It would be wonderful if faith were like a domesticated
animal, something we could train, something that would be predictable in its
patterns, comforting in its presence and something to snuggle with when the
nights grow long. It would do as we commanded, wagging its tail as we led it
around our lives.
But I think faith is a bit more like a wild animal,
beautiful and mysterious, something that causes us to catch our breath and to
pause, not knowing whether we should pull out our cameras to document the
experience or run for our lives. Some of us proceed to pull out a weapon so
that we can stuff the animal and hang it on our walls, like some sort of
trophy. As soon as we master the animal and have it stuffed on our wall, we can
check off the “faith” box and go on to conquer bigger things, like showing
others how to embark on the hunt so that they, too, may have faith stuffed and
hanging on their wall.
But some of us stand where we are, wide-eyed and staring,
awestruck (dumbstruck?) by what lies in front of us. Even after we are no
longer face-to-face with the wildness of it all, we can see it out of the
corners of our eyes, encouraging and threatening at the same time. The threat
isn’t “do this or else.” It is, rather, “your life will be forever changed. You
will be forever changed. You will never be able to go back.” The encouragement
isn’t so much “God will make all your dreams come true,” or “God wants to bless
you and make you exceedingly wealthy,” but “I have come to you in your
abundance, to you in your lack, to you in your hope and to you in your fear.”
It isn’t a promise that everything will be neatly arranged, but that God dwells
at the center of the mess of it all. We are simultaneously the pursuers and the
pursued.
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Faith is not so much something that we seek and find. It is
something that finds us and keeps us looking, beckoning us into the questions,
into the unknown, to respond not knowing the outcomes, to act not knowing the
consequence. Faith cannot be dom[1]
esticated or hung on the wall; it does not
offer easy answers or a list of “do’s and don’t’s.” It demands that we live in
community, bound together by the offensive grace that demands that we live in
and among God’s sinner-saint people. Faith is not acting because we know the
outcome; faith is acting despite our unknowing. It is the trust that, though we
do not know the outcome, we respond to those whom God has placed in our lives. In
the words of Bonhoeffer: “Those who… seek to avoid becoming guilty divorce
themselves from the ultimate reality of human existence; but in so doing they
also divorce themselves from the redeeming mystery of the sinless bearing of
guilt by Jesus Christ and have no part in the divine justification that attends
this event. They place their personal innocence above their responsibility for
other human beings are blind to the fact that precisely in so doing they have
become even more egregiously guilty. They are also blind to the fact that
genuine guiltlessness is demonstrated precisely by entering into community with
the guilt of other human beings for their sake… As the one who loved without
sin [Jesus] became guilty, seeking to stand within the community of human
guilt.” |
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Faith does not call us to preserve our personal innocence,
to keep our hands clean and our consciences free; faith draws us into the
community of sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes. It beckons us to tell
the truth: we are all sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes, unshackled by
Christ so that we might unbind one another, again and again, reminding each
other that, as we step out into the unknown, looking into the abyss
straight-on, that we do not journey alone. And faith lurks at the corners of
our existence, bright-eyed and poised, not because it is ready to attack nor as
an invitation for a fight. Faith prowls the outskirts of existence because we
are her children.
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 6;
trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles West and Douglas Stott; ed. Ilse Tödt, Heinz
Eduard Tödt, Ernst Feil and Clifford Green; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009),
276, 279.
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