Faith is a way of looking at what is seen and understanding it in a new way. Faith is a way of looking at what there is to be seen in the world and in ourselves by hoping, trusting and believing against all evidence to the contrary that beneath the surface there is much more that we cannot see.
Faith is the eye of the heart and by faith we see deep beneath the surface of things—by faith we struggle against all odds to be able to see—that the world is God’s creation. It is He who made us and not we ourselves. He made us out of peace to live in peace, out of light to dwell in light, out of His love to be above all things loved and loving. That is the last truth about the world.
Seeing but not seeing, understanding by not understanding, we all stand somewhere between the Yes and the No, the way Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Joshua, Deborah and Isaiah stood there before us…all of them. The truth of God as the last and deepest truth—none of them saw Him in the fullness any more than we have, but they spent their lives homesick for it—seeking it like a homeland, like home, and their story is our story because we too have seen at some point what peace is, light is and love is.
For years we have been talking about the changed landscape across our nation and lately of the change that will continue to come to our communities of faith. Within arm’s reach of the DC Baptist Convention campus and the campus of your congregation are those hungry ones, lonely ones, sick ones, all the strangers who turn out not to be strangers after all because we are all seeking the same homeland together. Whether we know it or not, even the mad ones and lost ones, who scare us half to death, in so many ways are so much like ourselves.
Maybe in time we will even be able to love them a little—to feed them when they are hungry and maybe no farther away than our own street; to visit them when they are sick and lonely; maybe hardest of all, to let them come serve us when the hunger and sickness and loneliness are not theirs but ours. But it will require taking risks, not knowing exactly why we are doing what we are doing other than God told us. It may even mean other people of faith may ridicule or laugh at what we are trying to build in this community. But when that happens, our faith-talking has become faith-walking. Who knows, maybe our faith-walking will be the Ark we build to rescue those from the perishing flood-waters of life.
