An Advent and Christmas devotion on faith, but not certainty

By the Rev. D. Randall Faro, St. John's Lutheran Church, Chehalis

“And the Word became flesh, and lived among us.” John 1:14

The author Anne Lamott has written that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. She’s on to something here.

I’m certain that two plus two equals four. I’m certain that the earth revolves around the sun. I am also absolutely certain that I will never summit Mount Everest. We’re talking here about empirically observable, scientifically demonstrable facts. Philosophers can quibble about reality and our perceptions of such, but I’ll bet you that if you give any one of them two apples and I give that same one two apples, said philosopher will say she has four apples. For certain.

What really happened some two thousand years ago in a pipsqueak town called Bethlehem in region of our planet today called Israel/Palestine? We’re not certain. And when the baby born that superstar night grew to be a man who was eventually executed, just exactly who was He and what does His life have to do with mine? Again, we’re not certain. By that I mean not four-apples certain. Rather, what this Christmas business has to do with our lives is a matter of faith.

The writer to the Hebrews put it this way: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” We don’t hope that two plus two equals four, and the Copernican revolution came to pass because of things seen with our own eyes. Faith, on the contrary, is always burdened by some amount of uncertainty. Were it not, it would be a scientific law that one would be a fool to not accept.

A modicum of uncertainly in no way takes away from our faith. In fact, it affirms faith for what it is. And we justifiably base our lives on our faith in Jesus Christ.

An analogy that I hope helps. For over fifty years of my life a foundational basis for it all has been my love for my wife Betsy, and a belief in and acceptance of her love for me. One surely can’t put love under a microscope, and there has always been the chance that either one of us would call it quits. Nevertheless we have “believed” in each other, and continue to affirm and depend on that ethereal and fragile thing called love. We are invited to do the same with God.

Justice and peace for all of humankind laid as a newborn in an animal feed trough . . . only faith can embrace that. A person can claim that one believes such with certainty (I surely do), but let’s call a spade a spade, namely that what we are talking about is faith. If we try to claim a scientific, empirical certainty for such, then anyone who might have a contrary view must be deemed loco. Which is exactly what Jesus did not do.

As a matter of New Testament fact, Jesus reached out to and commended (often for a faith they didn’t even know they had) oodles of Gentiles, i.e., not members of the Hebrew faith community. Jesus never demanded certainty. He just said: “Follow Me. I’ll show you things you never imagined, and you won’t be sorry. And by the way, we’re going to save the world.” Only one thing in the world would cause a person to drop their present lives and follow Him, and it certainly wasn’t certainty. It was faith.

So this Christmas Eve we’ll sing Silent Night, O Come All Ye Faithful, and O Little Town of Bethlehem again . . . in faith. Please don’t try to prove any of it to me. Not only because it can’t be done, but because we are called to put our trust in something far deeper and more important than that which is revealed by mathematical equations or microscopes. And when the Christmas Gospel ends with the shepherds praising God for “all they had heard and seen,” please remember that at the time they didn’t have a clue how to make sense of it all either. Yet they were gripped with new meaning and new joy in their lives, which was based one hundred percent on faith.

And so with us. A blessed Christmas to all as we once more gather to wonder together at the glorious mystery of God-in-the-flesh.