I have to start with a spoiler alert. This sermon may not be appropriate for all ages. In fact, you may want to remove younger children from the congregation before it’s too late.
Next, I want to confess that the genesis of this sermon was a child’s question. Usually I start with the day’s scriptures but this week a question from a distraught fourth grader inspired me.
This dear boy came home from school after the holiday recess very upset. He told his mother that a classmate had told him Santa is not real. It’s your parents who give you all the gifts at Christmas. And, then our Sunday Schooler wailed, “If Santa isn’t real, maybe God isn’t real,” and he burst into tears.
Now I have to tell you mom did a first class, A #1 job of handling the situation, but, a few days later when she telephoned me to talk about it, she set me thinking about the place of doubt in our lives of faith and who among us hasn’t wondered what and how to believe in this post-Copernican, post-Darwinian, post-Freudian world we now live in.
I think it was my old friend Frederick Buechner who said doubt is the ants in the pants of faith. Don’t we all wonder, from time to time, how to understand the seeming paradoxes we find between science and religion, between the word of the Bible and what we know to be factual about the world?
Episcopalians do not understand the Bible to be literally the Word of God. Our sources of authority are Scripture, tradition, and reason. Reason – we bring to our theological study our God-given faculties and we understand that God’s truth goes far beyond our limited mental capacity.
But, here’s where we are stuck. I am told that one of the key findings of science (quantum physics) – and here I am w-a-y over my head – is that the mind is not separate from what it observes. We tend to think of God as “out there,” separate from us when what we are learning is that human consciousness and what we interact with are deeply entangled, constantly co-creating with one another.
We think in a subject-object paradigm that existed when we thought we were separate beings, knowing things as objects. Now that subject-object thinking is challenged by scientific advances and our collective unconscious. But, the old ideas are deeply engrained in our psyches and dealing with paradoxes is always a challenge. So, we hold in tension the God who is both small enough to be felt within our beating hearts and large enough to stretch to the outer edge of a universe we struggle to fully imagine. It makes God what God has always been, not only a matter of comprehension but also a God of direct experience which we call Revelation. If some of us admit to moments of doubt, many of us also will confess to out-of-body moments of God-experience when we have known ourselves to have been knocked sideways with the awe and wonder of the mysterium tremendium of the divine.
We have always known that logic and knowledge alone cannot grasp the fullness of God, but such concepts are beyond the maturity of even a brilliant eight-year-old.
When our limited pea-brains hit their limit and explanatory words fail us we fall back on God’s presence and our parents’ arms to hold us and gentle us with love and acceptance, unanswerable questions and all.
Professor Roger Owens of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary reminds us of a story by grade school author Patricia MacLachlan. In her book, My Father’s Words, MacLachlan relates a scene at a wake when two children, Fiona and her younger brother Finn have lost their father in a car accident. The children are sitting at home following their father’s funeral. Their friend Luke, who lives across the street, enters and squeezes between them on the couch. Fiona says
Luke sat between Finn and me, saying nothing. Luke didn’t talk much ever and that was one of the things I liked about him.
“I’m here,” he said finally.
“I see that. Thanks” replied Fiona.
“I’m here. I see that. Thanks.” When words fail us we rely on God’s presence. When our limited intellectual faculties and sensory perception reach the edge and can take us no further, we are stirred by awareness of the warming of our hearts with the limitless love of the Divine. We are each – at one time or another – that eight year old wondering how to hang on to our faith. We are all Fiona and Finn, in one way or another. And wherever this Christ says I’m here, hope is never extinguished and the possibility persists that we might venture a response. That we might say, “I see that. Thanks.” Amen.