“Dangerous Faith”

October 29, 2006

Scripture Reading:  Mark 10:46-52

Rev. Dr. Carol  L. Kerr

 Blue Point Congregational Church 

Jessica Anne Lyberger was a five week old baby girl who made it into the nations press a while ago.  Jessica came down with pneumonia and her father, John Cortland Lyberger, described by the press as a fundamentalist preacher prayed for his daughter.  He believed that God would answer prayer.  He believed that God was the God of healing.  He had read the stories of Jesus healing just like the one we read this morning of blind Bartemous calling for Jesus to give him sight. 

So instead of going to the hospital, which ironically was directly across from his home in Estes Park Colorado, he continued to pray.  He prayed day and night for his little girl.  He prayed fervently.  However, Jessica Anne died. 

The district attorney felt that Lyberger was guilty of criminal negligence.  He brought him to court and he was found guilty of man slaughter.  The judge in the case felt that justice would not be served by putting him in prison.  He had five other children and by all the reports he was a good father.  So he sentenced him to five years of probation.  He had to do community service working as an orderly in the hospital across the street from his house.

When the trial was over, a reporter stopped Lyberger and asked him what he thought of the verdict.  He said, “Well God is my judge, I’ll give an account to him.”  In a sense he was right.  Like all of us he will stand before God’s judgment seat and give an account for the way he has lived his days.  In that day, if he asked you to serve on the jury, what would your verdict be?  What do you think God’s verdict would be?

My first reaction is that I am immediately horrified.  My verdict would be guilty.  I can just imagine this poor infant, her little chest heaving in an out rapidly as she was desperately trying to get some oxygen.  Her father blindly praying and praying when God’s help was no more than 50 feet away.  All she needed was a few squirts of bubblegum pink antibiotic in the back of her mouth, perhaps a resperator, and within a day, she would have been better.  Within a week, it would have all been a dim memory.  A year she would have been toddling around, saying Da-da and lifting her arms to him with great joy and faithful love.  Phrases like “utterly inexcusable,” and “insanely crazy” come to mind. 

After my first strong reaction, I have a second reaction.  It is a feeling that slips in on the side and nags at me.  There is something about how fervent his faith is.  There is something about the intensity of his belief.  There is something about the passion of his prayers that seems admirable.  I am sure he reads the Bible more than me.  I am sure he has more parts memorized by heart.  I pray leaning back in a chair, he prays, I am sure, on his knees.  Jessica Ann would have been home schooled, if she had lived.  I send my kids to the public school and let them be exposed to all kids of beliefs,  possible drugs,  acting out of all kinds, language of all kinds…. His fundamentalist faith seems to show up and surpass my faith which is characterized by fuzzy edges and a kind of wandering openness to things. 

What is fundamentalism anyway?  Did you know that fundamentalism is a relatively recent thing in the history of Christianity?  Fundamentalism is a literalism that came out of Protestant Christianity in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  It came as a result of modernism.  Modernism is a point of view that science and the rational mind are the only way to truth.  Science expunged faith.  The Bible is an extended fairytale and God is a fairy godmother.  Science is very literal in its understanding of reality.  Science thinks there is one and only one way to look at reality.    As a reaction to this some Christians clung to a literal interpretation of the Bible.  There is one and only one way to look at the Bible so that at least that would not be lost.     

Fundamentalists hate Darwinism and the concept of evolution because there is no way to derive the soul, the image of God, the Buddha nature, the Atman, or whatever from just natural selection working with chance variations.  For John Lyberger medicine was like Darwinism.  In his mind, medical science, reduced his little girl to a bunch of organs and cells and electric impulses.  In his mind, the medical community sees bodies as harvestable stem cell material.   From Lyberger’s point of view if he picked up his little girl and crossed the street to the hospital he would fall into a bottomless crevasse.  He would be submitting her to people who did not believe in her soul more than they believed in their medicine.  Remember the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years.  She came up to Jesus in a crowd and touched his hem.  He could feel power leaving him, he asked who touched him.  When she said she had done it, he responded, “Your faith has made you well.”  Isn’t Lyman doing what Jesus said, relying on his faith to make his little girl well? 

So how do I reconcile these two things?  On the one hand, my horror at the fact that Lyberger did not save his little babies life by simply crossing the street and getting some antibiotics for her?  On the other hand, my admiration of how fervently he believes in his faith.  Then it occurs to me that I am confusing something.  I am confusing his fervent intensity of faith with depth of faith.  You see when my son, Gavin, was in a coma, we called the ambulance and had him hooked up to every everything they could think of at Maine Medical Center.  We took CAT scans, MRI’s, and monitored him continually.  And, when the day was done, and we had nothing more to do but wait into the night until he awoke from his coma.   I sat in a chair next to his bed and read through all the healing stories of Jesus, Blind Bartemeus, the woman whose faith made her well and more.  Not long after I had read about the man suddenly sitting up, around midnight, Gavin suddenly awoke and asked “Where am I?”  The resident came in, the nurse came in, we all just stood there smiling at each other.

Was it the fact that I was reading those scriptures that made Gavin suddenly awake?  Was it my faith that made Gavin well?  I think so in part.  Was it medical science that made Gavin well?   I think so in part.  You see, I realize that I am not fundamentalist.  Rather, I am not literal and do not claim to know the answers.  Rather, I believe in an infinite Unity, God, from which all truth comes.  It is the ungraspable essence from which science comes and from which religions come.  I believe in a unity which is multi-layered and includes all truths rather than excluding truths.  This is so even if we don’t know exactly who it fits together from out point of view. I am reminded of an ancient definition of God as “…an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. (Paramenides 5^th century).  I am not fundamentalist because there is something we will never grasp, something we can never know.  God I beyond our human categories.  God is beyond any one box we can put him into.   We can see things in part but we will never know the whole with certainty.  There will always be something that eludes us.   I have faith in this unity some of which is still revealing itself to us, and will continue to stretch our imaginations, and make us continually wonder not with complete certainty but with a reverence for mystery.  This faith of mind has great latitude and tolerance because it allows not knowing things for sure.   

Where to I get this tolerance from?  Andrew Sullivan in an article in October 9, 2006 Time Magazine, “When Not Seeing Is Believing” put it well.   As Christians we believe that God was made man through Jesus.  If Jesus was man he was prone to the feelings and doubts and joys and agonies of being human.  He told stories.  He had friends.  He got to places late; he misread the actions of others; he wept; he felt disappointment; he asked as many questions as he gave answer; and he was sometimes silent with doubt and afraid.  He was open to all kinds of people good people and bad people.  What mattered most to him was not what they believed but if they acted in love.  A loving scientist and a loving fundamentalist would probably we just as good for Jesus.  “In that… understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love is more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle.” 

I do respect Lyman for the passion of is faith, but I do not think that passion in itself gives his faith the depth that it needs.  Also, I am very self conscious preaching this because I do not want to lack humility and say, my faith is better than his.  For, like I said, I do embrace mystery and I do not think I have all the answers, and I respect the fact that Lyman may have some understanding of God that I am missing somehow.

However, I am willing to venture this sermon for the following reason: a person’s theology makes a difference.  Often people will say that they are not interested in theology, they are just interested in having an experience of God.  Well, that would be like your going to your doctor and saying you have a pain in your stomach.  The doctor says, “You need to know I don’t pay much attention to medicine, what I am into is bedside manner.  Why don’t we just cut you open and see what is inside!”

Fervent faith without good theology can be in fact very dangerous.  C.S. Lewis was once delivering a lection to the Royal Airforce not long after World War II.  In the middle of the lecture a burly sergeant stood up and said, “I don’t have time for that nonsense.  I was in the desert and if you and an experience of God you don’t have time to talk about God.”   But, Lewis responded experience is all well and good.  It is like walking on the beach and feeling the salt spray, hearing the seagulls caw, and becoming one with the wind and waves.   As such, you can say that you know the ocean.  However, if you want to get anywhere you are going to need a map.  Sure a map is much more boring than just being on the beach or in a boat.  But, without the map you are sure to hit rocks and flouder at sea.  The map is the good theology that helps one navigate their faith through the depths and sometimes stormy seas of life.  

This applies to us personally and also globally.  As the world gets smaller and smaller fundamentalism is an untenable position.  We must be open to many faiths and deeply respect the many perspectives as there are in the world.  A path where each side insists they are completely right and the other side is completely wrong, whether it be fundamentalist Christianity or fundamentalist Islam or atheistic science,  will lead to nothing but mutually assured destruction.   Toleration is the oxygen that open democracy and the world’s future desperately needs to survive.  

Bartimaeus was blind but in some sense he was the first one to really see who Jesus was.  Jesus and his disciples were on the way to Jerusalem, the Passover feast, and ultimately crucifixion.  Although the disciples had sight they could not see what was really happening.  They were embroiled in arguments about who was going to be first and the most honored of Jesus’ disciples.  But, Bartimaeus being blind was sitting on the side was aware of all he could not   see and did not know for sure.  Perhaps it was this perspective that allowed him to really know what Jesus was about and to be the first to call out Jesus’ identity as Messiah,  “Jesus, son of David have mercy on me.”