"Fancy Faith" - Sermon for the 7th Sunday of Easter, 5-17-26

† The older I get and the longer I do this work, the more comfortable I am with faith. I used to read as much as I could from religious skeptics. Not skeptics of religion, but ordained and academically credentialed people of the Church who wished to steer their readers away from a kind of simplistic biblical and theological literalism dependent on faith, to more of a symbolic approach that used scripture and dogma as myth; important founding stories, to be sure, but just that: stories.

I once fancied these religious skeptics. The virgin birth, and Jesus’s bodily resurrection from the grave, and his bodily ascension into heaven – wherever heaven is – were stories, claimed the religious skeptics, that the early church told itself to make sense of what they were coming to believe about the nature of Christ and the Trinity and the sacraments. These stories became creedal statements; we rehearse them every Sunday. But these stories, the authors asserted, were likely not historically or scientifically true.

Such books were written as a kind of tool for evangelism. How do we get modern, historically and scientifically literate people to come to believe, if we insist that they believe in that which defies reason? “You don’t have to check your brain at the door,” the Episcopal Church once advertised, smugly. And it worked! Perhaps it worked for you, too. One of the reasons that I found the Episcopal Church, and stayed, is that we are willing to entertain and engage our intellect in these inquiries, even when it forms the occasional skeptical clergyperson who has more smarts than sense.

And yet I have found out about myself that the more I learn about the macro near-infinity of the cosmos, and the micro near-infinity of the atom, the less I need, or even want, rational explanations for statements of faith. I am content with my willing acquiescence to, say, the bodily ascension of Jesus’s to the right hand of the Father in heaven. When it comes to religion, metaphysics is more important than astrophysics. Sense has caught up with smarts. I fancy faith.

I have come to believe once again in the super-natural abilities of God to interpose God’s will into our earthly plane of existence. And because of that, God needs neither my understanding of God’s actions, nor my permission to act. It is a much less exhausting place for me to live.

If God the Son being born of a woman without biological conception is God’s best idea to show God’s limitless and salvific love for creation, and God’s desire to divinize us by becoming one of us in Jesus, himself fully human and fully divine, then so be it.

If Jesus’s bodily resurrection from the grave after being cruelly killed by crucifixion is God’s best idea to show that death does not have the last word over us, that we too shall rise, and that even the worst that we humans can do to each other, to creation, and to God does not put us out of reach of God’s mercy, then so be it.     

If Jesus’s bodily ascension into heaven from our earthly plane of existence is God’s best idea to show that humanity, which is part of Christ’s body, has already ascended with him, and that his ascended body still suffers our pain on earth, then so be it.

If people call me a naif, a simpleton, or even a fool for believing what cannot be proven by scientific method, then so be it. I do not need to know how; rather, I choose to believe that.

I find comfort in Jesus’s Last Supper prayer for his disciples, and for us; his prayer to his Father, and ours, for our protection, our sanctity, our unity, and our faith.

I find comfort in Saint Peter’s epistle; his encouraging words that remind us that the faithful who abide suffering and slander will be restored to eternal glory.

And I find comfort in Christ’s Church, which takes our intellect and reason into respectful account as God-given gifts, yet respects as generous mystery that which will leave much more for us to uncover and understand on that day when God finally exalts us “to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before.” †

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

Seventh after Easter A – May 17, 2026

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“Fancy Faith”