Canter Bridge

The writer of this sermonic piece knows that faith can be told as a story.

Though faith can be approached analytically, definitionally, abstractly, its gleam emerges best through the stories of the faithful. Men and women act in ways that defy this world’s logic. They refuse to hedge their bets. They put all their eggs in just one basket. They toss caution to the wind, throwing themselves into action both noble and self-sacrificing because the gravity of their lives pivots not on the fragile shelf of self-preservation but rather on the bedrock of divine promise.

So we listen to their stories, finding in their nobility a standard worthy of our own trembling imitation.

They trembled, too. Let the preterite tense of the narrative not blind us to this fact. We see their valor as an act punctiliar, perfect not only in its outcome but also in its design. It was not so.

The heroism of faith is accomplished incrementally. It appears as a given only in retrospect. In the tense drama of real time, it is merely a possibility, often only a remote one. This is why one cannot live on lists alone like this writer’s bullet-pointed summary of faith’s legacy. Rather, the reader must return to the narratives itself to see why faith’s accomplishment seems impossible until finally, suddenly, it is done. There. Finished.

Faith does its work against all odds except one.

All that it has going for it is the foundational potency of God’s promise.

For most, that is not enough. The do not appear in lists. They do not engender daughters and sons who look back in awe and gratitude, then seize faith’s moment in their own time.

They are like the chaff. Their story will be forgotten. Their caution wins them the security of just one moment, appearing as though it is all. It is almost nothing.

By contrast, the stories of the faithful are told forever. They lost, by appearances, the short moment in which they could have seized this world’s best.

The world was unworthy of them.