Say What?
Say What?
Rev. Chandler Stokes Mark 12:18-27
The Fourth Sunday of Easter April 26, 2015 Scripture Introduction Today’s text comes in the middle of a series of three controversies in Mark 12. In each dispute Jesus’ opponents are ostensibly testing him, and yet in the larger sense they are on trial before him. In each passage, God’s claim is at issue—do they understand themselves as “before God”? In the first passage, Jesus says, “Render to God what belongs to God. And you belong to God.” In the third, Jesus says, “You owe God your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” And in today’s text, intentionally set between them, Jesus’ opponents are trying to dismiss his claim on them entirely by disputing his logic. Today I want to draw attention to this stratagem of Jesus’ opponents, rather than the specific argument. They employ their intellect to fend off the claim of the one to whom they belong. Scripture: Mark 12:18-27 18 Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and asked him a question, saying, 19 “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. 20 There were seven brothers; the first married and, when he died, left no children; 21 and the second married the widow and died, leaving no children; and the third likewise; 22 none of the seven left children. Last of all the woman herself died. 23 In the resurrection whose wife will she be? For the seven had married her.” 24 Jesus said to them, “Is not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? 25 For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. 26 And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? 27 He is God not of the dead, but of the living; you are quite wrong.” *** This series of disputes is a series of trials on the streets of Jerusalem. The frustration and failure of Jesus’ opponents to entrap or defeat him intellectually eventually leads to their putting him on trial before the Sanhedrin. In each street trial, Jesus keeps turning his adversaries back to the claim God has on them: You bear the image of God; you belong to God. You’re called to love God with everything you are. He is God of the living—not just Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but you. It’s as if Jesus kept saying, “Do you see in whose court you stand? What is your testimony?” As I said in the introduction, I don’t intend to address the content of this particular argument so much as take it as an example of intellectual maneuvering to distance God’s claim. In this series of controversies, Jesus keeps asserting God’s loving prerogative on our lives, and the Sadducees here simply want to dismiss Jesus’ claim altogether for its illogic. But before I move on to that more general point, I will comment on one thing in this argument. Jesus says, “…when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” Jesus wasn’t alone in this view. Rabbis of that time often made the point that angels don’t marry, because they don’t have sex. The rabbis felt compelled to point out—this is great—that the reason Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
Say What? angels don’t is that heaven is better than sex. I kid you not. Biblical commentaries will take you places you never imagined. Last week we explored how assumptions about Christianity sometimes make it difficult for people to trust our welcome. This week I want to examine how assumptions about religion in general also make it difficult for people to find their way into religious community. The Sadducees’ arguments stand in today for all the disputation that pushes the life of faith away. We live in an age of scientism that expects everything to have an explanation, when all truth must carry a kind of scientistic proof to have value; and religious truth is often erroneously expected to be empirical truth. Even though serious scientists can and do understand the difference and can have no difficulty as persons of faith, many others, less reflective, are drawn to shallow skepticism and glib rejection of religious truth, based on flawed expectations. Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury’s, recent work The Edge of Words suggests that when we speak of God, there comes a point when “…to go on speaking at all requires a shift of expectation, away from the assumption that there will be a point of descriptive closure, some expression or formulation that is definitively adequate to what is in view.”1 What he suggests is that when we speak of God or even use the word “God,” we are dealing with something that will not submit to definitive description. One might say that God hovers always on the edge of words. And since our age expects some “expression or formulation that is definitively adequate” to everything, God eludes that and thereby is dismissed. What seems to happen is that, when the language fails to meet this false standard of proof, when language fails to provide the expected secure, definitive grasp, many back away and reject the possibility of any other kind of truth. The alternative would be that, when we reach the edge of words, rather than back away, we instead show up. When we ask you, the new members joining Westminster, to witness today, to testify to your faith, we are not asking you to state an empirical truth that is entirely outside of you, like an object or idea that somehow asks nothing of you. We are asking you to step to the edge of words, where you are indeed on the line or in the dock before the God of the living, where trust and conviction must go. Many of you have heard this story before. When I was sixteen years old, my father wanted me to join the church. I’d been to two new-members series, and after both, I’d told him, “I just don’t get it.” I don’t get what they’re asking me or understand what they’re saying.” He said: “Chandler, they’re just asking you if you believe in God. And you can think of God as something like the laws of probability.” This statement was really helpful to me at the time. In retrospect, I joined the church mostly because I wanted to get Dad off my back. I was tired of going to these classes. But what he said to me was important. His phrase, “something like the laws of probability,” opened a door for me that simply hadn’t been there before. I was sixteen, but the image of an old man with a big, Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language, Kindle Edition (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), Kindle Locations 271-73.
1
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 2 of 5
April 26, 2015
Say What? long beard sitting on a throne in the sky was still pretty much the only image I had of God. So my father gave me something more intriguing and palatable, something that engaged my mind and set me free from the confines of my earlier, more restricted view. “Something like the laws of probability” suggested something that set the circumstances, created the givens of the universe such that what happened, happened. It was something subtle, pervasive, huge, and constant. It was also something full of un-anticipatable events and yet woven securely into the fabric of reality. That suggested a lot about God that was more durable than the old man on the throne. I still think that it’s an evocative metaphor for God. But all metaphors have their limits. “Probability” certainly lacks warmth, or intimacy, or affection. I can see why it worked for Dad. Nevertheless, it was helpful simply in terms of providing an alternative to an image of old masculine authority, too easily reduced to human projection. But the piece that I didn’t even think to question at the time was what he said the church was asking me. He said, “They’re just asking you if you believe in God.” Dad was trying to make the concept of God intellectually palatable for me, trying to give me an idea of God that would allow me to join the church. He imagined that the church was asking me to believe in God, to give intellectual assent to an idea—it’s not uncommon. The English word “believe” doesn’t help us grasp the biblical concept very well. That’s why, when folks join the church, we don’t ask, “Do you believe in God?” That suggests intellectual assent. Instead, we ask, “Do you trust…?” We ask, “Do you trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” There’s a difference. The Greek word that we translate “believe” is the word πιστεύω, and that word is best translated “trust”—not “believe.” I shared this example with the new members the other night. I’ve seen people out on the ice, ice fishing. (And remember, I grew up in California.) I’ve seen them cut a hole in the ice and drop their line in the water. And I’ve seen them set up their little shacks out there. I’ve heard they’ve got heaters and cold beer. The cold beer I definitely believe. And I’ve seen them drive their trucks out on the ice. I believe that you can drive your one-ton truck out on the ice, but I πιστεύω gravity. I’m not driving out there. And trust is the issue. So we ask, “Do you trust Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” Belief is intellectual assent; trust is about how it shows up in your life; it’s responding to the claim. We ask, “Do you trust?” I had no idea what I was getting into when I joined the church at sixteen. I may have exchanged the concept of the man in the sky for mathematical probability, but I could still hold the whole thing at arm’s length. It wasn’t at all clear what difference it should/would/could make to “believe” in God. I might have drawn a little nearer the edge of words, but I wasn’t going beyond concept. I have often quoted a small portion of astronomer Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. I commend the book and the film it inspired. The minister, Joss, asks the scientist, Ellie, “Did you love your father?” Ellie says, “Yes,
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 3 of 5
April 26, 2015
Say What? very much.” And Joss says, “Prove it.”2 She is at a loss for words. She is very good at pointing out what appear to be logical inconsistencies in the concept of God. But when she is at a loss for words, she moves toward deeper understanding. The whole story of Contact is instructive—it is one brilliant scientist’s take on faith and science. An extraterrestrial species contacts earth. The message earth receives includes instructions for building an inter-galactic traveling machine. It’s not clear to the earth scientists how the machine works. It’s beyond their ability to grasp, but they are able to build it. And Ellie is sent in the machine. What happens when she enters it is mysterious. Speaking of places you never imagined, Ellie experiences going through what seems to her like a wormhole in space—though she has difficulty describing it. She experiences arriving at a place where she is shown and told amazing things. She even encounters her long-dead father in an extraordinary, ambiguous, and mysteriously resurrected way. Then suddenly, she finds herself back on earth. No one on earth saw her go anywhere. She simply went into and came out of the machine—no time passing at all. The only evidence is 18 hours of static on her recording device. But there is no empirical or scientific evidence of any of her journey—none. In the controversy that ensues, Ellie is brought before Congress to testify. The government offers that the whole thing has been an elaborate hoax—which would explain everything within a scientific view of the universe. And Ellie has to concede that the hoax is plausible, and she is reduced to offering her story without proof, a story that strains credibility. She has to concede that perhaps it didn’t happen. But she adds, “[I can’t withdraw my testimony], I had an experience. I can’t prove it. I can’t even explain it. But everything that I know as a human being, everything I am, tells me that it was real. I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever, a vision of the universe, that tells us undeniably how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are, a vision that tells us we are a part of something greater than ourselves that we are not, that none of us are alone…. I wish I could share that, so that everyone, if even for a moment, could feel that awe, and humility, and hope… That continues to be my wish.” With this experience that takes her to the edge of words, Ellie testifies before Congress; she is reduced to testimony alone in this trial. And so she crosses over from proof to πιστεύω and testimony. Theologian David Ford says, [The word of faith is] “inevitably self-involving. It cannot be adequately taken in unless we begin to be transformed… [It] is not a truth about which we can appropriately say
The precise quote in the screenplay is as follows: “JOSS (the minister, asks ELLIE, the scientist if she loved her parents) ELLIE: I never knew my mother. My father died when I was nine. JOSS: Did you love him? ELLIE (softly): Yes. Very much. JOSS: Prove it.” The context for the quote is also very instructive. I do commend the film. This script can be found at http://sfy.ru/?script=contact; screenplay by Menno Meyjes, Ann Druyan & Carl Sagan, Michael Goldenberg, Jim V. Hart—copyright 1997.
2
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 4 of 5
April 26, 2015
Say What? ‘How interesting!’ and then go on to some other investigation. It has the urgency of the most relevant news—like someone shouting ‘Fire!’ or whispering ‘Will you marry me?’”3 “Paul Ricoeur claims that testimony always exists in the context of a trial. This implies several things. One of which is that there will always be other voices, maybe even disputation, so the witness does not use the language of certainty but rather the rhetoric of persuasion.4 “Testimony, like Christian faith itself,… is not the language of certainty; but rather the language of conviction. It is not the language of knowledge, like the kind of knowledge that is rooted in fact, but is rather the language of trust that is rooted in experience. The language of testimony is not language to convince but language to persuade, to allure. It is language that is winsome. We may not be testifying before Congress, today or any day of the week. We may not feel ourselves in court or on trial. We may not sense that our testimony matters a great deal, but Tom Long says, “Christians understand themselves to be in the biggest court case of all, the trial of the ages. What is being contested is the very nature of reality, and everything is at stake.”5 Faith is more about trust than about belief, and trust is about how faith shows up in how we live, like driving on ice. It’s beautiful, really. When the scientist Ellie is beginning to experience what the intergalactic device is doing, she slides over the edge of words to testimony and says, “I can’t explain it; I can’t even describe it.” When Ellie is in that heaven-like place, where the wormhole takes her, she says, “Oh, it’s beautiful. … no words… no words… to describe it… poetry… They should have sent a poet… It’s so beautiful. Beautiful. So beautiful. So beautiful. I had no idea. I had no idea. I had no idea.” And in her “πιστεύω” Ellie testifies, “I was given something wonderful, something that changed me…” Maybe this sanctuary is some kind of inter-galactic machine, where at moments we can experience “undeniably how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are,… that we are a part of Something greater than ourselves, that no one, none of us is alone….,” where those moments of awe, and humility, and hope may change us. It is a gift that can change us forever. We believe. Help our unbelief. We trust. Lord, help that faith show up in our lives and testify to your presence at the edge of words. Let the people say, Amen.
David Ford, The Shape of Living: Spiritual Directions for Everyday Life (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), p. 10. These and the next few paragraphs are largely from Rev. Tom Are’s lectures at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in January 2012, with some editing.
3
4
Anna Carter Florence, Preaching as Testimony (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007), p. 62.
5
Thomas G. Long, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), p. 28.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 5 of 5
April 26, 2015
Rev. Chandler Stokes Mark 12:18-27
The Fourth Sunday of Easter April 26, 2015 Scripture Introduction Today’s text comes in the middle of a series of three controversies in Mark 12. In each dispute Jesus’ opponents are ostensibly testing him, and yet in the larger sense they are on trial before him. In each passage, God’s claim is at issue—do they understand themselves as “before God”? In the first passage, Jesus says, “Render to God what belongs to God. And you belong to God.” In the third, Jesus says, “You owe God your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” And in today’s text, intentionally set between them, Jesus’ opponents are trying to dismiss his claim on them entirely by disputing his logic. Today I want to draw attention to this stratagem of Jesus’ opponents, rather than the specific argument. They employ their intellect to fend off the claim of the one to whom they belong. Scripture: Mark 12:18-27 18 Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and asked him a question, saying, 19 “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. 20 There were seven brothers; the first married and, when he died, left no children; 21 and the second married the widow and died, leaving no children; and the third likewise; 22 none of the seven left children. Last of all the woman herself died. 23 In the resurrection whose wife will she be? For the seven had married her.” 24 Jesus said to them, “Is not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? 25 For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. 26 And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? 27 He is God not of the dead, but of the living; you are quite wrong.” *** This series of disputes is a series of trials on the streets of Jerusalem. The frustration and failure of Jesus’ opponents to entrap or defeat him intellectually eventually leads to their putting him on trial before the Sanhedrin. In each street trial, Jesus keeps turning his adversaries back to the claim God has on them: You bear the image of God; you belong to God. You’re called to love God with everything you are. He is God of the living—not just Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but you. It’s as if Jesus kept saying, “Do you see in whose court you stand? What is your testimony?” As I said in the introduction, I don’t intend to address the content of this particular argument so much as take it as an example of intellectual maneuvering to distance God’s claim. In this series of controversies, Jesus keeps asserting God’s loving prerogative on our lives, and the Sadducees here simply want to dismiss Jesus’ claim altogether for its illogic. But before I move on to that more general point, I will comment on one thing in this argument. Jesus says, “…when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” Jesus wasn’t alone in this view. Rabbis of that time often made the point that angels don’t marry, because they don’t have sex. The rabbis felt compelled to point out—this is great—that the reason Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
Say What? angels don’t is that heaven is better than sex. I kid you not. Biblical commentaries will take you places you never imagined. Last week we explored how assumptions about Christianity sometimes make it difficult for people to trust our welcome. This week I want to examine how assumptions about religion in general also make it difficult for people to find their way into religious community. The Sadducees’ arguments stand in today for all the disputation that pushes the life of faith away. We live in an age of scientism that expects everything to have an explanation, when all truth must carry a kind of scientistic proof to have value; and religious truth is often erroneously expected to be empirical truth. Even though serious scientists can and do understand the difference and can have no difficulty as persons of faith, many others, less reflective, are drawn to shallow skepticism and glib rejection of religious truth, based on flawed expectations. Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury’s, recent work The Edge of Words suggests that when we speak of God, there comes a point when “…to go on speaking at all requires a shift of expectation, away from the assumption that there will be a point of descriptive closure, some expression or formulation that is definitively adequate to what is in view.”1 What he suggests is that when we speak of God or even use the word “God,” we are dealing with something that will not submit to definitive description. One might say that God hovers always on the edge of words. And since our age expects some “expression or formulation that is definitively adequate” to everything, God eludes that and thereby is dismissed. What seems to happen is that, when the language fails to meet this false standard of proof, when language fails to provide the expected secure, definitive grasp, many back away and reject the possibility of any other kind of truth. The alternative would be that, when we reach the edge of words, rather than back away, we instead show up. When we ask you, the new members joining Westminster, to witness today, to testify to your faith, we are not asking you to state an empirical truth that is entirely outside of you, like an object or idea that somehow asks nothing of you. We are asking you to step to the edge of words, where you are indeed on the line or in the dock before the God of the living, where trust and conviction must go. Many of you have heard this story before. When I was sixteen years old, my father wanted me to join the church. I’d been to two new-members series, and after both, I’d told him, “I just don’t get it.” I don’t get what they’re asking me or understand what they’re saying.” He said: “Chandler, they’re just asking you if you believe in God. And you can think of God as something like the laws of probability.” This statement was really helpful to me at the time. In retrospect, I joined the church mostly because I wanted to get Dad off my back. I was tired of going to these classes. But what he said to me was important. His phrase, “something like the laws of probability,” opened a door for me that simply hadn’t been there before. I was sixteen, but the image of an old man with a big, Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language, Kindle Edition (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), Kindle Locations 271-73.
1
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 2 of 5
April 26, 2015
Say What? long beard sitting on a throne in the sky was still pretty much the only image I had of God. So my father gave me something more intriguing and palatable, something that engaged my mind and set me free from the confines of my earlier, more restricted view. “Something like the laws of probability” suggested something that set the circumstances, created the givens of the universe such that what happened, happened. It was something subtle, pervasive, huge, and constant. It was also something full of un-anticipatable events and yet woven securely into the fabric of reality. That suggested a lot about God that was more durable than the old man on the throne. I still think that it’s an evocative metaphor for God. But all metaphors have their limits. “Probability” certainly lacks warmth, or intimacy, or affection. I can see why it worked for Dad. Nevertheless, it was helpful simply in terms of providing an alternative to an image of old masculine authority, too easily reduced to human projection. But the piece that I didn’t even think to question at the time was what he said the church was asking me. He said, “They’re just asking you if you believe in God.” Dad was trying to make the concept of God intellectually palatable for me, trying to give me an idea of God that would allow me to join the church. He imagined that the church was asking me to believe in God, to give intellectual assent to an idea—it’s not uncommon. The English word “believe” doesn’t help us grasp the biblical concept very well. That’s why, when folks join the church, we don’t ask, “Do you believe in God?” That suggests intellectual assent. Instead, we ask, “Do you trust…?” We ask, “Do you trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” There’s a difference. The Greek word that we translate “believe” is the word πιστεύω, and that word is best translated “trust”—not “believe.” I shared this example with the new members the other night. I’ve seen people out on the ice, ice fishing. (And remember, I grew up in California.) I’ve seen them cut a hole in the ice and drop their line in the water. And I’ve seen them set up their little shacks out there. I’ve heard they’ve got heaters and cold beer. The cold beer I definitely believe. And I’ve seen them drive their trucks out on the ice. I believe that you can drive your one-ton truck out on the ice, but I πιστεύω gravity. I’m not driving out there. And trust is the issue. So we ask, “Do you trust Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” Belief is intellectual assent; trust is about how it shows up in your life; it’s responding to the claim. We ask, “Do you trust?” I had no idea what I was getting into when I joined the church at sixteen. I may have exchanged the concept of the man in the sky for mathematical probability, but I could still hold the whole thing at arm’s length. It wasn’t at all clear what difference it should/would/could make to “believe” in God. I might have drawn a little nearer the edge of words, but I wasn’t going beyond concept. I have often quoted a small portion of astronomer Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. I commend the book and the film it inspired. The minister, Joss, asks the scientist, Ellie, “Did you love your father?” Ellie says, “Yes,
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 3 of 5
April 26, 2015
Say What? very much.” And Joss says, “Prove it.”2 She is at a loss for words. She is very good at pointing out what appear to be logical inconsistencies in the concept of God. But when she is at a loss for words, she moves toward deeper understanding. The whole story of Contact is instructive—it is one brilliant scientist’s take on faith and science. An extraterrestrial species contacts earth. The message earth receives includes instructions for building an inter-galactic traveling machine. It’s not clear to the earth scientists how the machine works. It’s beyond their ability to grasp, but they are able to build it. And Ellie is sent in the machine. What happens when she enters it is mysterious. Speaking of places you never imagined, Ellie experiences going through what seems to her like a wormhole in space—though she has difficulty describing it. She experiences arriving at a place where she is shown and told amazing things. She even encounters her long-dead father in an extraordinary, ambiguous, and mysteriously resurrected way. Then suddenly, she finds herself back on earth. No one on earth saw her go anywhere. She simply went into and came out of the machine—no time passing at all. The only evidence is 18 hours of static on her recording device. But there is no empirical or scientific evidence of any of her journey—none. In the controversy that ensues, Ellie is brought before Congress to testify. The government offers that the whole thing has been an elaborate hoax—which would explain everything within a scientific view of the universe. And Ellie has to concede that the hoax is plausible, and she is reduced to offering her story without proof, a story that strains credibility. She has to concede that perhaps it didn’t happen. But she adds, “[I can’t withdraw my testimony], I had an experience. I can’t prove it. I can’t even explain it. But everything that I know as a human being, everything I am, tells me that it was real. I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever, a vision of the universe, that tells us undeniably how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are, a vision that tells us we are a part of something greater than ourselves that we are not, that none of us are alone…. I wish I could share that, so that everyone, if even for a moment, could feel that awe, and humility, and hope… That continues to be my wish.” With this experience that takes her to the edge of words, Ellie testifies before Congress; she is reduced to testimony alone in this trial. And so she crosses over from proof to πιστεύω and testimony. Theologian David Ford says, [The word of faith is] “inevitably self-involving. It cannot be adequately taken in unless we begin to be transformed… [It] is not a truth about which we can appropriately say
The precise quote in the screenplay is as follows: “JOSS (the minister, asks ELLIE, the scientist if she loved her parents) ELLIE: I never knew my mother. My father died when I was nine. JOSS: Did you love him? ELLIE (softly): Yes. Very much. JOSS: Prove it.” The context for the quote is also very instructive. I do commend the film. This script can be found at http://sfy.ru/?script=contact; screenplay by Menno Meyjes, Ann Druyan & Carl Sagan, Michael Goldenberg, Jim V. Hart—copyright 1997.
2
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 4 of 5
April 26, 2015
Say What? ‘How interesting!’ and then go on to some other investigation. It has the urgency of the most relevant news—like someone shouting ‘Fire!’ or whispering ‘Will you marry me?’”3 “Paul Ricoeur claims that testimony always exists in the context of a trial. This implies several things. One of which is that there will always be other voices, maybe even disputation, so the witness does not use the language of certainty but rather the rhetoric of persuasion.4 “Testimony, like Christian faith itself,… is not the language of certainty; but rather the language of conviction. It is not the language of knowledge, like the kind of knowledge that is rooted in fact, but is rather the language of trust that is rooted in experience. The language of testimony is not language to convince but language to persuade, to allure. It is language that is winsome. We may not be testifying before Congress, today or any day of the week. We may not feel ourselves in court or on trial. We may not sense that our testimony matters a great deal, but Tom Long says, “Christians understand themselves to be in the biggest court case of all, the trial of the ages. What is being contested is the very nature of reality, and everything is at stake.”5 Faith is more about trust than about belief, and trust is about how faith shows up in how we live, like driving on ice. It’s beautiful, really. When the scientist Ellie is beginning to experience what the intergalactic device is doing, she slides over the edge of words to testimony and says, “I can’t explain it; I can’t even describe it.” When Ellie is in that heaven-like place, where the wormhole takes her, she says, “Oh, it’s beautiful. … no words… no words… to describe it… poetry… They should have sent a poet… It’s so beautiful. Beautiful. So beautiful. So beautiful. I had no idea. I had no idea. I had no idea.” And in her “πιστεύω” Ellie testifies, “I was given something wonderful, something that changed me…” Maybe this sanctuary is some kind of inter-galactic machine, where at moments we can experience “undeniably how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are,… that we are a part of Something greater than ourselves, that no one, none of us is alone….,” where those moments of awe, and humility, and hope may change us. It is a gift that can change us forever. We believe. Help our unbelief. We trust. Lord, help that faith show up in our lives and testify to your presence at the edge of words. Let the people say, Amen.
David Ford, The Shape of Living: Spiritual Directions for Everyday Life (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), p. 10. These and the next few paragraphs are largely from Rev. Tom Are’s lectures at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in January 2012, with some editing.
3
4
Anna Carter Florence, Preaching as Testimony (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007), p. 62.
5
Thomas G. Long, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), p. 28.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 5 of 5
April 26, 2015
