The Evolution of the Leap of Faith

2 Pentecost – May 29, 2005

(Deuteronomy 11:18-21, 26-28; Psalm 31; Romans 3:21-25a,28; Matthew 7:21-27)

When I was going to high school and college I only took the science courses that were required.  I’ve become much more interested in science in the second half of my life.  But one thing I learned back then was that nature worked very slowly.  They talked about the Grand Canyon being carved out of the steady flow of the Colorado River, grain by grain, century after century.  They talked about the slow, very chancy, survival of the fittest, depending on random mutations that gave just enough of a reproductive edge that they were passed on generation after generation.  Geologic time, biologic time was really slow time.

But then, I think sometime after I stopped taking science courses, the understanding of how change in nature takes place shifted.  There was more appreciation of cataclysmic events – meteor strikes wiping out species – huge floods cutting channels in the rock overnight.  The authors of the book The Beak of the Finch speculate that even evolution can work the same way, with sudden climatic change, giving rise to sudden, adaptive biologic change, over seasons rather than centuries.

I think it’s in this latter way that our spirituality progresses, both culturally and individually.

The University of Chicago historian of religion, Mireae Eliade, called human beings “homo religious” because religion and ritual are so deep within our nature that there was never a time when there was a human being who was not religious.  The same, however, could probably be said for science in its broadest sense, I think, because of our innate curiosity and our constant attempts to control the world around us.  In the earliest days, those two, religion and science, were pretty much indistinguishable.  We learned how to create fire.  We struck the flint above the dried grass while at the same time chanting the prayer to the fire god, and we didn’t even ask which was the “effective” part of all that.  We may not have even realized that there were “parts” to it at all.  That is just how it had always been done.

When things went wrong it called for more.  When a battle loomed soldiers refrained from sex to focus their energy.  When a draught occurred maybe a sacrifice was called for.  After all you can’t expect something from the gods if you don’t give anything back.  And if the gods are angry it must be someone’s fault.

The big shift that came with Moses, the sudden leap in spiritual evolution, wasn’t the discovery of the quid pro quo, the blessing and the curse, but the moral nature of God’s commandments, going beyond the ritual technology to focus on the ways we treat one another.

That move separated religion from science and joined it to politics.  The tribes became a people, and the people were God’s own people.  Every time the people strayed from their part of the covenant the curse emerged, and the prophets called them back to the healing of the blessing.

Still human beings being human, just as the technological side of the religion and science complex took over from the spiritual as the meaning behind the rituals were forgotten, so too, by the time of Jesus, by the time of Paul, the political side of this religio-political-moral complex had come into ascendancy.  Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots didn’t so much seek God’s blessing as their own power, their own authority, their own prideful assertion that they alone spoke for God, until the only place that true spirit could be found was in a stable next to a Bethlehem inn, or in an out of the way Galilean village, or on a cross between two thieves.

The meteor and the earthquake, and the flood and the wind that changes the course of spiritual evolution came once more, and this time said, “There is no quid pro quo.  There is only grace.  There is only love.”  And the only way that you can miss out on that is to shut the door and refuse to see the amazing truth of this amazing grace.

“There is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are now justified by his grace as a gift.”  Alleluia!

But it amazes me how often and how deeply over the last two thousand years we have just said, “No, thank you,” and built our foundation on our arrogant and our ignorant “technique”, and our prideful and very boring self-righteousness.

I see this even more clearly in individual lives – my own and others.  Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny even in the spiritual realm.  (See I did learn something in science class.)

When we are little we play with magic power.  Our cries create food.  Our upraised arms bring secure and loving hugs.  Or, in the times of danger we sense around us in the world we may not understand, a world of raised voices or worried looks, we try to figure out what it means when they say, ”Don’t get your father angry,” or “you’ve got to be careful when Mommy’s upset.”  We think, “What did I do that caused them to fight – I won’t ever be like that again.”

You can get stuck in that place of infantile technique.  When life gets scary people can get very rigid and become convinced that only a certain way of doing things will avoid disaster.  At its pathological end you have people who check the lock 70, 80, 100 times when they leave the house, or wash their hands until they bleed, or want to spy on everyone.  But all these things are on a spectrum.  Maybe you think you’re the only one who really knows how to drive a car.  Maybe you have to use a particular prayer book when you pray.  Or maybe you just blame it all on someone else – men, women, right-wingers, left-wingers, immigrants or the rich, bishops, clergy, or lay people.

More often then not the deep insecurities of the failure of our childhood techno-religion got covered over.  We pass as okay.  We think we’re okay.  But we don’t let anyone get too close.

If we’re lucky we climb the mountain to meet our God and hammer out our covenant.  Like the Hebrew tribes becoming a people, we become our own man and our own woman.  We become a responsible adult willing to face the blessing and curses, the consequences of our decisions.

And we do the best we can, I think.  I was struck recently by the reaction of the East Salinas Latino community to the television expose on the gang problem that they felt painted their community in an unrealistically and sensationalized negative light.   Most people, they said, were not gangsters.  Most people didn’t get shot just walking down the street.  And the same can be said about the negative stereotypes of politicians or CEOs or military interrogators that make the news day after day.  It’s “news” because it is not the norm.  We do our best.  We have good intentions.  But then we begin to believe that our ways are the only ways, that if we are right then anyone who sees or does things differently must be wrong.  The old fears come back again, rationalized and projected, but just as destructive.  Our mature, strong, responsible ego is still not big enough to take on the world or bargain with God, so we shrink the world down to fit our size, and instead of embracing the image of God in which we have been created, we create a God in our image.  We end up worshiping ourselves, the best and the brightest, the free and the brave…..bombs bursting not in light, but in deeper and deeper darkness.

The fact is that we control about as much of our life as the Jews of Jesus’ time controlled the world they lived in, which is not very much.  We are thrown into a life we didn’t make and didn’t choose, and we are subject to forces both outside and within that our response-abilities ultimately just can’t handle.

When we realize that, we can go in a number of directions.

We can despair – which Luther called “hell”.

We can keep dong the same thing over and over again expecting different results – which AA calls “insanity”.

We can escape, or try to escape, into work, or into romance, or into one kind of addiction or another – the typical mid-life crisis.

Or we can take a leap of faith.  We can claim the life we’ve been given, claim it as our own.  We can meet each day as a kind of mission.  And, in spite of the likelihood that we’ll be crucified for it, we can love one another as God has loved us.

I’ve come to see the Christian faith less as a faith “in” Jesus Christ and more as an appropriation of the faith “of” Jesus Christ – the total acceptance, in gratitude, of life as life in its fullness is given, and the trust that the source of that life, our creator and redeemer, our beginning and our end holds us now, and holds us in eternity.

With that as a foundation for our lives, our church, our nation, our world, the floods can come, but they will be like the waters of baptism washing our sin away.  The wind can blow, but it will only help us breathe the Spirit deeper into our lives.

One of the other things they’ve started teaching since I stopped taking science classes is that the dinosaurs didn’t completely die out, but evolved into birds and learned to fly.

So can we.

Thanks be to God.