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Monday, February 05, 2007
"If You Say So" Faith
Psalm 138; Luke 5:1-11
One day Jesus decided to do his teaching a bit differently. The crowd who'd come to hear him was so huge and enthusiastic they just about pushed him into the lake. So he climbed into a fishing boat, asked the captain to pull out a way from the shoreline, and proceeded to teach his lesson.
Afterwards, he told the fishermen to launch out into deeper water and catch some fish. Simon Peter said, "We tried that all night long and caught absolutely nothing." Under his breath he probably muttered, "Nice guy, great preacher, but he don't know from fish at all." But then he spoke the simplest statement of faith you'll ever find: "But, if you say so...." And he did what Jesus said. And hauled in an overflowing boatload of fish!
That's a wonderful living parable about the nature of faith. If what we believe were purely reasonable, who would ever need faith?
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The other day I read a fascinating interview posted on the Powell's Books Web site. They were talking with Jim Wallis, an evangelical leader, about his best-selling book, God's Politics (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).
At one point Wallis surprisingly finds himself agreeing with Kurt Vonnegut, hardly a religious role model in American culture. In fact, the interviewer calls him "the archetypal cynic." Listen to Jim Wallis's response.
"I'm very sympathetic to the cynics.... They're against all the bad stuff. They really are.... They don't agree with it. They think it's wrong. And maybe they tried to change it for a while. They were out there, and they got tired, disappointed, disillusioned. But they were out there and nothing changed. And commitment makes you feel vulnerable.... You say, I'm against it all, but I don't think it can change. So why am I out here, naked and vulnerable? I've got to pull back a little bit and look after my own security. They're still against it all. There are no rose colored glasses here. They don't say, Things are great. They just say, I don't think it can change. Commitment makes you feel vulnerable, so cynicism is a buffer against commitment. It's a safe place. A sanctuary. You can still be against the bad stuff. But you want to protect your own security. But hope is a decision you make....
"Hope is a choice, a decision, not a feeling, a state of mind, or a personality trait. The Bible says,'Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.' I love that. Or my paraphrase of that is, Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and watching the evidence change. To me this is very real. The reason I was at Nelson Mandela's inauguration [mentioned earlier in this interview] is I was there for all the hard times. I snuck into the country to stand with a persecuted church. They were struggling and suffering. But they believed that day, that big party of Inauguration Day, was possible long before it came to be. They saw through the eyes of faith that that day would come.
"I remember when I got picked up at the airport by friends. We turned a corner and saw the South African security police. Now I've been interrogated by those guys, and they're scary. They're ugly. They're vicious. And I said, 'Quick, get away, get away.' And my South African friends said, 'Oh, they're ours now.' They're ours now! It was amazing. I've never seen history change in front of my face like that before."
And that is exactly what Peter means when he says to Jesus, "If you say so," and casts his nets for that miraculous catch of fish. Believing in spite of the evidence, and watching the evidence change!
Because Peter and his buddies were willing to hope against all hope that Jesus could be trusted, they left their boats at the dock that day and went off with him to change the whole wide world.
And that's what they did, spreading Christ's good news down the centuries and around the world. Their choice to hope that day sowed the seeds for Jim Wallis in Washington, D.C., his Christian friends in South Africa, American believers on the left and on the right, of every denominational brand name or stubbornly independent -- for all of us, to hold on to hope -- and to hold out hope -- in a world soaked through with cynicism.
"If you say so." Such hesitant words, but packed with spiritual atomic energy!
posted by Jack Buckley at
5:07 PM
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