Believing

“How can you be a Christian? Do you really believe what ‘those guys’ believe?”

I get that question a lot. Especially when I share a political position like being pro-choice or being in support of same-sex equality. “But you still believe x-y-z? Just like the Westboro Baptist guys? How can you believe that? Or how about Ted Cruz? And Mike Huckabee? They’re Christians, if you believe like them, then you’re either lying or you’re lying about that other stuff.”

First off, let me start by saying, I don’t really know what the Westboro Baptist folks believe, other than what’s on their picket signs, so I don’t know if we share belief in anything. Same goes for Pat Robertson or Dr. Dobson or Ted Cruz. I don’t really know what they believe except for the bits on the radio, TV, the web, or in the news. So do I believe what they believe? I don’t know. Most likely there is at least one thing we believe in common, things like “Jesus existed”, for example.

But often it’s in comparison to folks like that when I am asked “why and how you can believe in this thing called ‘Christianity’. You aren’t conservative, you have some very liberal leanings, and you’d never vote for ‘that guy’, so how you can you call yourself Christian? Why would you want to associate with them?”

Political crap aside, I am going to address the root question. “How can you be a Christian?”

That question isn’t as simple as it sounds. I could go down so many different tangents just to explain the question before I can give a full answer. Tangents like “why I don’t like the word ‘Christian'”. But I will do my best to answer the basic question. So here goes:

Yes. I’m a Christian. I believe in the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob as described in the Old Testament of what is known as “The Bible”. I believe in Jesus, son of the living God, who was given that none should perish but that all should have eternal life. There’s much more, but for the sake of brevity, that is enough.

The key word here is ‘believe’. It’s what I ‘believe’. I have ‘faith’. Many celebrity preachers would say that to believe something is to “know” it even though you can’t see it or prove it. I think that’s a really crappy way to describe faith. The letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament, chapter 11, verse 1 says “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” And while that’s OK, I still don’t think that is really a good definition, it’s just another way of saying that you “know” something that you haven’t seen or heard.

Here’s how I see it. When I sit on a chair, I have faith that it’s not going to collapse under me and send me crashing to the floor. I also have faith that a monster from under the earth isn’t going to break the floor under that chair and drag me down to the molten core of the earth with it’s tentacles. There’s a million little tiny things we all have faith in every moment of every day. Some ridiculous, others mundane, others rather practical. Faith that the clock on the nightstand shows the correct time, faith that the TV show we’re watching won’t get switched off in the middle of the most exciting scene, faith that our employer won’t fire us today if we do our job, faith that our spouses are faithful, faith that our children are behaving themselves at school, faith that the car will get us to the grocery store and they aren’t out of toilet paper..

You don’t “know” these things, but you believe them. That’s faith. Some things you have more evidence for, so they’re easier to believe than others. The monster under the floor, for example. It hasn’t happened before, so the likelihood of it happening now is pretty slim, so it’s easier to have faith that it won’t happen. But if you’re sitting on a flimsy folding 20-year-old lawn chair, maybe you won’t have as much faith in it not collapsing as you do in the monster not showing up.

My journey in the Christian faith is like that. I don’t claim to “know” anything. In fact I will tell you that there are days when I am not even sure I believe anything at all. (“*GASP!* He’s a doubter!!!” Yes, I have doubts sometimes. Anyone who claims they don’t is a terrible liar.) I don’t “know” beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is real, that Jesus was real, or that any of the Bible is true. I can’t know. Short of historical and archeological evidence, there is very little that we CAN know. (Anyone know where to get a TARDIS?)

But still, I believe.

Just like the chair and the monster under the floor, there are some things that are easier to believe than others.

This is where things get tricky so bear with me as I ramble and rant through this a bit.

When I was young, it was easy to believe. Santa, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, Jesus. Kids’ imaginations are open to the possibilities of anything being true, especially when a parent or authority figure tells you it’s true. Some would argue that continuing to believe in Jesus into adulthood is like still believing in Santa into adulthood, and maybe some people hold on to their faith that way, but I am only speaking for myself. For me it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I got my first real dose of faith, and not until I was in my 30s that I really started to understand what it is that I believe and why I believe it (and continue to believe). And not until my 40s that I understood that i’s OK or the things I believe and why I believe to CHANGE.

Part of the reason I believe the things I do is evidence. Yes, evidence. That might seem contrary to the concepts of “belief” and “faith”, but think about my chair metaphor. If a chair is heavy, made of metal and thick wood, then experiences you have had in the past with metal and wood will inform your belief about that chair. Metal and wood are strong, you’ve seen evidence of that, so your belief in a metal and wood chair will be built on that experience.

The same is true (for me) for belief and faith in the basics of Christianity. Granted there isn’t much in the way of concrete, provable archeological and historical evidence, I will concede that. But there is some. We have the writings of the Bible, some proven to exist long before the time of Christ. The Bible was collected and brought together even though it was written by many different writers. Setting aside whether some things in it are true or not, it EXISTS. Some will argue that since there is no reliable writings outside the Bible is proof it’s false (there are many writings in fact, but that’s a different story), but these things were collected into one place. It doesn’t prove that it’s true, but the fact that these writings exist and have existed for thousands of years is evidence. There is archeological evidence as well. Again, not a lot but some. References to the “house of David” dated to the time during and shortly after David would have been king of Israel. Many say, however, that it’s not enough, that because we can’t find Noah’s ark or The Cross or figure out how the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, none of it is true. But a little evidence is still evidence. In my faith journey, it’s another bit that leads to the whole.

Back to our chair analogy, even though we have experience with wood and metal, and we’re pretty sure the chair won’t collapse under us, it still could. Our experience tells us most likely it won’t. Experience informs our faith that the chair won’t collapse.

But there’s more.

Let’s say there’s a room full of these chairs. All the same materials and construction. Pretty much identical. Since we have sat on one that didn’t collapse, we have faith that none of the others, since they’re identical, will collapse either. However, there might still be a chance. With so many chairs, there might be one that is faulty. The more we try the greater likelihood that one might break.

Flip that around. If the chair did collapse, we have faith that the others will too. But one might sustain us. Our experience with chairs tells us they are made to be sat on, so in spite of our experience with one chair that breaks, we still have faith that one MIGHT allow us to sit on it, since that is what chairs are for.

In my faith journey, evidence for a thousand little things led to faith in bigger things and that led to faith in God, just like a thousand little things led to faith that one of those faulty chairs was still useable. I could bore you with all those little discussions and life experiences, and maybe I will one day (though hopefully it won’t be boring), for the sake of brevity in this post I won’t. I’m painting in broad strokes here.

Remember our monster under the floor? So we sit on the chair, it didn’t collapse. We sat there for a while, and the monster didn’t reach up and grab us.

But of those two, which was MOST LIKELY to happen? What about something else? Like the chair didn’t collapse AND someone didn’t walk into the room carrying a cake singing “Happy Birthday”? Which of those was MOST LIKELY to happen? But, at least in this case, the birthday celebration is possible (compared to the floor monster).

What is possible? Some things are likely, but other things, though less likely, are possible. Things that are possible are easier to believe in than things that seem outrageous. If I’m sitting in a restaurant, on my chair that didn’t collapse, it’s more likely that a birthday celebration will happen that if I’m sitting on that same chair alone in my house.

When it comes to faith in God and Jesus, what are things that are possible? What are the things we think are possible based on our experience and evidence, even if we don’t have experience or evidence of those things? Here the faith base widens. More than the evidence, we suddenly see things that could be, and in fact may certainly be, even though we have no previous experience or evidence that they are. Did the Israelites live as slaves in Egypt? There’s not much evidence they did, there is, however, evidence of the ancient Egyptians using  non-Egyptians as slaves to build towns and monuments, so it’s POSSIBLE the Israelites were among them. This  doesn’t make Israelite slaves TRUE, but it’s not a big leap to make from “what is known” to “what could have been”. And like the birthday in the restaurant, it seems likely.

But what about the big things? What about GOD, what about Heaven and Hell and resurrection from the dead and miracles and all of that?

This where things get ‘big’, this is what we call the “leap” of faith. From the “things that are known” and “things that are likely” to “things that are impossible to know” and seem very very unlikely, if not completely impossible to be true.

Let me try another metaphor. A foot bridge. It looks old and rickety. You’re not sure it can hold you. But you take a step. Then another. Your fear of it breaking and sending you plummeting to your death starts to ease up. By the time you get to the end, your faith in the bridge has been confirmed, you no longer doubt it. Each step erased a little doubt.

My faith in God is like that. Each little step led to more and more faith until I found myself believing in what, from the other side, seemed impossible.

How can I believe? How can I have faith? A little bit here. A little bit there. And more and more until I got to what I believe is real and true.

Does my belief MAKE it true? No. And again, I don’t claim, because I believe it, that I know it. But I believe.

And that’s enough for me.

Now, regarding Ted or Mike or The Westboro folks? I can’t speak for them. But I can say that even though we might, possibly, share common ground on one thing or another, it doesn’t mean we share everything, especially on political issues. My faith, in, maybe, the same God and Jesus does NOT mean I believe in the same things about how to treat people and money.

Claiming that all Christians are like them is like claiming that all followers of Islam are Isis or all Italian-Americans are in “the mob”, or all people that live in Hawaii like pineapple.

But that’s a blog post for another time.