Faith, Faith, Faith

My wife's middle name is Faith.  I mention this because she loves to be part of my blog and because there's a reason she has that name.  She was born three months premature, in a time when there wasn't much hope for kids born at that point, but she survived and her parents gave her Faith as a middle name.  I also mention it because faith is the theme of this week's lectionary text from Hebrews, and the theme of a movie we watched with the kids last night: Rise of the Guardians.  Because sometimes the universe conspires to put something so glaringly in your path that you just can't avoid it.  The ancient Greeks called it fate, I call it the Holy Spirit, because I have faith.
Faith is one of those words that gets used a lot, but not always in exactly the same way.  Faith can mean belief in the context that I just used.  Keeping the faith means being rooted and steady.  Acting in good faith means being trustworthy and true to your word.  Hebrews says, "Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see."  I think that's a pretty good definition.
You don't need faith in things you can see.  I don't  have to have faith that there's a big pine tree outside my window, but I do need to have faith that there is a God.  There is a theological concept called Deus Absconditis, which means Hidden God.  It's a rather important concept because it explains a lot of the stories in the Bible, and for Christians has an impact on our understanding of the person of Jesus.  In the Bible God desires to be known, but there is a certain limit to our ability to understand God.  There is also the rather peculiar insistence on mystery and seeing God only in part.  You have to think it would be a lot easier for God to keep people focused if She regularly showed up and made a PR stop.  We humans are wired to believe what we see, to the point where we're real suckers for illusion and sleight of hand.  However, God does not like to make personal appearances and leaves it mostly up to our faith.
This is good and bad, because while are wired to believe what we see, we're also wired for faith, we are prone, in fact, I would say we need to believe in things.  In one of my favorite TV shows, The X-files, (try to contain your shock) Agent Mulder has a poster with a UFO on it that says, "I want to believe."  We don't just want to believe, we need to believe, it's part of what makes us human.
It's a rather glaring weakness, because it opens us up to all sorts of nonsense.  Faith can be easily abused, and it often is.  Faith can lead people to do terrible things, and it often does.  Faith, in fact, is such a glaring weakness that many people have chosen to try and live without it.  I want to emphasize the word try, because it's not something you can really get away from.  If you choose not to believe in God or gods, you inevitably replace them with something, you can't really help it, there's a part of you that needs filling.
Which brings me back to Christian faith and the notion of deus absconditus.  God has remained hidden because He can fill that empty space in us, in fact He's the only thing that can, but like most solutions to humanity's problems, it works a lot better if we think it's our idea.  God has made us with this peculiar independent streak, and we like to think that we're in control, so instead of overwhelming us with both barrels of God's majesty, She peeks out and says, "Hey, this is what I'm like, wanna hang out?"
That peek is Jesus of Nazareth.
In Jesus' life, death and resurrection we found out a few things about God:
God loves children.
God cares for the sick and the broken.
God forgives the sinful.
God gets mad at the legal and religious authorities who like to tell people that God is different than God actually is.
God calls really ordinary and unimpressive people to follow him around and do stuff with him.
God likes to tell us about the Kingdom, but leave it up to us to take it or leave it.
Oh yeah, and God loves us... a lot... enough to keep the power that created the universe under wraps so it doesn't fry our circuits.
God deals with our empty space, not by filling it up with majesty and overwhelming it with omniscience but by giving us the gift of faith.
That's what faith really is, a gift.
A gift that pulls us through the fear.
A gift that doesn't always chase away our doubts, but lets us know that we can trust what we cannot know.
For all of God that remains hidden, there is enough to believe, if you want.