Trusting the Invisible

In the Sunday sermons in July we've been looking at the kingdom parables. The whole of Matthew Chapter 13 is sometimes called the Kingdom Discourse. On the last Sunday in July we hit a whole bunch of the shorter kingdom parables--the leftovers after several weeks covering the longer ones one parable at a time. Among these are the parable of the Mustard Seed and the parable of the Yeast. In the sermon I said that the mustard seed was an idiom that meant the smallest possible thing a human can see. Yeast is smaller still and becomes entirely invisible when mixed into the dough. The main point of these details is that God is working--the mustard plant is growing and the dough is rising--whether we can see it or not.

I have been thinking about this quite a bit. The Greek word for faith can mean both belief and trust. Probably the best way to think about it is that faith is some of both. To believe something is one thing, but there's an aspect of faith that you believe without evidence. Trust is delicate in a relationship between people, and when there's been a break in relationship, sometimes the only way to restore it is to unilaterally trust. This means trusting the other person with no evidence that they are trustworthy, trusting by sheer strength of will. Of course, to prevent yourself from being abused, you have to "trust, but verify," as Ronald Reagan said. The thing about faith that's different from simple belief or trust is that in either case it exists in spite of lack of evidence.

Found in a cellar where Jews hid from the Gestapo in Cologne France, was this statement[1]:

I believe in the sun, even in the darkness.

I believe in God, even if God is silent.

I believe in compassion, even when it must remain hidden.

This is about belief in spite of evidence. The sun exists even if you are hiding in a dark cellar. God exists even if you receive no answer when you pray. Love exists between people even if circumstances prevent them from showing it. That last example is awfully close to our statement about trust, as well. Both love and trust exist in the relationship, in the space between people. Both can be fragile, but that fragility can be overcome by strength of will, the decision to intentionally love or trust unilaterally without evidence. I believe this is the start of all reconciliation.

The thing is that the kingdom parables, especially the Mustard Seed and the Yeast are not about faith itself. In fact, they all assume faith. These parables assume faith and are about the kingdom. Last month I said that the Greek word for kingdom is both a noun and a verb, and that a better translation, one that captures this noun-verb duality, would be reign. The Kingdom of heaven is the reign of heaven. As a noun, "kingdom" might make us think of these parables as being about the nouns, about the seed and about the yeast or the dough, and therefore about a noun, faith, whether trust or belief or both. But the word is both noun AND verb. If we think of the reign of heaven instead of the kingdom of heaven, then we can think about the ACTION of the seed and the ACTION of the yeast. The seed grows, the yeast makes the bread soft and fluffy. The parables are not so much about OUR belief or trust, but about God's ACTION. What does God do? God creates a tree and shelters birds and feeds a hundred people. These parables are about those great things God has done and those great things God continues to do.

And what these parables are saying is not so much that God exists even though we do not have evidence like the Sun or Love mentioned on the walls of that cell in Cologne, but that God ACTS even though we do not have evidence. We may despair (lose hope) that the birds of heaven, the peoples of the earth have no shelter, but even as we do, God is ACTING; God is growing a tree and providing shelter. God is causing the dough to rise and feeding with abundant provision. The difference between faith as belief, faith as trust, and the kingdom of God is that belief is about something existing, trust is about provision in the face of need, and the kingdom is about God acting. The first two are about us, but the kingdom parables are about God. God acts to take care of God's people even when we can't see God acting.

I said that Love and Trust can both be intentional acts, and that both can be initiated unilaterally to help heal broken relationships. In 2 Corinthians, Paul says,

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.

What God does, when God ACTS in the reign of heaven, is unilaterally initiate reconciliation with us. God unilaterally loves us, saves us, and trusts us to respond and stay faithful. Sometimes we break that trust, but God never does and God calls us to do the same for each other, to ACT. God does all this even when we can't see God acting.

There's a beautiful Easter hymn that captures this: "Christ has risen while earth slumbers, Christ has risen where hope died, as he said and as he promised, as we doubted and denied." For three days after we crucified the only begotten son of God, we could not see Christ in the world. Even then, God was acting and raised Christ from the dead while we slept and lost hope that God could act in any way at all. That's what the kingdom of heaven is about. That's what the Reign of God is about. God acts whether we see any evidence or not.

Blessings,

--Chas

[1]This version is from

Howe, Everett. “I Believe in the Sun, Part V: The Source.” The Humanist Seminarian, April 5, 2021. https://humanistseminarian.com/2021/04/04/i-believe-in-the-sun-part-v-the-source/.

Howe is very careful to trace this quote to primary sources and reconsiders the translation, so it is slightly different from other versions presenting it as a poem or song.