Proper 14, Year C, August 10, 2025
Seeing is believing in the things you see
Loving is believing in the ones you love[1]
The chorus from Margie Adams’ “Unicorn Song” is a counterpoint to the great refrain in this morning’s reading from the Letter to the Hebrews. Nobody’s faith is perfect, and few, if any of us, are able to believe all the time – no matter what we profess to believe. All of us doubt. Doubt is part of human nature, and most of us want some sort of proof or evidence to undergird our beliefs.
As Carter Heyward (one of the first ordained women in the Episcopal Church) observed: “Faith is a process of leaping into the abyss not on the basis of any certainty about “where” we shall land, but rather on the belief that we ‘shall’ land.” It is a lifelong journey with ebbs and flows, mountains and valleys, high points and low moments.
As evidenced by this morning’s Hebrew Scripture reading, our biblical ancestors displayed this paradox of faithful living. Abram didn’t understand how, as a childless old man, he would have descendants, but he believed in God’s promise. After reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s history of The Mayflower, I’m fairly convinced that our Pilgrim ancestors held the same belief. They were confident that they would land in a New World even if they didn’t know exactly where they would land along its shoreline.
The Pilgrim story made me think about my maternal ancestors who immigrated from England to Virginia in the late-1600’s and my paternal ancestors who came from Hungary to Zanesville, Ohio on their honeymoon in the mid-1800’s. What faith did they carry with them about what life would be like in America? Whenever we journey to a new place or chapter in life, there are no guarantees – just faith, hope, promises and lots of uncertainty.
When the author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” he or she is in many ways trying to encourage our sometimes feeble but other times remarkable faith.
I’ve concluded that human beings are not born with faith, but rather we are born with the capacity for faith. Faith often originates with an experience of God or the search for such an experience. We have an encounter with the Divine that we then try to understand; or for reasons sometimes unbeknownst even to ourselves, we go looking for such an encounter. For instance, did you ever feel restless, took off on a road trip, and it became a pilgrimage? Did you ever feel that your regular pattern of worship had grown stale so you decided to explore a new spiritual practice (like yoga or meditation), and it brought you closer to God? Did you ever hit a brick wall in your love life or your career, and it became a time of spiritual growth? Or, did you ever confront the tumultuous waters of illness or death and cross to a new place of belief and confidence in God?
As a young adult of mixed religious identity, I wrestled with God about faith so that I could proceed with integrity on what I believed was a call to ordination. In fact, one of my most memorable wrestling matches took place in my early twenties at St. Mary of the Harbor in Provincetown. During a Sunday service about 45 years ago, I got so agitated with God that I walked out before communion, sat on the break wall and screamed at the Almighty One. “Show me who you are and what you want me to believe,” I shouted; but all I heard in response was the sound of wind, waves and sea gulls. Like Abraham, I wanted a sign. But unlike Abraham who received a vision of stars in the heavens, I didn’t get a sign – at least not on that morning. And so, I continued to walk with God and a few years later entered seminary on faith with uncertainty that my way would be made clear.
And as I shared with you in the past, during my first year of seminary, I met God in a McDonald’s. Exhausted from taking on someone bigger and stronger than me and ready to drop out of seminary, I found myself walking down 42nd Street one day in January asking God to let me go. Suddenly, a voice called out to me from within me saying, “I’m not going to let go of you.” “What do you want with me?” I asked. “I want your life,” the voice answered. “Why me?” I responded. “Why not?” the voice replied. At this point, I realized that something important was happening, and I needed to stop and pay attention to it. I went into a near-by McDonald’s restaurant, ordered my usual cheeseburger-fries-and-coke, and began frantically scribbling down a conversation with this voice from nowhere.
Yes, sitting in a McDonald’s restaurant on 42nd Street in New York City, on January 31, 1983, I had a conversation that changed my life, once and for all. A voice that was inside of me and yet outside of me – a voice that was not my own – called me by name, identified itself as God, touched my wounds, contradicted my theology, answered my questions, called me to my vocation, and reassured me when I protested. When I questioned why the voice was talking with me, I heard, “Because you’ve been asking for it.”
It was true. Like Abraham, I had been asking, begging, even challenging God to be clear with me, to help me answer my questions of faith and vocation. And there I was – sitting in the cathedral of fast food, having this private conversation with an invisible voice.
At the end of our time together, I asked, “If you’re inside of me, then how can you be God?” The voice replied in words I will never forget, words I’ve repeated from many a pulpit, a podium and even on a TED talk stage, “I’m inside of anyone and everyone who wants to know me. And, if the world would hear and follow me, my kingdom would come.”
With that comment, the conversation ended. I got up and walked home in quiet amazement, wondering if I had really spoken with God.
A few days later, one of my professors, the late Dorothee Soelle, told our class that faith is a two-way street: it is both a gift from God and one’s decision to accept the gift. I didn’t know if I had talked with God, but in a letter to Carter Heyward, I wrote, “If I don’t accept the voice of God on faith now, I don’t think I’ll ever get a more direct message.”
As I walked home from school that evening, I saw a large feather on the sidewalk. Since it was the middle of winter, I was surprised by its presence. I picked it up and put it in my backpack. Later that night, I studied the feather and decided that it was a sign from God that I was headed in the right direction.
Many years later, once again struggling with a major vocational decision, I went for a walk with a friend. As we walked and talked, I looked down and there were several feathers at my feet. Again, I took them as signs of God’s spirit leading me. Every time I see a feather on the ground, I pause, and I am reminded that God is with me, and these so-called ‘signs’ have become an integral part of my experience and faith, my seeing and believing.
I imagine that whenever Noah saw a rainbow, he remembered God’s covenant after the flood; when Abraham looked up at the stars in the night sky, he recalled God’s promise; and when Paul saw lightning on a summer afternoon, he probably remembered his encounter with the Risen Lord that brought him to his knees on the road to Damascus.
The author of Hebrews observes that most of our spiritual ancestors “died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.” Moses never set foot into Canaan. Some of the Pilgrims died with the Cape Cod shoreline in sight but never set foot onto land. Like many immigrants, they had faith, but signs from the Holy One strengthened their belief.
God gives each of us the capacity for faith; God gives us the experiences that can lead to faith; and God gives us the ability to reflect on those experiences in order to grow in faith. At the same time, God grants us the freedom to claim these experiences, dismiss them, or let them sit idle and dormant. If we make the claim, the experience can become a signpost and reminder of a sustaining belief for our faith journey. If we dismiss it, the encounter will remain simply that – an experience without deeper meaning or insight into divine reality. Remember what my theology professor Dorothee Soelle said on the morning I claimed my conversation with God: “Faith is a two-way street. It is a gift freely given, [but] it is [also] the decision to accept the gift.”
This coming Tuesday night is the height of the annual Perseid meteor shower. Even though we’re also scheduled to have a full moon, if it’s clear, the night sky will be filled with shooting stars – as far as the eye can see. I suggest that, following the Peter Kendall Clark concert here at the Chapel at 5:30, if you’re able, go to the beach, lie on your back, and look up. Recalling the words of God to Abram: “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then remember the divine promise – so shall your blessings be.
And if this isn’t enough, I invite you to ponder the signs you’ve been given over the course of your lifetime, ruminate on the experiences that have influenced your faith, and recall the encounters you’ve had with the divine. Remember – the voice of God is inside each and every one of us – we just have to wait, watch, listen and pay attention., or as St. Luke writes: “be dressed for action [and have our] lamps lit.”
As you wrestle with faith in a world where the temptation of secularism lures many away from God, I pray that you may have “the assurance of things hoped for [and the] conviction of things not seen;” and that when you feel estranged and disillusioned, like a stranger in a foreign land, may you look toward heaven and count the stars or look to the ground and notice the feather, and remember that God has prepared a home for you and will lead you to that place. And finally, I pray that you may have the grace, humility, and chutzpah to say as often as necessary: “God, I believe. Help my unbelief.”
The Very Rev. Tracey Lind
St. James the Fisherman, Wellfleet
[1] Margie Adams, “The Unicorn Song”