Awkward Balance:

A Foot in the West and a Knee in the East

 

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for . . .

(Hebrews 11:1a; KJV)

 

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the 21st Sunday after Pentecost, October 21, 2007

Volume 2 Number 16

First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6^th Street, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

 

 

 

I’ve introduced you in this sermon series to a stream of oxymorons from which we have sought lessons for Christian living.  Today’s oxymoron is Awkward Balance.  How can one with awkward stance be said to be balanced?  The words work to negate each other, for if one is positioned in a tilted fashion, they are not truly balanced.  Picture trying to reach and replace a light bulb in your home, one foot firm on a chair, the other foot higher, on the arm of the couch.  As you reach your trailing foot comes to a tiptoe and, at last, leaves the chair.  There you are on one foot, straining to reach, Awkwardly Balanced, an accident in the making.

 

As you see, my subtitle sounds quite awkward indeed, “A Foot in the West and a Knee in the East.”  My first choice of a subtitle, however, was, A Sermon with “Substance.”   I wanted to consider the word “substance” in order to observe its etymological meaning, “to stand under. ”  Sub, obviously, means “under” as in a submarine.  Stance means “to stand,” as we still use the word of a golfer addressing a ball or a batter positioning himself in the box.

 

I once wrote a sermon on the baptism of Jesus, the opening of heaven and a dove descending upon Jesus.  I titled it, “Baptism Properly StoodUnder.”  I intended the sermon to be a contrast to sermons I’d written which joined the theological fray over baptism, the sparring between Baptists and Pedobaptists, Evangelicals and Mainliners.   My earlier sermons would fall under the category, “Baptism Properly UnderStood,” addressing the obvious questions.   Adult or infant?  Sprinkling, pouring, or immersion?   Such questions constitute the playing field for our usual approach to the subject.

 

I suggested that baptism is not so much to be UnderStood as to be StoodUnder.  “To Stand Under” points out the futility of those theological mechanisms which have sought to provide a definitive answer to the quibbling characterizing two millennia of Christian history.  To StandUnder embraces, not a claim of theological superiority to other UnderStandings, but rather a sense of sacred mystery.  To StandUnder leads, not to smug assumptions that we UnderStand while others don’t, but rather to amazement at the Sacred Moment itself, the Sacred Presence with which the sacrament is invested.

 

Faith is not UnderStanding, as if one, through their denominational statements, have arrived at a firm grasp of truth.  Rather, Faith is the StandingUnder, the embrace of the mystery of God’s existence and, especially, of God’s capacity for and desire for relationship.  We are chasing the forever elusive if we think faith can arrive at documented, lab-tested, scientific certainty of God’s existence.   We, rather, StandUnder the mystery without expecting empirical, scientific proof.  One of the best selling books of our day is Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, just one of a cascade of new books by an atheism much more aggressive than its comparatively mild predecessors.  The title of Christopher Hitchens book says it clearly, “God is Not Great:  How Religion Poisons Everything.”  To attempt to meet such scientific minds with hope of changing their UnderStanding through offering empirical proof of the existence of God is a futile project.  Faith has never been about UnderStanding, but about StandingUnder.

 

Such an assertion may make us a bit uncomfortable.  By “us” I mean Christians raised in a Western, scientific-oriented culture.  We would prefer faith to be at least as much about our UnderStanding as our StandingUnder.  We are children of the West, accustomed to verification and guarantees.  Yet, the very word “faith” implies that we don’t have and indeed can’t have such verification, that no scientific assurances exist that our faith will bear out in the end.  That’s an uncomfortable thing for Westerners.  Every area of our daily lives have been undeniably enhanced by science.  We see the value of having knowledge systematized, explained, concretized, grasped with 100% accuracy and, at last, results guaranteed.  It is, perhaps, to this end that we erect systems, even in our theologies.  “Systematic theology” is in large part a Western idea, the very term suggesting that if we analyze properly, we can arrive at an undeniable Validity Point, objective evidence for our beliefs.  We have come to expect this from our result-oriented, Western style of systematized logic.  The task is, of course, self-defeating, because the moment faith is proven, it is no longer faith, but rather is shifted into the dimension of undisputed fact.   There will be a day, we believe, when faith will become sight.  Until then we must walk by faith, not by sight. 

 

With that I come back to my original analogy, our oxymoronic tilt, our Awkward Balance.  How odd we must look, we Western Christians who have a firmly planted Foot in the West, and yet still a reverent Knee in the East.  We have a foot solidly planted in the West with its scientific prowess, yet we reverently bow a knee in the East with its attachment to divine Presence, miracle, and mystery.  Our faith is born and nurtured in an Eastern context of StandingUnder mystery, through parable and story and mythos, rather than through systematic attempts definitively to outline proof.  We straddle two worlds.  While we are children of the West and its science, our faith is born through Eastern paradigms of parable and story, ritual and sacrament, miracle and meaning.  As Westerners we want to UnderStand, but on religion we are Easterners, and we StandUnder a divine mystery. 

 

Can the mystery of faith be UnderStood in the same sense that once great mysteries of nature such as atoms, DNA, and the human genome have given up their mystery to laboratory experiment?  If these one time mysteries are now so completely and scientifically UnderStood, then perhaps the sacred mysteries will likewise render up their treasure to systematic efforts.

 

“If I don’t UnderStand it,” I can hear the lay person thinking, “that’s okay, my pastor has been to seminary and the university and spent long years UnderStanding the mystery.”  And to that I say, as your pastor, that if I once, in early years, thought myself to have UnderStood the divine mystery, no more.  I have, rather, spent long years StandingUnder the mystery, until it has become part of me that I am unwilling to relinquish.  I say this, not because I can prove my faith in a God who desires relationship with his creatures, but because this faith has become, as Alister McGrath writes, the oxygen of my existence.  McGrath, a former atheist given to the Western, scientific model of knowing, goes on to quote C. S. Lewis, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun rises in the morning – not only because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.”  The atheist of scientific mind grins in condescension at such words.  However eloquently and poetically they are written, they add nothing to the task of UnderStanding the world in which we live.  While C. S. Lewis’ words do a fine job of StandingUnder, as an avenue toward UnderStanding they are poor.  These words are poetry, not proof.  And yet, though I cannot empirically prove my faith, it offers a way of knowing I would not want to live without. 

 

And so, Awkwardly Balanced I Stand, with a Foot in the West and a Knee in the East.  This is an Oxymoron for Christian Living, for Faithful Living in a Complex World.

 

Some would have us remove our Knee from the East, to plant both feet solidly in the scientific endeavor of the West, affirming that science is our ultimate, our only Way of Knowing.  Michael Shermer, a one time theological student at Pepperdine who became an atheist (though he prefers “Skeptic”), writes about his “de-conversion” from Christianity.  “Instead of rhetoric and disputation of theology, there were the logic and probabilities of science.  What a difference this difference in thinking makes.  The switch to science, however, was only one factor in my de-conversion.  There was also the intolerance generated by absolute morality, the logical outcome of knowing without doubt that you are right and everybody else is wrong . . . this was the final factor in my road back from Damascus: I enjoyed the company and friendship of science people much more than that of religious people . . . While the Chartes Cathedral may be stirring from some, Mount Wilson Observatory is inspirational to a much broader base.  Scientific discoveries, after all, belong to everyone.”  Whatever else may be said of this quote, they are certainly the words of one completely balanced, both feet square in the Western way of Knowing.

 

Shermer is saying, “Take your Knee out of the East and plant both feet solidly in the West’s embrace of logic and science as our ultimate Way of Knowing.  Two feet in the West, that’s what you need.  Balanced.  Not  awkward.  Leave parable.  Leave story.  Leave mythos.  Leave faith.  Leave mystery.”  It all sounds very balanced, I’ll admit.  And most unattractive.  If this is the alternative, let me forever be Awkwardly Balanced.    

 

Some are of opposite mind, advising us to renounce Western culture and the godless secularism it has produced, to remove the planted foot from the West and to bow with both knees in the East.  At some level this is the desire of the strictly fundamentalist stripes of all three monotheistic faiths.  Karen Armstrong writes, “Western civilization has changed the world.  Nothing – including religion – can ever be the same again.”  That’s true, and it is resistance to that fact, the tenacious embrace of fundamentalism (especially, in our day, Islamic fundamentalism) that has bombs going off.  What are those bombs but attempts to dislodge our foot from the West and its secularism?  Leaving, however, the obvious examples of Islamic terrorism in its rejection of Western secularism, a milder example which we from time to time read of may be those who refuse medical attention for a sick child, believing that, since God is our healer and the New Testament instructs us to anoint and pray for the sick, then there is no need for medical science to become involved.  Again, to cast such words into the active metaphor of this sermon, this is saying, “Bow both knees in the East, utilizing only those ways of knowing engendered by faith.  We reject, as much as we can, the advances of medical science.  We reject Western culture’s advance in knowledge through science, and remove our foot from the West so that we can fully trust God.”  

 

I think the human spirit needs a healthy blend, however true it may be that this creates an Awkward Balance.  We need both.  We need to feel the impact of the West, with its logic and science and relentless quest to UnderStand.  We need, also, the influence of the East, its parables and miracle, its natural inclination to StandUnder.   Two feet in either sphere, it seems to me, is unhealthy and even dangerous.  While two feet in the West may seem balanced, it relinquishes much that is vital to the human spirit, forever separating us from the mystery of the sacred, losing the possibility that anything is ultimately transcendent.

 

On the other hand, though two knees in the East may seem balanced, that, too, raises immense problems.  Two knees in the East, unchecked by the liberal attitudes and influences of the West, morphs into fundamentalism, legalism, irrational anger and violence toward those outside the faith,  Two knees in the East is a recipe for sustaining the Dark Ages.  From the self-righteous assumption of moralistic certainty that creates religious legalism (not to mention sheer rudeness of living), to more virulent forms of fundamentalism that injure and kill innocents in the name of God, the dangers are crystal clear.  So we need Awkward Balance, a Foot in the West and a Knee in the East. 

 

 

Sources and notes:

The Battle for God, by Karen Armstrong (Ballantine Books, New York, 2000) is an excellent analysis of the various monotheistic fundamentalisms.  Armstrong’s treatment of the West’s way of knowing as logos, and the East’s as mythos, provides an excellent framework for understanding the tensions between West and East, as well as understanding the philosophical similarities and differences of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian fundamentalist groups.   While this sermon treats those differences under different concepts (logos = UnderStanding; mythos = StandingUnder), the end result is similar.

 

Two articles from the July/August 2005 issue of Science & Spirit, a journal given to the discussion of the relationship of Science (Western ways of knowing), and Spirit (Eastern ways of knowing) were helpful in my preparation.  These brief articles were posited against one another, the first by a once-theologian-turned-atheist (Michael Shermer, “Science is My Savior”) and the second by a once-atheist-turned-Christian (Alister McGrath, God as My Guide”).