Pastor's Blog    

“By way of encouragement, God tells us in scripture: ‘I will remove the stony heart from their bodies, and replace it with a natural heart…” (Ezekiel 11:19). But I’m still waiting, asking myself when and how this will happen.

In our community the other day there wasn’t much coffee. Coffee does me good down here in the desert…it helps me…I am old.

I was worried about not having any, about spending a few hours feeling dull and weak, and so—without perceiving the evil I was doing—I went into the kitchen before the others and drank up all that was left.

Afterwards, having suffered all day and made my confession, I thought in shame of my selfishness, of the ease with which I had excluded my two brothers from those black, bitter remains.

It seems a tiny thing, yet in that cup of coffee, taken and not shared with my brothers, is the root of all the evil which disturbs us, the poison of all the arrogance which selfishness, riches, and power create.

The difference between me and Jesus is right here, in an affair that seems simple but isn’t at all; after a whole life time it is still there to make you think. Jesus would have left the coffee for his brothers; I excluded my brothers.

No, it isn’t easy to live with hearts like ours: let us confess it.—from The God Who Comes by Carlo Caretto.

Faith is difficult to describe.  It resists our tendencies to intellectualize (to subjugate) or to make simply a matter of personal experience (to make subjective).  This is well because both ultimately pursue the same end through different means: controlling faith i.e. controlling God.  We are products of the informational revolution.  There are no questions we can’t ask.  And so we ask, and grow smug in the self-assurance that we can control ideas, mechanisms, politics, people, and our very own lives.  Faith remains wild in its mystery, and will exist no other way.

To assert that ideas which escape man’s full comprehension are to be discarded as absurd is to arrive at the pinnacle of arrogance. One need not look long through the vast reaches of our universe to rediscover our relative ignorance. This doesn’t hinder our quest for knowledge, but rather highlights our rather recent inability to admit that we live within and among great mystery. We are far from taming the beast.

The most compelling elements of humanity remain wild and free.  Faith is but one.  We may know that the stars exist, but how do we know they are beautiful?  We may know rhythm and pitch, but how do we know a musical masterpiece?  We may know hormones and biology, but how do we know we’re in love?  Like these, faith resides in a place where we know things we can’t know, and are content in the wonder of the world around us.

Those of us who consider ourselves followers of Jesus will readily admit that at some point faith noisily intruded into our lives declaring (love, forgiveness, redemption) and demanding (worship, faithfulness, selflessness).  What we saw was Jesus, and we found him beautiful.  We found that we loved him, that maybe somewhere within us we had always loved him.  In earnest, we said “o.k.,” and we made his life our own.  We did not pursue faith, rather it pursued us.  We cannot describe faith, rather it describes us.

Those who would not consider themselves followers of Christ either have not yet had this moment of faith’s intrusion, or at it, dismissively said “that’s o.k.,” and followed other saviors (other religions), or ivory towers (secularism), or sadly, and most commonly, themselves.  What, then, remains to be said for faith is said in the gospel breathed, spoken, lived, and empowered by the mysterious workings of the Spirit. He has given us faith in order to see past the chaos of our world and our lives into the beautiful restoration that began with the resurrection. God has made the world his mess to fix, and fix it he will… in wonderful fashion!