We are in the year 2018. We are surrounded with technological advances and scientific understandings more than any other time. We have landed on the moon, have a space station orbiting the earth, and are talking about living on Mars. Information speeds around our planet instantaneously. We can talk and facetime with a friend on the other side of our planet with only micro-seconds of delay. The list could go on – we are a people who have so much, know so much, have discovered so much - so why do we bother with faith?
The truth is that 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago people probably were saying the same thing wherever they lived – we know so much more than our ancestors, we have discovered so much more. People living 100 or 1,000 years from now may look back at us and wonder at what primitive lives we lived. It all reminds us that we are part of something so much more, that there is something much greater and much more mysterious going on than all our scientific advances or medical knowledge or technological break throughs can totally capture. That is when we turn to faith – faith in God, in a More that is Mystery, and Love, and Wonder, and Possibility.
We choose faith in our generation. In past centuries, faith was assumed. People included faith practice in their lives in the way they would include food and labour and sleep. They could not have imagined life without religious practice and a sense of faith as a foundation to all they did. But we are in a time when, because of all the science and technology, because of rapid change and human migration, and because of some horrendous actions by religious people which overshadow the good that faith can do, having a faith or religious practice at the core of your life is no longer assumed. We now live in a culture formed much more around materialism and science, though even science, too, has a hard time being taken seriously and is sometimes dismissed. For the first time in history, to follow a faith and a religious practice is a choice, not a given.