Is and If

(Message given at Wayside Friends Church on Aug. 4, 2024)

The last couple of months have been filled with books, and thinking, and podcasts, and wrestling in my head, and driving, and pondering.

I’m in the second half of my fifties, I’ve had major life changes—plural—in the last seven years. Lots of things have been shattered, rooted out, taken away, stress-tested. 

Yet I still hold onto faith in Jesus. What is the shape of this faith I can still believe in?

How can I start tracing the contours, the shape of this faith I can still hold on to, that still holds me? Let’s try a couple things. Would you meander along with me? I’m sure your mind and heart and experience are unique, your experience and season of life a bit different than mine. But perhaps as I work toward sharing honestly, you will find pieces that resonate.

I’ll start with two different two-letter words, and come back to them later. Ready?

I think the shape of this faith I can still hold on to centers around the words “is” and “if.”

(I used AI to make this graphic, but honestly it would be so nice if Brandon Buerkle would let his artistic lettering brain go to work on this concept!)

“Is” and “if.” Each of these is intentionally chosen, each intentionally chosen over other words that could be held at the heart of faith. Each needs the other, or the whole thing seems to come crashing down. “Is” and “if.”

Ok let’s continue meandering with a story, one that took place right over on the George Fox Campus, more than 35 years ago.

I’d come to Fox, a very earnest and serious guy trying to re-center my life on Jesus after ending high school with some things I regretted. I came to college with, as I said it at the time, a calling to give my life to be a pastor. 

I was in the old Bruin’s Den meeting a friend’s dad who was the Superintendent of the Friends Church in California. He knew I was thinking of coming down to Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, knew I felt a call to be a pastor. But he also knew from his son that I was a geeky academic who loved theology. 

As I sat with him in the Bruin’s Den, eating one of their awesome cinnamon rolls, he said something that made my insides churn, in that good way, that way where your soul knows even before your brain that something here is RIGHT.

“We really need,” he said, “we really need someone to write an excellent systematic theology for Quakers. It just doesn’t exist. It’s not really how Quakers work, but we really need someone who can just get it all down in a compelling way.”

My insides were drawn like a magnet because I was about a year into realizing how much I loved the way Quakers practiced faith, and I had the kind of brain that loved categorizing and communicating and systematizing and putting things together. 

It was my moment.

“Never fear, older generation leader-man! I. Have. Arrived.” Of course I didn’t actually say that out loud, but my churning insides said it, and for the next decade-plus, the idea was never very far from the front of my consciousness. 

How can I get our beliefs down in a compelling way? 

How can I articulate what we believe in fresh, convincing, helpful words? Over the last few months, I read through a lot of things I’ve written at significant points in my life. And from my “systematic theology” era (shout out Taylor Swift), I have three different versions of my “Statement of Faith.” Two were for applications for pastor jobs, and one was for the process of Recording, which is the process Quakers do that is similar to ordination. 

I was quite proud of the one I did for the Recording process, because every candidate had like 20 questions we had to answer about the things we believed about various things. Rather than do a list format, I worked hard to articulate a coherent narrative of positive statements about what I believed, answering the 20 questions, but making it a story instead of a list. 

At the time, I got great feedback, and I was quite proud of how I was “stating my faith” in these Statements of Faith.

But here’s the interesting thing, almost 30 years later.

What I thought at the time was so innovative and so creative, so alive and so personal, so much a “me” contribution to this supposed systematic theology need among Quakers…what I thought was so alive at the time, reads now for what it is: a rearranging and grouping of other people’s statements of belief. It doesn’t read now as anything alive at all.

Sitting where I am now, I would dare to say they weren’t statements of faith at all. They were statements of beliefs, and beliefs are not the heart of a living faith. They certainly don’t outline the shape of a faith I can believe and live out with passion today.

Articulating beliefs does not give a shape or substance to faith that is sustaining and life-giving. Trying to get beliefs and position statements down with certainty no longer makes my insides churn with excitement. The quest for certainty and rightness just isn’t a quest that can hold my attention honestly in this season of life, in this world we live in.

To briefly return to my “is” and “if” words, the “is” of this messy world does not play very nicely with certainty.

Certainty might work for words like “ought” and “should,” but “is?” “Is” isn’t buttoned down or certain. It’s messy and complicated and nuanced. 

Ok. Which meandering path to take next? 

I read a book this summer that was beyond me, that pushed me, that chewed up any confidence I had in the comprehension power of my brain and spit it out with a wry smile. [sarcasm] Thanks for the recommendation, Hope Bellinger! [end sarcasm] (Actually, I do mean it: thank you!)

It’s called Zero at the Bone: 50 Entries against Despair, by Christian Wiman. Wiman is a theologian, most definitely an Enneagram 4 (even though I know we’re not supposed to type other people), a man acquainted with suffering—and most profoundly and to his core, Wiman is a poet. 

As my soul grappled with these 50 entries against despair, I could see and feel and thrive in his brilliance—when his words were in the theological realm.

When he was in the poetic realm, I could tell that he was even more insightful and brilliant, but it was the kind of awareness that comes from slamming hard into a boundary wall that is keeping you out of something beyond your grasp. I so often was left muttering, “what is he trying to say?”

Faith is most at home—Wiman writes—faith is by its very nature poetic rather than theological. Rooted rather than abstract. Particular rather than universal. Paradox rather than binary. Organism rather than mechanical. Now instead of future or past.

Wiman is herding us toward “is,” not “ought.” To find God in the messy “is.”

Yet the Western Church so often abstracts and universalizes. So often creates assembly lines of discipleship to build certain belief statements.

Why is this? Lying unnoticed and often out of our awareness at the heart of the Western Church is that famous Greek philosopher, Plato. Wiman’s book reminded me how Plato’s way of viewing the world undergirds us so much in Western society.

Plato and Greek philosophy centered around ideal forms, thoughts, truth. These real, true, and ideal forms exist apart from matter, the stuff of this tangible world. The ideal forms never get perfectly reflected when they get mixed up and tainted by the physical world. 

The abstract, the form, the universal idea is more true, more right, more real, more valuable—more important than any tangible, physical approximation of the form in our dirty, dusty, flesh and blood world. 

This way of seeing the world has given us some good things in the West: mathematics, and Newtonian physics, and airplanes, and bottling processes that can get pretty close to making Diet Coke with the same wonderful taste, whether I buy it here or in Wyoming or Pennsylvania. 

For so long, our Western world thought: “if we can just find the thing that is universal, we can make things better for everyone.” Particularity and diversity aren’t as helpful or real or valuable as the universal form of truth. We need to get beyond the specific particular “is” in front of us, and try to find that abstract universal real truth. 

“Is” is messy. “Ought” (a good word for those forms or ideals) is where it’s at in the Western world.

But, reminds Wiman in Zero at the Bone, that devaluing of the particular is exactly the opposite of the God who took on human flesh in a particular time and place in a stable two thousand years ago.

The very heart of Christian faith is Jesus, son of God, born of Mary. Remember in John 14, the disciple Phillip, on the night before Jesus was crucified, telling Jesus: “Just show us God, please. Then we will be satisfied.”

Oh, Jesus says. You want to see God? “You’ve seen me, therefore you’ve seen God,” Jesus replied. The living, breathing Jesus is not less than the invisible abstract “form” of God. Rather than ask to see the “should be,” the abstract invisible form of God, Phillip…you can look at what is. Me. I’m what is, and I’m right in front of you.

From the beginning of Genesis, God has created and shown us a different world than Greek philosophy. It’s not just the baby in the manger; it’s also God’s Spirit hovering over the void, making the stuff of matter, taking the dirt and breathing life into it. Dirt and breath, human and divine, particular and universal, all in the messy now. All in the complex “is.”

So now we are finally getting to why “is” sits in the shape of faith for me now.

Faith, if it is faith in Jesus (the Word in flesh), and faith in God (who breathed life into dirt)—Christian faith must have “is” as a focus. It must live and breathe in this world in which we live and breathe every day. It’s not up there, other, abstract. It’s not future in heaven or past in Eden. It’s not certain, pure, or ideal. 

It is. It breathes. It lives! 

God has bound Themself to this world, to the physical, to us. God IS. God IS in the tangible stuff of this everyday life. God IS, and our faith IS. 

This summer, I read another thing I wrote.

It was in July of 2006, and it’s just so very different than stuff from my “systematic” era. I wrote a blog post that I titled “Why I Choose to Identify as a Christ-Centered Quaker.” 

And it’s just so alive. I can see that I was no longer trying to rearrange other people’s words and beliefs. I’m writing my story, my is. I literally wrote about God showing up, God pursuing me. About the Divine not only breaking into our world in a manger millennia ago, but in my here and now. I even wrote a tongue-in-cheek post the next day, imagining Ms. Evangeline Orthodox and Mr. Farris See interrogating me about why I wasn’t clearer about my beliefs.

It’s not like I had to get to my late 30’s to experience God. I had many experiences of God before then. It’s just that our religious system has this nasty habit of putting beliefs at the center of how we define faith. We get pushed to put “ought” at the center, when the whole history of humanity with God keeps whispering “look in the messy ‘is’.”

The character of God is relational.

In Zero at the Bone, Wiman has this provocative statement that loneliness is at the center of God’s character; God’s desire for relationship, for expressing love, drives God.

It’s an intriguing thought. And it matches a whole lot of the Bible. God refuses to stay far away and abstract. God comes close and draws near and inhabits and pitches a tent.

God pushes into the messy “is”, and because of that, the “is” of our lives often holds encounters with the Divine, with Justice, with Goodness.

Jesus said “where two or three are gathered, there I am right in the middle.” [Matthew 18:20] Not up there, not floating in perfect abstraction, not busy waiting for us in some unattainable perfection. Jesus IS right in the middle of our flesh and blood community. Jesus IS alive in our now.

There’s a stereotype of a preacher that I confess I have lived into at times.

Every experience has the risk of becoming a sermon illustration. Every is is in danger of being made into an ideal, a model, a moral, an ought or a should. 

Sometimes life is not a lesson. It just is. 

Sometimes life doesn’t fit our perfect categories of good and evil. It just is.

Sometimes life isn’t just and right. It just is.

Yet taking a wide open look at what is, as it is, now, right in front of us; that can bring some wonderful things.

Both psychologists and spiritual directors encourage us to name our gratitudes each day, to look for those moments in each day that are a spark of goodness.

Whether we always see it or not, God is in the “is-ness” of this world, even when things seem lonely and rough.

I love the story of Elijah, the prophet in the bible who is living in a time where he’s outnumbered and on the losing side. (1 Kings 19:1-18) 

King Ahab and Queen Jezebel want him dead. Even his big moment, when God shows up and vindicates him by sending fire from heaven miraculously, when 400 prophets of the false god Baal couldn’t do it; even his big moment leads to his low moment of running for his life, hiding in the desert from Ahab and Jezebel.

He’s cranky, he’s tired, he worked hard, like that viral video with that little kid home from school.

That’s Elijah! He complains to God too, a big massive “woe is me, life shouldn’t be this way, I’m the only one who’s been faithful to you even with the odds stacked against me and I’m just done, take me home Lord.” 

I have spent more time than I like to admit over the last several years describing my “is” as a “woe is me.” 

When I spend time comparing my “is” to what I think “should be” or “what is fair,” I can really spiral down. “Should” and “fair” and “ought” are words that don’t lead me to good places.

But for Elijah, God showed up in the mess of the “is.” God lets Elijah take a nap. God gives Elijah some food. And then, he gives this little gentle reminder of what truly is, of how the is of this world isn’t as bad as Elijah thinks. “Elijah, I know that there are 7000 people who haven’t bowed their knee to Baal. Thanks for all you’ve done, but you’re not the only one.”

Living in “is” is grateful, noticing the good (even if we need divine intervention to see it). And it is also a fierce, open-eyed look at ALL that is, the injustice and the pain and the loss. 

Living in “is” refuses naivety or toxic positivity or any kind of privileged blindness to the hard things of the world. In fact, as Wiman says all through Zero at the Bone, suffering and pain ground us in the material world. Ground us in is. 

All right, what about the “if?” Let’s meander down that path for a bit.

When we look too long at the is, when the power of dehumanizing systems and unjust institutions seems ALL that there is, looking for the good becomes more and more difficult. 

The pain and injustice of all that is, needs the unexpected outside hope of if. The presence of God brings the hope and possibility of if.

I remember a message Elizabeth gave here several years ago, before her back surgery. She had spent months in pain, and she talked about how she needed to come to the place of accepting it was not going to get better without surgery. She said she was going to accept the pain she was living with, but she was not going to approve of it. 

Acceptance but not approval. I won’t be blind to the pain, but I also won’t approve of this for all time. I will hold onto hope for a surgery that can heal. Accept but not approve. Is and If.

I want to hold on to IF that can transform the IS. What IF God moved? What would it look like? 

What I’m realizing is that I can’t let certainty and mechanical thinking creep back in here. I can’t control God’s movement. It’s not a guarantee. My eyes are wide open to the “is” and I see that while God does intervene, intercede, break in at times, it is not every time. I see that some people thrive, who seem to have no faith at all, and some who are so devoted to Jesus struggle. 

Faith for me in this season of life is “is and if”, not “if/then.”

What I mean by that is, I don’t have the control or certainty implied by an “if/then” faith. I at least cannot deny that I see a world in which God has shown up and dwells in, moving all creation toward love and unity and justice. But there is a mystery, a paradox, an organic rather than mechanical way in which God acts in our world and in my life. 

“If/then” faith can’t hold me, because I just don’t see justice, goodness, love, and God always showing up if I do certain things. 

But looking honestly at this world as it is shows traces of God’s justice, goodness, and love that I also cannot deny. So much so, that I cling to the hope of the if of God’s activity. So much so, that I stake my life on living my “is” as much as I can for Jesus, no matter how the “if” turns out.

A couple weeks ago, I talked about Daniel from the bible.

Remember his three friends? We know them by their empire names, their Babylonian names of Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego. They refuse to bow down to the golden statue of King Nebuchadnezzar. They get brought before the king, and have this beautiful moment where they say: “Throw us in the fire. Our God is able to save us. But even if God doesn’t…” 

Even IF the “if” doesn’t result in the “then” that I want…even if God doesn’t save us, in the mystery of God’s work..

“But even if God doesn’t, we will not bow to your idol.” (Daniel 3:17-18)

We know God could act! But even if God doesn’t, we’re staking our lives on it.

What an amazing example of faith with the “is” and “if” brought together!

In my best moments, that’s the heart of the faith that I hold and that I want to hold me. 

May we resist the pressure to make the center of faith beliefs, oughts, and shoulds. May we find the strength to look at the raw reality of the “is” in which we live, finding gratitude and God’s presence where we can. And when we boldly open our eyes honestly to the “is” around us, may the pain, suffering, and relentless injustice never take away the hope of God’s “if.”