Faith | Cats | Hope | Grace

You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the Earth. These are lines from one of the more well-known parables of Jesus. But, my core memory or feeling when I hear this story is Godspell. Yup, the musical.

I went to a performing arts high school and one of the shows one year was a performance of Godspell in our new black box theater. You don’t really have majors in high school, but I was primarily on a dance track with a secondary track of piano. If I was in any of the musicals, it was as a dancer in the chorus. But the year we did Godspell, I wanted to stretch myself and planned to audition for one of the singing roles. I threw myself into preparation. Listened to the entire soundtrack multiple times. Rehearsed my audition piece to within an inch of its life. For someone who until that moment had never sung in front of anyone outside of family, I crushed that audition. I didn’t get a part. But decades later, that is still my proudest audition moment. But that couple of weeks of immersing myself in preparation was a wonderful opportunity to do theological reflection in a completely unexpected place.

My high school was a public high school that had just recently had major conversations about the formation of a Christian student group and the fine line that needed to be walked with it being a student initiated and student led group in order to get the administrative ok. Prayer by the football team at football games was a major point of discussion. And here we were about to put on Godspell. What I spent part of my audition prep time with was wrestling with why this musical at this high school. What was it about these stories of Jesus, this image of community that while not universal, were expansive enough that they could speak to a wider audience. What was it about this particular presentation of these stories—in the form of a rock musical—that allowed me and a possible audience to hear something new or different in these centuries-old stories. That unexpected encounter with the Gospel led to a deeper engagement than I had experienced in church until that time. And it’s still impactful. To this day, I am almost literally incapable to singing the version of Day by Day that’s in our hymnal when it’s one of the appointed hymns for the day. I without even thinking about it revert to the version from Godspell.

I’m about to say something scandalous being this close to a college campus. I think we sometimes assume we need to wrap our faith and our theology in advanced theories and language. That if there was a hierarchy gauging the quality of faith, having precise language and a firm, unmovable understanding of all matters of faith is at the top of that hierarchy. The belief that deep thinking and advanced ideas necessarily go with deep faith. That deep theological reflection can’t be spurned on by a rock musical.

And I recognize my own hypocrisy. I say all this as someone who really wants to understand the various strands of theology—systematic, incarnational, liberation theology—and loves a good churchy word. There is a perennial tension I think between head and heart when it comes to our faiths and our faith lives. I think this is part of what Paul is saying in his letter to the church at Corinth. He tells them that he isn’t bringing the mystery of God wrapped in the trappings of human wisdom, but instead through the wisdom of God which is seated in the power of God. I think time, in addition to Paul’s general way of being, is an important factor here. I don’t think we always give Paul the benefit of the doubt, or at least I don’t, that he is only 60-70 years out from the death and resurrection of Christ. Let’s be honest, this is still breaking news for him and the communities he ministered to and with. As he is writing these letters to these various faith communities, he is doing theology on the fly. He with those in these communities are articulating what they believe, why they believe it, who is in this community. They don’t yet have the benefit of creeds and covenants. Maybe because it’s all still new, maybe because those communities had a wisdom that in our current age we don’t employ as much, Paul is leaning on the wisdom of God, which to a human understanding can feel a bit mysterious. Where we sit in 2026, we have had the collective benefit of millennia to wrestle to the ground what we believe and why we believe. Which communities believe in transubstantiation and which do not. We have spent centuries answering questions so that we don’t have to sit with the mystery. Not that something is unknown or unknowable. But that something could be so big as to be outside of our full understanding. And to say, “That’s ok.” To trust with our hearts. Over the course of centuries, I wonder if our collective comfort with not knowing all the answers has steadily decreased. And with that a greater reliance on our heads. I wonder if in our need to have clarity and answers and misplaced assuredness, when we don’t get that clarity in our questions to and about God, in our engagement with theology, when the mystery can’t be avoided, if we use that as an excuse to withdraw from our faiths and our relationship to God. To say because there isn’t perfect certainty and clarity, something is less real or less important. Paul, as he was doing early theology, recognized that the power and knowledge of God is a mystery to human understanding. Mystery is unknown. Mystery is messy. Mystery is uncomfortable. But mystery is where God sits. Part of our faith lives is to wrestle with, engage with, to question, and ultimately to figure out our individual ability to sit with various levels of the unknown and the unknowable.

Even with the importance of allowing ourselves to be wrapped in the mystery, it’s still important to strive to understand, to work to create clarity, to have clarity about what we do and don’t believe and why that is or is not the case. To strive to understand what it means. A lack of clarity and grounding can allow us to be blown thither and yon at the mercy of the winds of the world around us. Instead of being able to confidently read the world around us through the lenses of our faiths. Of being able to use that lenses to see more clearly how we are called to engage in our world. We aren’t *not* influenced by our world and our society, but our work of understanding, our embrace of the mystery, that provides the mast and the sail that shape the directionality of our work in the world.        

But with our work at having and creating greater understanding, we have to be wary of an understanding that is hollow, that has no depth. Where we understand a textbook definition of something, but there ends our engagement. A hollow understanding stops at a definition or a surface level understanding and never makes it to full integration with our lives. A hollow understanding keeps a deeper connection and a deeper engagement at arms length. It’s these moments where we use intellect as a shield or a sanitizing agent. Where we use it as just an opportunity to check a box.

A hollow understanding, a lack of genuine engagement can lead to a false piety or a faith that has no meaning. It is this false piety that is called out in Isaiah this morning’s reading. It is pious postures that don’t quite translate to pious actions. “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist.” God is calling out that there seems to have been a definitional understanding and participation in the fast. But that understanding stopped there and did not go deeper into impacting actions. There was such surety of what the meaning of fasting is and was. And with that surety, an expected response from God. There was and is an adherence to the letter of the requirement and not the spirit that was breathing life into it. We hear from God, “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” Now those are two very different understandings of the fast.

I will admit I’ve been standing here going back and forth about our heads and our hearts, and have probably muddied the matter. But all this is messy, as to be perfectly honest all human endeavors are. We want, need, and deserve deep thinking about our faiths and our traditions. Deep thinking that has and continues to be developed throughout our shared Christian journey. But we shouldn’t let that deep thinking get in the way of deep meaning. Paul described himself as not coming with lofty words or wisdom of his own creation, but the simplicity of the wisdom of God and all the mystery that brings with it. And that opens up space for the deep wisdom and points of reflection that can be found in art, in the news, in the music of a rock musical.

All of this is like holding a small bird in your hand. You don’t want to crush or suffocate it, so you need to keep your hands a bit apart. But you don’t want the bird to fly away, so you need to keep your hands a bit close together. And the bird, like our faiths, is a living thing. It moves, and grows and shrinks. It is impacted by and impacts the hands around it—impacting and being impacted by the world around us. But only if we let it. Only if we know where and on what we stand. Only if we leave ourselves open the possibility and the creative, revealing power of mystery.

Not just head. Not just heart. But the continual ebb and flow of both that together shape our faiths. That ebb and flow that gives us the grounding to be influenced by and to influence our world. That gives us faithfully engaged ways to read our world. That gives us ever new ways to hear God’s call to us.