• We value all human life because it is the intentional creation of God, and therefore not ours to destroy. So we strongly support Care Net of Puget Sound, and so we are hoping you will attend the Fernando Ortega concert at Crossroads on Friday Feb. 21, and urge your friends to do so! Ticket sales are going more slowly than we would like. Hoping you can help with that! Tickets can be purchased at fernandocrossroads.com.
• Many of us, without knowing it, are waiting for some event that will “settle” us in the faith, some event that will finally deliver the certainty we’ve lacked. After that point we will do what we have known we should do, we will be whom we should be. The unspoken prayer begins, “ God, if only you would…. ” So we are spending our lives in the waiting room, the antechamber of biblical Christianity.
• Our ingrained hesitancy involves deeper matters than we might suspect, matters to which Jesus and Paul spoke plainly. In 1 Corinthians 1:22, Paul said (to Greeks), “Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.” The Incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Lord did not amount to a system of thought to which one subscribed, an eastern or western philosophical tradition, but to an event that one must either believe or not. The question was not whether you had been sufficiently persuaded, but whether you intended to believe. This is the foolishness of faith.
• Herein lies one of the chicken-or-egg debates of Church history, namely do we seek understanding in order that we might believe, or do we believe in order to understand. When Peter made his so-called good confession and said Jesus was “ the Christ, the son of the living God” he was alone in that moment, out on what would have felt like, relative to the others around him, a narrow limb. Jesus told him, “flesh and blood have not revealed this to you,” meaning, “your faith is not the result of reasoned process of eliminating all doubt.” Rather, he had chosen — and it took some courage — to respond to the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit by saying, “ you are the Christ.” It was on this that Jesus began to build the Church in Jerusalem. So Augustine said, “Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.”
• Lesslie Newbigin has wisely said (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “If the Christian faith is based strictly on reason, then the arguments in its favor must be beyond questioning. But they are not. They are relatively fragile.” But Newbigin is only borrowing from Paul: “ For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”