We Walk by Faith, Not by Sight
Human beings have a funny habit. We romanticize and gloss over and reinvent and rationalize our past, our sins, our errors. When we look to the future, though, we plan, and analyze, and confidently extrapolate from what we imagine we plainly see around us, and then imagine that we are the authors of our future. This bizarre methodology is what the world trains us to call “sensible.”
It is hardly that.
Scripture informs us that, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Conversely, “We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18). And God spoke to Israel reminding them, “Ye are not as yet come to the rest and to the inheritance, which the LORD your God giveth you” (Deuteronomy 12:9).
Put baldly, our godless past is much worse and less secure than we imagine, but our godly future, when entrusted to him in faith, is much more glorious than we can expect or reasonably plan for. We dare not limit our hope to what we can see, because all we can see are thousands and thousands of distractions. All the which are on the verge of winking out of existence altogether: not a very secure basis on which to build.
This is why I am so “unreasonably” hopeful for our parish. Our 100 Days program has involved a serious moral inventory of our past, and now, we are boldly stepping into a new chapter for our future. An “objective,” “sensible,” worldly observer would say we are delusional, not “facing facts.”
I don’t need to recite the “facts” about Messiah Anglican Church. We all know them. But there is a fact the world can not see because the world does not know: Jesus Christ is our “fact.” This does not guarantee “success,” for our parish as a worldly institution. I can’t promise anything about that. But I can promise that Jesus will be Jesus—and that is the place to build.
—Fr. Eric
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