had fallen in their community. In the language of the people group she went to serve, the word for snow is, “barf.” She thought—rightly I might add—that my brother and I would appreciate the fact that it was “barfing” outside. We thought that was hilarious. I still think it’s hilarious.

And for most of my young life, my vision of what it meant to be a missionary was to go to a place where women had to cover their faces, where you had to evacuate cities under attack and mortar rounds exploded around your fleeing car, and where people said funny things like “barf” for snow. I thought missionaries were strange, exotic people, and incredibly rare in the Church. God sent them out into the far reaches of the world, but God clearly didn’t send all of us to those nations.

This story from the Gospel according to John that we read confronts the understanding I had of God and missions and being sent by Jesus. While in this story Jesus speaks to his disciples, I think the words are meant for the entire Church to hear. And if we’re all meant to hear these words, that means Jesus sends us all out on a mission. Missions and the call of God to reach the world are not reserved for a few special Christians. Missions are not just one ministry among many ministries of the Church. Nor is mission just an aspect of the kingdom of God or an piece of his character. Our God is a God of mission. We have a God who is active in the world, a God who engages, and who sends his Son. Mission is not just an attribute of his character—mission is God’s character. [2] God calls the universe into existence and seeks out a relationship with the world. He calls people into his kingdom, he seeks to create a new family, and he sends his people out to work alongside him in this mission. God has done this in many ways throughout history from the calling of Abraham that we heard about last week from Brian, to sending his own Son, Jesus, and to creating the Church to be his representatives in the world. I know this is all rather large and lofty, but then again so is God.

I’ve had the opportunity to fill the pulpit at two local Covenant churches in the past month, Eagle Rock Covenant Church and Pasadena Covenant Church, where Carey and I are members. It’s really the first times I’ve preached since 2006. The sermon-writing and preaching muscles were certainly a bit weak, but I enjoyed the experiences.

Audio for the sermon at Eagle Rock Covenant can be found here.

Update:

Audio for the sermon at Pasadena Covenant can be found here.

The texts of both sermons to come soon.

It’s Gerard Manley Hopkins’ birthday today. For those of you asking, “Who?” Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and wonderful poet. He was born July 28, 1844 and died in 1889. He wrote one of my favorite poems, “God’s Grandeur.” It’s worth reprinting—and since it’s public domain, I can do so without any worry.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

(HT: The Writer’s Almanac)

I’ve been using A Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Daily Meditations from His Letters, Writings, and Sermons as a morning read and it doesn’t fit well within the traditional dose of daily encouragement so you can carpe diem like other devotional books. This book doesn’t allow the reader to wake up and wrap themselves in a warm blanket of Jesusy fuzziness, which is no surprise since it’s from Bonhoeffer. Rather, this book challenges the reader, often with a punch in the nose. Consider the entry for yesterday, June 26. The excerpt comes from his book Ethics, pages 140-141.

June 26: The Sin of Acquiescence

The church confesses itself guilty of violating all of the Ten Commandments. It confesses thereby its apostasy from Christ. It has not so borne witness to the truth of God in a way that leads all inquiry and science to recognize its origin in this truth. It has not so proclaimed the righteousness of God that all human justice must see there its own source and essence. It has not been able to make the loving care of God so credible that all human economic activity would be guided by it in its task. By falling silent the church became guiltly for the loss of responsible action in society, courageous intervention, and the readiness to suffer for what is acknowledged as right. It is guilty of the government’s falling away from Christ.

Psalm 4

1 Answer me when I call, O God of my right! You gave me room when I was in distress. Be gracious to me, and hear my prayer.

2 How long, you people, shall my honor suffer shame? How long will you love vain words, and seek after lies? Selah

3 But know that the LORD has set apart the faithful for himself; the LORD hears when I call to him.

4 When you are disturbed, do not sin; ponder it on your beds, and be silent. Selah

5 Offer right sacrifices, and put your trust in the LORD.

6 There are many who say, “O that we might see some good! Let the light of your face shine on us, O LORD!”

7 You have put gladness in my heart more than when their grain and wine abound.

8 I will both lie down and sleep in peace; for you alone, O LORD, make me lie down in safety. (NRSV)

This summer I took an Old Testament Writings course and it really reopened the Psalms for me. I have actually been using them as a guide to prayer the past few months. We read Walter Brueggemann’s challenging article, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” which argues without the lament, we become overly passive partners in the covenant and are relegated to “Yes-men” and “Yes-women.” Without the lament, we lose the ability to raise justice questions. (The article can be found in The Psalms and the Life of Faith, edited by Patrick D. Miller.) Reading this article and some of the lament Psalms (e.g., Ps 22, 88, etc.) gave me a greater appreciation for the lament found in the Psalter and elsewhere through the Old Testament. We have a gracious God who not only allows us to complain, but also considers our complaints. And it seems to me that in the face of events like Hurricane Katrina that lament and complaint are perhaps the most appropriate responses. I fear that without being able to direct my laments to God, I would have walked away from the faith long ago.

Let us sing with the psalmist and cry out in lament on behalf of our sisters and brothers suffering from the devastation Hurricane Katrina wrought.

Psalm 69.1-3

Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck.

I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.

I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God.