Tuesday, January 20, 2021
Ed Hinson
Faith
We live in a time of novel challenges and dangers, with many precedents in history but, for better or worse, experienced by very few alive now in our country. Times of pandemic, in spite of if not because of the accompanying upheavals, have often opened doors to new practices and insights, not least of which in the religious and spiritual realm. How open are we to growth in these trying times?
Saint Paul tells us in Hebrews (11:1), "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." In the Fundamentalist church in which I grew up, the "thing hoped for" was everlasting life, the "conviction" of that thing was our life in Christ, reflecting on earth that ultimate eternal outcome. In that particular belief system, a life of faith centered necessarily on the hereafter.
The state of our society today, however, seems to thrust this familiar verse into our everyday lives in a new and more immediate way. The patterns of our lives have been disrupted and short term concerns and worries crowd out seemingly all else. We perceive novel challenges at every turn. We have hopes for positive outcomes, but assurance seems very hard to come by. Do we have faith? Can we have faith?
In his Gospel, Saint John recounts the stressful time during Holy Week, at the Last Supper, where Judas has just departed to carry out his betrayal and Jesus has just told Peter that he will very soon deny his Master. Jesus then reassures his shaken disciples: "Let not your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in Me." He bids them to extend their faith to deal with the new troubles facing them. How can our own existing faith bolster us in our present challenges?
Every year, our Church calendar takes us through the story of our belief, holding up the heroes of the Faith and having us identify with the regular people involved -- the shepherds near Bethlehem, the people spreading palms and garments in Jerusalem, the disciples stunned by the Resurrection. the amazed crowd at Pentecost. Making this journey each year reinforces our own faith, in large part because we know how the story turns out. What if we didn't know how it would turn out? Perhaps, unavoidably, the actual participants in our founding events had a faith different to ours, not knowing what was to come.
Here, in our now, the Advent season of the Church year has come and gone, and yet in our daily lives we remain in a seemingly perpetual state of expectation. We have our hopes, but we don't know what we are expecting. I believe that our earliest Christian brothers and sisters would understand us in this, and I believe in turn that our situation can allow us to identify more fully with their experience. Can our current troubles allow us to grow our faith in this way?
Can we take up this opportunity to experience a reflection of the faith of those who awaited and directly experienced the Messiah? Let us in these turbulent times have assurance in our hopes, and in our thoughts and actions exhibit the confidence that with God's grace our unseen hopes will be realized. And in this way let us experience a kind of faith akin to that of our very earliest Christian forbears, and thus experience now a foretaste of the realization of our hope in Christ.