"On Being a Person of Faith"

A couple of days ago, as I was walking through the church courtyard on my way to the office, a car pulled up to the curb and a man jumped out. He waved a three by five index card in the air, then handed it to me. “Here,” he said, “this is for your prayer list.” He was gone before I could ask him anything about it.

The card contained only a name and the message - in bold capital letters - “EXTRA PRAYERS NEEDED.” That poignant request stayed with me. I carried the index card home. Now it sits on my desk there. I don’t know what else to do with it except to pray for the soul whose name it bears.

It seems like the only thing to do even though I’m an agnostic when it comes to prayer. I do believe that prayer helps me to carry on an honest dialogue within myself. I know that prayer can calm me when I am distraught. And I notice how prayer helps me to name my hopes and fears, a simple act that centers me inside. But I don’t know if my prayers change anything or invoke any power outside my own. I only know that they can change me.

But I didn’t have time to explain my position to the stranger who approached me. I could only take his card and tell him, “Yes, I will do this for you.” It’s what he would expect from a person of faith. I would not have wanted to let him down.

Such encounters remind me that faith is basically an attitude, a response to people and to life. Faith does not require well-defined beliefs or comprehensive doctrines. It asks only that we approach people with compassion and life with trust.

In her book "Beyond Belief," Elaine Pagels explores the territory of faith and belief. What she discovered is that there is a difference between the two. “Faith often includes belief,” she writes, “but it involves much more: the trust that enables us to commit ourselves to what we hope and love.”

What Elaine Pagels was seeking the morning she found herself in the back of the church, was not the certainty of belief or the security of doctrine. She was seeking faith. She understood instinctively that a community of people “that had gathered to sing, to celebrate, to acknowledge common needs, and to deal with what we cannot control or imagine” - had a faith to share with her.

At the time, however, she did not realize what she was seeking. Like most people, she thought that faith was a system of beliefs with which she was expected to agree. As she began to participate in the church, she learned that faith came to her not in the form of belief, but in the truth of experience. She found it when she sat in the company of other people; when her “defenses fell away, exposing storms of grief and hope,” so that she could gather “new energy . . . to face whatever awaited [her] as constructively as possible.”

Realizing how intuitive, diverse, and experiential faith development is, Elaine Pagels began to look at her own research differently. She is a scholar of early Christianity, especially the writings discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, the texts known as the gnostic gospels. Pagels is an authority on how some sources became codified - and others did not - into what has become the Christian tradition. Her book is a serious historical inquiry into the foundation of the early church and the creation of orthodoxy.

It is also the story of her personal search. She asks, how did the Christian faith, with the stories and celebrations and patterns of coming together that nourish people like her, become a set of beliefs she could not accept? Her exploration yielded some interesting answers, historical and personal.

As the church became an institution with social and political power, church leaders became less tolerant of diversity within their community. They felt they needed a unified belief system to assure the survival of their tradition. They accepted some accounts of the life and death of Jesus, but not others. Some versions became canon, some heresy. They whittled away at a rich and varied testimony until all that was left were the four gospels we know as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These became the definitive story of the tradition and the foundation of its beliefs.

But Elaine Pagels knew that there were other accounts, by disciples such as Mary Magdalene, Thomas, and Philip. These sources revealed that early Christianity was not a unified belief system, but a complex and highly diverse movement. The followers of Jesus debated fundamental questions such as how to live and how to love their neighbor. They were seekers, exploring a new way of being in the world, the way of their faith.

Elaine Pagels suggests that this early form of Christianity contains spiritual wisdom for all people of faith today. In it she sees diversity and freedom, passionate engagement with questions of meaning, courage and honesty, and respect for the individual search for truth. She sees her faith reflected in the origins of a tradition that she has come to understand in a new way.

She does not ask this tradition to tell her what to believe. For there are no simple answers, she writes. And “most of us, sooner or later, find that, at critical points in our lives, we must strike out on our own to make a path where none else exists. What I have come to love,” Pagels adds, “in the wealth and diversity of our religious traditions - and the communities that sustain them - is that they offer the testimony of innumerable people to spiritual discovery. Thus, they encourage those who endeavor, in Jesus’ words, to ‘seek and you shall find.’”

If you seek faith, you may not find belief. What you may find, however, is trust: “the trust that enables us to commit ourselves to what we hope and love,” to use Elaine Pagels’s direct and elegant definition. This faith makes no assumptions about how the universe will respond. A lot is out of our hands, as always. This faith is only about the commitment we make to live in a certain way.

I could have told the man who approached me in the courtyard that he’d come to the wrong place, that we had no prayer list. But in that brief moment when he handed me the card, I thought only of his urgency and his need. Walking into the church I thought, I can pray for him. Even though I’m not sure I believe.

My beliefs may be inconsistent. And they change over time, sometimes even from one day to the next. But as Elaine Pagels learned, beliefs are not faith.

This distinction is so important for us Unitarian Universalists. For although our beliefs are diverse - and often inconsistent, our common faith is a powerful bond. What makes us a people of faith is that we understand the value of committing ourselves to what we hope and love. We trust that life asks us to live in this way.

We know there are no simple answers to the questions we raise and that often we must go it alone. Yet there is something about being in community that gives us strength. However alone or lost we may feel, in each other’s presence we can, in Elaine Pagels’s words, “acknowledge common needs, and . . . deal with what we cannot control or imagine.” Sometimes we may even get the idea, as Elaine Pagels dared to hope, that “such communion has the potential to transform us.”

I have many doubts, but not about being a person of faith. Unitarian Universalism, precisely because of its tolerance and its agnostic tendencies, has given us a strong faith tradition in which to grow and develop as individuals. Living without a common belief system has its challenges, but what we receive for our effort is an unmediated sense of the mystery and gift of life itself. We trust we can find what we need through this direct experience, whatever it may be. We live by this trust and honor it with our hope and our love. Earlier in the service we heard a story about how everyone needs a rock. And not just any rock. We need the rock that we have chosen. It is our choice that makes it special.

This is how our faith works too. What makes it ours is that we have looked for it, chosen it, held it close, and kept it forever. It is part of where we have been and what we love. Carrying it with us gives us hope and strength.

If you seek it, you will find it. Not the simple answer or the firm belief. But the faith we hold, with trust and hope, to help us live for all the days ahead.

References for this sermon include Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, by Elaine Pagels (New York: Random House, 2003) and the book review The Heresy That Saved a Skeptic, by Dinitia Smith, in "The New York Times," June 14, 2003. The children’s story is Everybody Needs a Rock, by Byrd Baylor (New York: Atheneum, 1974).