Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

Preached by Winton Boyd on Sunday, March 14, 2010

It was midsummer in the mid-90’s, and I was leading a high school church camp in the mountains above Fresno. Over 35 teenagers spent the week at a rustic, no frills camp that had no electricity, while they slept in platform tents. It was an amazing week, the theme of which was “Living with No Fear.” We took hikes, sang and talked around campfires, played in mountain and lakes, ate hearty food, and renewed our baptism in the stream that ran through the camp. Greeting them as they came down the dusty road leading into the camp revealed that for many of these young people, a week at this summer camp – Camp Tamarack – was a yearly ritual. Many of them had been coming since they were old enough to walk. It was a familiar place and a familiar pattern.

By the end of the week, it was apparent that some deep friendships were renewed, and that many had wonderful experiences of faith and mystery. A beautiful sense of community was felt by most, if not all. I drove down the mountain back to my family amazed, delighted and excited for these folks – about a dozen of whom went to the church I served in Fresno.

Less than three weeks later, about 90 of us, including those dozen high schoolers, drove back up the same mountain for a weekend Family Camp at the same site. Based on the wonderful week we had just shared, our leadership team granted those teens some new privileges. They could come to camp without a parent or guardian, and they didn’t have to sleep in platform tents, but could as a group sleep in the rustic lodge where they could stay up a bit later and enjoy a final weekend of laughter before school started.

Two days after the family camp ended, I learned that during the wee hours of Sunday morning, after the rest of the camp had gone to sleep, those dozen high schoolers had gone down to the Vesper area, where we had worshipped as a camp many times, and smoked pot with each other.

While I was angry that they had broken trust, had abused privileges, I was also dumbfounded how the same group that had had an amazing spiritual experience in early August could return to that place just weeks later and seek not community and mysticism but drug use.

In some painful and heartfelt conversations throughout the ensuing week, what I heard from one young man made the most sense. Coming down from senior high camp on a spiritual high, he had struggled to figure out how to integrate that experience, how to reconcile that sense of community and love with his dread for the new school year approaching. Sharing in the illicit activity at least brought a rush, he said. He couldn’t recreate the power of high school camp, and was confused whether it had been real. This amazingly articulate high school student was able to say, “I thought it was real, but now I’m not sure.”

His honest reflection was an amazing gift to me. One that resonates with so much of our lives, and in fact, with the text for today’s sermon. I believe, help my unbelief.

This is what the father said after watching his son be healed. If we hold this one sentence out from today’s gospel reading, it feels and sounds different than if it’s read in conjunction with the whole story. Through struggle and confusion, a father’s child has been healed. He has lived with an infirm son for years, and now, one would expect, he is on top of the world. We can imagine that he’s actually overwhelmed.
On the heels of that, he says “I believe, help my unbelief.” What did he mean?

• I believe now, but there may come a moment or day when I can’t believe?

• I’ve doubted and been skeptical before, it could come again?

• I believe, but I know that pride and arrogance could get the best of me and I might forget what that was like?

• I believe, but I’m not sure what I believe – I’m still trying to sort this out –understand this – make sense of this?

• I believe, but I’m not sure I’m really awake – this dream may end?

The healing has to have been an amazing experience – but the juxtaposition of an amazing moment and creeping uncertainty is not unique.

The gift of wonderful spiritual experiences in our lives is they ignite something deep within us, often untapped for years, which results in a sense of connection to the world, power, and energy. These experiences hold our own personal universe together.
The challenge of such occasions is that sometimes it is hard to know how to mesh them with the rest of our lives.

• We feel so at peace sitting by the lake on summer vacation, but can’t recall that peace a week later back at work.
• We feel power and connection with others in our work trips or mission trips, but come home and feel a disconnect with that experience and the daily reality of our own culture.
• A wonderful experience of prayer and worship meets up with a grouchy spouse or partner or child, a pressing work deadline, the lingering depression or anxiety, the financial uncertainties.
• Sometimes the change shows up when we try to articulate the experience – putting something beyond description into words. I’ve seen it dozens of times bringing youth back from urban immersions, walking the labyrinth, or mission trips. The disconnect between what has happened inside them and their ability to articulate it often seems to diminish their spiritual high or spiritual experience. Many of you may have had a reaction to me when I exited from a concert by Bobby McFerrin a year ago. I could not put into words, and thus found it hard to share, the profound way that concert touched my spirit.

This father’s statement, “I believe, help my unbelief” resonates with many of us.

There’s another angle to this statement though. Just as we hear about the resurrection every year, and Christmas; of late we’ve heard about doubt and uncertainty. This story is a reminder that even in the midst of miracles, doubt doesn’t go away. It reminds that no matter where we are, how faithful we feel, how connected and grounded we are – doubt and disbelief are always close at hand.

We see it in the psalms – where praise and confusion come together

We see it in the story of Thomas – Jesus has been crucified, buried and has risen again – and Thomas ‘spoils the party’ with his questions, his insistence that he see the nail holes to confirm this wasn’t all a hoax.

We are reminded that there’s a reason the resurrection story and the story of Thomas are read in succeeding weeks throughout Christendom every year – they are BOTH part of our own spiritual cycles, our own journeys of faith.

In short, doubt is part of the cycle of faith.

Jennifer Michael Hecht, in a book about the history of doubt writes that “The great (historical) figures I love the most are ones who continue constantly to question. (What is often certain for them is that they don’t ) really know what the universe is all about. (But)they decide for sure that questioning is for them….You have to be a little bold and a little brave in most periods of time to be a doubter. …the dominant history basically suggests that doubt is very modern and that we had a few doubters in the ancient world, but …doubt is (not)a modern phenomenon… when I did the research … I found (doubt)it was much more cohesive and self-knowing than I had ever dreamed.”(Speaking of Faith interview)

Given the reality of doubt, given the cyclical nature of it, it is fair to ask, how do we make our way through it? How do we live with it?

Sometimes the way through uncertainty involves community – the faith of others buoys us in ways we can’t do alone. Just as doubt has been part of the faith cycle, community in the Christian faith has always been a given. None of us does this alone. When we say we are a covenanted community, we acknowledge that no one person will feel “full of faith” all the time. We support each other, teach each other, model for each other. For this reason, our emphasis on intergenerational community, while counter cultural, has profound relational and spiritual ramifications. We sit alongside one another in times of grief, disillusionment, and stress – not because we have answers but because on this given day, as a companion to another, we have just enough faith for the two of us.

Sometimes the way forward is aided by new information. The author of a new book The Evolution of God speculated recently that the rise in the “spirituality but not religious” segment of the population may have something to do with a sense that to follow an organized religion, one has to give up on science. It was probably an awareness of this that prompted our denomination to begin a campaign a couple of years ago on the compatibility of faith and science. A poster for it read, GOD MAKES ROOM FOR QUANTAM MECHANICS (and regular ones too). For too long, science and faith have had a combustible relationship. But even churches evolve. In the UCC we explore, celebrate, hypothesize, believe, question and pray. Science and faith are not mutually exclusive. No matter who you are or what lab you’re your working in, you’re welcome here.

It is an effort to help those who don’t know, realize there are churches and Christians who don’t separate faith and science. Just knowing that will help many who thought they had to choose.

It highlights that part of our faith journey is continuing to mine and plunge into the depths of the religion we profess. There are many versions of Christianity and many who leave the faith leave the version they know. Learning there are others versions can bring hope and new faith. This is why we have rainbows around the church, why we repeat each month that all are welcome at communion. We are trying to provide “new information” that will be a way forward.

Sometimes the way forward is through crisis, which pulls back all the superfluous and secondary issues in faith, and cut down to our core, we feel renewed in what we do believe.

Sometimes ritual leads us through. In one of our Java and Jesus dvd discussions last fall, pastor and professor Renita Weems said quite bluntly, “Faith is what you do between the last time you experienced God and the next time you experience God. I think it’s that interval right there – that “in the meantime.” (That’s the) beauty of ritual. It’s routine. It’s boring. But every so often, if you’re in the right place…God shows up and whispers something, maybe enough to keep you going for another twenty years . Worship, prayer, meditation, lighting candles – these and many other rituals don’t create spiritual connection, but sometimes they facilitate it. Sometimes, they catch us quite by surprise too.” (Genesis:  A Living Conversation)

The tragedy of much of organized religion is that these often repeated cycles of uncertainty, emptiness and confusion are too seldom acknowledged, honored, or appreciated. Too often the expectation is that our spiritual life will have a continual upward trajectory. Our experience tells us life just isn’t that way. As a community, we need to hold one another accountable to living a faith that matches such a life. As Joanna Macy, a Buddhist, has written, “It’s that knife edge of uncertainty where we come alive.”

Holding our community and our faith in this way – celebrating the honesty of our questions, celebrating our honest engagement with doubt and uncertainty – these become then part of our individual and collective witness of faith, part of our public and private testimony.

In the end the statement, “I believe, help my unbelief” is a statement of faith. A trust that the God who created us will not abandon us and trust in the community of faith that is necessary for a full life of faith. As we give thanks for that God, let us give thanks for those of us today who know this to be true. Let us also give thanks for those who can only wish it to be true. And let us give thanks for those in our midst who feel quite clearly that it is not true. For in this diversity lies our true hope for a faith to match our everyday life. Amen.

Today’s text
Mark 9: 14-24
The Healing of a Boy with a Spirit
When they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them, and some scribes arguing with them. When the whole crowd saw him, they were immediately overcome with awe, and they ran forward to greet him. He asked them, ‘What are you arguing about with them?’ Someone from the crowd answered him, ‘Teacher, I brought you my son; he has a spirit that makes him unable to speak; and whenever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they could not do so.’ He answered them, ‘You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you? Bring him to me.’ And they brought the boy to him. When the spirit saw him, immediately it threw the boy into convulsions, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. Jesus asked the father, ‘How long has this been happening to him?’ And he said, ‘From childhood. It has often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him; but if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.’ Jesus said to him, ‘If you are able!—All things can be done for the one who believes.’ Immediately the father of the child cried out, ‘I believe; help my unbelief!’