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WHEN IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE Psalm 14 St. Andrew UCC 07/17/16 Mark 9:14-27

It just stuck in my craw – today’s psalter reading where the psalmist writes: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” While I suppose there are some types of atheism which are intolerant and dogmatic and which, frankly, deserve the indignation of the 14th psalm, today we more commonly see another kind of attitude altogether. We find an enormous number of people who are puzzled – wistfully wishing that there might be a God, but finding it difficult to believe there really is one. And, having found myself in precisely that position more than once or twice, it is difficult to be indignant about that. Any of us would find ourselves living in a glass house, were we to throw a stone at that particular sentiment.

This is borne out of personal experience, having buried a spouse and survived a stroke in the same year. So, for someone going through such a rough patch with God, the appropriate text is not the 14th psalm, but rather is the kindly, understanding attitude of Jesus towards the man who cried out his puzzlement about it all: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

So today’s sermon is not an attack on atheism, nor is it even an argument in favor of God, as though in the few moments we 2 have together here we could marshal our reason like an army and march it down the field to a victorious proof. No, my aim this morning is a bit more modest -- a sympathetic endeavor to suggest to someone who might be finding it hard to believe in God a few considerations that may make the problem a little simpler and your life seem a little less perilous.

First off, we have to note that no one believes in all of God. No one can. All of God is too big for anybody’s faith to comprehend. We can’t even believe in all of the physical universe; it is simply too great. But, as was said of Mrs. Einstein, while she did not understand Einstein’s theory of relativity, what was more important to her was she understood Einstein! Who among us hasn’t felt like that, at least from time to time? We cannot take in all of the cosmos, but some of it we can; and often what is most important to us is what we can take in and believe.

Now, if this is true of our physical universe, how much more true must it be of God! Many people lose faith in God because we are not willing to take God (I can’t believe I actually am saying this) “on the installment plan,” -- believing in as much of God as we can. Rather, we approach the matter with an all- or-nothing attitude, and finding we cannot believe in all of God, give up on the whole business altogether. But when we 3 are dealing with the idea of God, the most profound reality we ever can think about, an all-or-nothing attitude is preposter- ous! No! Believe in as much of God as you can! Surely that is the first good advice for anyone who is finding it hard to believe in God at all.

You catch a glimpse of how prevalent this all-or-nothing attitude is in the questions ministers get from folks asking for a definition of God – as though somehow God could be defined! I once asked one of my Sunday school students how she was able to draw such pretty pictures. She studied for a minute and then announced, “First I think; then I draw a line around my think.” That’s a pretty good explanation from a four- year-old! But if we sit down to have a think about God, and then try to draw a line around our think, we have to admit that the God “whose judgments are unsearchable and whose ways are past tracing out” [Romans 11:33], to borrow the apostle Paul’s fine phrase, has eluded us. More modestly, we must simply believe in as much of God as we can.

Now, I can feel some of you here squirming a bit at what I am saying, supposing it to be some vague, evasive modernism – feeling that it lacks the clear, definitely outlined idea of God that our ancestors used to have. This only shows how little we know about the religious ideas of our forbears at their best. 4

Who was it that said, “At present, all we see are baffling reflections in a mirror?” That was the apostle Paul in his letter to the Corinthian church. (1 Corinthians 13: 12) Who was it that said, “All that can be said concerning God is not God, but only certain smallest fragments which fall from his table?” That was St. Catherine of Genoa in the 15th Century (b. 1447). Who was it that said, “His essence, indeed, is incomprehensible, utterly transcending all human thought?” That was none other than our old friend John Calvin (1509- 1564). Who said, “Our safest eloquence concerning him is our silence, when we confess without confession that his glory is inexplicable, his greatness above our capacity and reach. He is above and we upon earth. Therefore, it behoveth our words to be wary and few?” That is Calvin’s contemporary, Richard Hooker in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie. (16th C.) So, as you can plainly see, our ancestors at their best did not have the neatly outlined caricature of God we commonly hear presented from contemporary American pulpits. Instead they had a great God, one before whom they stood in humble awe, and, acknowledging that they could not comprehend this God altogether, believed in as much of God as they could.

Frankly, this approach is what has gotten me through the toughest spots in my life, the ones where I had to dig down deep and remember that I am not called on to believe in all of God. And that is a good thing, because I cannot. All of God is too great. But as for disbelieving all that the word “God” 5 stands for, I can’t do that either – not even on my most pessimistic days!

Here and now we live in two worlds at the same time – one visible, tangible, physical; the other invisible, intangible, and spiritual. The rocks we touch and the stars we see are no more real to us than the love of goodness or beauty or truth. The visitation of the divine is no stranger to us! There are hours when we are conscious that the most real forces in the world are spiritual forces.

“God,” says the New Testament, “is love.” [1 John 4:8b] So there is always some of God that we can get at and believe in. So, do at least this much: don’t say, “I disbelieve,” putting all the weight on the negative side. Say, instead, “I will believe in as much of the divine as I can.” For then you join that great company of souls upon whom the master has looked with understanding as they cried out, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

In the second place, we might say to someone having a hard time believing in God that, while philosophically we may deny God, psychologically we always must have one. One of the most mysterious things about human nature is that we never can content ourselves with things beneath or things around us alone; we always must have something above to which we give 6 ourselves and to which we feel we belong.

“Reverence [ehrfreucht]” according to Goethe, “is the one thing on which all else depends for making man in every point a man.” Or to re-phrase him, we are not fully human without reverence. Each of us instinctively is a worshipper; we have to give ourselves to something, making of it a god and serving it, or there is scant meaning or direction in our life. So even when we think we have gotten rid of God philosophically, we have not gotten rid of God psychologically. The simple truth is that we require a transcendent object of devotion (which is the late George Herbert Palmer’s argument).

This explains in part why, when so many have given up on God philosophically, there has been so luxuriant a crop of substitutes for God psychologically. From Uncle Sam to Alma Mater, we find figures to whom we can be devoted, to whom we can belong, to whom we can give ourselves. Tons of people have given up on God philosophically, but feel the need for one psychologically, which is a pretty tough spot to be in – your philosophy pushing you one way and your psychology pulling you the other; feeling a deep desire for an object of devotion in a world where you think there’s nothing worth being loyal to!

H.G. Wells was far from being an orthodox believer, but he 7 was talking about his most profound spiritual experience when he wrote: At times in the silence of the night and in rare lonely moments, I come upon a sort of communion of myself with something great that is not myself. It is perhaps poverty of mind and language which obliges met to say that this universal scheme take on the effect of a sym- pathetic person – and my communion a quality of fearless worship. These moments happen, and they are the supreme fact of my religious life to me; they are the crown of my religious experience. (“ H.G. Wells’ Confession of Faith” in Atlantic Monthly: vol.103, p.559) There you have it: many folk unable to call it God, yet who psychologically find their deepest experiences involving God -- on the one side holding inward communion with what seems like God, and on the other side living in a universe where they are tempted to say there is none. As a blog by a self-described atheist asked within the past month: “Why won’t this God I don’t believe in leave me alone?”

So, if you are tempted to think you don’t believe in God, or if you are finding it difficult while, like the rest of us, you are having experiences that keep suggesting God to you, I say, “Trust the deepest in yourself.” If you cannot trust what is deepest in your own life, what can you trust in this old world?

An old friend once summered on the coast of Maine where 8 he discovered on an island a group of children who were receiving no religious training. So he rowed out on Sunday mornings to hold Sunday school with them. On the first day, wanting to start out with something close at hand and familiar to them, he asked for those who had seen the Atlantic Ocean to raise their hands. Not a single hand went up. At first he thought they were just being shy, so he asked again. But, no; they were serious – they never had seen the Atlantic Ocean. All their lives they had lived in it; their boats had sailed on it; its waters had sung their lullabies at night when they were babes; the rhythmic beating of its waves on the shore had wakened them each morning; but they did not realize it was the Atlantic Ocean.

We are a lot like that concerning God. All that is deepest in our spiritual life is merely the near end of God. All that is best in us is God in us. We cannot run away. As soon as we deny God, we simply call God by another name and make a substitute. So, as long as we have to have a god, why not go ahead and have a great one?! Do not say, “I disbelieve.” Say, instead, “I believe; help my unbelief.”

Also, if you are finding it hard to believe in God, please acknowledge that there also are towering difficulties in the way of disbelief as well. Of course it is difficult to believe in God. 9

Great faith always has carried with it the burden of doubt. Yes, the psalmist wrote: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want [Psalm 23], but we commonly forget about the time he wrote: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me? Why dost thou hide thy face from me? [Psalm 22]

Who can look at the vast, unmeasured cosmos and automatically find a kindly presence there? Who can regard the strange history of our own planet with its volcanic furies, its huge, useless beasts, its cruel parasitic life forms, its strange evolving mysteries, and not find it hard to fit God in? Who can look upon our chaotic world, or even endure its monstrous cruelty – and glibly say, “Our Father, who art in heaven . . .?” If you think it is easy to believe in God, you don’t know what believing in God really is.

So, it may be hard to believe in God. But if it is, far from being discouraged about your religious life, I say if you handle it right, you may yet join the succession of great believers, for the great believers are those who, finding it hard to believe in God, found it harder still to disbelieve. Just look at the recently-discovered letters from Blessed Mother Teresa where she talks about long stretches of ‘feeling God’s absence.’ [Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light by Doubleday, 2007]. 10

They say that a Russian woman under the old regime took a government examination and, after it was over, feared she might have failed. In particular she was worried about one question: “What is the inscription on the Sarmian Wall?” She had written down what she thought the answer was: Religion is the opiate of the masses. But after she was through with the exam, she walked the seven miles from Leningrad to the Sarmian Wall just to be sure. And there it was – just as she had written: Religion is the opiate of the masses. And, falling to her knees, she crossed herself and said, “Thank God!”

Hard to believe in God? Indeed it is. God is so great, and the problem is so vast and deep. But it is harder yet to disbelieve. “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.”

Finally if you find it hard to believe in God, ask yourself whether you would not like to have this be a world where your children would find it easier to believe than you have found it. You see, friends, faith is not just a theoretical matter; it is practical as well. Most folks who don’t believe feel that way because they are discouraged about life. Some say that we who do believe have succumbed to wishful thinking. Well, there is comfort, there is security, there is sustenance in believing that even if the horse is running away, there are hands stronger than our own on the reins. 11

Listen as Bishop Quayle, Episcopal Bishop of Vermont, puts it in his own picturesque way: “I was lying awake one night worrying myself to distraction about a problem I could do nothing about – until I seemed to hear God speak to me. And God said, ‘Quayle, you go on to bed. I’ll sit up the rest of the night with this one. I’m going to be up anyway.’” Now the atheist would call such an experience a fantasy, but even it is, you have to admit that it is keeping millions of people off psychiatrist’s couches! And what if it’s true? What if stronger hands than ours are on the reins? What if there is “an enduring power, not ourselves, which makes for righteous- ness?” (Matthew Arnold, 1894)

So, if you are having trouble believing in God, say at least this much to yourself: “I can make a difference. I can make my life an argument for God; I can make this world the kind of place where my children and grandchildren find it easier to believe than I have found it.” For God is not simply an idea to have faith in. No, God is a living presence, a worker, lifting up an ensign for the people and calling us to follow it for justice, for equality, for unity, for peace.

And you must not deny that God; you cannot say, “No,” to that God. For the sake of your soul – for the sake of the world 12

– you must not say, “No.” to that God.

Say instead, “I believe; help my unbelief.” Amen.