God knows it’s out of sight
God knows we can get all the way from here to there
Even if we’ve got to walk a million miles by candlelight
Above, I am quoting some lyrics from Bob Dylan's "God Knows." That song was copyrighted in 1990. The lyrics remind me of another one of Dylan's assertions, this one from some lyrics found in a song copyrighted in 1967, more than twenty years earlier. Here is what Dylan said in that song, "I Shall Be Released":
They say ev’ry man must fall
Yet I swear I see my reflection
Some place so high above this wall
Dylan has been pretty much God-obsessed from the start. At least, that's the way I hear his music. Assertions that "Heaven" is a real thing, and that Dylan can see that he is forever existing, somehow, somewhere, "high above this [earthly] wall," constitute (poetically expressed, of course) rather beautiful, and rather powerful, statements of faith.
While I continue to think that Iris DeMent is on the right track, in her song, "Let The Mystery Be," and that trying to make definitive statements about the nature of our human existence is almost always an invitation to make a mistake - and particularly when one of us starts speaking for God, and outlining exactly what God is supposed to think about this thing, or that - I do believe that statements of faith, like the ones that Dylan often inserts into his songs, are something quite different, and are telling us something "real" about this life into which we have found ourselves so mysteriously placed.
When we start asserting that we "know," and that we can tell who is damned, and who is saved, and exactly what everyone should do (about everything), we are almost certainly going to put ourselves on the wrong track.
Jesus, as you may remember, did not personally adopt that kind of censorious and didactic approach, and did speak not of his "faith," in what he talked about, but as if he knew the "facts." That is consistent, of course, with the "faith" of those who think that he did know those "facts," and was just who he said he was.
"God knows."
We don't.
Any "statements of faith" about which we feel comfortable are statements we make to ourselves, and are not any kind of dogma and direction which we can properly seek to enforce against others.
That's my Sunday sermon for today.
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