Having Faiths

9 Pentecost, C p14, August 7, 2022
Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11:1-3 (4-7) 8-16 Luke 12:32-40

Lectionary Link

In today's epistle reading we find a definition for a lifestyle of living.  Faith is the assurance of things hoped for; the conviction of things not seen.

In this definition of faith, faith retains the essence of the classical Greek word pistos, which also happens to be the New Testament Greek word for "faith."  In classical Greek pistos means "persuasion."  Faith or belief is what we are persuaded about.

I would like us to understand persuasion or faith as a connecting crux between the past and the future in the now which in the stream of continuity is always moving.

Today we use the word faith to be synonymous with religious family.  What faith do you belong to?  Christian faith.  Jewish faith. Islam.  And it can be further specific life the Episcopal faith tradition.

Persuasion is the ability to posture ourselves with anticipatory foresight of an ever 

positive future life.  The opposite postures to faith might be fear and anxiety based upon a future that is negative.

And of course, in a free world where future probabilities are cast before us as projected traces of what has gone before, there is a future-scape of both good and evil.  Faith is the ability to see realistically the future-scape of the field of probabilities of good and evil, and yet in the now posture ourselves with the persuasive actions and word of the infiniteness "worthwhileness" of life.

How do we do this?  We do this with the continuous vision of the ever coming Son of man, or child of humanity.

This child of humanity is modeled upon the life of Jesus Christ who was one who in a hybrid way surpassed all previous models of humanity, and he promised us the vision of the continuously coming child of humanity as the possibility of the potential of perpetually surpassing ourselves in goodness in future states.

And so faith is living with the tentativeness of the moment in the beckoning of betterment.

And because we live in time we live with faiths, the faith of today, surpassing the faith of yesterday, if only in the newness of moment, and hopefully retaining the traces of successful past faithful moments as the foundation and the germinator of new arise persuasive acts which reflect the excellence to which we are called.

We live our lives with all kinds of faith, spiritual faith, artistic faith, scientific faith because our lives are comprised in pragmatic action by the results, the evidence of how we have been persuaded.

Scientific faith is the moment of repetition of a gained natural laws as an insight about how something is comprised, and this repetition is done in confidence because of the path of consistent replications which we have observed over time.  And yet even with such scientific faith which could border on certitude, we remain humbly tentative about a closed or final conclusion about any laws being a final articulation of the way things are.  Why?  Because the openness of the future insight might clarify in a different, and so different that we might perform even the quotidian in different ways.

Artistic faith is also tentative, because the experience of beauty is always open to more events of different "aha" visions.  The future of art is always based upon the confession, "I did not see that before."

So too is religious faith, spiritual faith, and faith in God.  We don't have certitude in our persuasion about our particular vision of Totality, because such vision is only seeing in part in moments of time.

Let us know today that we cannot avoid having faith, because we cannot avoid time with the now being the crux of our persuaded lives responding in anticipation of the future.

My prayer today is that we will not look at the future as surpassing ourselves in evil, and so let the energy of persuasion be denigrated to the expression of Angst, worry, fear, and depression.  

Let us lift up our eyes to the visions of hope and so constituted our current persuaded lives in a faithfulness which expresses the goodness of hope, as it is informed by the future child of humanity, the ever beckoning Self-Surpassing Us in our future state.  Amen.