I should tell you what evoked this sermon was an incident a few weeks ago when an old friend stopped by after the service and asked me, "What are you working on now?" and I replied quickly, as though my answer sprung out of my subconscious, "I'm trying to find out what I still believe." It was an impulsive response but it reminded me: I've been out around this place for about fifty years, more or less. Some of you know me well and many of you may only know my name. Well, I have a confession to make this morning - though I preached here and had study groups for 35 years, I'm not sure any of you know what I believe and some of you could care less. But I will risk it anyway, in the hope that it might be helpful on your own journey.
I was born and raised in a devout Baptist home in Texas, nurtured and taught in Sunday School and church until I was 20 years of age. I was preaching at the age of 15 and when I was in college studying for the ministry, I preached on street corners and in jails. The bible was my source book for preaching and the guide for my personal life.
Before I go any farther, I would like to define what I mean by faith. In the letter to the Hebrews, it reads, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Faith is closely tied to hope. In the reading this morning, it claims that we are "saved by hope." I like Alan Watts' suggestion that faith is a leap into the unknown.
To continue my journey, all that happened to me in those early years in terms of my beliefs was shattered in WWII when I was in the Marines. I was an aerial photographer taking pictures of the carnage, death, and destruction of that so-called "good war." My simple and certain beliefs in the fundamentals of my Southern Baptist upbringing and its version of the Christian faith sort of disappeared from the map of my journey. While the war and my combat experience played havoc with my religious faith, it made of me a militant pacifist and an avid seeker for truth.
After the war I discovered another kind of Baptist (northern) and decided I might be able to be another kind of minister. This new possibility was fed by the books of Harry Emerson Fosdick. His writings led many ex-G.I.'s back into church. (For you younger folk, Fosdick was a champion exponent of liberal Christianity in the struggle with fundamentalism in the 30's and 40's. John D. Rockefeller, just as he helped build this church for the vision of Edward Judson, built Riverside Church for Harry Emerson Fosdick.)
After finishing college at U. of C., I attended Colgate Rochester Divinity School, a Baptist seminary in upstate New York, I got another shot in the arm when I found the writings and life of Walter Rauschenbusch and his social gospel. His version of the gospel was not only about personal salvation, but was about the redemption of economic and political systems that shaped and misshaped human lives. I became immersed in liberal Christianity. The other thing I learned about there was my Anabaptist heritage. That was part of the Left-wing Reformation that included Mennonites and Brethren. Baptists are not really Protestants. They were resistant to both Church and State.
I was into faith reformation.
I transferred to Yale Divinity School because I decided I wanted a ministry to students in higher education and Yale had a special department for that. It was there that my absolute pacifism and my liberal Christianity were both challenged and tested. I was exposed to theology and ethics by some of the greatest teachers of that time. My major professor was Richard Niebuhr, the lesser-known brother of Reinhold, but his equal any day, and he taught me Christian ethics. The theology de jour, at that time, was neo-orthodoxy, which was touted as the corrective to liberal Christianity. Somehow I wasn't convinced so I spent a lot of time reading the little known Russian theologians, Dostoevsky, Soloviev, Berdyaev, particularly, whose theology emphasized the humanity of God. In seminary, I had a voracious appetite for learning. I remember reading all 900 pages of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica and writing a critique of his "proofs of the existence of God." All that theology, biblical and historical, I absorbed and internalized, and when I went into student work at Ohio State with kids from the farms and small towns of Ohio, I found it rather difficult to try to pass on what I learned in seminary (as some of you here can testify) but I did manage to teach some of them a new way of looking at the Bible; and a few of them to translate Christian teaching into activity in social and political issues. There my theology faded into the background and my social and political ethics became more dominant in my thinking.
Then I came to Judson where two young churchmen, Bob Spike and Dean Wright, revived this church and were determined to make Christianity intelligible and relevant in Greenwich Village. They were meeting in artists' lofts and discussing Tillich, Camus and Sartre with believers and nonbelievers. I thought, "I have died and gone to heaven!" To find a church deeply involved in the community trying to make the church and the faith relevant to those who had given up on both. It was all that I could hope for.
Well, it was here over those three decades and more of world-shaking revolutions, political upheavals, and paradigm shifts that my faith was challenged, tested, and changed. Through it all, this congregation endured and indulged my evolution in faith and praxis, primarily, I think, because they were experiencing in their own lives the same unease about all they once believed. It was this congregation that adopted the position that "they loved the questions more than the answers" (of course that has its pitfalls and dangers).
It was here in your midst that my skeptical nature was confirmed. There was always a lament among members that I didn't talk about God much or for that matter, my mention of theology was rather scarce. Actually, the only thing that they were certain about my beliefs was that I was "hooked on Jesus."
So in 1971, I felt they were due an explanation, so I preached about why I didn't talk much about God or my beliefs. That confession was part of my faith journey and it may be close to where I am now, theologically speaking. When I was a young preacher down in Texas, I talked about God and to God all the time. Later, after seminary, I could bore anyone to death with a lengthy exposition on the theological implications for any ethical decision one had to make. Then, some time after I was preaching here at Judson, my claims for God seemed presumptuous. I began to feel strangely reticent and very reluctant to talk very much about God. Most of you know my claim that if someone asks me if I believe in God, my reply is: "I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that it might incriminate me." That simply means I don't know what "God" the person is asking about.
At that time, there were so many engaged in rather arrogant talk about the acts and attributes of God, as though she had allowed them to do her biography. I'm sure, all that loose talk about God made me more reluctant to speak of God. The name was so over-used and abused, its meaning so obscured, I fell silent.
I confessed to the congregation that I was a "trustful agnostic." Trust is a way of living that outlives many beliefs and I feel that the faith I have is not an absolute certainty but a fighting certitude. I believed that my life and yours are a gift from an ultimate Source. And I am responsible to and grateful for that Mysterious Giver of all existence.
At the end of that sermon I didn't know whether this congregation would be having some doubt about my fitness to be their leader (and I am sure some did). But they let me continue with them on my journey of faith. And remember that faith and hope are curiously intertwined, so I want to add here that both then and now my life is nurtured and kept going in a persistent hope that is rooted in my belief in an open future. My experience, confirmed in my aging years, tells me that it is always too early to announce the Apocalypse or the final doom for the human race. History has a way of swinging in wide and unexpected arcs that deal a total blow to every deadly determinism. Deep inside me is the faith (hope) that people are malleable - life can and does change, history is not frozen. It tells me that my life is not contingent on the future coming out right, nor is it validated by the victory or loss of any cause or reform that I might be fighting for.
I presume the meaning of this is that my identity is not dependent on what I have achieved, but it is dependent on my coming to terms with my past. I had to accept my early years in Texas in the care of pious and conservative parents, the racism and bigotry in my home and culture; I had to come to terms with my war years, living close to death, and inflicting it on others. All my experiences were teachers and shapers of my present life.
Is my journey of faith ended? I hope not. Even though I am in the December of my life, I am still on the way, seeking not a Holy Grail or Shangri-la but some more illumination on that which at this time "I only see through a glass darkly."
Since my re-deployment, I have been pursuing my search for a fuller meaning of my faith wherever it might lead me. Early on, I read a book, Constantine's Sword, by James Carroll, and that book almost made a Jew out of me, or I should say, more of Jew than I already am. The book was a 2000-year tracking of the abominable persecution, degradation, and humiliation that the church practiced on the Jews for their failure to believe in our Jesus Christ. I hope none of you are thinking, "but that was only the Roman Catholic Church," because it would mean that you have never read the anti-Semitic diatribes of Martin Luther or John Wesley or about the silence of Protestants in Nazi Germany.
I was led to reflect on and calculate the damage that our belief had done in all history. You know the suffering and violence perpetrated in the name of religious beliefs. It reminded me of a shocking statement made by a retired theological professor who said to me: "Howard, I am beginning to think that monotheism is the curse of our time." I am still trying to decide whether that was an excessive comment blurted out of a deep disappointment, or a confession with more truth in it than we believers would like to admit.
At any rate, my search has taken me to a concentrated effort to discover what the meaning of those confessions of faith, that we have claimed, will mean for us and our children in the post-modern world. I know at the present time everyone is frightened by the fundamentalists here and the Islamic jihad abroad. Even the Democratic Party is trying to learn to "talk religious" and that frightens me more than some of the threats that President Bush lays on us.
One thing I have discovered in my pilgrimage is that the post-modern world that has been evolving will play havoc with many of the beliefs and truths of all our social, political, and religious institutions. The words "eternal" and "absolute" will be lost in a changing vocabulary. For example, I have discovered a new group of evangelicals, just below the media's radar. It's called the "Emerging Church." They don't believe that the Bible can be taken literally; they believe you must be in the world; they shun mega-churches and as a matter of fact, all forms of the church as it now exists. They seem to be taking the post-modern world seriously even though they are about 50 years late. They are about where Judson was in the 60's, but at least they are seeing that the changes will require new truths and new ways of being the church in the world. There are scores of books written about these new age evangelicals. I must confess I haven't seen many progressive Christians writing about the post-modern world's impact on Christianity and its institutions.
Somehow I seem to be out of step in my search, perhaps because I'm taking a longer view than the next election or the next medical discovery that will improve our lifespan. Not that those are not important, but it's that my search leads to another level: the level of long-range envisioning. I'm puzzled and concerned about how the Church, conservative or liberal, is going to exist in a world of new paradigms. How will our spiritual tribe endure in a world where God is an extraneous symbol and religion is seen a perpetrator of wars and an oppressor of the poor and the marginalized, and where morality is nothing but a personal choice? I don't think we have been looking at the influence on our children and our children's children. The recent studies on the iPod generation might give some clues if we haven't already noticed.
In my present state of "trustful agnosticism," I'm hoping that I may find some answers to the changes that may need to come in new expressions of the Christian faith and new forms of the church in the post-modern age. In the meantime, keep on marching, voting, advocating for whatever we believe in, and allow an old man to be traveling on another road to discovery.
I know you didn't hear much faith in this exposition. Maybe that is because I'm still searching for that faith which I can believe passionately and I can hang my heart on, or perhaps Carmines was right, faith is something we can only dance and sing. Maybe it is not something we can write a treatise on or preach sermons about but that which we give our lives to with utter abandon.
If Donna asks me to preach again in another year, I may have a hint of what I have discovered. Thank you for listening to my journey and rest assured that I know each one of you have a travel story that has led you to what you now believe. It's not over, so "bon voyage."
