Isaiah 65:17-25, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13, Luke 21:5-19
“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” (BCP, p. 358) These words are from The Nicene Creed, a statement of our faith. We recite this Creed in worship every Sunday. So what do we mean when we say “we believe”? What does it mean to have faith? Our Gospel lesson today calls us to faith: “So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.” Have faith, God will give you the words, God will be with you. How do we know this, and I mean know this in the deepest sense, in our hearts, in our being? How do we come to this faith?
When we worship, we sing, we say prayers, we come to the table. We listen to the Word and to an interpretation of the Word. But, worship is more than an intellectual exercise. Bread and wine and a table are all part of our worship. These items carry meaning beyond the object itself. A table is a place to eat. Yet, our table here, our altar engenders in us a felt understanding of sacrifice, of offering ourselves to Christ, of offering ourselves to one another through a shared meal. Bread is food and wine is drink. Yet, in the Eucharist, the bread and the wine engender in us the presence of Christ in our worship and in our lives. Objects carry meaning and worship becomes more a felt experience than an intellectual exercise. Worship is an act of praise and intercession and thanksgiving. This felt experience is, I believe, a key to understanding faith.
Faith, in a manner, is inexplicable. It is a sense – it is a known sense, a felt sense. Archbishop Rowan Williams discusses faith in his recent book Tokens of Trust. Williams notes that the Bible does not offer an explicit argument for the existence of God (p. 21). Rather, we are offered an implicit argument through the struggles of the Israelites, the prophets and the saints in their relationship with God. So, what brings us to faith? What is the bridge from the intellectual exercise of reading the words or listening to the words, and that known sense of God’s existence, that felt sense that God lives with us and in us? Archbishop Williams points us to those people in our lives who draw us in, those people who have a certain way about them, a certain attitude or approach to life that we want to understand, that we want to be a part of. Perhaps this manner is a certain peacefulness, or a quiet fortitude, or a sense of thanksgiving – we are drawn in – we want to know that place, live in that place.
For Rowan Williams, Etty Hillesum is such a person. Williams describes her witness – her journey of faith as witness to God’s existence. “Etty Hillesum was a young Jewish woman in her twenties when the Germans occupied Holland – not a pious or conventional person at all, not someone with an explicit religious commitment. Her published diaries and letters from 1941 to 1943 show how, during this terrible period in the history of her country and her people, she became more and more conscious of God’s hand on her life, at a time when most would have been likely to feel more deeply sceptical about God. Imprisoned in the transit camp at Westerbork before being shipped off to Auschwitz where she was to die in the gas chambers in November 1943, at the age of twenty-nine, she wrote, ‘there must be someone to live through it all and bear witness to the fact that God lived, even in these times. And why should I not be that witness? In a letter to a friend from Westerbork, she described her life as having become ‘an uninterrupted dialogue with You, oh God,’ and she could write of sensing her vocation in the camp as being ‘not…simply to proclaim You, God, to commend You to the heart of others. One must also clear the path toward You in them’ (p. 22-23).” Living our lives in relationship with one another is not simply a way of getting through life. Relationship is foundational to our existence – relationship is how we learn and grow into the full stature of Christ. We are drawn to certain people because they trigger in us that innate desire to know and love God.
I read an article in the Chicago Tribune recently (“How Holocaust Heroine Rescued 2,500 Children”, October 21, 2007), another heart-moving story from the Holocaust, one that speaks eloquently of the witness that draws us to faith. This is the story of four high school students who have brought to the world’s attention Irena Sendler, a Polish woman who saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto. These high school students from Kansas were given an assignment: to “collaborate on a National History Day project to write a short play about an event from the past.” These girls learned about Sendler, and started doing research on her life, only to discover that she is still alive. She is 97-years-old and living in a nursing home in Warsaw. During World War II, Sendler was a social worker who made daily trips into the Ghetto. She took on the heart-wrenching task of convincing parents headed towards the gas chambers to give up their children. Sendler smuggled children out of the ghetto in body bags, potato sacks, even a tool box, and placed them in homes, convents and orphanages. She documented the ancestry and location of each child, placed the information in glass jars, and buried the jars under a tree in the neighbor’s yard. The play the high school girls wrote is entitled “Life in a Jar.” After the war, Sendler worked to reunite these children with their relatives.
These four high school girls are now in their 20s. Their 10-minute play has been expanded to 35 minutes, and they perform it around the country and abroad. However, what is equally as moving to me as the subject of the play is the relationship these four girls now have with Sendler. They have “forged a deep friendship with her.” They stay in contact with her and are planning on visiting her for her 100th birthday. Three of the four women do not have mothers. Their former history teacher explains, “She has become something of a surrogate mother for them…She is now the force that guides so much of what they do.” Sendler’s faith is a driving force in her acceptance of all people, in this Catholic woman’s felt responsibility to save these Jewish children. These high school girls are drawn to her in a way that shapes their lives. And, we are drawn to faith in Sendler’s witness and in the process which brought this story to the world’s attention.
This is a story of good amidst evil. Our gospel lesson today warns us that tragedy will occur, tragedy will be a part of our life experience: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues.” Etty Hillesum and Irena Sendler maintained their faith through tragedy, even grew in their faith through tragedy. “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” What does it mean to have faith in “the Almighty”? Why does tragedy occur with an Almighty God? Rowan Williams sheds some light: “…we can get the idea of ‘almightiness’ a bit wrong by thinking of it in terms of a great wish-fulfillment fantasy instead of seeing it as a way of saying that God always has the capacity to do something fresh and different, to bring something new out of a situation…(p. 16).” The question may not be why, “why tragedy?”, but how, “how do we live in this world?” God lives with us, God lives in us through all of life’s experiences. In our worship, the bread, the wine, the table, the candles, the stained glass windows, the music draw us in, draw us to that place where we have a felt sense of reverence, and praise, and dependence, and thanksgiving, and love…for God, our Creator. And, consciously or not, I believe we carry that holy place with us and we are drawn to others when we see it, or somehow sense it, in them. Our faith is affirmed and deepened…our faith grows through the gift of relationship. Thanks be to God! Amen.
