Sermon: Third Sunday after Pentecost

The Rev. Benjamin Anthony
Episcopal Chaplain at Emory University


When belief in God is broached as a conversation topic, what ensues usually unfolds along the lines of rationality, logic or evidence. Or such belief is defended as an operation of faith, which is construed as the opposite of these other "empirically" based forms of human behavior. Belief in God and its attendant religious practices are situated as just one more form of human discourse, albeit one promoting largely discredited truth claims and where it has survived past its expiration date, religion is seen as liable to promote sectarian clannishness and "inspired" violence.

Religion's emergence into a competitive marketplace of ideas has exposed its weakness as a "system" capable of explaining everything. This is fine. Actually, this is a rather wonderful gift. In its inability to explain everything religion has a valuable, if underutilized freedom.

This freedom goes mostly unrecognized. Instead the pressures to make religion a "system of ideas" have induced in Christianity an amnesia for what makes religion—and the faith it sustains—possible. We seem to have forgotten that what makes faith possible (and worthwhile, I might add) is trust. Trust that the God we proclaim is loving, good and intent upon human flourishing. Trust that the lives we lead are gifts from this God. As religion becomes something of a minority report in contemporary culture, it will be increasingly tempting to make appeals to rationality, empirical evidence and proof as justification for its practice. I believe we would do well to look elsewhere. I believe we would do well to consider what it means to trust God and what signs constitute the trustworthiness of God.

Recently in the New York Times Stanley Fish authored a two-part column entitled "God Talk". In the column Fish took up the claims of an author named Terry Eagleton who has recently published a book in response to some of the louder voices of contemporary atheism. I won't summarize Fish's columns here or even attempt to characterize the responses to it. What I will say is this: I don't think it was originally intended to be more than a one-shot piece but the response to it, as measured by reader comments posted to the online edition, was so vigorous and polarized that Fish was moved to respond and refine his original post. By the time the editorial gatekeepers at the Times closed the articles to further reader comments, each column had generated nearly 800 comments apiece. Regardless of where one comes down on belief in God, it seems safe to say that a considerable number of people are concerned with the question and that the resources typically used to answer that question are better suited to generate heat rather than light.

One final comment: this is not a call for blinkered anti-intellectualism or a shortcut through the rigorous terrain of critical inquiry. Christianity is an historic religion which claims that the decisive events of salvation are human events and that redemption unfolds as a process of human history. But faith arises not just from evidence that verifies these events as "true" but in response to a God that is trustworthy. Said simply: Christian faith trusts that the God of Jesus Christ is the Creator and redeemer of the world. To that we turn.

Our turn towards the trustworthiness of God is helped along by a turn into today's Scripture texts. What I propose to do is to do a reading of them; specifically, I want to draw together the lesson from Job, its insights into God as Creator and the scene from the Gospel in which Jesus calms a windstorm and the fears of his disciples. What I hope such a reading will produce is a sense that the God who, as Creator is invisibly beyond all things becomes visible in Jesus.

The lesson from Job comes near the conclusion of the book. Job's friends have held forth, offering their partial understandings of how God governs the world and the affairs of people. Finally, God speaks. As if to emphasize the mysteriousness, God speaks "from a whirlwind," a narrative flourish that lends the speech an atmosphere of tremendous darkness. These are words freighted with incomprehensible gravity. God says to Job (and to us as well), "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?...or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?"

The only answer to be given goes something like "I don't know." Indeed this is the answer that Job gives when God's speech concludes after much elaboration. Job, humbled and chastened, says to God, "I know that You can do everything, that nothing you propose is impossible for You... Indeed I spoke without understanding of things beyond me which I did not know." (Job 42:2-3). On the one hand the power and hiddenness of God are accented and establish a limit for what human understanding can comprehend. This disparity, this gap that separates Creator from creature is impassable and any attempt to explore this disparity requires a measure of trust. Said simply, we may come to know our world well and intimately but that knowledge will always remain a darkened mirror reflecting the glory of God.

But we can say at least this much: God as Creator has brought the world into being with powers that infinitely surpass human imagination and as Creator, God shapes human destinies even more completely.

Now, let's turn our attention to the Gospel lesson. At first glance we seem to get a pretty straightforward affirmation of the insight we gained in the Job lesson. That is, we see that the power to subdue and order creation are at the disposal of Jesus, the Son of God. This miraculous display of power impresses the disciples. With the windstorm that had been buffeting their boat reduced to a dead calm, the disciples remark to one another, "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" We nod in ironic agreement for we, the readers of Mark's gospel, know who this man Jesus is. We know that he is the Son of God, right? But do we know what this means? Do we see Jesus as a kind of super human and fail to see the way in which he is actually perfectly human? In other words, does our faith owe to the narrow range of miracles that show forth Jesus' power to tame the forces of nature? Or does our faith owe to the rather greater miracle that is rooted in Jesus' relationship to God?

For in Jesus we see a perfect and pacific dependence upon God. And that tranquil, trusting relationship seems to me to be the overarching significance of this story from Mark's gospel. Before Jesus rebukes the windstorm, the narrator notes that Jesus was "was in the stern, asleep on the cushion." And immediately following the calming of the storm, Jesus asks his once panicking disciples, "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" Framing the performance of this miracle are clues that disclose the true nature of God as Creator. Jesus rests, secure in the care of God, trusting that the Creator of all things is intensely and intimately present to him. The disciples fear and trust is ensnarled with anxiety and despair: their faith perishes in the world's relentless threats of chaotic return.

We see that Jesus perfectly embodies God's creative power and intent. Jesus trusts God completely and so discloses the trustworthiness of God. As Rowan Williams has said, we see that God's power is "the unlimited power to be there, to be faithful to and for a world that is deeply unstable and unjust and suspicious and uncooperative: the power to go on trying to get through at all costs, labouring and wrestling with the human heart" (Tokens, p. 19).

This is hardly proof that God exists or even that belief in God is empirically plausible. I'm not sure such comforts are available to us. Perhaps God cannot be proven to exist. But there are reasons to trust that this is the case.

The words spoken to Job from an arcane whirlwind become plainly visible in Jesus, the embodied Word of God. And we see that the purposes of God intend our well-being. We see that God has created us to have life and to have it abundantly. We see as Rowan Williams says that "God is to be trusted as we would trust a loving parent, whose commitment to us is inexhaustible, whose purposes for us are unfailingly generous; someone whose life is the source of our life, and who guarantees that there is always a home for us." (Tokens of Trust, p. 19).