First Parish Unitarian UniversalistStanding on the Edge of Faith
by Rev. Christine Robinson
A Sermon Preached at the First Parish - Canton, MA
February 10, 2001
The Old Testament book of I Kings tells a profound story about one kind of faith and religious experience.the kind we UU's tend to have. Here's the story. One of God's prophets, Elijah, has, in the course of informing the King about Yahweh's preferred policies, gotten himself out of favor of the court..so out of favor that he must hide away, in fear for his life. He is profoundly depressed by what he sees as his failure to set the king on the straight and narrow path of righteousness..so depressed that he actually asks the Lord to take his life.
Instead, the Lord sends an angel to feed him up and then dispatches him to the wilderness to fast and pray (and presumably, stay out of harm's way) for 40 days. After this cooling off period, so the story goes, the word of the Lord came to Elijah and said, "Elijah, what are you doing in that cave?" And maybe Elijah heard that voice loud and clear but given what happened next, I rather doubt it. I think that what happened to Elijah was that he started to get restless in his hideout, and started to ask himself significant questions about the meaning of his one and precious life and what he should be doing next, and those questions seemed especially charged to him.
But they were not questions he was ready to answer..he was too angry and scared and depressed. In the story, he goes into a serious complaining jag, and rehearses his grievances. In spite of all his efforts of prophesy, leadership, and religious education, Israel has forsaken God, has built altars to worship other deities and killed all the prophets of Yahweh except Elijah himself and now they are planning to kill him, too. His prophet-ly project of saving Israel and proclaiming Yahweh's word to them in other words, looks to be a colossal failure.
I've been there. Have you? I've worked hard on some project, I've taken on commitments, given my all to some dream I thought was important, and one by one the props are knocked out, the others can't or won't continue, the obstacles are too great, the visions differ, the time is not right; it fails. The ship wrecks, the plans fall through, I'm left looking like a chump for caring so much -- you've been there, too, I know, in greater or smaller ways. So we can all relate to Elijah, staring out of the mouth of his cave on the edge of the wilderness, thinking and saying in his mind to God, "This project of the chosen people that you set me to, it's a goner and I'm a fool for having given so much to it so just forget it! You can have it all! And since everything I cared about is impossible, take me while you're at it!!!"
In response to this all-too-human whining, so the story goes, God sends Elijah to the top of the mountain and treats him to a rare, meteorological display. I quote:
a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rock, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind, an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.
What the voice said to Elijah is not recorded, which gives credence to the way The New Revised Standard version translates this passage. It says, "and after the fire, the sound of sheer silence.
After Elijah listened a while to the sound of sheer silence, he returned to his cave, and there, the word of the Lord came to him again, or it occurred to him to ask himself, again, "What are you doing in that cave, Elijah?" Elijah repeats his complaint. He is unhappy because the job he believes he was sent to do has failed, and because he thinks that he's the only one left to do it and now there's a price on his head, too. But after his experience of the sheer silence, the force of his complaint has dissipated, and he finally falls silent, and what comes to him in the silence is that it is time to continue his prophetic career and to go to Damascus and see to the anointing of the King of Syria.
Elijah goes, and it all unfolds from there. The chosen people have never completely straightened up, but they still revere Elijah as the greatest of the prophets who lived a Godly life and tried to get the wayward Hebrews to do the same.
This is my single favorite story about how God communicates with people, because it resonates with my own experience best. (Like Woody Allen, I've never seen such an unambiguous miracle that it forced me to believe in the God of my fathers.) To me earthquakes are just earthquakes and whirlwinds are atmospheric phenomena. I ask God for a sign or a portent and I, like Elijah, get the sound of sheer silence. And I know that you mostly do, too. At least we're in good company!
After all, this is one of God's prophets who is experiencing this silence -- a professional in the God business, after all. So it is really nice to know that, in spite of not finding God in signs and voices, he still manages to find relief from his funk, guidance for his life, and meaning and purpose restored to his days. He stands on the edge of the wilderness and on the edge of faith, hoping, presumably, to have it all laid out for him in plain Hebrew, but when what he gets is the sound of sheer silence, he finds it unexpectedly comforting and returns to staking his life (as surely as Christopher Columbus) on his internal belief that he is moving in the right direction. Now there's a prophet after my own heart! It's nice to know that a person whose experience of God is the experience of sheer silence, not only did such great things to be remembered by a religious community, but that his particular way of experiencing faith was deemed a story edifying enough to tell over and over, to embellish, and finally commit to sacred scripture.
This is how I experience the thing we call God. Not in signs and portents, unmistakable evidence, clear voices in my head urging me to believe this or do that-- That doesn't happen to me. But when I am really, really down, and really, really need some direction in my life, I, too, stand on the edge of the wilderness and on the edge of a doubting sort of faith, and listen to a question that comes from somewhere deep inside me. What AM I doing here, wallowing in self pity, nostalgia, or spoilt plans? Is this what I was supposed to do with my one and precious life? And it turns out that I don't need any booming divine voices dressed up in whirlwinds or earthquakes to answer that question for myself. Nor do I need a revelatory inspiration complete with fireworks to figure out what I need to be doing next. Turns out -- at least so far -- that I've got all this inside me after all. It doesn't matter what I name this, what matters is that I stop my frantic living long enough to pay attention to it, get up the gumption to as it prompts, and then own it as my own special brand of religious experience - the divine voice of sheer silence that at times gives me the guidance and strength I need to move into life from the edge of faith.
Late last year, the Christian Century, which is a liberal Christian news and commentary magazine, had a remarkable article about Unitarian Universalism in it. After commenting that our denomination has posted growth every year during the past 19 years.years which have seen most of the mainstream Christian faiths shrink painfully, the author quoted survey data from several sources about us. Among interesting items was this one. In significant contrast to persons in other faith bodies who participated in this interfaith research, Unitarian Universalists are not prone to have much in the way of vivid spiritual experiences. Not that we don't have a spiritual outlook..many of us do. But we tend to live our lives without a vivid sense of God's presence, without routinely experiencing answers or consolation from our prayers, and with an intellectual rather than a felt theology.
There's a shorthand name for our introverted way of experiencing faith; We' re mostly "Wintry" believers. This is in contrast to Summery types, who most often come in the breezy, "Me and Jesus" style of Country Western Christianity, but who can be found in all faith groups, including, occasionally, even ours. Summery types hear the voice of God, are pals with the goddess, get answers to their prayers, seem to experience general clarity and sureness about their faith and know that they're saved, right, and good. All of which is very intimidating to the spiritually shy Winter types.
Wintry types, whose experience of God is of mystery, absence, uncertainty, and sheer silence, are found in all faith groups, too. In any faith tradition short of the most charismatic, there will be some people who will admit, if they feel safe doing so, that they also don't have revelations, don't sense God's presence in their lives, and don't hear any specific answers to their prayers. There's a reason that Elijah's "still small voice" is one of the more quoted phrases of the Old Testament.lots of people relate to it. But Wintry believers feel they have to stay in the closet in their local Methodist and Catholic churches, whereas absence, silence, and unsureness is our spiritual specialty. "Cherish your doubts," we advise our newcomers, "for doubt is the attendant of faith.
It might seem utterly obvious that a denomination which is open to and contains a high proportion of Humanists, Agnostics, Atheists, and persons who think of their faith as "earth centered" will not report vivid experiences of God. But the cause and effect relationship is more often than not the other way around. Most of us came from traditional faith groups where only the Summery kinds of spirituality were talked about or celebrated, and where various beliefs and dogmas were based on the assumption that "everyone" has certain kinds of experiences. I still remember my utter bewilderment at my childhood friends and their ministers who told me that what I should do about my lack of belief in God was to pray about it. What, pray to the God I didn't believe in? How would I do that? They seemed to think it would come naturally and that out of such an exercise would automatically come answers and clarity. I was even told once that if this didn't happen to me, it was because of my sinful willfulness. How's that for blaming the victim? If someone at the Fourth Presbyterian Church had taken me aside and told me that one of the greatest stories of faith ever was about a prophet whose best answer from God came in the sound of sheer silence, I might be a Presbyterian today. As it was, lacking the spiritual experience that was taken for granted there, I could only conclude that my friends had been brainwashed by deluded adults who didn't seem to notice their circular reasoning. In the Unitarian Sunday school, they seemed to understand these things better. And here I am. Although, in the end, I did figure out a way to believe in God and have had a few experiences in the sheer silence that have confirmed that belief for me, I remain profoundly grateful that, as a Unitarian Universalist, I not only don't have to pretend to believe things I don't believe, but also, I don't have to pretend to be having experiences I don't have.
The fellow who wrote the Christian Century article took a stab at explaining why our strange and uncertain faith is experiencing modest success when our sister faiths are hemorrhaging. Even he knew that he had failed. I don't think it is such a mystery, myself. I think that what attracts people to congregations of any sort is their yearning to find words for their spiritual experiences, be they vivid or quiet, company on their spiritual journeys, be they dramatic or plodding, and help with their spiritual questions. What attracts people to OUR congregations is that they can find a variety of helpful words, companions, and assistance without feeling forced into a theological mold and they can find this help in an atmosphere where their tenuous or introverted or mostly absent experience of the holy is treated sympathetically and is widely shared, and used, not as a disqualifier for religious participation but as a platform for developing a faithful, spiritual life. Here's a congregation full of people who, whatever their beliefs, live rich and centered and spiritual lives without clear answers to their prayers, complete sureness about their beliefs, or direct answers to their questions about how to live and what to do, who manage quite well with still small voices and thrive in the sound of sheer silence.
Some UU's are not comfortable naming that inner voice of self or conscience, Divine -- some are. I doubt that any UU would deny that it exists or that it is important, so that this is one area in which theology is just window dressing on a common experience. It is not really important for our lives whether Elijah heard the voice of God in the cave or whether the stirrings of his own conscience were asking him what he was doing there and what he should be doing next, or whether those two are just two names for the same reality. The important thing is that we understand that experiences of conscience, intuition, and insight are important to us and that, however we talk about them, we pay attention to them and understand them as experiences of faith which we must embrace or stand forever on the edge, not only of faith, but of life.
The important thing, after all, in the end, is not how we explain the origin of our wisdom and longings, but that we follow them into an active and meaningful life and don't stay in that cave on the edge of the wilderness ignoring whatever it is that is urging us to move on. The important thing is that we go ahead and act, in spite of our uncertainties, that we follow the call of the best that we know, that we leap, after looking as hard as we can, into the unknown without letting the fact that we're not as sure of ourselves as our Summery friends, keep us from doing anything at all.
Spiritual maturity for the typical UU, Wintry, Elijah-like soul is getting used to the idea that we will mostly have to act and believe without absolute certainty and acting and believing anyway. Elijah came to the conclusion that he needed to get on with his life as a prophet as best he could and to go to anoint the King of Syria. So he went. But he didn't go because he saw the instructions written in bold type in the sky, he went because, as best he could figure with the deepest wisdom he could command, that was what he was supposed to do. Did he know it like he knew that the sun would rise in the morning? No. But he went anyway. And, for him, the risk paid off.
So it is for us. We decide to have a baby--or not. Or take the terrible risk of love, or find a new church or conclude that it is time to cease treatment or give up on a dream or change our attitude toward some problem in our life. Do we know for sure that is the best course? Rarely. We see multiple possibilities and sympathize at least somewhat, with all sides. Sometime we mutter among ourselves that it would be nice to have the sureness of faith and ethics that our neighbors do, but its just an act. We 're secretly proud of our doubts and our ability to make distinctions among shades of gray. We appreciate ourselves and each other for appreciating the mystery and the wonder of our lives and for not trying to have easy answers. We may not know what a prayer is, but we do know how to pay attention, and when we need to, we do.
We mostly know that, in the face of all this uncertainty, we could stand perpetually on the edge of faith, huddle in our cave on the edge of the wilderness, and sulk our lives away. Not a good plan. Big waste of the one, wild and precious life. So we pack up our cherished uncertainties, throw our capes over our shoulders and move out into the mystery, armed with the knowledge that we are capable of living by our wits and that, when we really need it, when things come to a crashing halt and we've hardly any choice but to listen, we will hear the sound of sheer silence, and know it to be the way home.