Titles and openings often tell you what the rest of the work is going to be about, if you are really paying attention, and the title/subtitle of our blog creates a bit of tension in me. Trying not to lose our faith is a troublesome concept for this generation, because all I want to do is lose my faith, discard it, leave it behind, and critique it into oblivion. I want to dismantle my conceptions of God and the Church and then walk away, hands up in the air (in frustration not in worship), at the disconnected pieces that no longer have any intellectual glue to hold them together. My faith is like this plant we have had for over five years. This plant grows and grows and grows; we have cut it back at least three times. We leave it out of the sun and yet it grows, we prune it and it comes back more, except this last time we finally cut it way back down to the bottom, totally laying down the challenge to this plant to continue growing. Two days later we saw the first leaf shoot out in a defiant will to live. On the third day, we awoke to find the leaf gone...our cats ate it.
Everything in life is a metaphor, and I am tempted to leave this post now like I am so many sermons, with just the image and idea and no application or "how to" advice. Metaphors are destroyed when they are forced to mean only one thing, just like our faith is and just like our God is. This is why I want to lose my faith and my articulation of a God that was only made in my or my teacher's image. I am perpetually pruning my faith and every once in a while I chop it all down leaving nothing and waiting for that divinely defiant revelation of God to burst forth. Easily the words "I don't belive in God anymore" can come to my lips, and more and more we are understanding that not as a dualistic annihilation of God, but as a metaphor: The God I once knew is gone, the God I once believed in just got complicated, the God I once held on to has eluded my grasp, the God I once created in my image is now creating me in the divine image instead.
Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount to seek first the kingdom of God, and God's righteousness, and all these "other" things will be given to you as well. As a child I sang the song with these words and thought that if I sought God then I would gain wealth and riches or a healthy and happy life, but that is not what Jesus means. Jesus means seek first God's kingdom, not your own kingdom built with God's help. Seek first God's righteousness (God's way of living in right relationship with your neighbor) and not your own moralistic code of conduct, and then all these other things (these anxieties about life and its necessities) will be given to you as well. But how do we know what God's kingdom is if it is not our own understanding of God's kingdom. How do we seek after the thing that we might not recognize once we find it? This is our theological crisis.
God calls Moses to lead the people Israel out of Egyptian captivity, and Moses wants to know who this God is, so that he can tell the people who they are following. God replies, tell them, I am who I am, I am sent you. That is like saying, Is is Is (which is a metaphor!) and letting the existential crisis flow. Even though we are "Post-Modern" we still like to believe in that which we can conceive; we still think, therefore we are. But God and faith transcend cartesian/Modern philosophy and make the radical claim that who God is, and who we are created to be, are both beyond our conceptions of who God is and who we are created to be. This makes me constantly lose my faith.
I awoke this morning, and literally said out loud, "I don't believe in God anymore." And that sucked. Until I was making coffee and God said to me, "No, it is not that you don't believe in me, you no longer believe in the version of me you thought was going to make your life easier." That version wasn't working out too well at the moment. And that sucked. Everytime I lose my version of God I have the opportunity to experience faith at it most "faith-full," that is the kind of faith that welcomes a God I do not know or understand into my life. This is a hospitable faith, a welcoming-the-stranger-into-your-home kind of faith. For I am welcoming the unknown God as the unknown God into my life. That way God gets to be who God gets to be and not God gets to be who God is to me.
There is no doubt that it is enjoyable to enliven our spirits with a new understanding of who God is when we come across one. We feel that we are growing and bursting forth with new life. Such seasons are to be enjoyed and I believe come from God. Once we begin to understand our new understanding of God to well, however, then the metaphor stops generating new meaning and become stagnant, ultimately dying once we understand it completely. Then it is okay to lose our faith, to chop the plant down and challenge it to grow again.
P.S. When we were younger we used to tell our teachers that our dogs ate our homework, now I tell God, the cats ate my faith.
