The Suspension of Belief | A Sermon on Belief, Faith, and the Difference Between the Two
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin on The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, August 7, 2022.
Genesis 15:1-6; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
I’d like to spend some time this morning considering the difference between belief and faith.
Belief.
And Faith.
Throughout Scripture, there is little if any difference between the two. Consider the Gospel of John, written so that “you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). Faith goes without mention because belief just about covers it.
And yet, common usage these days suggests that there is a difference between the words belief and faith.
Belief is often used to reference an intellectual assent to a certain set of facts. Faith, on the other hand, means something more. Faith engages trust, commitment, even love in a way that belief, in common usage, does not.
You may believe, for example, in your partner. Yes, they exist! And they will act as they have acted, do as they have done, in the past - fairly predictably even. To be sure. But to have faith in them, well, that’s another matter entirely.
Philosopher Alan Watts once wrote:
In general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. . . . The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes.
Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.
Belief clings; but faith lets go. [1]
This morning, we revisit the story of Abram and Sarai (who will later become Abraham and Sarah). And we encounter two of the most marvelous and foundational sentences in scripture.
The first is from Genesis:
And [Abram] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness (15:6).
[Abram] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
And the second is from Hebrews:
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Heb. 11:1).
Belief and faith. Still one and the same to Scripture.
We meet Abraham and Sarah childless and in their old age. The word of the Lord has come to Abraham in a vision, finding him in this barren and finite state. And God tells him that not only will he have a child, but that he and Sarah will have millions of descendants –as many as there are stars in the night sky.
God is promising what is surely inconceivable, and yet we are told that Abraham believed the Lord despite all preconceptions, all evidence to the contrary.
For this, Abraham and Sarah were rewarded.
For this, the impossible was made possible.
For this, Abraham and Sarah became, for all those who would follow, standard-bearers of faith.
In the words of Barbara Brown Taylor:
[Abraham] is the primal believer who trusted God’s promise though he had no earthly evidence that the promise was ever going to come true. . . . [H]is story is key. Abraham did not lift a finger to be saved. All he did was believe in God’s promises, and that was enough. He was saved by faith alone. [2]
Isn’t that truly fantastic: that our faith is enough for God. And yet, that may be well and good for those with faith, but what about those without?
Throughout the Bible, we hear that while faith is necessary it need not be much. We are assured that our faith could be as small as a mustard seed. And yet still we worry. We worry that our faith is not enough. That our faith is not the right kind of faith. We worry that we’ve placed our faith in the wrong hands or that we’ve lost our faith altogether, as if faith were a set of car keys that could be easily recovered if we could only think about the last place we saw it.
But what if we are confusing faith with belief? What if we are treating the two as if they are interchangeable in a world where they have come to mean different things altogether.
When I ask people about their faith, it almost always moves to a conversation about belief. They share that they don’t believe everything they’re supposed to –they don’t believe all that we profess in the Creed. They don’t believe that miracles happen or even that the biblical miracles happened. They’re skeptical about the creation story, the flood, and perhaps even the entire Old Testament. They don’t believe enough or the right way (according to them) and this becomes synonymous with a lack of faith.
As if faith is a destination one reaches through belief in the right way and in the right things.
But mental agreement and a whole-hearted commitment to God’s truth and promise are two different things. We can hold both belief in one hand and faith in another and there can be distance between them.
More faith is not the result of believing harder. More faith is not a game of mental math.
Taylor writes:
[The people I know] try hard to do what is right, but that isn’t moving any mountains for them. It isn’t even helping them sleep at night.
Some keep bottles of Excedrin PM by their beds. Others . . . lie in the dark worrying about everything from where their children will go to college to whether they will have enough money to retire. If they just had more faith, they say, if they just believed, then none of this would be happening to them.
If they had faith, they would be able to sleep soundly through the night. They would walk around with a working compass inside of them—one that pointed to true north no matter where they were. If they had faith, they would not be angry or afraid anymore. They would be as calm and confident as Abraham was, resting on the promises of God. [3]
But let’s clarify something. Abraham was not calm and confident. Not always. Maybe not even where we find him this morning. He lived a life full of hope and fear, anger and joy. We know this because Abraham is one of us. A human being living in this beautiful and brutal world.
And Scripture tells us that God visited Abraham three times. And what does God say first to Abraham on his third visit? He says, “Do not be afraid.” Certainly, this indicates that Abraham was fearful. And God knew it. And still God came. And still God promised. And still God delivered.
And because Abram believed the Lord; the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
We can imagine that despite all evidence to the contrary, that Abraham was able to suspend disbelief long enough to imagine the future that God promised. And yet the suspension of disbelief is also not the equivalent of faith. This is where our current ideas around belief and faith get all twisted up.
There are those who think the faithful are merely suspending their disbelief. Have somehow and someway overcome the mind’s need for logic, reason, and trust based on past action and evidence. Have been able to set their doubts aside so that faith might take over. A kind of magical thinking if you will.
But what if faith is less the suspension of disbelief and more like the suspension of belief –belief as we use it and understand it today.
One writer notes that “when we suspend belief, that means we must first be aware of what we do or do not believe. We must be willing to accept that there may be another perspective, [another story, another (perhaps a better) way.” [4]
Belief clings; faith lets go.
Perhaps as Abraham stared up at the night sky, at the immensity of stars, the vastness of space, extending as far as the eye could see, perhaps, for a moment, he suspended belief. He let go of what he knew to be true about his circumstances based on experience, evidence, and logic, and he allowed room for God’s promise to take root and to build an uncertain future held in the hands of a faithful God.
Because the story, in the end, is not about Abraham’s faith, not really. The story is about God’s faithfulness.
God put his trust in, cast his promise over, Abraham, taking a gamble like none other. God who, let’s face it, has little reason to believe in us, to trust any of us with much of anything, places his faith in us again and again. Abraham simply reciprocated in the best way he knew how, letting go of what he knew to be true about his circumstances and living instead into the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
There is a place for belief, certainly, even in the way we commonly use the word now. Belief helps us to operate, to function. To plan and to remain safe. And yet faith goes further. Faith can be impractical; it never makes perfect sense and it’s not entirely logical, but it is for us. Gifted to us from before time until the end of time.
Believe it or not; the seed of faith, small as it may be, has been planted within you. It will not make your life easy. It does not mean bad things won’t still happen to you. It may even take a while to see results from a life of faith.
And yet, faith like love opens us up to an entirely different story, one that promises us that we are never alone, that the blessing always outweighs any potential pain, and that our story is God’s story too –full of promise and always unfinished.
*The image is “Joshua Tree at Night,” by Henrique Pinto via Wikicommons.
[1] Maria Popova, “Alan Watts on the Difference Between Belief and Faith,” The Marginalian, https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/06/27/alan-watts-belief-vs-faith.
[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Sacramental Sky,” a sermon preached at Duke University Chapel, Durham, North Carolina, on the Second Sunday of Lent, February 18, 2010.
[3] Taylor, “The Sacramental Sky”.
[4] Jody Rust, “Good Students Suspend Disbelief; Great Students Suspend Belief,” the West River Eagle, 20 February 2019, https://www.westrivereagle.com/articles/good-students-suspend-disbelief-great-students-suspend-belief.
