Faith Seems Impossible, March 19

Saturday, March 19

1 Corinthians 13:1-3: If I speak in the tongues[ of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Faith can, at times, seem impossible.

Five years ago, I found myself working at a church with which I had theological and moral disagreements. I’ll avoid going into too many of the details here, but perhaps give an example.

If the belief is that the bible is literal and inerrant, then the story of The Fall is very confusing. God creates Adam and Eve and tells them, “have fun! Do your thing! Oh, but that one tree, don’t eat that. Seriously.” Then a snake comes over and says, “yo! Guys! Have you tried these apples?! They’re so good, you guys! Omg you gotta have one.” Everybody has apples, naked people, yadda yadda yadda, sin is created.

I have a two-year-old son. I know that if I tell him “don’t touch that cheese,” the next thing I see will be cheese in his hand. Further, in all honesty, if my wife tells me, “please don’t touch the cheese before dinner,” somewhere the two-year-old inside of me INSISTS that the cheese must be touched prior to dinner. And no serpents live in my home.

This whole thing feels like a set-up. God is omniscient. He knew Adam and Eve would stumble into the orchard. God is omnipotent. He made the apple, he made the serpent, and he made Adam and Eve. God made the desire for apples (and cheese). So God made sin.

But God hates our sin (or, at least, this is what I was told), and millions of goats had to be killed over the years to atone for it. Then Jesus was killed and now all the sin is forgiven.

Wait, what? All the sin gets washed away, but until the apple (which God created), there wasn’t sin in the first place? Why not save the goats (and the Jesus) and skip the whole sin thing all together? An omnipotent God could certainly do this. Would a loving and just God set us up for failure in this way?

This is only a single example of an extensive train of thought that lasted for many months. I found that these contradictions seemed to call into question things that seemed like they should be fundamental truths about God - things that seemed like first principles. Was God actually omnipotent? Was God actually omniscient? Was God actually just? Did God really love us? Was God actually good?

Did God even exist?

So I had questions and I started to look to the community around me to try and find some kind of answers. The answers I was given were very unsatisfactory. They usually oriented around the “mysteriousness” of God’s actions; were built around self-contained, logical contradictions; unprovable negatives; or only raised more questions.

No one around me seemed to be struggling. People that I respected and went to for answers seemed to be pleased with the platitudes or contradictions that they used to try and answer my questions. Was I the only one that felt this way? Why was this hard for me and easy for them? My father was a pastor, shouldn’t that mean I was better at this?

As this experience went on, I started to find it painful. I had been a Christian for many years. This was an element of my identity that was important to me and that felt foundational to who I was. Two significant elements of my personality that I valued deeply, my faith and my intellect, seemed to be at odds with each other and at risk of ripping apart and mutually self-destructing.

Faith seems impossible.

This story probably doesn’t end the way that it should. It should end with me finding some demonstration of God’s goodness and truth. It should end with me encouraging you to stay faithful even when you have questions and even when things don’t make sense. I should be telling you that sometimes faith seems impossible, but it never actually is.

For me, faith seemed impossible.

And I gave up.

I very clearly remember standing in the sound booth during the sermon and internally fighting a war: “I should believe this.” “I’m not faithful enough.” “I would be able to do this if I were a good christian.” “This would make sense if I were a better person.”

I can still hear the noise in my brain and feel the tension in my body rising as I think through this experience.

“Wait,” I thought, “why in the world am I torturing myself with this?!”

So I stopped.

And I let go.

I won’t say that I reached a conclusion. I haven’t. I don’t know what I think, and I’ve come to a place where “I don’t know” is a sufficient answer. The fight, the work that seemed necessary to believe, wasn’t worth the torment that I was putting myself through. I decided it didn’t matter.

But now I had a problem: for all this time, I had been a christian and that made me a good person. I thought that my faith in God motivated me to be kind, to help those in need, to love others even in the face of anger and adversity. Now that my christianity, my faith, was gone, or at least highly unresolved, would those things also necessarily be gone?

If faith, if God, no longer dictated what was right, if faith and God no longer guided my choices, who made those decisions now? Who was it that decided what a good life meant? The only answer that seemed to make any sense was this: me. I decided I had to make those choices. I was the arbiter for myself of what would serve the betterment of the world around me, of what it meant to lead a worthwhile life.

One of the scriptures that initially guided me into identifying as a christian was 1 Corinthians 13. We’ve all probably been to enough weddings to know it. That message about love felt so true to me. That seemed like the most important thing. Looking back at it now, I think it still is true and important, but one passage in particular seems more significant to me now: “if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”

Love is more important than faith. And your faith isn’t what decides whether you should, or should not love, or even what love looks like.

You are. You get to decide how you live. You get to choose.

And you still get to choose even when your faith feels weak. You get to choose even if you aren’t sure who you are anymore, or if what you’ve been doing all this time is the right thing. You get to choose even when the war rages inside of you that says you aren’t doing it right or you aren’t good enough.

You still get to choose love.

So faith does sometimes feel like it’s impossible. But love never actually is.

For contemplation: In what ways can you continue to choose love in your own life?

Stephen Bailey, Director of Digital Arts