A Chapel Homily on Anfechtung and Faith

The winter 2019 issue of Valpo magazine arrived a few days ago. This is the quarterly magazine of my university's alumni association. The cover article is about the 2017 alumni tour that I led to Germany in observance of the 500th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation. The article also focuses on the participation of Valpo's chorale in the special services that took place in Wittenberg and its environs at the same time. The editor was kind enough to include even a few quotes from yours truly.

To read a truncated version of the article online and to see some of the photos, you can go to here.

(My colleague, Gretchen Buggeln, and I are now gearing up for the European tour that we are leading in July 2020. While this tour is also being sponsored by the university's alumni association, it is open to anyone who considers himself or herself "a friend of Valpo." For info on that tour, you can go here. Space will be limited to 30 participants.)

Seeing the article reminded me that during the candidacy process for becoming a rostered minister of word and sacrament in the ELCA, I was asked "to select and submit a sermon you preaching during this past year that highlights your role as a missional leader who participates in the formation of disciples." I chose to submit a homily I preached in the Chapel of the Resurrection just one week after returning from the Germany tour. The chapel theme for that semester was "Ever Reforming: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty." The chapel leaders asked me to preach a six-min homily on this theme. The assigned Scripture text was Gen. 32.22-32. Those chapel leaders also asked me to weave Martin Luther into the homily, in light of the 500th anniversary.

So here's what I preached that morning (Nov 7, 2017):

            The theme for chapel this semester has been “Ever Reforming: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty.” This theme arose from the fact that this past October marked the 500th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation, an event linked with the posting of Martin Luther’s famous theses.

            We often think of Luther as a great man of faith, but he also was a great man of doubt. He was often uncertain about the world and about his own relation to God. Luther used a word to describe these periods of doubt and uncertainty: Anfechtung. Can you say this word with me? Anfechtung! This is your word for the day. It is a word that connects with the story of Jacob wrestling with that strange figure by the river Jabbok. Luther knew that story well. Indeed, he often felt like Jacob, wrestling with God. The word “Anfechtung” describes what others have called “the dark night of the soul.” It is a word that refers to the experience of serious doubt about God, when one is suffering deep spiritual tribulation, spiritual crisis. Anfechtung, as Luther described it, can even feel like one is being attacked by spiritual forces over which one has no control. In a time of Anfechtung, according to Luther, God and the Devil seem to be one and the same. When one is experiencing Anfechtung, one is out in the wilderness, literally be-wildered, wrestling with God and the Devil. Even after becoming a monk and still later as a professor of theology, Luther suffered Anfechtungen. These periods of doubt and anxiety often were occasioned by illness or the deaths of others. Luther often repeated the famous aphorism, “In the midst of life we are surrounded by death.” Undoubtedly, he was then thinking of the random nature of the plague, which would strike a town or village, when some would succumb and others would not. Luther knew he was a mortal sinner, and this too led to Anfechtungen. As he learned from experience, the only way to find relief from Anfechtungen is through faith in the promise of Christ. That promise takes us away from ourselves and relocates our lives in Christ, in his eternal love and in the context of his abiding presence. Luther learned that there is nothing so deep and troubling that God in Christ is not deeper still. In the midst of death, we are surrounded by Christ.

            As Luther learned firsthand, experience re-forms our faith. When my nephew was two, he was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, cancer of the nerves. It is a childhood cancer that overtakes almost all who get it. Many thousands of us prayed for Andrew’s healing. For a while it appeared that he was going to escape the clutches of that cancer. But one day it began to grow again, and this time it was unstoppable. Four-year-old Andrew died in his mother's arms as he reached out his own small arms and mumbled, “Jesus, Jesus...”

            As some of you know, at the very same time that Andrew was dying, my own 4-yr-old son hit his head on a swivel chair, which resulted in a torn artery under his cranium. At the time, he and my wife were visiting her family in Chicago and I was back at our home in Portland, Ore. So I received the worst phone call of my life to date, when an ER doctor told me that my son was being flown to another hospital for emergency brain surgery. When I hung up the phone, I was no longer in Portland but out in the wilderness. I spent most of that night flying to the Midwest. Well, that’s not quite accurate. I spent most of that night in a mental fog, Anfechtung of the worst kind. And in the more lucid moments, I was praying and pleading. I was Jacob at the Jabbok, wrestling with God and the Devil, caught somewhere between faith and doubt.

            I should probably mention that my son’s name is Jacob. I can use the present tense “is” because Jacob’s surgery resulted in a miracle. So much blood had pooled on his little brain that he should have died or at least been severely disabled. The neurosurgeon, too, was a bit bewildered. When I arrived at the hospital the next morning, there Jacob was, sitting in the bed with what looked like a white turban on his head. “Nice that you could make it, Dad.” When he prayed the Lord’s Prayer later that day by himself, when he got to the Fourth Petition, he said, “Give us this day our daily breath.” I can no longer pray that petition without remembering that one-liner.

            My faith was certainly re-formed through that whole experience. Experience has taught me that there is a lot of bewilderment in faith and theology. Why did Andrew die and Jacob did not? Was God deaf to the prayers for Andrew but responsive to the prayers and pleadings for Jacob? I believe God hears our prayers and responds to them in God's own ways. God invites us to pray and promises to hear us. I also know that what I pray for is not necessarily what God wills to happen. As one of America's greatest theologians has correctly put the matter, “The Almighty has His own purposes.” Why the prayers for Andrew did not issue forth in a miracle like that which apparently happened to Jacob is beyond the ken of mere mortals. If there is a moral to the story of Job, it is this one. I am also much more aware today than I was fifteen years ago about the fragility and uncertainty of life. So much remains an inscrutable mystery. God has God’s reasons that human reason knows not.

            Thank God, Christ joins us in our bewilderment. His light is sufficient for all Anfechtungen. In his light we see light. In Luce tua videmus lucem. [This is Valpo’s motto.] When we can count on nothing else in this world, there is one who remains constant: our Lord with his abiding love and mercy.

            Patriarch Jacob wrestled with God until he forced a blessing from God. This encounter by the waters of the Jabbok would forever mark him. For the rest of his life he would be called “Israel,” he who wrestled with God--and prevailed.

            Is that not finally what faith is, at least in part, namely, wrestling with God until we force a blessing from God? What tempered my Anfechtung that lonely night I traveled to Chicago was the baptism of my son. That watery encounter with God forever marked my Jacob, far more deeply and permanently than the question-mark-shaped scar on his head today has done. I can no longer read the story of Patriarch Jacob’s watery encounter with God at the Jabbok without at the same time thinking of my own Jacob’s baptismal encounter with God—and our own subsequent wrestling with God and of God’s own wrestling with us—in which we prevail by trusting that ultimately God is for us and not against us. That’s faith in the midst of doubt and uncertainty.

            You, too, are marked with the cross of Christ forever. That baptismal marking is an act that repeatedly wrestles a blessing from God. It provides a certain grounding for those who suffer Anfechtung in this uncertain world. It is a blessing that even death and hell cannot destroy. For now, for you, that watery blessing in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is enough. Amen.