“The Economy of Fact, The Negligence of Faith”

HMPC, Daniel 6: 10-23

March 9, 2008 – Lent 5

As a junior in high school, my parents loaded me in a car and took me across the South and East to see colleges. Visit campuses. Breathe the air. Collect evidence and figures ranging from dorm size, financial aid, courses to take, whether or not I could play football at the school, the books in the library, and that most important of all college criteria for the then 17 year old that I was, whether or not I thought the girls were cute.

As a senior in high school, I then took all the information I had gathered and applied to 9 colleges, and got into 8 of them. Once I got financial aid and money figures from those eight, my parents began to encourage me to make a decision. “How do I decide,?” I asked them. “Use what you know,” they told me.

Well to make a long story short, I had to decide by the end of April, 1990. The night before I had to mail my letter, I went into the dining room with a soda and made the most important decision of my life. And I did it on blind faith, gut instinct, pure emotion. In fact, I ended up going to the school that had made me no financial aid offer, no scholarship offer, even though I had full or partial scholarship offers from the other 7. The place I chose didn’t even have the cutest girls, as a whole from the eight I was looking at, although the number of cute girls was more than adequate.

Because of that decision I met my wife, and she’s really cute. And I met then men and women who encouraged me to go into the ministry. My college counselor and my father, almost eleven years ago now, wanted to know how I came to that decision, and my only answer was, “I just knew it was right.”

Isn’t it funny that this is how we make most of the big decisions in our lives? As a minister I am asked all the time about things like marriage, children, and aging parents. How do I know if this is the one I am supposed to marry? Is this the right time to try for a child? Do I let my mother move in with us, get her home care, encourage her to move to assisted living? Do I start a new job? Should I move to another city? People really struggle with these questions.

I believe that we have struggled with these questions because culture has convinced us that the only basis of making decisions is factual – “just the facts please” is almost a mantra. “Just study the facts,” and, “Know your facts and it’ll be obvious” are what we are told. And this just is not true.

Now it is true that our economy, our society needs facts to run efficiently. Banks would not go very far making business decisions on emotion. They’re not going to give me millions of dollars just because I am a nice guy. The courts generally rely on facts as well, as do teachers, and doctors. Facts are important.

But they fail us when we equate our self-worth to the facts about our lives. They fail us when we turn solely to them as the basis of our decisions. And we in turn suffer because we allow our only economy, the way we trade goods, money, time, talents, and ourselves with one another to be an economy of fact. The fact is, we are entirely too factual. We neglect our faith as a basis for living in exchange for a seemingly more predictable fact based existence. And there are times when the facts both defy and fail us.

Take Daniel’s story as an example. Fact – he broke the law. Fact – real lions. Fact – sealed door. Fact – he’s in deep trouble. But he turns to God. He shows no fear. And he is delivered. What if, I wonder, he shows fear? If he panics? Perhaps the lions, because of his calm stature think he is just another lion? Perhaps not. Either way, Daniel in this story from antiquity teaches us that the facts are not the whole story.

The most telling teacher of this is the king in the story – he who could not reverse his own law. So, Daniel is cast into the pit. The law, the facts, seem to be irreversible, irrefutable, and yet, faith in God breaks through. One of my teachers in seminary teaches that this is the most critical lesson of all of Daniel – that just when we think history is factually irreversible Apartheid can come down, nuclear stockpiling can cease, families no longer have to live under the veil of addiction. Just when you think you have failed, dear friends, when the facts are stacked against you, understand that faith is a tool of reversal. It’s bigger than the facts. After all, the facts aren’t what they are cracked up to be.

The American philosopher Eric Hoffer once said, “Facts are counter-revolutionary,” in the same spirit the writer Gore Vidal added, “It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.”

This is supported by the observation that almost any person that you and I admire as a changer of the shape of the world was and is a person of faith. Fact – India was a nation struggling with Islam, Hinduism, and Great Britain. Faith – a small man named Ghandi with faith as big as the sky led the most prolific peaceful revolution in world history. Fact – the America of three generations ago was a bitter, racially divided and segregated place. Faith – a man and his church and those who would follow begin a movement of such force that the entire value system about race in the country is changed, and Martin Luther King, Jr. finds in his faith the energy to lead his people towards a land of promise they had never imagined possible. Fact – addiction is a terrible disease. It is a slow and insidious pathway towards death that is hard to beat. Faith – a man named Bill W. begins to understand that by letting God heal wounds, letting God be a source of recovery, letting God allow forgiveness and end to shame, by letting God be a bearer of burdens and a builder of communities of meetings that addiction could be beaten. And 75 years later Alcoholics Anonymous has touched more that 100 million lives world-wide. The facts were insurmountable. Their “economy” was oppressive. And yet, faith ruled the day.

You know the word economy is an old Greek word. It comes first from the word oikos, which means house. It then is derived from words like, koinos – communal, or common, koinonia, association, fellowship – eventually, koinonia evolves into ekoinonia, which, a couple millennia later becomes economy. Economy is that which we have in common, the association we keep with one another.

And our economy is fact. Ours is a world of facts and arithmetic. We value fact. We like figures. We want the surgery because we know it works. We want the proof to be on the page, in the pudding, and in paragraph form. This is not a bad thing. No, it is not. We need facts – they build bridges and make roads; they create medicines and fire alarms. They are generally good. But we trust them more than we ought. There are times when faith is what we are called to trust and declare. There are times when faith, and not fact, is to be our testimony, our witness, and our confession. There is not a single fact which will get Daniel out of the mouth of the lions. And yet, he got out. Investment in this story is a matter of faith as well as it challenges us with its near improbability and its next-to-impossibility. Daniel’s story proves to us that you cannot think your way out of a lion’s den. And it challenges us to wonder: Can we pray our way out of a lion’s den?

The truth about facts is that facts get us only so far. Very often, almost always, the decisions that matter defy factual insight or factual reliability. And this leads me to wonder how much confusion and bewilderment is caused when facts are viewed as the be all and end of all. I also wonder what the world would be like if we lived in an economy of faith. Where the “I know” statements were consistently replaced with “I believe.” In other words, we neglect faith at the peril of our own confusion and own bewilderment. For if we must decide on instinct, gut, or faith expressed through prayer to God to help us discover the right path, and we have only relied on facts in our pasts, then we will be paralyzed and helpless. Such decisions exist. There is no factual test of relationships. No way to know when a child is born what kind of woman she’ll become. No way to foresee the perfect course of action when a parent is asking us for help. Only faith will help us steer this course.

Here is where we might meet Jesus. A man in whom fact and faith completely intersect. He was a factual historical figure. He did really live. The risk of faith is whether or not we profess him to be God’s son, sent to redeem the world, and call all people to the kingdom. And Jesus invites us to the table, not to confuse us with facts or debate the facts like the candidates soon to descend upon the Tar Heel state invariably will. Whose facts are correct are anyone’s best guess. The best faith, though, would claim that Jesus calls us here to meet him and be re-charged in lives of faith, too often neglected at the expense of fact.

Come then to this cross, where faith supercedes fact, and belief is second to none.