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  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Stewardship and Gift Policy
    • Saints We've Known
    • Charitable Giving and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
  • Sermons 2022-23
    • A Waste of time
    • The Seventh Principle
    • Make Light of It
    • A Turn of the Screw
    • America: Part II
    • What Do You Expect?
    • Good Mourning
    • Beyone Repair?
    • No Signal
    • Absolutely, Maybe, Definitely Not
    • Do Guardian Angels Exist?
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  • LOVEUU
  • Community Resources
    • Mental Health Providers, Worcester MA
    • Southern Worcester County Parent Guide
  • Contact Us
    • Sermons 2021-22
  • Sermon Archives
    • Finding Joy in Uncertain Times
    • The Arithmetic of Joy
    • Of Muck and Martyrs
    • Doing Dishes
    • Idle Worship
    • The Fear of the Refugee
    • It's Not Just You
    • If We Choose
    • Lazy Busy
    • A Most Human Season
    • Running on Empty
    • Alone Together
    • Come Home
    • Winter Warmth
    • How Big Is Your Circle?
    • Thanksgiving Life
    • Kurt Vonnegut: Humanist Hero
    • In Costume
    • Again
    • Borderland
    • The Geometry of Life
    • Transformation and Growth
    • Come Build a Land
    • Our Brains, Our Minds and Our Hearts
    • Gifts
    • Repairers of the Breach
    • The Times They Are A-Changin'
    • Mission Possible
    • It Matters
    • Thanksgiving Reflection
    • Shoes That Fit
    • Winter
    • Ignorance, Answers, and Bliss
    • Questions, Questions
    • Living to the Point of Tears
    • Lost in the Shuffle: UU's Less Popular Principle
    • On the Turning Away
    • A Matter of Degree
    • A Collection of Near Death Experiences
    • I Know Her So Well, I Think. I Thought.
    • Faith-based Resilience
    • To Abet Creation
    • Who Cares?
    • A Matter of Life and Depth
    • Pass/Fail
    • Enough
    • O Holy Light
    • With New Eyes
    • Coming Alive
    • Beyond Words
    • Becoming
    • A Miracle Even Thomas Jefferson Could Embrace
    • Fear Not!
    • The Miracle of Change
    • Meeting Grace
    • R-E-S-P-E-C-T
    • Serving with Grace
    • The Pursuit of Happiness
    • When Heresy Met Sally
    • The Souls of All Living Creatures
    • What Are You Looking For?
    • Beloved
    • Let Me Count The Ways
    • Happiness
    • Chosen
    • Faith and Belief
    • Room To Grow
    • Blessed Fools
    • Don't Be a Superhero
    • Getting There from Here
    • Unfinished Business
    • Universalism's Origen
    • Yearn to Learn
    • Beauty Saves
    • Commentary on Freedom
    • Being Human: Religious Community in a Plastic Age
    • Questionable Certainties and Faithful Doubts
    • Commentaries on Murphy's Law
    • Children of a Lesser God
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Life Incarnate
    • So You Want to Be Happy
    • A Year's End Resolution
    • Where Stars Are Born
    • Thanking Eve
    • Anger, Our Teacher
    • Everlasting Punishment
    • Comprehending Moral Imperatives in a Me-centered World
    • Promises Kept
    • Dancing With The Stars: Science and Religion
    • Two Steps and Missteps: Church Membership for Human Beings
    • Light of the World
    • Dear God
    • Imago Hominis
    • CESA: Reflections on Drug Addiction
    • Falling in Love Again
    • How Does Your Garden Grow
    • Repent! No Guilt Trip Required
    • Go Out into the World
    • Thanks-living
    • Life and Not Life
    • Guilty As Charged
    • Dare To Hope
    • Don't Forget To Chew
    • Break the Silence - Stop the Violence
    • Living Among Strangers
    • What Is Religion Anyway?
    • East of Eden
    • Praying Attention
    • Wholly Human
    • The Healing Power of Forgiveness
    • All I Want for Christmas
    • Let It Be...Let It Go
    • Why Not?
    • People Like You
    • Vulnerable Trust
    • Thin Places
    • Now What?
    • Courageously Humble
    • The Last Butterfly
    • The Good, The Bad, and The Whole
    • Sacred Souvenirs
    • Made Whole
    • This Wild and Precious Life
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Where Our Future Can Begin
    • Taking Stock: Managing Our Spiritual Inventory
    • To Convert Life into Truth
    • Are We There Yet?
    • Family Matters
    • Ordinary Saints
    • All I Wanted Was Everything
    • Giving Thanks
    • To Be or Not To Be
    • Entering the Christmas Story
    • A Great Light
    • What's Real?
    • Troubling the Water
    • The Amazing Mr. Wedgewood
    • Lend Me Your Ears
    • Work That Is Real
    • Happy Melba Toast Day
    • The Great Pacific Garbage Dump
    • Plastics, Benjamin!
    • Surprise Beginnings
    • A Place at the Table
    • Norbert Capek’s Flower Communion: A Call To Honor Life
    • Voices of God
    • Hold On To What Is Good
    • The Little Stone Church That Rocks
    • What Would Jean-Luc Do?: A Tribute to Humanist Hero Gene Roddenberry
    • From Who am I? to Whose are We?
    • Turning
    • Spirituality
    • R & R
    • Spritual F-Words
    • Does Anyone Really Like Herding Cats?
    • Prepare to Be Amazed
    • The Greatest Gift
    • The Impossible Will Take A Little While
    • Taking Sides: Journey to the Center of the Universe
    • Help Wanted, Apply Within
    • Two Truths & Plastics and Water Don't Mix
    • The Third Conversation
    • Good People >
      • UU You >
        • Twitter and Covid and Wall Street, Oh, my!
        • I Do Believe in Spooks >
          • Holy Homophones >
            • What's in a Name?
            • So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!
            • Open-Mindedness, As Assigned
            • Going on a Journey
            • Cheap Love
            • Nonproductive Delight
            • The Persistence of Memory
            • Thoughts about the Historical Jesus
            • Lindens and Tiarella and Bearberry, Oh My!
            • Season's Greetings
            • I Still Have A Dream
            • Peace Corps - A Lesson in Caring
            • Spiritual Engineering
            • Thanks for the Memories
            • Our Stories, Ourselves
            • Anxious Gardeners
            • The Best Sermon Ever!
            • UUnited
            • We Are Courageous
            • A Right Way to Be Wrong
            • Sacred Ideals
            • This Wild and Precious Life Revisited
            • 20/20
            • Home
            • What About Now?
        • Fragile
        • Time Ravel
        • Now Is Not the Time for Hope
        • The G Word (It's Probably Not what You Think)
    • No Thanks, I'll Walk
    • Be the Change
    • I Don't Know
    • What Lies Within
    • Guest Perspective
    • Growing Panes
    • De Colores
    • Roots and Wings
BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH

Faith and Belief
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
March 11, 2018
By Jared Adams

 
Good morning. 
 
This year, each month has been assigned a theme to help direct our sermon topics. This month, the theme is faith. 
 
When I heard what the theme was for my month, I started thinking about the word “faith” and what I might want to say about it, what it means to me, but before I got too far with that, my thoughts turned to a scene from the movie Star Trek VI. As a kid I pretty much memorized all of those movies, so I guess it’s not surprising that thinking about the word faith brought one of them to mind. In this scene, Spock, that most well known of Vulcans, is trying to impart the value of faith to a young Vulcan woman named Valeris, played by Kim Catrall. If you want to see some impressive range in an actress, watch Star Trek VI and follow it up with any episode of Sex and the City. Now, Vulcans, for those who don’t know are a species who have embraced a strict philosophy of logic and reason. They try to live their lives with as little emotional interference as possible. 
 
Valeris, the younger Vulcan, is in deep conflict. The Klingon empire, an alien race they’ve been warring with for decades, is collapsing due to an environmental catastrophe. In their desperation, they have asked for assistance in evacuating their home planet. Valeris believes that the Klingons cannot be trusted. She believes that the opportunity must be seized to conquer the Klingons while they’re weak. 
 
She says to Spock:
Do you not recognize that a turning point has been reached.
Spock replies:
History is replete with turning points. You must have faith.
 
V: Faith?
 
S: That the universe will unfold, as it should. 
 
V: But is that logical? Surely, we must-
 
Spock shakes his head
 
S: Logic, logic, logic. Logic is the BEGINNING of wisdom, Valeris, not the end. 
 
I remember being blown away by this scene when I saw it in the theater at the tender age of 12. Spock, the ultimate advocate for logic over emotion, telling a young Vulcan to have, of all things, faith? Even when one could argue that the logical course of action would be to conquer the violent Klingons? 
 
It got me wondering, even then, what does it mean to have faith? Does it mean we think that things will probably turn out alright? As in, having faith in an outcome? Does having faith in an outcome mean we believe that outcome will come to pass? What exactly is the difference between faith and belief? 
 
My gut feeling was that faith is kind of “belief lite” or “diet belief”. Faith is on its way to belief. I figured, faith means we choose to act as if things are going to turn out for the best. 
 
The words carried different emotional weight for me as well. The word faith gives me sort of a warm, fuzzy feeling. Perhaps with a little warning around the edges, but mostly positive associations. The word belief, on the other hand, gives me sort of a prickly, boxed in feeling. I can’t hear the word without remembering a thousand cautionary tales about the dangers of unquestioning belief. I’ve found that the older I get, the fewer things I truly believe, but those things that I do believe I believe fervently. 
 
An image came to mind as I was comparing the two - “belief” and “faith”. The image was of a bridge. Perhaps faith is like walking over a bridge and trusting that it will not break. And perhaps different kinds of bridges require different levels of faith. 
 
A long foot bridge stretching out over a deep canyon? Crossing that will likely require a great deal of faith. Before ventured out onto it, we would probably want to be reassured that this bridge was designed by engineers. maybe with degrees from MIT. We would want to know that many others have successfully crossed this bridge before us. 
 
We can imagine an identical bridge crossing over a babbling brook, but this time just a few feet below. This bridge may require less faith. By the time the bridge is only a few inches from the ground, we may not even bother with faith. As the task become less perilous, the need for faith diminishes. I would say it also is likely to transform, into belief. When we believe in a thing, we often give ourselves permission to take it for granted. We might even challenge the bridge by skipping along it or jumping up and down. 
 
I suppose this demonstrates that we can believe things pretty casually, if they don’t pose an imminent threat. IF they don’t frighten us. 
 
So at this point I wanted to check myself, and weigh in with some friends to see if my ideas were in the ballpark of what was commonly believed. I decided to put the question out into the world in the form of a Facebook post. I’m happy to say a few members of this congregation weighed in on this, but since I didn’t ask for permission to use their responses, I won’t mention anyone by name. The question I asked was “In your personal opinion and understanding, what is the difference between faith and belief?”
 
The answers started coming in right away. Now, I knew that the words “faith and belief” were loaded, but even so, I admit I was surprised at people’s responses. A few of the answers were so charged, they brought to my mind the image of a person coming up to me, a bulging bag slung over their shoulder.“What do I think about faith and belief?” They would ask.  At this point, the person would dump out the contents of their bag in front of me. “That’s what.” 
 
Some went as far as to say that they believed faith meant willfully ignoring evidence to support a false belief. From this perspective, faith is by definition at odds with empirical evidence. 
 
Some people talked about faith as a sort of internal probability program that’s always running. As in, I have faith that the light will go on when I flip the light switch because it has done so almost without fail. Another person used the example of trusting a husband to pick up the dry cleaning because in the past he has been consistently reliable. 
 
Still others describes faith as a device that allows us to trust in a positive outcome when the alternative is too upsetting to consider. Believing in the positive outcome of a dangerous surgery or believing that our children will return home safe from school every day. This is the kind of necessary faith without which just getting out of bed each morning would be challenging. 
 
Others talked about faith in their fellow man to be righteous and honest, and how they tried to carry that faith with them in their interactions as a starting point for all their daily interactions and relationships. 
 
Finally, there were those who described their faith in God. A faith perhaps unprovable but deeply felt, one that rooted them in themselves. 
 
With all of the discrepancy around the definition of the word “faith”, I seriously considered changing my sermon topic completely and calling it something like “the trouble with language”. It would seem that the definition of faith is a deeply personal thing, and we view the concept through the lens of our own beliefs and histories. 
 
However, this discrepancy comes at a cost. I could see how two people could enter a conversation, and if both of those people held prior convictions (conflicting prior convictions) about the definition of a word central to the discussion, a meaningful conversation becomes impossible. 
 
To put it another way, if one person thinks you’re talking about a car and the other person thinks you’re talking about a sail boat, it’s going to lead to some confusion. One could be left wondering “Wait, why are we even talking about whether it can float or not?” or “What does tire pressure have to do with this?”
 
Perhaps the worst part of this kind of confusion is that people in this situation may never discover that they share more common ground than they realize. They simply lack a common vocabulary. In a very real way, they aren’t even speaking the same language. 
 
So, in the end I decided the “trouble with language” would do as a tangent and didn’t require a full sermon. At least not this time. Besides, even with the discrepancies, I thought I was beginning to spy a unifying thread. And that unifying thread was…fear. The need for faith arrives when we are faced with the possibility of a fearful outcome. We have faith that the light will come on because it is frightening to be in the dark. Many of us have faith in a life after this one. It is frightening to consider the alternative.  We have faith in our fellow man because if we did not, we might despair and lose our ability to trust. We have faith that our children will come home safe to us each day because if we didn’t find a way to trust in that, we would lock them away in their rooms, feeding them through a slot in the door, just to keep them out of harm’s way. 
 
This isn’t to say that faith is some kind of willful blindness to the dangers of the world. Instead, each cross roads is an opportunity to choose where to place our faith. Faith doesn’t do the work of discriminating between things we should or shouldn’t have faith in. It would seem that part is up to us. 
 
As UUs, we choose to have faith in the seven principles and we strive to make real those principles, as much as we can, because we believe that they have the potential to create a better, kinder world. 
 
To some degree, we are all able to choose the things that we put faith in. The temptation will always be there when we are afraid to put faith in the wrong things.   
 
We have seen throughout history what happens when people put their faith in anger. Nationalism. Vengeance. Hatred of the other. And we have seen what happens when people put their faith in love and acceptance. In equality and tolerance. Whether we are guided by the facts of history or the equally compelling call of our hearts, we come together on Sundays largely to remind one another of the things we believe to be true, and the faith required to live that truth.
 
Even Spock, speaking to Valeris, is cautioning her not give into fear. He is saying to her, “We must not crush our enemy simply because we can, and because we are afraid of what may happen if we do not. Instead, when their need is dire, we must extend a hand to help them.”   
 
So may it be. 
 
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