What's Expected (Proper 22C)

 

What’s Expected
Seventeenth after Pentecost (Proper 22 Year C RCL)
5 October 2025--9:00 a.m.

Sung Morning Prayer with Liturgy of the Table

Parish Church of St Luke, Grants Pass (Oregon)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Readings: Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; Psalm 37:1-10; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

A few years ago, a member of the altar guild at Trinity Ashland approached me before service and said with emotion, “I need more faith!”  “What?” I said.  “I need more faith!” She repeated.  “How so?” I replied.  She answered, “I am totally angry and tired of dealing with the messes, drama, and scary stuff left by squatters when I come to Church in the morning. I know I should love the homeless and be gentle and welcoming.  But when they cause problems, I just can’t muster it.  I need more faith!”  

 

My heart went out to her.  Many of us in parish service have had to deal with “messes, drama, and scary stuff” due to people without shelter overnighting in the Church courtyard.  This good woman had been doing so admirably for months, only occasionally saying something when someone really went outside the boundaries.  But here she was, dealing with a major case of guilt and self-reproach for not “being nice” enough, for not “following Jesus” and forgiving.    All I could say was, “you have faith, and you don’t need to beat up on yourself for other people’s faults. We must keep reminding people of the rules, and if it doesn’t work, we might have to close the campus reluctantly, like all the other houses of worship in town.” 

 

“I need more faith.”  We all run into this, from a variety of quarters:  a feeling of being overwhelmed by demands on our time and emotional energies, and a sense of guilt and self-reproach when we don’t seem to be able to meet the requirements of what is expected of us, of what we expect of ourselves, or even muster a moderate amount of graciousness to help cover our shortfall.     

 

The Gospel reading for today is about this.  Jesus has just told the disciples that they need to forgive people who harm or hurt them even “seven times a day.”   The disciples respond with today’s line:  “Increase our faith!”  They are saying, “Yikes!  Forgive someone who does us wrong over and over again?  I need more faith.” 

 

Jesus answers,  “If you had even just a little tiny bit of faith, say the size of a little seed, then you could do impossible things!”  Elsewhere, it is “you can move mountains just by telling them to move.”  Here it is “you could tell that huge Mulberry tree over there to plant itself in the middle of the ocean and it would thrive there!” 

 

Jesus is being a little sarcastic here.  It sounds like he himself has had a bad day and might be saying to himself, “You need some faith here, Jesus!”  But what he means, stripped of the sarcasm, is clearly, “You already have enough faith.  Just put it into practice.”
 

He gives a parable saying it’s all about expectations:  “Does the household staff get to rest and have dinner just because they’ve worked hard in the field all day? No.  They must first feed the Householder in proper style and only then can they take their meal and rest.  Don’t expect any better.  Do what’s expected of you, and then some, and don’t worry about getting nice thank you’s or attaboy’s or attagirl’s.  You’ve only done what was expected.” 

 

As most of Jesus’ edgier parables, this parable in its original setting may be a criticism of the economy and society of exploitation around him.  But in Luke’s context it means:  “Lower your expectations and you might find that just doing what’s expected of you is enough of a reward.” 

 

What’s expected.  It sounds like a bad joke from that torment that most of us have encountered in our professional lives, the performance evaluation.  Cartoonist Scott Adams in one “Dilbert” strip pictures Dilbert’s officemate Alice seated across from her boss.  He begins, “Alice, your performance this year ‘meets expectations.’ You get a two percent pay increase.” Alice replies, “Meets expectations? I worked eighty hours every week!” The boss replies, “Yeah ... Well, I expected that.”  Alice adds, “I earned three patents this year! The company will make millions!”  The boss: “Really? Wow.   … I mean ... I expected that too.” Alice adds, “I donated bone marrow to our biggest customer! Twice!”  To which the boss replies, “I noted that under ‘attendance problem.’”  Later, Alice is in the cafeteria, clearly sobbing. Dilbert says, “I told you the bone marrow thing would haunt you.” Another officemate opines, “I'm starting to think the time I worked through my lunch hour was for nothing.”

Jesus says, “When you have done all you were ordered, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what was expected!’”  Sounds like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss from hell.  “Meets expectations?” Really? 

 

When reading the Gospels, we must constantly remind ourselves that the historical Jesus is to us a foreigner who speaks an unintelligible language.  His life and work was sparer and harder than any of us have seen.  They make the hardships of today’s third world look gentle.  His culture and religion are alien, with values and world-views that often seem narrow, inhumane, and even bigoted.  So we must carefully interpret his words or risk getting the wrong point.

In the chapters of Luke we have been reading over the last few weeks, Jesus has told shocking stories about people receiving rewards and recompense.   The loving father of the prodigal son welcomes the disrespectful and dissipated ingrate home.  He runs out to him, embraces him, and throws a big expensive party for him, much to the annoyance of his older brother who has met the expectations of his father and culture.   The householder praises the shrewdness of the dishonest manager, who retires to a gentle life being hosted and funded by those who benefited from his departing from expectations.  The homeless wretch Lazarus, no doubt ridden with messes, drama, and scary stuff, is welcomed to Abraham’s bosom, while the wealthy man who exceeded the expectations of society must suffer in the afterlife.

 

The disciples may well be thinking, “If moral reprobates, crooks, and those who sponge off of others are going to be blessed by God, just think of what good people like us are going to get!” 

 

And then Jesus tells them to forgive, forgive, forgive:  seven times a day for repeat offenders who seem not able to change.  And with the rest of us, they say, “I need more faith.”    Jesus, in clear exasperation says, “You want more faith?  Just a tiny bit of faith would work miracles for you, if you had any.  Let me tell you about some slaves who don’t get any extra praise or reward when they simply do what is expected of them.”

Jesus is giving them a Zen koan:  a saying hard to understand, that draws forth from us a change in perceptions and attitudes.   Like most of his parables, the saying turns everything on its head, and reverses expectations.   The first will be last; the last first.  The leader must be servant of all.

 

He is talking about faith in a loving God, a God of grace, a God like that loving father of two wayward boys.  If you want faith, you have to have faith.  And that means faith in God.  And God destroys our petty expectations by exceeding them. 

 

Jesus grew up reading and quoting from the Book of Sirach, which says, “My child, if you want to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for an ordeal” (Ecclesiasticus 2:1). Ordeal—dealing with the messes, the drama, and the scary stuff—is part of the job description of serving God.  It is part of the job description of being a disciple of Jesus. 

 

But faith in God—faith in the living Jesus’ expectation-overturning Abba—faith even in tiny, tiny amounts makes it better.  It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.  It’s about whether it’s real trust in that loving God. 

 

When we trust, when we are deeply thankful and grateful, well, we stop keeping score.  Many things that once were intolerably hard become easy.  We seem to know the right thing to say at the right time.  And we no longer have a grudge against God or anyone else.  True faith—even in tiny amounts—is like that. 

 

Thomas Merton wrote, “[Concern about] means and ends... is not the way to build a life of prayer.  In prayer we discover what we already have.  You start where you are, and you deepen what you already have, and you realize that you are already there.  We already have everything, but we don't know it and we don't experience it.  Everything has been given to us in Christ.  All we need is to experience what we already possess.  The trouble is, we aren't taking the time to do so.”

 

May we strengthen our life of prayer, and exert trust and faith in that living, loving God, even just a little faith, because that is all it takes to work miracles.

 

Amen. 

 

Shock Therapy (Proper 18C)

 

Shock Therapy

(Proper 18C)

Homily Delivered 7 September 2025

9:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of St Luke, Grants Pass (Oregon)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Psalm 1; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33

God, give us hearts to love and feel,

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

Today’s scriptures aren’t easy.  The first reading says if you follow God’s commands, he’ll bless you and your life will be wonderful.  If you don’t, he’ll curse you and your life will be miserable.   Most of us, I think, know from our lives that bad things often happen to good people, and the wicked often prosper.  Thus the faith of Deuteronomy seems more like a wish than a description of reality.  In the Epistle, Paul sends back a run-away slave, Onesimus (“Mr. Useful”) to his owner, Philemon.  Both are Christians.  Most of us probably wish that Paul had told Philemon “Slavery is bad; set Onesimus free.”  But no—all he can manage is “Take him back, be gentle, he’s a good kid.”  And the Gospel—well, it is one of the hardest of the hard sayings of Jesus:  “Hate your families and your lives.” 

 

On days like today I am glad we Episcopalians read so much of the Bible in our liturgy. And it is hard to believe in Biblical Inerrancy if you actually read the Bible and don’t just quote selected parts of it.  Your faith in Biblical Truth becomes nuanced, and you realize that sometimes the authors are arguing with each other.  You see that the unity and harmony of Holy Scripture lies deep beneath the surface, and not in the shallows of doctrines or morals.  Holding the Bible to be God’s word means being true to what that diverse dialogue revealed, and in continuing the dialogue even today.

 

Luke here shows us a fierce, scary Jesus.  “Whoever comes to me and does not hate [his closest family members and] life itself, is incapable of being my disciple!”  Can this be the same Jesus who said, “Love your enemies?”   Or “Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself?”

 

There are ways of softening Jesus’ message here. But these tend to miss the starkness of language and emotional freight of the saying.

 

The world where Jesus lived had plenty of ideas about whom to love and whom to hate. Deuteronomy teaches, “You shall love the Lord your God will all your might, mind, and strength.”  The Psalms and Proverbs include statements like “I hate all those who cling to worthless idols, the unjust, and the evildoer” and see these as a model.  Leviticus: “Love your neighbor.”  The Dead Seas Scrolls teach, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”  

 

So what is Jesus up to when he turns this on its head and says, “love your enemies” and, “hate your friends and family?” 

 

Context is key. Note how the story starts: “Now huge crowds had started following Jesus around.”  The problem here is an overabundance of popularity and unwelcomed celebrity.   People flocked to Jesus in curiosity, to see whether he might satisfy their hopes. Jesus’s hard saying is to these groupies. 

 

Luke adds, by way of commentary, two parables of Jesus that probably had circulated separately: the tower builder and the king going to war.

 

A similar parable did not make it into the canon: Gospel of Thomas Logion 98 is one of the few I believe may go back to the historical Jesus.  It is the even fiercer parable of the assassin:  “The kingdom … is like a certain man who wanted to kill a powerful man. In his own house he drew his sword and stuck it into the wall in order to find out whether his hand could carry through. Then he slew the powerful man.”

 

All three parables are about focus and commitment, and the need to be realistic about what a task may require.   Two are violent: a king going to war and an assassin preparing to murder a prominent person.   I am a pacifist, and reject wholeheartedly the myth of redemptive violence.  I wish Jesus had not chosen such violent images.  But Jesus’s fierce images here are about a fierce subject—commitment. 

 

Human endeavors, whatever they are, demand commitment.  Sometimes this means that a certain amount of force is required.   

 

When potters begin to throw pots on the wheel, they must first knead or wedge the clay to get it to the proper consistency and uniformity.  Then they must attach it to the wheel.  If it is not first properly affixed and centered, it will go unstable and spin off the wheel, unraveling into a chaotic mess.  To properly affix the clay you must slam it hard, with force, onto the wheel.  Anything less than that risks a failed pot.

 

When you get nibbles on your fishing line, you must firmly, with force, pull the line to set the hook.  Too violent, and you pull the hook out of the fish’s mouth, not firmly enough, it will get loose.  Either way, you lose the fish. 

 

Surfing requires you to really put an all-out effort at paddling when the wave begins to swell beneath you.  You have to give it your all or your board will be too slow, and the wave will pass it by.  To catch a wave, you have to have all-out commitment.  It is like this on a rugby pitch or football field:  you have to give it up, go all-out, leave everything on the field if you are to have any hope of winning, and that from the start.  Hold back, and you will most likely injure yourself. 

 

These parables and sayings should not be taken literally.  Jesus here is not telling us to go to war to be his disciples, to become assassins.  He is not telling us literally to hate our loved ones and despise life. 

 

He is saying that the cost of discipleship is high, far higher than any of the crowds following Jesus out of curiosity seem to have realized.  At the very minimum, it demands attentive openness to the teacher, rather than keeping a little running score on if the teacher measures up. 

 

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, grace is free, but it is not cheap.  It demands an all-out commitment. Faith is an all-life matter, not an expression of consumer desire. Faith cannot run on auto-pilot.

 

Jesus tells parables in order to shock his listeners into a new understanding, a new relationship. The parables, with their unlikely comparisons, twist endings, and overturning of expectations, are a little like Zen koans.  They seek to stun the hearer into a new reality.   They are Jesus’ shock therapy for souls lost in self-delusion.  The parables of the unfunded builder, the king unprepared for war, and the assassin’s training—these are his shock therapy for those who want to pick and choose their religion, who dabble in spirituality, and who are unwilling to go the distance with God.  

 

One Zen master famously said, “If you meet the Buddha walking down the street, kill him!”  Not a particularly gentle image.  The gut-wrenching saying forces us to understand that any Buddha we contain in our understanding or mind is not really the Buddha. So it is with “If you want to follow me, hate those you love.”  It’s precisely because families and our love for them matter so much for us that this saying shocks us to realize how important commitment to the Reign of God is. 

 

Jesus’ hard sayings all share this koan-like character: highly charged language and images, without any effort at softening them or prettifying them, force us to shift gears: “I bring a sword, not peace!  I divide families and loved ones, not unite them!  Cut off your limbs, sever your organs, and put out your eyes if they cause you to sin!  Leave your families without even saying goodbye and let the rotting dead bury themselves! Hate your families!”

 

Lord, have mercy! Sweet Jesus save us from Fierce Jesus!

This week, let us look at how we spend our time, our emotional energy, our money, and ask ourselves, what am I committed to?  Is it service and kindness?  Is it alleviating suffering and reconciling alienation?  Am I committed to Jesus and God’s Reign?  Where do my true desires lie?  What makes my heart sing?  Do my actions reflect these desires? 

 

And then let us pray for the grace to follow fiercely, with utmost devotion, what gentle Jesus, what fierce Jesus, is calling us to.

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.

 

Slack (Proper 16C)

 

Slack (Proper 16C)

Homily Delivered 24 August 2025

9:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Coos Bay (Oregon)

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17

 

God, give us hearts to love and feel,

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

A few years ago, I went on a cruise in the waters of Alaska and British Columbia, during which time I saw some of the great cliff-bound inlets of the Inner Passage.  One of these is called Ford’s Terror.  It is named after one Harry L. Ford, a crew member of the US. Coast and Geodetic Survey Vessel Carlisle P. Patterson.   One day in 1889, Ford, doing a survey of the area, took a small rowboat into the steep glacier-bound fjord alone.  The water in the narrow inlet as he entered was calm and relaxed, what sailors call “slack water.”  After a short time looking at the icebergs, harbor seals, and high cliffs, he rowed back to the inlet to go back to Endicott Arm and his ship.  But the tide had turned.  What had been calm, peaceful, and still turquoise water was now a raging torrent of white with a wall of curling surf taller than his boat was long.  For the next twelve hours, cold and hungry, he waited in terror, fearing that perhaps the calm water would not return before he died.  But at the next low tide, during the short interval between the tide going out and coming in, the water went slack again, and he was able to row out again, grateful and with a story of terror that would immortalize his name in maps and Gazetteers.  

 

 

“Slack”—the term draws up images of calm and peaceful water, but, for wind sailors at least, also risks water that is too relaxed, without enough wind above it to drive a sail-boat.    Slack sails are useless.  The word thus also means the lack of tension and tautness necessary to accomplish things.  My father always told me as a boy to “give it some slack” when I was fishing so that the line would let the baited hook drift naturally in the deep water.    Later, as a teenager, I came to feel he was perhaps a little too attentive to my life. His “Give it some slack,” became my “Cut me some slack, will you?”    Even later, one of the worse epithets my children hurled at each other when they might not be pulling their own weight was “you slacker!” 

 

Today’s Hebrew Scripture asks us to cut each other some slack, give each other a break.  Remove the yoke from among you.  Don’t exploit each other.  Remove the pointing of the finger, speaking ill of others. Don’t reduce others to objects to be evaluated and judged, ridiculed, made fun of, or maligned.  Give food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.  Stand with the downtrodden.  Help and don’t judge.  Give them a break because they need it, not because they deserve it.  When we give such slack and rest, God says, he will “build up your ancient ruins.”  That means “make you nation great again.”  So to make our nation great, we need to remove the pointing finger, break off the yokes of oppression we have placed on others, not blame others all the more and make their lives more miserable. 

 

This last week saw the death of James Dobson, the evangelical psychologist found of Focus on the Family, who did a lot of finger-pointing in his life.  I like to think that as he is ushered through the pearly gates, he is greeted by a choral rendition of “Born this Way” sung by the Heavenly Gay Mens’ Choir, composed of those who died AIDS and of having been kicked out of their homes at 17 years of age by “loving” parents following Dobson’s advice.  Then Matthew Shepherd leads him into to be judged by Jesus for what he did in his life.  Since “we believe he will come to be our judge” is not a gleeful expression “bad guys will get what’s coming to them” but rather an expression of hope for that divine judgment will be gentle, forgiving Jesus, I hope that even James Dobson is cut some slack. 

 

The Isaiah passage also asks us to cut ourselves some slack.   It ties these social justice issues to the Sabbath.  We shouldn’t place a heavy yoke upon us ourselves, even if we think this serves our purposes.   We shouldn’t belittle ourselves, or think ourselves slackers when we take needed rest.  We need to find time to rest each week, and make this a priority.  We need to not consider this shameful, or slacking off, but rather honorable:

 

If you refrain from trampling the sabbath,

from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;

if you call the sabbath a delight

and the holy day of the Noble One honorable;

if you honor it, not going your own ways,

serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;

then you shall take delight in the Noble One….

 

To be sure, the Sabbath is not just a call for regular down time.  “Remember the seventh day by keeping it holy.”  This means, as the Prayer Book puts it, a duty “to set aside regular times for worship, prayer, and the study of God’s ways” (p. 847).  

Yet rest is still at the heart of the commandment.  In the catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, we read, “"[The Sabbath] is a day of protest against the servitude of work and the worship of money" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 2172). 

 

In the Gospel reading today, Jesus gives a woman a break, and cuts her some slack.  She has been bound down by muscle tension, here personified as a demonic spirit, that held her doubled over for years.   He simply lays his hands on her, unbinds her, relaxes her, and restores her slack, natural posture.   She rejoices, thanking God. 

 

But a community religious leader nearby is not pleased.  He sees Jesus as a competitor calling for people to be lax in following the Law, slack in their religious duties.  He doesn’t want that particular yoke removed, and he points his finger:  “Your business appears to be faith healing and here you are, doing business on the Sabbath! Jesus, you slacker!”

 

Most rabbinic treatments of the Sabbath allow the saving of a life, even if the effort otherwise looks like work.  When Jesus is criticized for breaking the Sabbath by healing in John, what is at issue seems to be not the healing itself, but the means he uses:  he mixes his saliva with dirt to make a kind of eye ointment.  Mixing mortar for building or clay for potting were defined as work forbidden on Sabbath. 

 

In today’s story, being bent over clearly does not rate as a life-threatening condition.  “There are six other days of the week on which you could have done this,” says Jesus’ opponent.   His list of things forbidden or allowed on Sabbath has become taut and inflexible, the opposite of the restful slack Sabbath intends.   

 

Jesus points this out by noting that his critic fails to see the joy of the woman.  Pulling animals out of the mire was allowed on Sabbath in rigorous interpretations, even if their lives were not immediately threatened.  This woman was more important than an animal!  Her taut binding, bent over in pain for years, was worse than the suffering of a beast caught in the mud!  So couldn’t an a fortiori case be made to allow healing her? 

 

We are seeing here a Galilean legal flexibility running headlong against Judean legal rigor:  rural slackness versus urban tautness.  

 

Generally a critic of rigorists, Jesus himself could have his moments of tightness:  it is almost certain that the Historical Jesus forbade any taking of oaths or swearing on things, and the casual repudiation of one’s dependent spouse that was the divorce of his day.  

 

Second Isaiah had said, “if you honor [the Sabbath], … then you shall take delight in the LORD” (Isa 59:12-13).  The woman who has been set free from her bonds here is rejoicing in the Lord, and so, thinks Jesus, how can we possibly have violated the Sabbath?   A good tree yields sweet fruit, a bad tree, bitter.  What possible criticism is there when such obvious good has been wrought? 

 

Knowing when to cut ourselves and each other slack, and when to keep taut the line that ties us to the Good and the Right, and gets things done, is a trick.  Using a set of external rules to tell us this will, invariably, lead to a tight, inflexible rule that itself must be broken.  It leads to the pointing finger, the heavy yoke.  This art cannot be mastered without an open heart and open hands, without trust in God, and benevolence or good will for all.  It is rooted the principle that Jesus taught: forgive others that we may be forgiven; treat others as we ourselves would want to be treated.   This complex of ideas is covered by what Buddhists call detachment, compassion, and doing no harm. 

 

When Harry Ford was caught in what is now called Ford’s Terror, he almost certainly prayed for slack water.  We all pray for slack at times and we all must be able to give it. We are all in this together, and proper humility demands that we have solidarity with all our other creatures.  It demands that we be gentle. 

 

Remove the yoke, take away the pointing finger. The rule of thumb that Jesus uses here in this story is good—look at how our actions affect ourselves and others.  Regardless of fingers pointing at us or the yokes laid upon us, we must give the line slack or pull it taut as necessary to advance human dignity, love, and freedom.  

 

Jesus said his mission was to announce the Year of the Lord’s Favor, to break the bonds, to set the captive loose.  He announced the coming of God’s Reign in full power, and acted in ways that show he saw himself as the Year of Jubilee when all debts were forgiven, as the Sabbath of Lord, when all could rest and rejoice. 

 

He wants to cut us slack; we should let him do that.  He calls us to cut ourselves and each other slack.  This is how the pointing finger will be removed, and yokes broken.  Let go.  Cut someone some slack.  Give them a break. And let’s give ourselves a break as well. 

 

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.

 

Count the Stars (Proper 14C)

 

Count the Stars
Homily delivered the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

(Proper 14; Year C RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
10 August 2025; 9:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Emmanuel Parish Church, Coos Bay (Oregon)
Readings:  Gen 15:1-6,  Psa 33:12-22, Heb 11:1-3, 8-16, Luke 12:32-40

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh.

 

During the summer when I was 16 years old, I worked as a life guard at the local public pool.  In my off hours, I read a lot that summer, including the autobiographies of Malcolm X and of Mohandas K. Gandhi.  They made me think a lot about faith, justice, and morals.   I also worked through an introductory college text book on logic, to help me prepare for the upcoming high school debate season.  I was seized by the idea of parsimony in explanations championed by William of Occam: the shortest and simplest explanation that takes into account all the facts is probably the best.  I began wielding “Occam’s Razor” to cut back the superfluous and tendentious when simpler explanations sufficed.   One day, out in the summer heat on a life-guard high chair looking out over the swimmers, it occurred to me:  I could understand the world without any recourse to the idea of “God.”  I had been raised in a religious family, and was full of stories from Scripture that saw the world with God in charge.  Though increasingly at school I noticed the conflicting accounts of science and religion on the origin of life, various historical events, and even morality and sexuality, it had never occurred to me to question these stories told me by those I loved.  But as I sat there, I wondered if “God talk” were just a randomly extraneous explanation of things better and more elegantly described without recourse to stories seeming to me more and more like ancient myths.  Looking up at the sun, I saw merely a ball of superheated gas, not a celestial sign of God’s power and love.  The sky around it was an immense sea of atmosphere before empty space, reflecting and defusing the sun’s light to reveal the exquisite blue.  In that moment, I was freed from the burden that religion, swallowed whole and without question, had imposed on me.  A couple years later, when the song came out, I recognized the deep emotional roots of John Lennon’s call:  “Imagine there’s no heaven, It’s easy if you try.  No hell below us, Above us, only sky.  Imagine all the people living for today...  You may say that I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one. I hope one day you’ll join us, And the world shall live as one.”  

 

But by that time, I had run into the despair and fear of meaninglessness that my atheism allowed to grow, and had let those non-Christian autobiographies start me on a journey that led me back to trust in God more deeply, albeit with less certitude.  What I had shaved off with Occam’s Razor—the supernaturalist theistic explanations of how the universe works—never grew back.  But in its stead had grown a sense not of how but of why.  Those God-talk stories seemed to tell “why?” better and more parsimoniously than most secular tales.   And this, not with a God “out there” somewhere who might break into nature if we did something to impress him, but rather, a mystery of love in whom we live, and move, and have our being. 

 

Today’s scripture lessons are all about faith.  Here is my translation of the opening of today’s epistle reading from Hebrews: 

 

“Trusting in God, faith, is what undergirds whatever hope we have; it is what makes things otherwise unseen clear to our view.   It was, after all, by their trust that our ancestors gained special distinction.  And it is trusting that gives us the ability to truly understand what it means to say that God’s speech called the universe into existence: things visible created by the invisible” (Heb 11:1-3).  

 

The Greek word normally translated by “faith,” is in most cases better translated by “trust.”  Such trust—whether quiet or loud—is what lies beneath all hope.  It is what helps us see truth otherwise invisible.  That’s because meaning grows primarily out of an orientation of the heart, not the opinions of the mind.  We call such an orientation of the heart “faith,” or “trust,” openness coupled with confidence. 

 

The lesson from Genesis tells us the story of Abram.  In Rabbinic lore, Abram came from a family who for a living made idols, symbols for all the various competing things at work—fearsome or attractive—in the world about us.  The One God calls him out of this life of pursuing things before his eyes, and move from his ancestral home.  Today’s epistle says he responds by following the call, “not knowing where he was going.”  God promises him a new home, and legacy of family.  But Abram’s eyes tell him that none of that is possible: he and his wife are sterile and well beyond child-bearing years.  God takes Abram out under the night sky, tells him to look up, and “Count the stars.  That’s how many descendants you’ll have.”  The text says Abram trusted God’s promise, despite it all, and “God booked this trust as Uprightness.” 

 

“Count the stars”: more descendants than the stars in the heavens!  But this is more than an extravagant simile.  “Count the stars”: after all the glorious visions we have been treated to in the last few years from the space telescopes, we know that this is a call to ponder overwhelming, beautiful, and deep mystery.  God here calls Abram to look at one part of the world before him, calls him to visit a thin place, and contemplate the awe-inspiring night sky. The awe leads Abram to trust. 

 

But note:  it is impossible literally to count all the stars.  Or, if those space telescope photos are to be trusted, even count the galaxies, each with billions of stars.  There are just too many. You can’t count the stars.  But you can try.  And in trying you realize that you just can’t do it. 

 

“Count the stars—that’s how my promise will be!”   Things impossible now will become accessible.  Things invisible now become visible to a trusting heart.      

 

Faith and trust are not the opposite of disbelief and distrust.  They are not locked in a life and death struggle.  Rather, they are in dialogue.  Faith is trusting, despite all the reasons you have NOT to trust.  Faith cannot bring the invisible to light without working daily with the fears, frustrations, and doubt brought by the darkness about. 

 

Galileo Galilei famously defended himself against the Inquisition by referring to the continuity of faith and reason, belief and doubt: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”

 

And just as faith grows in the midst of doubt, the fact that we doubt at all is evidence of what we have faith in. 

 

J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote to his youngest son Christopher, “I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water.”  His point was that we are generally unaware of the framework of our lives—we take it for granted, and do not question it much.  A fish in water is unaware of the water about it: that is just how its world is.  It knows nothing of wetness, though wetness is all about it, because it can’t even conceive of dryness.  But take it out of the water, and it becomes acutely aware that something—something important and necessary for life—is missing.  Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis later wrote,  

 

 “My [adolescent] argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A [person] does not call a line crooked unless [they have] some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it?  A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet...  [A]theism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning” (from Mere Christianity).   “[Look at how w]e are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. ‘How he’s grown!’ we exclaim, ‘How time flies!’ as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal” (from Reflections on the Psalms.)

Trust is a matter of the heart.  Where we put our efforts is where our hearts wind up.  If you at times just cannot muster trust in God, seek out moments of awe, count the stars.  But then act as if you already have that trust, and it will come. 

 

Like Abram counting the stars, be honest about fears and doubts, but set out anyway, even though we don’t know exactly where we’re going.

 

Count the stars.  Look honestly at our reasons for doubting God, for not trusting in the Love behind all things.  God knows the world we live in is full of evidence of a lack of love.  But the very fact that we find this wrong, that it makes us uncomfortable, tells us that this is not all there is.  The glimpses of love and beauty and blessing we show and see from time to time actually reveal the true heart of things, the invisible heart of the world that faith makes visible.  As beautiful and sweet as this world is, it at times makes us gasp for air, like a fish out of water.  That’s because we are not made for this world alone, and the imprint of the Creator’s love is in our hard-wiring.    It turns us away from despair and back to the Creator whose image we bear.  Count the stars.  And know you are beloved.  

In the name of God,  Amen.