Tagged: Mysticism
Vocation and the Voice
Preached for the ordination of Andrew Taylor, Lawrencetown United Baptist Church, May 23, 2026
9 At that place [the mountain of Horeb] he [that is, Elijah] came to a cave and spent the night there. Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 10 He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” 11 He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake, 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. 13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 14 He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” 15 Then the Lord said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king over Aram. 16 Also you shall anoint Jehu son of Nimshi as king over Israel, and you shall anoint Elisha son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah as prophet in your place. (1 Kings 19:9-16, NRSV)
“Teaching about Christ begins in silence.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer told his students in 1933. Bonhoeffer, if you recall, was the German pastor and theologian who opposed the Nazis. This is a man of incredible courage and conviction, and he says, if you want to learn about Jesus, it begins in silence.
But what a weird thing to say! Maybe he had a particular unruly class, and he just wanted them all to be quiet. I often try to play the “quiet game” with my kids when I want them to settle down and listen. I’ve never had much success, however. No, I don’t think that is what Bonhoeffer means.
There is something counterintuitive going on here: One would think that teaching involves action and obviously speaking. If you want to learn, you should start reading, studying, writing down thoughts and discussing them, maybe in a breakout room with other plucky seminary students—so get busy. But no. While all of those are important and profitable, Bonhoeffer says if you want to learn about Jesus, it must begin in silence.
Today, we are ordaining Andrew Taylor for pastoral ministry. It is such an honour to give the sermon for my friend Andrew. I’d say he is my student, and that is how I first met him at Acadia, but the truth is, in God’s kingdom and in our friendship, there are only disciples learning from each other.
Ordination is a recognition of a community of disciples of the calling God has on a person to be a preacher, a shepherd, a leader—you can say so many other things here: a companion, a nurturer, an advocate — of that community. How does he know this is what God wants for him? How does Lawrencetown United Baptist Church know this is what it wants to recognize? And more than that, where does a pastor draw his or her calling from? What confirms it and sustains it?
For those who know this passage, it takes place after a series of dramatic events in the life of the prophet Elijah.
Just before it, Elijah has a conflict with the prophets of the god Baal at Mount Carmel. Elijah confronts the king, Ahab, about his injustice and idolatry. Ahab has been killing the prophets of God, all the truth speakers and justice seekers. Elijah calls out this false god by challenging the 450 prophets of Baal, these yes men of tyranny, to a contest of sorts. Each chose a bull at Mount Carmel, and each was to pray to their god to see which god would honour the sacrifice and rain down fire from heaven. The god that did so would obviously be the true God. The other better close-up shop.
The prophets of Baal prayed and prophesied, yelled at the sky and even cut themselves trying to evoke their god, but nothing happened: a pathetic sight.
Then Elijah, so confident in the living God, tells his servants to drench his sacrifice with water three times over.
Elijah then turns and utters a simple prayer, and then, suddenly, the sacrifice erupted into flames from the sky.
You could not imagine a more decisive victory in the name of faith against delusion and oppression. Yet, it did not end up that way.
A humiliated Ahab turns to his queen, Jazabel, who then orders the execution of Elijah. Rather than believe and repent what they just saw, they turn to suppress the truth and get rid of anyone who contradicts their lies. Such are the patterns of those that prefer power to truth.
Elijah then has to run for his life, out into the wilderness, where he collapses from the elements. Elijah is defeated emotionally and physically. And he cries out, longing for death. Yet, it says an angel of the Lord brought food and water to him, and he musters enough strength to make it to a cave, a cave on the mountain of Horeb, the mountain on which Moses met God.
He gets to the cave, but he is still wary. A cave is safer, but his heart is still broken. What he thought would be a decisive turning moment for his people made things worse. What would be a vindication of his work as a prophet had only made his life and message more precarious.
And so, there in that cave, he calls out to God. Perhaps you have experienced a similar moment, a moment where you are utterly exhausted and at the end of your rope.
It is often in these moments that God finds us. And it says, there the word of God came to him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” The voice is not just asking why Elijah is in a cave, but something much deeper. Why are you here? What is your purpose? But Elijah laments: everything has gone wrong, and now he is the last one left. The situation is hopeless.
And God tells him something, “Go out and stand on the mountain.” Go and meet me where Moses met me. Stand on the same rocks, breathe the same air, feel the same sun, look out at the same horizon. Elijah goes out, probably expecting to see God like Moses did: in a pillar of fire.
And something spectacular does happen: First, a powerful wind came, so powerful it could shatter stone, but it says, God was not in the wind.
Then an earthquake rumbled, shaking the mountain, but God was not in the earthquake either.
Then a fire blazed, a fire not unlike the one that consumed the sacrifice just a few days ago—surely God is in the fire, just like in the time of Moses—but no, God was not in the fire.
Then it happened. God was there. Not in the power of wind or rumble or fire—not in the most powerful things Elijah knew, but in a whisper. Or more literally, in the sound of sheer silence.
No words are recorded. Just that Elijah heard God in pure stillness.
The Voice in the Silence
What was this? This moment is as mystical as it is mystifying. What happened here? How do you hear silence? Why would God not be in the powerful displays that preceded this? The Quaker mystic Thomas Kelly wrote about encountering God in the silence. He writes this,
Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continually return. Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself. Yielding to these persuasions, gladly committing ourselves in body and soul, utterly and completely, to the Light Within, is the beginning of true life. It is a dynamic center, a creative Life that presses to birth within us. It is a Light Within that illumines the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the human face. It is a seed stirring to life if we do not choke it. It is the Shekinah of the soul, the Presence in the midst.(Kelly, Testament of Devotion, 9-10)
Perhaps God is teaching Elijah where God is truly found and where strength truly comes from.
In the silence, Elijah’s soul was laid bare, and there was God’s presence in the midst. In the silence, you are left confronting your inner thoughts and memories, scrutinizing what gives you confidence and what brings you doubt. In the silence, if we learn to listen well, the lies we are told and the lies we tell ourselves, all our worldly claims to status and significance, circle, spin, and sputter until eventually they run out of steam. And when that happens, we are left, left in that thin space where the Spirit of God that speaks from on high and the Spirit of God that calls out from the depths of our souls—the Shekinah of the soul, as Kelly put it—speak together as one, although often without words.
There in the silence, Elijah encountered the one who is beyond all things but in all things.
Elijah encountered the one who is beyond all thought and action, all institutions and traditions, all authorities and powers, yet the one who is present, faithful, and true.
Elijah encountered the one whom Moses encountered, the “I am that I am,” the one who simply is, the one who is with us.
And because of this, Elijah also found himself.
In this moment, it seems, Elijah received an ordination of sorts, a re-confirmation of his calling.
It is there in the silence, in those moments unmediated by any earthly power or authority, when we stand before God and are answerable to Spirit alone, there, as we Baptists would say, in the liberty and responsibility of our souls, the liberty and responsibility that is ours and no one else’s. It is in this space that we find our true calling.
As Andrew knows, I must have sketched half a dozen sermon outlines, pondering over which scripture to speak to you on today. Yet, I felt drawn, a pull from deep within, to this word.
I was also drawn to this passage because of the person Andrew is. You are free to compare him to the prophet Elijah if you wish, but that is not strictly what I mean. I was drawn to this passage because I know Andrew’s convictions and calling, Andrew’s sense of Spirit. We have had so many good conversations over the nature of God and the Christian life, the meaning of the church, often on my back deck, but also over food, usually at the Noodle Guys.
What can I say? God fed the Israelites manna for their spiritual journey, and for others, it seems to be Asiago shells or mushroom ravioli.
Sometimes we have talked for hours, laughed and joked, other times we have sat in the silence and watched the stars come out.
And in all these moments, in various ways, I have gotten a sense of God’s presence: in our friendship, in Andrew’s life, in the moments of stillness.
It is in the moments of vulnerability and honesty before God, when we dare to have them, that we know who we are and what we are called for.
For many of us, while we were on different career paths, we heard God’s call and, in doing so, realized who we were meant to be. We felt called to proclaim God’s word, to steward a community, to care for the vulnerable, realizing that walking with God and walking alongside others in their walk with God is our life’s calling.
The Vocation in the Silence
Andrew, as you step forward in ordination, as this community of disciples recognizes this in you, and you continue to shepherd this flock, remember those moments in the stillness. Remember the moments you spend with God where you first understood your calling. You will need to draw on them for strength and practice them continually, for there will be times of discouragement which we all face.
So, it was for Elijah. If you can believe it, Elijah, one of the greatest prophets of God, doubted his calling.
Elijah, the man who saw fire rain down from heaven on a waterlogged pyre, the man nourished by angels, a man who for all intents and purposes should have had an ironclad faith and invincible sense of vocation—this Elijah we find here in a cave, on the run, disheartened: wondering where has God’s kingdom gone, wondering where are all those who stand up for God’s truth and justice, wondering how can God be all powerful in the face of such rampant tyranny and murder, wondering if any of his work made a difference, wondering how can God’s ways prevail when he is the only one left? Perhaps in these dark days, we have wondered similar things.
Yet, there he encountered God. Sometimes we expect God to speak in dramatic ways, but God does not speak in a vision or even in words in that moment. More perplexing is that it comes after three amazing displays of power that almost certainly should be interpreted as evidence of God’s presence. After all, God did appear to Moses in a pillar of fire, to Jonathan in an earthquake, and to Job in a whirlwind.
What happened in this moment seems more subtle but more profound than any outward display of power, more than any spectacle, no matter how supernatural.
Perhaps God was correcting Elijah. Perhaps, as many of us assume, Elijah had come to believe that God works through power as humans understand power: through grand interventions, through kings and armies, through numerical growth, through money, status, and awards. Perhaps Elijah lost sight of the more radical way God works: through the small things, through seemingly insignificant acts of authenticity, not in the noise and spectacle but in the calmness and stillness.
Elijah’s soul encountered the sheer presence of God. Before Elijah went out to the mountain, he was questioning; he was discouraged; he felt alone and afraid; he wanted to give up. But in that moment, something happened. He sensed something more powerful than all earthly power. And yet, it made no noise, nor could it even be seen. Something so easy to miss. He felt the sense of the divine. He knew the presence of God. And that was enough.
God was enough for him as God is enough for us. God is enough for every struggle and every need we could ever have.
When we behold the presence of God, we know what we have to do. We know who we are. We know our purpose and direction.
In God, we know we are enough.
It says after this, God instructed him and sent him on his way. God tells him to go and raise up the next prophets and the next kings that will overturn the tyranny and idolatry of the current regime. His work has not been in vain. The resistance has not been snuffed out. God’s kingdom had not been defeated or usurped. It is alive within us. There is hope. With God, there is always hope.
Brothers and sisters, may we never forget this, for when we forget his presence, we can lose sight of our purpose.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. writes of encountering this same presence of God in times of discouragement. In his autobiography, Stride Towards Freedom, he writes of his work in combatting the injustice and evil of his day—evils that are sadly still with us today—but one night he got a death threat on the phone. It shook him to the core. He could not sleep, and in the long hours of the night, he grew afraid. He went down to his kitchen. He recounts,
I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me, I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. “I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”
He then writes,
At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced God before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: “Stand up for justice, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.” Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.”(King, Stride Toward Freedom, 134-135)
Sometimes I have noticed that the more meaningful the ministry, the more dogged the discouragement can be. Opposition comes at the most pivotal points. The night, as they say, is darkest before the dawn.
In those moments, we must look to God. We must sit in the stillness of prayer and scripture. Look within to conscience and calling. Rest in the presence of our God, the great friend to humanity, the one who is perfect love and justice. The one who is our hope.
We can be tempted to measure our calling with earthly standards of success, but as the pastor who preached at my ordination, Tim Walker, said to me—and so, I pass this important advice on to you today—we are not called to success; our purpose is not to “grow the church,” we are not perpetuators of institutions, it is our job first and foremost to be faithful. We are not called to “success” but to faithfulness.
When we remember this, when we know and trust who God is, we know who we are and what we were meant for.
My charge for Andrew today is to hold tight to this presence.
Be who God has called you to be.
Be the one who you know before God you were meant to be.
Be the proclaimer of God’s word.
Be the shepherd of God’s flock.
Be the truth seeker, the justice advocator, the movement organizer, God has called you to be.
Know that your intellect, your emotions, your story, your character, your good humour—know that even the things you might not like about yourself, all are a part of who God is calling you to be.
You are ordained to the calling that is for you before God, God and no other, for the good work God had for you, you and no one else.
A Community Ready to Listen
Just know, Andrew—as I am sure you already know—that this hallowed calling, this sacred work, does not have to be done alone.
I remember the words of one Baptist leader, Kyle Childress (whom I had the pleasure of interviewing while writing my dissertation). He said that to believe the Baptist distinctive of soul liberty, but to do so in community, is to believe in the possibility—when community is done well—that there should be “no more lonely prophets.”
Of course, what he means by this is not that we wouldn’t go through times of discouragement in solitude. It means that if we hold that the Spirit of Christ as been poured out on all flesh, the presence of Christ is where two or three are gathered, that to be the church today, a community of souls responsible to God, covenanting together, discerning together, is to know that the work of pursuing God’s word and truth, spreading the gospel in word and deed, caring for others and nurturing the bonds of fellowship—this is not the task of one person.
This calling of listening and following God’s presence is not limited to the pastorate but is entrusted to the whole people of God.
Lawrencetown United Baptist Church, gathered disciples in the name of Jesus, we the people of God, ordain Andrew today, recognizing the Spirit’s empowering in his life, but this is not just Andrew’s ordination, but yours. Today, you also reaffirm your calling.
Will you be a people always committed to listening to that still voice of God?
Will you be a people committed to following the truth of Spirit?
Will you be a people committed to growing the love of God, pursuing the justice of God, sharing the joy of God and to do this together?
Brothers and sisters, may we commit and recommit ourselves to this sacred calling, now, today, tomorrow, and always, knowing that Christ promises that he will be with us, even unto the end of the age. Amen.
Faith in Fragments
A reading of Psalm 77 from the NRSV:
1 I cry aloud to God,
aloud to God, that he may hear me.
2 In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord;
in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying;
my soul refuses to be comforted.
3 I think of God, and I moan;
I meditate, and my spirit faints. Selah
4 You keep my eyelids from closing;
I am so troubled that I cannot speak.
5 I consider the days of old,
and remember the years of long ago.
6 I commune with my heart in the night;
I meditate and search my spirit:
7 “Will the Lord spurn forever,
and never again be favorable?
8 Has his steadfast love ceased forever?
Are his promises at an end for all time?
9 Has God forgotten to be gracious?
Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” Selah
10 And I say, “It is my grief
that the right hand of the Most High has changed.”
11 I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord;
I will remember your wonders of old.
12 I will meditate on all your work,
and muse on your mighty deeds.
13 Your way, O God, is holy.
What god is so great as our God?
14 You are the God who works wonders;
you have displayed your might among the peoples.
15 With your strong arm you redeemed your people,
the descendants of Jacob and Joseph. Selah
16 When the waters saw you, O God,
when the waters saw you, they were afraid;
the depths trembled.
17 The clouds poured out water;
the skies thundered;
your arrows flashed on every side.
18 The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind;
your lightnings lit up the world;
the earth trembled and shook.
19 Your way was through the sea,
your path, through the mighty waters;
yet your footprints were unseen.
20 You led your people like a flock
by the hand of Moses and Aaron.
May God bless the reading of his word.
The Psalms are the prayer book of Israel, arranged to mediate and pray through our life of obedience to God’s law. They are written in five books just like the books of Moses, mirroring them. They are a lasting reminder in the canon of scripture that true faith in God and true obedience to his ways are only possible by prayer.
As Psalms 1 and 2, the gateways to the Psalter, state, these poetic prayers are also intended to pray through the rise of David, the anointed one, the plight of the persecuted righteous, but then the Psalms form a narrative of sorts, praying through the failure of the Davidic kings, and then the exile of God’s people and its devastation, and then finally the restoration of Israel’s hope surrounding the coming messiah and restoration of temple worship. Psalm 77 occurs in that middle point, between the times of thanksgiving.
In this travail of 150 Psalms, I was surprised, the first time I read through them in high school, to find out so many of them are psalms that express lament, doubt, even anger and accusation at God. About half are psalms what Walter Brueggemann calls psalms of “disorientation.” And they are disorienting, make no mistake. The first time I read some of these psalms I remember my words being caught in my throat in shock.
Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? (Psalm 10)
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Ps. 22)
Why have you rejected me? (Ps. 43)
Why do you hide your face and forget our misery and oppression? (Ps 44)
O God, why have you rejected us forever? (Ps. 74)
Lord, where is your great love? (Ps. 89)
I remember saying to myself, “How can this be in the Bible?” Does the author not trust God? If you trust God, how can you ask such false, absurd, disrespectful things of him? I was taught that God is good and if you feel otherwise your feelings are wrong, so don’t trust your feelings.
I was also taught that we were saved by faith, and how do you know you have faith? You believe the right things. How do you come to know the right things? The Holy Spirit convicts you directly, so don’t ever question your beliefs. To doubt them is to doubt what saves you. You trust them and never waver, for so many have doubted their way along that proverbial “slippery slope.”
I was taught that all that a Christian needs to do to overcome sadness or despair, if true Christians are capable of such things, was to believe a bit harder, to focus on Jesus a bit closer, obey more purely, and if that does not help you have done something wrong. We sang, “Since Jesus Christ came in and cleansed my heart from sin, I’m inright, outright, upright, downright, happy all the time.” Of course, we know that life is not uniformly happy, but some have heard this and thought: If I am sad, does that mean I don’t have Jesus?
So, when I came across a psalm like this one, my automatic gloss on a text like this in order to make it fit my paradigm was, “Oh well, this is Old Covenant. So glad we are in the New Covenant of grace now!” (Somewhere Glenn Wooden and Matt Walsh just shuttered, I’m sure).
The Psalms are perhaps one of the most interesting books of the Bible in that they are God’s word to us by first being our words expressed to God, which possess all sorts of interesting conundrums for how we understand inspiration for sure. If Marshal McLuhan is correct and the medium is the message, the fact that the psalter is the experience of God’s people prayed to God – experience of creation, politics, love, war, illness and healing, obedience and confession, thanksgiving and despair, praise for God’s presence in one’s life, and more pointedly, lament over times of a sense of God’s absence – all of these prayers, strangely and beautifully, turn back to be a word from God to us, and this says something: there is no domain of human experience, whether science or history, politics or poetry, that is irrelevant or meaningless to our relationship with God. This includes times of despair, feelings of abandonment by God, even anger at God. God permits these to be meaningful to him.
Worship, according to the Psalms means there is no facet of human life that God does not find meaningful, and no facet of human life that cannot find its meaning in him. Whether it is the mountain of divine ecstasy, miracles, that fuzzy feeling we all get when Andrew Conrad sings in chapel with silk-smooth voice, or the opposite: “valleys of the shadow of death,” darkness, discouragement and despair.
The Psalms, like this one, then offer a template for emotions to inhabit, words to give voice to what is our hearts, or, as John Calvin once said, a mirror to see into our souls. They offer a rhythm to allow scripture’s story to be our story and for our story to an extension of Christ’s story in the world.
There is a Christian poem that we have probably all heard so many times that to quote it now may sound a bit cheesy, but it goes like this: there was a man walking along the beach with God, and he looks at the footprints to find that there were only one set of tracks where his life seemed the toughest. “Where were you then?” he asked God. “My child,” God replies, “that is when I carried you.”
We miss the insight here that often in times when we think God is absent – that indeed there are times we will feel God is absent, that we will feel like God has forsaken us – it is in these times he is in fact present to us in a way we only discover afterwards.
The mystic Simone Weil once said that the absence of God was more present to her than the experience of all other presences. For her times where she thought she saw God absent in the world begged deep multi-layered questions for faith and prayer that atheism only gave shallow responses to.
Mystics like St. John of the Cross have called these experiences the “dark night of the soul.” Dark nights are times in which we feel distant from God, times that we might even then get angry at God, accusing him, or blaming ourselves, and yet, if these experiences do their work, they are pathways to deeper trust, deeper intimacy, deeper love of a God who is ineffable: beyond all our words, ideas, feelings, and actions.
Have you gone through a time like this? Did you wonder whether God was there? Perhaps you still wonder. Perhaps you are going through one of sorts right now. Or, perhaps, you are sitting here thinking this does not apply to you, and so, perhaps you should just bank this message for later: perhaps you may need this message in the near future, say some time between mid-terms and finals (I don’t know, but that is just my guess).
I can tell you I needed this message. My most significant personal trial occurred in the final year of Bible College, which I call “my dark summer.” I went to a Bible College in Cambridge, Ontario. My experience in Bible College up until this point I think had been pretty standard. I hung out with friends. We would goof off playing video games till 2:00 am, pull all-nighters getting essays done that we waited till the night of to do, or sit around strategizing how to “court” certain girls. I say “court” because – thank-you Joshua Harris – we did not believe in “dating” (if you don’t know that distinction, trust that you have been spared). The guys residence, which did not permit the presence of any woman in there except for a small window of a few hours after lunch on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, was like a G rated National Lampoon’s Animal House, with holes in the walls from wrestling matches and broken lamp shades from air soft rifle attacks, and other collateral damage from the ongoing prank wars. The kind of usually college things.
I loved my studies, despite not taking them particularly seriously. I was always an insatiably curious person. And while the seminary’s official perspectives were generally conservative, in the ongoing rigor of academic studies, I began to ask questions about the reliability of scripture; how do you interpret Genesis one? What do you do with the ending of Mark? Could even, dare I even utter the question, a woman be ordained? (That was a dangerous question in those circles). Each time I would just repress the question, swallowing it back with an easy proof text to keep me on the straight and narrow, lest I go down the “slippery slope.”
Or at least I certainly tried. While I was in college, I helped a small house church. I remember one night after Alpha Course, I was angry at one person because they believed in infant baptism (how dare he!). I turned to my pastor and friend saying, “We need to stop that person from thinking that way! It’s unbiblical!”
My pastor and friend turned to me in the car, “How do you know you aren’t the one who is wrong?”
I responded, “I can’t be wrong. I have the Holy Spirit!”
He smiled and echoed my words back to me, “You are saying you cannot be wrong?”
“That’s right,” I said again, “I cannot be wrong. I have the Holy Spirit.”
This repeated on for a while, longer than I would care to admit, and he kept repeating my words to me till the thought struck me, “Wow, I sound really arrogant. I’m human. I’m a sinner. Of course, I could be wrong!” The day I learned to ask myself “Could I be wrong?” about the things I regarded as “too important for me to be wrong,” was the day my faith started to fragment.
Psalm 77 says in verse 3, “I think of God, and I moan; I meditate, and my spirit faints.” Tremper Longman notes that the Psalmist seems to be uncomfortable with the ideas they had about God. The pat answers no longer satisfy.
But then something else happened, my father, who had just retired, complained at Christmas time of stomach-aches, and doctors diagnosed it as inoperable, pancreatic cancer. In four months, he lost over a hundred pounds, shriveling up into something you would see in holocaust pictures.
Yet, my Dad had a very strong faith. He knew that he was going to die, and told me, “Spencer, I know I am not getting out of this one.” He told me how proud he was of me and encouraged me to continue pursuing my ministry calling and academics. As he said that, he took off his wedding ring and his favorite watch and gave them to me.
He kept telling me that the last thing he wanted to do was see me graduate, so in April, we drove him to Forward Baptist Church, and we brought him in on a wheel chair for the graduation ceremony. He passed away two weeks later in hospice, just over four months after being diagnosed.
Losing your Dad is like losing the one reason to make another person proud, because he was that person. Watching your Dad die, knowing that pancreatic cancer is hereditary, is like watching yourself die, to be permanently haunted with the suspicion that one day, you too may just get a stomach-ache, and this is how you will go too, and it will be painful. It caused me to wonder what the point of doing studies was. Was there a point to anything?
Yet, he showed me an example of perseverance in suffering. One time, his meds wore off, and he clenched his fists so that his fingers dug into his palms. Bent over in the tremendous pain, he prayed, “Thank-you, God, even for this. Thank-you for every opportunity you give me to show my love for you!” Those words have gotten me through a lot.
At the same time, that summer, more happened. I went to the mall. I saw my close friend, who was a part-time supervisor there and also an associate pastor in the area. He asked if I was up for coming to his car, while he was on smoke break. I agreed. When we got there, he confessed to me that his marriage had come to a brutal end. I asked, “Why?” and he responded: “Spencer, I’m gay.” This came as a complete surprise to me. He apparently married his wife trying to suppress or change his orientation, but the result was the opposite. He went through reorientation therapy and it only made matters worse. When he told his senior pastor, the pastor fired him on the spot, saying, “Obviously you just need more faith!”
The ensuing scandal led him, my friend, to become suicidal. He had become convinced that he was predestined not to actually have salvation because, as he thought, “With enough faith I can do anything, but if I am still like this, I must not have enough faith. And if I do not have faith, which God gives as a gift, God must not want me to be saved. Perhaps,” he said to me, “maybe I am one of those people who say ‘Lord, Lord,’ but never were actual believers.” So, he concluded that if he did not have God in his life, life was no longer worth living. He attempted suicide and, thankfully, failed, and as he told me his story, he showed me his scared, sliced hands, which he had hidden under long sleeves. I was moved with tears. What I managed to choke out was that if he was willing to take his own life in the idea that life without God is not worth living, then truly he revers God in a way that I have never had to. That, I can only reason, is a sign that he does have a relationship with God. The first beatitude is blessed are the poor in spirit, not the rich in spirit, after all. If Jesus died for all sin at the cross, I simply could not accept that God rejects a person who needs him, no matter who they are.
My summer had more to it. Yes, there is more. The pastor of that little church I volunteered at, had recently closed, and moved into another congregation. My friend was really getting wayward at this point. He and his family went off on vacation to his hometown.
They got back and something was different. I felt like they were angry at me for some reason, as they just seemed stand-offish and dodgy. Turns out it was because their marriage was ending. The man had met up with a woman from high school while in his hometown and he was planning on going to leave to be with her. News like this did not stay hidden, soon everyone knew, and it was a mess.
He left, and I remember him telling me this and me just being in a state of shock for days. I idolized this person, my mentor and best friend. Yet I watched this man spiral mentally and spiritually into chaos. He left for a time, but in time he eventually came to his senses in that months that followed and came back.
Along with this, I was also penniless. I could not find a student job at the beginning of summer, and so, I was getting back on summer rent and worried I would get kicked out with all that was happening. I eventually finally got a job working night shift at Tim Horton’s. My only conversational partner in the dead of night, as I cleaned coffee pots and changed garbage cans, was a Polish immigrant lady named Helena, who knew enough English to take a coffee order, swear in half-English-half-Polish under her breath, and ask to go for a smoke. Those were lonely nights. As the semester started, I had to work night shifts then go to class, sleep, then work all night, and I did this for a time until I could find another job.
My father dying, my fiend coming-out about his sexuality and attempting suicide, my friend and mentor having a mental break down – this all happened in one summer.
When you care about a person, when you have a deep friendship, their doubts have a way of becoming your doubts: their pain, your pain.
The Psalm records in verse 6, “I communed with my heart in the night; I meditated and searched my spirit.” One night, I recall sitting in my room feeling that all rational grounding for my faith was left void, all practical examples of faith in my life had failed, left the church, or, even worse, had passed away due to horrific god-forsaken illness. It was in that moment of despair that I sensed a great void of meaning confront my life: Could all this be worthless? Is life an abyss of vacuous truth?
The Psalmist asks in verse 8, “Has his steadfast love ceased forever? Are his promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?”
Similarly, I asked: Where are you God? Why didn’t you heal my dad? Why didn’t you come through for my friends? Are you even there?
Then something happened. Something manifested itself to me. I remember sensing in that abyss of the void, the truth of Christ beyond all the failures of human thought and religion, a hope that prevailed. It did not take away the abyss, but make the darkness less of fear and more like stillness. An existential Selah, the Psalmist might suggest.
It simply assured me that while I can get my faith terribly wrong, Christ is still there. My “truth” could fail, but Christ will not. If Jesus is who he is, “Even if we are faithless,” says 2 Tim. 2:13, “he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.”
The Psalmist, similarly, despite doubt, despite anguish and accusation, recounts the deeds of God and feels assurance, meditating on the Exodus:
I will meditate on all your work…
Your way, O God, is holy…
You are the God who works wonders…
You redeem your people…
The result of this was that I committed myself to rethinking my faith with a new-found hope and reassurance. That summer I must have read through about 30 books. I thought to myself that if Christ is true even if my beliefs have failed, then I must give Christianity the benefit of the doubt and investigate what others have said, others I either ignored or missed. My studies became excited by a deep personal drive that pushed me on to doctoral studies, driven by the thrill of wondering and wandering with a God who is with us even in the questions.
I would not presume to say to you that somehow this means all these questions I had then have been resolved. The point of faith, of relationship, is not to have it resolve. St. John of the Cross reminds us that while periods of despair lift, the Dark Night of the Soul is actually without end in this life. For that is seeing, as Paul would said, always “as in a mirror darkly” until the final day where we will see God face to face.
I did not mean nor want any of the things that happened to me that summer in seminary. No one wants their faith to be fragmented like this, especially those who need it most, as I did. I have met so many Christians who have gone through a time of questioning or a time of discouragement, and they have fallen away from the church and from faith altogether, often because of an expectation of faith that could not permit doubts or could not see God’s presence in times of darkness, yet this psalm invites us to see, paradoxically, that God’s presence is there even in times of absence, light in times of darkness, and faith in and through the toughest questions.
If you know someone in your life perhaps like this, continue to pray for them, for we know that our good shepherd does not forsake the lost sheep. And if you feel you may be one of those lost sheep, know that our God has not forsaken you either. If you feel alone, know that you have a family here at ADC that may know a thing or two about what you may be going through.
My other concern is for us teachers and pastors also. Sometimes we can be so obsessed with numeric growth we neglect the hard work of spiritual growth. Sometimes we are so afraid of the fallout of asking a provocative question to our congregations we don’t ask it at all. Or worse, sometimes we become so afraid of the consequences of these questions, we stop asking them of ourselves entirely. To paraphrase St. John of the Cross, those who are in the darkest nights of the soul are the ones who have convinced themselves they are walking in perfect daylight.
C. S. Lewis once said this after his wife died, in his book, A Grief Observed, “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has been shattered time after time. God shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? And most are offended by this iconoclasm; but blessed are those who are not.”
Brothers and sisters, blessed are those who are not.
So, may you know today in all your questions, wonderings, and wanderings, that you have a God that knows you deeper than you know yourself, closer to you than you are to yourself, who sees you with eyes of mercy, who holds you with hands that were pierced for you and bleed for you at the cross.
May you be free to bring to him in prayer your whole self, nothing held back, whether confession or accusation, joy or despair, and know that there is nothing, absolutely nothing that can separate us from the love of Jesus Christ.
May you be blessed to be shattered, to have your faith in fragments, and yet, little by little, day by day, fragment by fragment, may you be remade into a mosaic that depicts Jesus to our broken world.
Amen.
Rev. Dr. Spencer Miles Boersma
Acadia Divinity College Chapel,
September 30th, 2020.
Spencer Boersma 