One thing we know for sure is that doing the right thing is far from easy. A quote from C.S. Lewis’s essay, “What Are We To Make Of Jesus Christ,” tells us, before we do anything, how hard faith can be:

The things He [Jesus] says are very different from what any other teacher has said. Others say, “this is the truth about the universe. This is the way you ought to go,” but He says, “I am the Truth, and the Way, and the Life.” He says, “No man can reach absolute reality, except through Me. Try to retain your own life and you will be inevitably ruined. Give yourself away and you will be saved.” He says, “If you are ashamed of Me, if, when you hear this call, your turn the other way, I also will look the other way when I come again as God without disguise. If anything whatever is keeping you from God and from Me, whatever it is, throw it away. If it is your eye, pull it out. If it is your hand, cut it off. If you put yourself first, you will be last. Come to me everyone who is carrying a heavy load, I will set that right. Your sins, all of them, are wiped out, I can do that. I am Re-birth, I am life. Eat me, drink me, I am your food. And finally, do not be afraid, I have overcome the whole universe.”

Elsewhere, C.S. Lewis said that Jesus was either right in these sayings about Himself, God, and the universe, or He was a lunatic that would make Hitler seem a perfectly sane man by comparison. It is not a question of morality or ethics, but of truth and the destiny of man, there being a general agreement that men know what sin is and that it is best to avoid it. The enumeration of correct behavior has been embraced by other faiths and even by unbelievers. What has not been digested is the claim by Jesus that He is God and that He controls the universe. This is the part of the story that turns off philosophers, theologians, and scientists because it is a complete departure from religion, even granted the moral and ethical underpinnings. Neither is it Myth, as Joseph Campbell wrote in his attempt to weave it into the stories men have created out of awe for what they have seen on the earth and in the skies. Christian faith is either life or it is a lie.

Supposing it to be a lie, and left with a universe that is apparently coming apart and running down, you might respond like Edna St. Vincent Millay who chose to resist Death in “Conscientious Objector” in the only way she could imagine:

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.

I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.

He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.

But I will not hold the bridle while he cinches the girth.

And he may mount by himself: I will not give him a leg

up.

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not tell

him which way the fox ran.

With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where the

black boy hides in the swamp.

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am

not on his pay-roll.

I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends nor of my enemies either.

Though he promise me much, I will not map him the route to any man’s door.

Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver

men to Death?

Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe with me; never through me

Shall you be overcome.

This lyric rings of moral courage, but the sound is weak compared to the bell rung by Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians:

If the raising of the dead is not a reality, why be baptized in their behalf? And why are we continually putting ourselves in danger? … If I fought those beasts at Ephesus for purely human motives, what profit was there for me? If the dead are not raised, ” Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!” … The trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed….” Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death where is your sting?

Edna has chosen to hide her friends and her enemies from the authorities, the warmongers, while Paul has chosen to stick it in their faces. That is the difference between poetry and faith; one is sentiment and the other is Life. If indeed Death should reign, I have a strong preference for Paul’s alternative of eating and drinking. The words of poets and of all men sound hollow if there is not a victory to point to and a life beyond death.

Fortunately, faith is a gift. You don’t have to earn it and you can’t claim it and give it to someone else. That takes the heat out of the call to convert the world to Christianity, and it removes the need to make Christain faith a religion, a philosophy, a myth, or a rational construction of the universe.

As C.S. Lewis said, the story is either true or not and you either believe it or you don’t. In either case, it is likely you will choose to live your life as vigorously as you can. But if it is a life based on the gift of faith, you will soon discover that you are in for a tough fight wherever you go. Why? Because you seek a victory over death and victory requires engagement. Such engagement is not found in a dreamland, nor by reduction of a changing universe, but in the exigency of flesh and blood life. Men of faith know that flesh and blood was born in the stars and is a reality being transformed, of which they are witnesses and in which they are active participants.

A poet can ride the wave of death and do in life what he pleases. A man of faith has to confront the hangman with a pardon from God even when the victim is his enemy. He can’t hide his enemies from Death, as would Edna, because it is a dance that cannot be avoided, a fall (S= K log W ) that has transfixed mankind. There are times when each man is a poet, and there are other times when he girds his loins, weeps, and steps between a gun and a life that would be lost. It may be that the best we can do does not count for much in a world that resists transformation. It means that the gift of faith is everything and the alternative is Death, even if courageously delayed by the best of poets.

I have begun to prefer simpler explanations and clearer thoughts. If I must die, I want to smell the gas and hear the screams. I don’t want to be philosophical about anything. I don’t want to go out poetically, with a whimper. Life crashes and bangs about, and Paul says that the return from death is announced by trumpeting. The noise is necessary. It is the signal for engagement and the voice of victory. When the world moans it is because there is life in it. When it laughs it is because men of faith have lifted the burdens from it. The belief is that the Creator is reclaiming the world with flesh and blood He took into Himself. If you suffer, He suffers; if you laugh, He laughs with you.

It is this dance of life that the gift of faith reveals. There is a Christian Community called Bruderhof started by Eberhart Arnold in Germany in the 1920s. His son, J. Heinrich Arnold (1913-1982) became the Pastor of the Bruderhof Community and his friends compiled a book of his letters, sayings, and essays. The book is called Discipleship and it is simple, clear and salty. He conveys the message about Jesus much like C.S. Lewis expressed it and he tried to carry it out in a Community much like the Community of the early Christians. J. Heinrich Arnold wrote:

Often the power of darkness puts fear into our hearts and keeps us from full dedication to God. When Jesus said in the synagogue, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you can have no life,” even his followers found these words hard to accept, and many of them left him. But when Jesus asked the Twelve, “Will you also leave me?” Peter responded, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have faith, and we know you are the holy one of god.” Such faith must live in us too — in our hearts, our souls, and our whole being. It must become a reality in us again and again: not a religious system, not a theory, but the knowledge that we can trust Jesus completely and give him everything — our whole lives — for all eternity. It is not necessary for us to understand everything intellectually. It is much more important to experience trust and faith in our hearts and being.

Apart from Jesus we will find no peace. Where he is, there is God. He is there even for those who leave him, as did many people in his time who found his words too difficult to accept. Therefore we pray for ourselves and for them. “Lord, help us. Come into this world. We need thee, thy flesh, thy death and life, and thy message for the whole creation.”

With the gift of faith and God in control of the universe, you may wonder why J. Heinrich and everyone else wants more help from God. It is because the only weapon allowed in the fight against Death is Love and most of us are unfamiliar with its use. We have romantic notions of it. We see it as a first try before we start swinging our fists. For two thousand years, the faithful have used very little of Love in the fight against murder and death. The problem is that, to use Love, you must be pure. This truth about Love, and the whole moral and ethical realm, was there before Jesus was born. Men knew then, and they know now, that if you lie, steal, cheat, fornicate, murder, act greedy, and remain dumb, you cannot create new life and nourish it. You can’t love through those acts. You can’t get beyond your own decaying flesh. Thus, we plea “Maranatha”—come Lord.