Philippians 2 offers a haunting and mysterious and upending hymn about the divine mystery of God’s self-emptying, God’s ‘giving-up-of-everything’, God’s endless momentum of love towards others. This passage speaks of the mystery of God’s humility, the humble stance God adopts towards all. And so, the faith we seek and for which we hope is shaped decisively not by a divine despot but by God’s self-emptying in an act of love. Faith requires then the cultivation of such humility – the hard, onerous, slow task of self-emptying oneself to God and God’s world, just a s Christ emptied Godself for us.
Faith thus is the fostering of a way of life, a way of being – being in God, in God’s world, story, and people. It is not about information, but formation and transformation, it is about discovering oneself loved by the One in whom are all things beautiful, good, and true.
Faith is at its heart contemplative; it is inhabiting the Sabbath rest of God, in which we finally learn to listen. In the quiet of discernment and waiting, God’s Spirit hovers over our lives wherein God finds all that is needed to fashion our world. Yet in this posture of attentive listening, we hear not only angels but also anguish, gladness and grief, sacrament and sacrilege. Faith, then, doubly attuned to beauty and the brokenness, is at times a place of bitter weeping (as Revelation 5.4 puts it). We weep bitterly for the wounds we cannot heal, the lives we cannot mend, the deaths we cannot undo, the disheartening limits we cannot transcend. We weep bitterly because no one among us can be found to unravel the strangulation of Sin, the shadow cast by Death. Not the particular sins of you and me, but the darkness and negation that grips the cosmos without reprieve, that unhinges “the world grown weary with the burden of itself” (David Bentley Hart, ‘The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth”).
Faith thus requires familiarity with suffering, solidarity with the marginalised. It beckons us to attention to “the abyss in which the truth of our lives is found” (Walter Brueggemann). Faith, in the aftermath of such silence and sorrow, entails the cultivation of particular forms of language. It entails the articulation of both “Look! I give you everything” of Genesis (1:29), and “Look! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), to be whispered lovingly into every nook and cranny of the cosmos.
It is the cultivation of such language that evokes, imagines, shapes, and summons all to share in the life and love of God. Faith is hence Eucharistic – the enveloping of our entire lives in the sweeping sacramental movement of God’s Spirit in the taking, blessing, breaking, and giving (Luke 24:30) of all things unto God. It is partaking in the liturgy of church and life, in which God’s drama is enacted in catholic faithfulness to Scripture and tradition, yet ever sensitive to local idiom and culture. And in being Eucharistic it is at core both hospitable, creating space for one another to flourish, and hopeful, singing together that “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”
Faith is centred on Christ, inscribed in the pattern and paradox of death and resurrection, incarnation and ascension. It is the pondering of the peculiarity of God in Christ, born as a poor Jewish Palestinian peasant, rejected and tortured, who fully participated in human life, even to death. Faith is about being caught up in the resurrection of the Crucified One. The wholeness and union with God that we yearn for is now possible through the Spirit.
Faith is oriented to hope, whereby the surprising inbreaking of God’s loving presence is unpredictable from and unimaginable in the present and its possibilities. It is pursued in the tension between the presence and gift of God, and the yet-to-be-fulfilled longing of creation for consummation. Faith is about learning to inhabit this tension, to discern its pastoral significance, to resist any shortcuts to certainty or completion. Faith is about learning to live with the unanswered questions that inhabit its centre.
Thus faith can only be pursued fulsomely and robustly in community. For inevitably, we return always to questions of ‘being’, to the question of Being. This God – Creator, Redeemer, Consummator – is Being-in-relation, and so when every single one of us is named anew – as the image of God, as children of God – we enter the communal shape into which we are called, a shape haltingly we apprehend as being more fully ourselves than that for which we had ever hoped. Faith invites the giving over of our whole being to the vastness of God and God’s world, to the wild vision of God’s shalom, irrespective of utility, uninhibited by detractors, unwavering in its humility, unconstrained in its imagination.
And this loving contemplation and emptying of one’s self – as a humble way of life, for the sake of God’s hope to befriend all creation, in the midst of the agony and pain of creation’s brokenness – is the life-giving centre of gravity to which faith must cling tenaciously, regardless of the cost. Amen.
The Reverend Associate Professor Matthew Anstey is the parish priest at St Theodore's, Toorak Gardens, South Australia, and a General Synod representative for the Diocese of Adelaide.
Matthew is working on a fresh, contemporary translation of the Psalms for Australian Anglican worship. For more information please see: https://www.ansteypsalter.com/
