Now I Know for Sure

Soren Kierkegaard wrote The Practice of Christianity in 1850. Like most of his works there were few who could make heads or tails of it. The main argument of the book was this: the opposite of faith is not doubt, the opposite of faith is offense. When we are offended in others, in God, we lose faith. This little idea (the opposite of faith is offense) this idea upset centuries of philosophical thought. It was generations before people understood what this meant, even more to see what this idea could do. 

A little background might help. In 1560 John Calvin finished his last edition of The Institutes of the Christian Religion.  Nearly 500 years later this is still a classic, standard to define theology and philosophy for our Church. At the heart of The Institutes is a definition of faith.  Calvin says faith is a firm and certain knowledge.  Centuries of pastors, elders, believers have been measured and guided by this definition.  I was.  Faith is what you know for certain; faith is a firm grasp of clear definitions born of the bible.  The clear and firm grasp is to expel doubt. Faith is to not doubt.

              A century after Calvin, Rene Descartes upped the ante with his cogito ergo sum.  I think therefore I am. So not only was faith knowledge, it was also being human.  To be is to understand.  From Descartes even to today, there is a quest for certain knowledge, for firm belief.  This is what it means to be human.  Homo sapiens. 

Although science and theology, physics and philosophy are no longer commingled as they were in the past, they have always sought the same goal: a firm and certain knowledge.  This is common ground.  Certainty may come from the Bible (theology), certainty may come from logic (philosophy), or certainty can come from demonstrable observation (scientific method). No matter where it comes from, the goal is the same: firm and certain knowledge where one has no doubt.  Faith without doubt.

In his little book, written in Danish, the odd and reclusive Kierkegaard changed the world.  In place of a firm and certain knowledge, he said faith is trust overcoming shock, rising above expectation, and resisting the grip of fear.  Faith no longer was a definition, a firm knowledge; faith was now a risk, an uncertainty.  Instead of trying to determine who God was without doubt or what was real beyond question, Kierkegaard said, you need to leap into the mysteries of life without any guarantee.  That is what faith is.  Life without destiny, with much more fortune than fate, without proof or explanation.

Kierkegaard wrote about two great offences requiring faith, two truths so audacious they scandalize us.  The first is that God, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing, everywhere, the omni-God, this God became human.  This is so outrageous it should be a non-starter.  Impossible.  The Apostle Paul said, this is foolishness to Greeks, and to the Jews, this is offence.  A scandal. 

The second offence is the opposite.  A carpenter’s kid is God? The one born of scandal is the messiah? Offensive!  This is what people said in Jesus’ home village.  Isn’t this the carpenter’s son, do not his brothers and sisters live with us?  This guy is not God. Crazy talk.  Who do you take us for? 

Kierkegaard said, here are the stumbling blocks of the Christian faith.  We worship God become human and we pray to the carpenter’s son.  When we baptize in Jesus’ name, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph and Mary, the one who walks around and talks about birds and seeds and vineyards, when we worship this one, we are engaged in a scandal. There is nothing logical or reasonable about this.  At some point the offence becomes undeniable.  Believing this is not logical or sensible. Believing this is always a risk, a leap, an overcoming of scandal.  

I know that when I venture down philosophical paths it can feel a bit obscure.  Philosophy doesn’t have a good reputation for being . . . well . . . interesting.  I know.  I learned long ago that my devotion to 19^th century philosophers will never make me a hit at a party.  Hence I usually resist the temptation to answer questions requiring a philosophical explanation.  Tends to bring the vibe of the room down. Yet for our reading today it is so important.  Knowing how offence is the opposite of faith is the only way to navigate the story of the widow’s son raised in Nain.  If we consider this beautiful story as a matter of certainty and knowledge, it loses its beauty.  Yet if we pause in the beauty of the story and consider Kierkegaard, we are likely to find faith.

The story is so lovely. Jesus is walking around and bumps into a funeral procession.  A widow is walking beside her child, her son, having died a tragic death.  You can infer the tragedy from Luke’s claim, Jesus was moved to pity, he felt compassion.  And then, without prompt or request, Jesus raises the boy from the dead, saying to the mother, “don’t weep.” And then everyone is amazed and afraid.

A miracle happened.  One who was dead was raised.  Out of nowhere, suddenly, tears of sorrow became tears of joy.  Lovely story.  It is a lovely story until we try to find certainty, a firm knowledge of how this is true of life. 

The need for certainty, and we do want certainty, is great. So great that this lovely story should offend.  And the offense is how random it is.  Jesus is just walking around and decides, I can fix this.  There is no plan, no request, no rhyme or reason beyond compassion.  Which is great.  Compassion is a good thing, the best even. You should cultivate compassion.  Yet we are not Jesus. I haven’t raised anyone from the dead recently.

Let me put it plainly.  The God of all creation, who sets the planets awhirl and the oceans to expand and contract, this God should not be random.  This God is not a roll of the dice, a lucky day.  The God of the heavens who knows everything and sees everything and can neither be swayed nor controlled by anyone, this one not only becomes human, but also just suddenly bumps into tragedy? The God of Gods should not be talking to angels saying, “so I was walking around Nain, and you will never guess what happened.”  The God of the universe, in whom we have a firm and certain knowledge, this one, should not be random.

The other scandal in our story is best understood as geography. Geography.  Jesus of Nazareth is a bit obscure and so is the widow or Nain.  Galilee and Nain are backwater villages in the middle of nowhere-ancient-Palestine.  Jesus heals this one, saves this one from death and brings the widow’s son back to life.  He’s lucky.  Which is great, but shouldn’t the messiah, the redeemer of the world, want a better plan than luck?  I am not knocking luck. I will knock on wood for luck. But sheer luck is not really a topnotch strategy for redeeming Israel, let alone the world. 

This story is lovely.  True.  But the beauty is like a cover, a camouflage of great mysteries.  Beneath the simple joy of one who was lost being rescued, beneath this great miracle is a scandal.  How does God just bump into tragedy; shouldn’t the all-knowing God have a better grasp than this?  And how is this miracle the saving of a people; how is Jesus being the Messiah here? It doesn’t make any sense.  It’s pretty, but pretty confusing too.  You simply can’t fit this story into a plan, a purpose, a firm and certain knowledge of what life is meant to be.  Random and certain don’t go together.

From time-to-time I hear people express their atheism or their agnosticism as if they were in this story.  How could God let all the children in Sudan and Gaza die today?  Not all the time, just today.  How can you believe in a God who seems so removed, so random, so bound by geography?  Do you want me to believe that God loves people in Galilee but has no concern for the rest of the world?  With a world of such chaos, why would I believe in a God who is in control? 

The common response to these all-too-valid questions is often unhelpful. To the depth of tragedy and suffering we too often offer the weak sauce of "God’s will is a mystery, who are we to question."  Or the other chestnut: The good Lord has a plan.  Which works until it doesn't.  Blind obedience to a firm and certain definition, for me, is not faith, but failure.

In 1992 at two in the morning I heard Kierkegaard’s answer to the questions, the scandal of God become human, the scandal of the randomness of mercy, I heard his answers in an interview.  While pressing on through a night of insomnia, Bob Costas, the sports broadcaster, appeared on my television screen.  At first I thought it was some sort of hallucination, lucid dream, but it was true: Bob Costas was interviewing the Nobel peace prize winner, the concentration camp survivor, author of Night, Elie Wiesel. I thought, well, this is odd and now I am awake.

As Costas asked questions you could tell he had given this a lot of thought and truly wanted to know how one survives Auschwitz and Buchenwald?  What does life look like after such unthinkable evil and darkness and suffering?  In response to each question, what Wiesel did was articulate how he overcame the offense of God, what he called the unrighteousness of God. 

At one point in the conversation Costas pressed him by reading a portion of his book, the portion where Wiesel is spiritually dead, and God is dead, and he is angry and has nothing to give or take from such a God.  Costas infers: is this where you stopped believing in God?

Wiesel’s response was true without certainty, it was faith without the need for surety.  He said, “I never stopped praying.”  Then he said, in essence, I am not happy with God, I am protesting this God, but my faith never left me. 

What I heard in Wiesel was how Kierkegaard’s little book was a resurrection of God.  The firm and certain God who predestines all creation, who knows all and has no fault or failure, this God died at Dunkirk and Antietam, this God died on slave auction blocks and city blocks of Hiroshima.  The God we speak of with a firm and certain knowledge, took the last train for the coast. 

From this death though came a resurrection.  Rising like the widow’s son was the god of scandal and offence, the god who can be followed but only with risk.  The firm ground of faith has now become the leap of faith. With every unimaginable day Wiesel spent in concentration camps, with each terrible loss of humanity, he too died and was reborn to live without certainty. 

Just as we should ask of the boy at Nain, so he asked why me?  Why here?  Why a holocaust at all?   The God of firm and certain knowledge cannot give good answers to these.  Better still, the best answer, silence, is not valued by firm and certain knowledge where there must be a confession, words to fill suffering.  In Wiesel’s answers I saw a new definition of faith overcoming the temptation of offence.  This could be our salvation as well.

At the end of the interview Costas asked about joy, hope.  Could he find these after so much loss, death?  Wiesel said, the birth of my son. This too is a resurrection. In the birth of his son, it was as if the silence of loss found a trust, the void was filled trusting life was worth living.  Amen.