Rollins Chapel
Dartmouth College
April 8, 2007 (Easter Sunday)
Richard R. Crocker, College Chaplain
“To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the
things we cannot see.” Hebrews 11:1 (Today’s English version)
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
seen.” Hebrews 11:1 (King James Version)
As perhaps you know, we have a brief weekly chapel service here in Rollins
chapel each Thursday during term at 12:30, to which all of you are most
welcome. And in these chapel services, I, and other invited speakers, have been
talking for the last several weeks about the relationship between faith and
reason.
Today, on Easter Sunday morning, at dawn, I will talk mainly about faith. We
are here to celebrate the anniversary of the resurrection of Jesus Christ,
which is the heart of our faith – and as hard as we may try, we can not make
such an event reasonable. People try, but they fail. They present scenarios in
which the body of Christ was stolen, or in which Jesus was actually in a coma
from which he awakened, or even in which the person crucified was not really
Jesus but a willing substitute for him. Such explanations may seem to some
people reasonable, but they fail as a basis for faith.
Easter Sunday is a time to celebrate and renew our faith. Now faith, the
bible tells us, is “to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the
things we can not see.” And Tolstoy, the great Russian author, argued that
faith is not an option; he said it is essential for living.[1] We can not live without faith, he
says. And I think he is right. Faith, in a general sense, is not something that
only religious people have. It is something that every human being must have in
order to live a fully human life. To be human is to live in anticipation
– with sure hope for something to come. And it is to know that reality is much
greater than we can see – or understand. Faith is implied in most of the
actions and transactions that we have every day – from the time we get up every
morning, facing a new day that had faith we would see but did not know we would
see, to the time we go to sleep, in the faith that we will be preserved through
the darkness and time of unconsciousness that we absolutely require. Faith is
not foreign or rare; it is absolutely intimate and essential. Faith is required
in almost every human interaction – when we order food and consume it; when we
go to class and listen to a professor; when we commit ourselves to working on a
project; when we share a confidence with our friends. We must have it; when we
cease to have any faith at all, we either devolve into insanity, or we die.
But although we require faith to live, there are many objects of faith. We
may have faith in our families, our friends, our college, our nation. The most
common, among certain people, is what they often proudly proclaim as “faith in
themselves.” This is what Tolstoy lived on for most of his youth – until it ran
out. If we are people of a certain talent, certain ability, certain resources,
certain status, it is easy to have faith in ourselves. We are taught and come
to believe that we can manage the world in a way that will be favorable to us,
and that is all we need. This kind of faith is cultivated at Dartmouth and
places like it. It was cultivated in the Russian aristocracy of Tolstoy’s
time. It continues to be cultivated among those who are gifted and
talented and wealthy. But as Tolstoy discovered, and as we do too, it has its
limits. All of us, eventually, will face situations and circumstances where our
talents are inadequate, our wealth is of no use, and our connections are of no
avail. In those situations, we find that we have been worshipping idols, and
that genuine faith, transcendent faith – faith that gives us reason to live, no
matter what the circumstances - is rooted in and sustained by something very
different than we had supposed or been taught. That is why Tolstoy came to
believe that the genuine faith he needed and sought was to be found, not among
his peers in the aristocracy, but among the Russian peasants who believed,
uncritically, in the teachings and practices of the Russian orthodox church.
Among them he chose to live, and among them he died.
Now we are here, I suspect, because all of us, in some way, have had contact
with the church. We may identify as church members, or we may not. We may feel
very much a part of the church, or we may not. But all of us who are here to
celebrate and renew our faith in Jesus Christ have this faith only because the
church has, in faithfulness and unfaithfulness, in truth and in error,
sometimes with more integrity and sometimes with less, proclaimed it. And,
fundamentally, the church proclaims that Jesus died and was resurrected, and
that through our relationship with him, through our belief in him, through our
love for him, through our obedience to him, we find strength and hope for this
life and beyond.
As I said, such faith rests upon a belief – the resurrection of Christ –
that reason can not grasp – though one can have reasons for believing something
that is itself beyond reason, We do that every day. We find reasons to support
almost all of our beliefs. Especially if we are inclined to value reason, as we
are in a college, it is important that we have reasons for everything. But our
fundamental commitments are beyond reason. There is no reason, for instance, to
believe that our life partner is the best, or our friends are the best, or our
nation is the best --- but most of us do.
And so it is with the resurrection. We have stories about it – and they
compel us – some of us – because we have heard them and our hearts are drawn by
them. Of all the stories about the resurrection, I like this one in Mark best,
because it is so stark. What happens in Mark’s gospel is simply that the women
go to the tomb to show their respect and love for Jesus by anointing his dead
body, and they find he isn’t there, and they see a mysterious stranger, and
they are so frightened that they run away. This is an experience that I can
identify with. I am often so frightened that I run away. But their fear was
transformed into faith, as they associated with others who loved Jesus and who
found that he was still with them – even after he had died. And so they came to
believe that we too are creatures whose life matters, and who may experience
resurrection into eternal life as Christ did. So did I. And so, perhaps, did
you.
Now, whatever we may know about the truth of Dartmouth College’s founding,
we do know for certain that it was founded by a Christian minister. We know
that Christian faith was at the heart of Dartmouth’s founding. And we know that
Christian faith is now peripheral to its mission, if it has any place at all.
What was once central has become, for the college and, ironically, for our
religion-soaked culture, peripheral. But for some of us, many of us really,
Christian faith remains the most compelling story in our lives. College is a
time when many students lose their faith. Having been taught about faith in
their home communities in a way that sometimes is simplistic, and then coming
to join a college community whose principal ideological commitment is
supposedly to reason alone, and encountering for the first time that we can not
prove God’s existence – indeed, that we can not even prove our own existence -
and encountering other good people who do not believe what we have been taught
but who believe other things -- it is sometimes easier to simply try to
suspend belief and to retreat from the faith we have been taught. But the
stubborn thing about faith is that even when it seems dormant, it is not dead.
We have to have it, in some form. If we lose faith in our friends, or our
families, or our college, or our nation, it is a terrible thing. But if we lose
faith in our God, in the goodness of life itself, we have lost the basic
direction of our lives. So we sometimes replace our religious faith with the
faith that has so much currency here – faith that we will be able to get a good
job and establish influential connections and find attractive partners, and
that in doing these things, our lives will in fact have a purpose. Death,
when it intrudes, is soon banished from our thoughts. We live as if we were
intended to live forever. And that is the irony. In our effort to banish death
from our world, we both deny the central truth of mortality, and we reveal the
energy that fuels every faith: the energy of hope – that all of this matters,
eternally. So as we meet today to celebrate and proclaim the basis of our faith
– that Christ is risen – we do so as people who know that our faith has as much
to do with how we live as with how we die. In a world which reason tells us in
uncertain and contingent, it is reasonable to build forts for ourselves, to
stockpile goods, acquire prestige, and strive for security. But, because of our
belief – this miraculous mysterious event that is at the heart of our faith, we
MUST live as people who do not trust wealth or seek to acquire it, who know our
life is very precious, but no more precious than the life of any other person,
and whose principal duty is not to hoard, but to share.
I would like to end this sermon with an inspirational story – but I could
only think of one, which I told you last Easter, and my most trusted critic, my
wife, told me not to tell it again. (You can read it on the web if you wish.
Here is the address:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~tucker/rsl/sermons/2006-04-16.html) SO my choice is
to simply stop and leave this sermon with an unsatisfactory ending – like the
gospel of Mark – or to end with a warning. I think a warning. Stark and brutal.
I wish it were warm and fuzzy.
According to almost all biblical scholars and scholarship, Mark’s gospel
just end at chapter 16m verse 8, with the women running away. Maybe another
ending was lost, or maybe that was where it was intended to end. But apparently
some believers felt it need a more proper ending, so they added the final 12
verses that you will find in your bibles today – often as a footnote. These 12
verses summarize other gospel endings, but they also included the very
dangerous claims that believers in Christ, as a result of their faith, can
handle poisonous snakes and consume deadly poisons without harm. So my warning
is this. Faith can become perverted. Even religious faith. Even Christian
faith. You know this. We live in a world today where religious faith is very
often perverted and dangerous. You know this. So this is the warning: anyone
who advocates violence – against self or others – in the name of God has
perverted faith. True transcendent faith brings life and hope that transcends
death. But it never never never entitles anyone to kill in the name of God.
Amen.
copyright©2997
Richard R. Crocker
[1] Leo Tolstoy,
Confessions. (many editions.)
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