Who Do You Trust?

Who do you trust?

Francis S. Collins, 2010

Why?

What evidence would it take to shake that trust, or to make you rethink your own assumptions?

Imagine learning your own religious leaders could bribe one of your closest friends, pay off those hired to keep the law, share fake news in ways that make your own life more dangerous.

Imagine hearing strange news from marginalized sources, then seeing with your own eyes that their story is true.

What a disconcerting, destabilizing time for the disciples in the days after Christ’s death: wondering what was true, who to believe, what to do next.

Then joy, excitement, courage, as they opened their hands and hearts to a resurrected Christ.

What a disconcerting, destabilizing time for us all, as we watch our leaders – political and religious – argue, contradict, spin the facts for hidden agendas. As we grapple with clashing points of view that make all our lives more dangerous. As we look for evidence, grieve what we see, wonder what will happen next.

Duplicitous leadership is as old as humanity. So is confirmation bias.

The religious leaders of Jesus’ day were a classic example of both. Mark records:

The Pharisees came and began to question Jesus. To test him, they asked him for a sign from heaven. He sighed deeply and said, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to it.” (8:11-13)

In reality, they’d already been given signs. Some were there when a voice spoke from heaven when Jesus was baptized. Some saw the man healed from leprosy. Some objected when the man lowered into Jesus’ presence on a mat stood and walked away. Some would have been in the synagogue when Jesus miraculously restored a man’s shriveled hand. They would have heard of the feeding of five thousand, the feeding of another four thousand, the healing of a man born deaf and mute, the healing of a man born blind.

What kind of sign did they want? What would open their own defiantly blind eyes?

I find myself thinking that in regard to our current president: how much evidence do you need of blatant, unrepentant, determined disregard for anyone but himself? The evidence was clear long before the 2016 election. It compounds daily. It is now costing lives and strangling our economy.

Peter Kreeft, 2014

As Jesus knew, in some cases no sign can break through. The Pharisees' pride and love of power outweighed compassion for their people or interest in truth.

And now, today, some religious leaders, many political leaders, many of my dearest friends, hold fast to their confirmation bias, looking for evidence to affirm their vote and loyalty, shouting down all conflicting evidence, trampling truth for partisan reasons, with no hint of compassion for the staggering pain confronting our country and communities.  

Yet confirmation bias cuts in many directions.

For some, a determined agnosticism shuts out any hint of reality beyond the material world.

For some, a narrow fundamentalism insists that any question of faith or articulation of doubt is unacceptable.

What questions, what signs, what accumulated evidence can break through the walls of our own most firmly held assumptions?

It’s helpful to remember that while our beliefs may in part be rational and evidence-based, in much larger part they are formed by experience, culture, desire, guilt, constructed layer by layer over a lifetime of hurt, confusion, compromise and

Rabbi Greg Hershberg, 2011

longing.

God sometimes breaks through all of that with a vision of himself, in dreams where Jesus speaks to hungry hearts. But more often, change of heart comes through encounters with loving believers who show more than tell what it means to follow Christ.

This has been the case in academic settings, among communities of scientists, in urban neighborhoods. In Iran, faith in Christ is spreading quickly as recent converts, many of them women, share their own new hope and joy with friends and family. Two documentaries, Sheep Among Wolves I and II, tell the story.

I think of that breakfast on the beach, where Jesus and his discouraged disciples shared fish over a fire.

My own faith has been fed, year by year, by encounters like that. Talking around a fire with sisters in the faith. Meeting for coffee with brothers who live what they believe. Reading the personal stories of thoughtful men and women who opened their hearts to listen and found their lives changed completely.

I pray, in this strange season, that we listen and love in ways that challenge confusion and open the door to light and truth and joy.

Some other reflections on miracles, faith and resurrection:

Common Miracles, Dec 18, 2011
Is the Resurrection Just a Myth?, April 12, 2015
The Defining Question, March 27, 2016