Faith and Futility

The opposite of faith is not unbelief but futility.

Christianity is based on what must be the ultimate happy ending – the story of the resurrection of Jesus. Volumes have been written, churches have been divided, and purported heretics have been burned over the supposed “meaning” of this event. But the event, I think, is not primarily something to spend a lot of time on trying to make theologically meaningful.

The resurrection of Jesus is an indication of the inviolable, pure nature of the Holy Spirit of God, the spirit that was in Jesus, the spirit which Christians claim is at work in metropolitan Richmond in the fall of 2014.

God doesn’t do everything. Otherwise the world would be a machine and we would be puppets. What does God do? That is the question that is most critically before each of us. I believe that if one catches a hint of the spirit of God, if one is energized by the spirit of God, if the spirit of God is around us working the work, then we are in fact engaging with the spirit of resurrection.

What is the nature of the resurrection spirit? First, it is something that engages directly in our human history. The resurrection is not something that occurs out of time, and it is not something that occurs off the earth, or unrelated to our senses. God only knows how one might describe “what actually happened” when Jesus appeared to his disciples after being executed and buried. I certainly would not purport to describe the physicality of it.

But here is the empirical data, for anyone who cares to see it: after his crucifixion and before the different “resurrection appearances” of Jesus, his followers were depressed and distraught, having lost their leader and the dreams which they had placed in him. They were overcome by final futility. But inexplicably, after the resurrection appearances they were empowered and hopeful, encouraged and encouraging. This is fact. They were motivated for the remainder of their lives. They seem to have had a spirit of love and persistence, hope and energy. They made a benefit of gender, ethnic, class, and religious differences, forming all kinds of people into a new and dynamic movement which regularly rescued people and situations.

Rescued people from despair. Rescued people from futility. The spirit of God is not about optimism. It is about resurrection. The story which Jesus’ followers repeatedly told to name this rescue was the story of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

A story is not the same thing as a spiritual feeling. But a spiritual feeling or experience can only be identified by story. The resurrection of Jesus was the crucible of spiritual experience for Jesus’ followers several days after his death. And the story of the resurrection of Jesus named both that experience and the continuing spiritual experience which sustained its retelling.

Today we still have that story. It names a spiritual experience and an anticipation. Time is wasted that argues over it as a doctrine, or debunks it in some simplistically “scientific” worldview. The decisive reality of the resurrection of Jesus is the continual reality of the spirit of Jesus and God acting in resurrection-spirit fashion in individual lives and specific communities.

Futility News. You can see it on television screens in waiting rooms. You can hear it in thousands of households of metropolitan Richmond. Our daily dose makes us accustomed to futility, and because it is so very untouchable, it makes us both frustrated and passive. It is the cloak for death, the daily excuse for passivity before injustice. It has a liturgical call and response. Call: “It’s the right thing.” Response: “It’ll never happen.” Optimism is a weakened antidote — a threadbare cloak for the death of dreams.

Futility is the opposite of resurrection faith. Futility and its companion passivity are life-killers. They worship the death of last year as the lord of the future. Where they reign, hundreds of deaths, hundreds of little crucifixions, thousands of failures obscure the map we read, the road we walk.

Resurrection is always specific and timely. For many of us it is daily. We see and experience resurrection first of all in our personal lives, then in life in our own immediate context, and altogether in the life of our metropolitan city.

To believe in God and life, Jesus suggests, is to love and serve without control, not hiding in a hole but entering and engaging the forgotten futilities with which we have allowed ourselves to be surrounded, re-believing in the resurrection-nature of the Spirit of God.

Faith is a way of seeing the present and the future. If you want faith, talk to people who have really faced death and tragedy. Talk to people for whom the choice of faith has been a life or death choice. Talk to people for whom faith has been the only light on a road which seemed closed by futility, who have found their way or have been found by the way.

They’re the ones who have taught us hope, the ones who help us live, the saints who pay prices others choose not to pay, often because others choose not to pay them.

Faith takes us way beyond futility, — not out of the world, but deeper into it. We are led on the way not by crucifixion but by the resurrection of human spirit in a land where others see only fate. Faith is the hope of our individual lives. It is also, marvelously, the hope of our metropolitan city. It is itself the resurrection spirit of God.

B. P. Campbell
Pastoral Director