SERMONS

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Sean Gilbert – 8/8/10

Faith: The Dance of Gift and Daring..
ACTS 11:1-3, 8-16

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Writes the poet:
      “Another place!
it’s enough to grieve me –
that old dream of going,
of becoming a better man
just by getting up and going
to a better place.”

 

An embodied faith, a moving, emboldened faith,
an enfleshed faith
isn’t so much concerned with
what faith is as notion or concept,
simply how one might more fully live.

And by living I mean
enjoining the heart of gratitude
with the will and vision of daring;
a dance no less,
the intermingling of prayer and action,
spirit and soul, grace and desire
the incomprehensible divine and our raw humanity,
 faith, faith, faith.

I trust you noticed or heard some wonderful phrasing in the Hebrew text in relation to
Abraham (and the hidden Sarah).
      “He set out , not knowing where he was going...”
      (He was) “As good as dead...”
      “By faith he/she received the power of procreation...”
      “If they had been thinking of the land they had left behind, they would have had the opportunity/temptation to return...”
 
Faith then, as gift and daring, is an incredibly fertile, intrinsic, essential and dynamic aspect of the human experience, irrespective of religious affiliation; not a faith in something like a body of information, religious precepts or concepts, but faith as but an inner growing seed, a searing flame, a summoning bell, an irrepressible call to some place better, in life, in daily experience.

The early 20th century pastor and preacher Percy Ainsworth certainly understood this.
“Faith does more than hold our hand in the darkness; it leads us into the light. It is the secret of coherence and harmony. It does not make experience more bearable; it makes it luminous and instructive. It takes the separate or tangled strands of human experience and weaves them into one string cable of help and care.”
Ahh, back to the thread, and the golden thread at that.

So, far from being abstract, obtuse or on the margins of ‘real’ life, the gift and daring of faith is the unfolding of life itself. It is life breaking open to possibility again and again, not unlike the miracle of loaves and fishes. Or the mythical actions of Sarah and Abraham from whom unnumbered descendants come. Faith begets faith as surely as love begets love.

Over the past week many of you have had the opportunity to reflect on the unfolding journey of communal faith that is Christ Church/ELC. It is and hopefully always will be a grateful, daring, innovative and procreative pathway (figuratively speaking, I might add, although not exclusively) Generative, in that original thinking and original creativity, will always give birth to what is now needed. Nostalgia or mere conventionalism (a looking back), having no helpful place on the journey forwards. In this way and only on this way, can the presence and place of Christian community offer the vitality of Spirit so needed in an otherwise predictable landscape of pronouncements and old religious certainties , no longer attune to life, nor reality.

Our friend from Poets Corner, David Ades...
      “The passage through borders is an act of faith:
      cartographer’s tools, the language of the stars,
      the revolving wheel of night must all be sacrificed;
      the vanishing of reference points must be practised
      and perfected; the ground must be compacted into
`            a kernel, diamond hard and bright. Only then:
      the tensing of the muscles and the leap.”

The leap forward, the dance outward, wherein planning can only go so far and do so much.

For it is the leap and dance into this moment wholly and fearlessly (if that be fully possible), that then determines what is to come, what is to grow and evolve in the future. In the masterly words of Garrison Keilor, “You can’t go fishing without getting wet”, for there is something totally embodied about faith – messy even – when it stops being theory and becomes a human deeper reality; embedded in the moment, responsive to this time and alive to the possibility of this ever-present calling toward love and hope in our needy and desperate  world.

Let us take a few moments for our own contemplation...