"I have a dream"

Dear friends,

This doesn't particularly fit the vibe of this blog, but as several people have asked to read the transcript of my chapel speech, I am just going to go ahead and post it on here. I never like letting people read something that I prepared as a speech, because my sentence structure for a speech is not always as acceptable or eloquent as it should be in written material. That being said, please do not judge me for the occasional sentence fragment.



Sara Moser

Campus Community

Chapel Speech

8 May 2009

Good morning. My name is Sara Moser. I am a senior religion major, and I, apparently, have a dream. Over my years at Northwestern, I have composed a fair number of chapel speeches in my head in which I was usually pacing dramatically across the stage, spilling forth eloquent rhetoric with just the right measure of sass, and even dropping a well-placed cuss word to punk out my one-woman show of biblical exposition. But then, I withdrew from the chapel speech of my head and remembered, “Oh wait, I’m not a trendy, charismatic pastor with black, square-rimmed glasses, I’m Sara Moser.” Even though it is indeed necessary that I be winsome and witty while wooing you with well-crafted rhetoric that has an unshakable biblical foundation, I feel that it’s not particularly necessary for me to feel that I have something to prove as a senior with a dream, because I am one of you. Faculty, staff, or student, we all stand in continuity with the biblical narrative, in which the people of God are enmeshed in this constant cycle of apostasy and reform. They mess up, come back to God. Mess up, and come back to God. My apparent dream, then, is that as a campus community of equals, we might view our community to be on the same continuum as the biblical greats in this unfolding narrative—right there alongside the great patriarchs and matriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Sarah, Rebeccah, Leah, and Rachel. Here we see supposed biblical heroes who, even through their proximity to God’s intervening work in the world, were in reality biblical losers who, just like us, continually failed to get it. Just like us, they were struggling to live and figure things out, “things” including God.
Looking upon this narrative, I would venture to say that the biblical writers and actors therein didn’t really “know” God just as today, we don’t really “know” God. Is this a bad thing, to not know God? I used to think so. But now, I am ever so content to place myself alongside God’s people as just another biblical loser, and I count one of my greatest accomplishments at Northwestern to be my acceptance that I cannot, and do not want to, know God.

Now, before you think “Hmm, that’s a bit sketchy,” allow me explain what I mean when I say that I do not want to know God. Earlier this week, I was described as possessing an “insatiable desire to ‘know’” and as one that often contributes by asking particularly “probing” questions. It’s true. I have always been that horribly annoying person, and never more so than when it comes to talking about anything having to do with Christianity. For a painful example, picture freshman Sara, dutifully attending the wing D-group like any good little freshman. I clutched my Good News Bible, the one with lots of underlining in the book of Romans and James (so that people would know that I was a Christian). That week in particular, I was writing a philosophy paper addressing the question, “Does God exist?” and I thought it pertinent that everyone else think about the question as well. My D-group leaders, though, had other things in mind. They began to lead a lovely discussion on the psalms and how we might discern characteristics of God through the imagery. “Wait,” I stopped them, “Why are we assuming that God exists? What is our basis for that knowledge?” “Loser freshman philosophy girl!” they cried, “stop what you are doing.” Well, perhaps they didn’t say that at all, maybe they would go on to thank me for challenging their thinking, but I know.


This ridiculous obsession with knowledge, or phrased more classily, “insatiable desire to know,” was undoubtedly at its peak my freshmen year, as I then began to lapse more into the role of “I’m a jaded, apathetic upperclassman, and I have already dealt with all of these issues.” I would sit sullenly in chapel, often unsatisfied with the subject matter at hand. I wondered how people could get up here and assert beliefs. I craved beliefs. A boy told me that I was like the doubter in James 1:6 who is “blown and tossed by the wind.” “Boy,” I said, “I know this. The verse is double-underlined in my Good News Bible. Someday I will have beliefs. Someday I will know the answers to all of my religious quandaries.” I thought that I hadn’t learned enough yet to allow myself to actually believe anything. I was excited for the day to come, when I would know everything. I was excited for the day when someone would ask me a question about God, or about Jesus, or about doctrine, or anything, and I would know the answer.

The preparation, though, for someday knowing everything, filled me with unbridled angst. People would ask me how I was doing: “Oh, you know, existential, postmodern, no self-esteem, hate my life, the usual.” “Well sister in Christ, just keep seeking God,” they would tell me. “Ah yes, God,” I would think, “someday I will seek and know God.” This was undoubtedly a trying lifestyle. And as I moved on in my apathetic upperclassman years, I began to figure out that everything is impossibly complex. Religion being my field of choice, I came to find studying the Bible a beastly endeavor—an endeavor that I am greatly passionate about, but a beastly one nonetheless. I was never going to get to a point where I could provide confident answers to any biblical question that might arise. In fact, the notion that I could do so, or should strive to do so, was absolutely absurd.

It was around this time that a respected adviser told me, “Don’t be a Gnostic.” He was referring to a sect in the early church of what we now refer to as heretical Christians. Amongst a whole smattering of other things, these Christians believed that salvation came through ‘gnosis’—salvation came through knowledge. “Don’t be that,” he had told me, “Don’t think that it is necessary to have the right knowledge in order to have faith.” I cannot remember in the slightest what we had been talking about that had led him to offer this bit of advice, but it stuck with me. “Don’t be a Gnostic.” This meant I was going to have to put more of a serious effort into faith—whatever that means. I didn’t know. And yet I came to realize that if I wanted to have faith, I was going to have to break down and be willing to assert belief, even though such beliefs cannot be justified in a logical manner. As hard as I may try to reduce everything to a logical progression of events, I will never succeed. In light of these realizations, my goal became to assert a statement of faith that somehow accepts the very beauty of faith, and then to continue to learn and explore in the light that such a statement would provide.

So when I say that I am grateful that I do not know God, and nor do I want to know God, what I mean is that I am grateful to have recognized that Christianity does not consist of knowing the right things or doing the right things. The biblical narrative is just that—a narrative—it is not something to defend, but rather something that as God’s chosen people, we are called to be a part of. When we survey the Judeo-Christian tradition, we do not see a people that are sure about this faith-life that they are a part of; what we see is more reminiscent of the reality that we know today—God’s people continually straying from the covenant, questioning the means and motives of God, and often going directly against God’s word.

In particular, the psalmists are quite vocal in expressing their angst regarding their interactions with God and their interactions within God’s land. They sure as heck don’t have God figured out. And yet there is not a sense that this is a problem. It is perhaps instead an absolutely distinct opportunity to explore knowledge of God on many different levels. This great array of different images for God beseeches us, “do not fumble to know God in the sense of understanding God, seek to know God in the sense of being transformed by God.” In other words, it’s not what you know about God, but rather how you let the experience of an unknowable God infiltrate your life as a Christian.

Now, I will be the absolute first to admit that when I speak and write about things of this nature, I often feel as though I am putting forth fanciful, idealistic rhetoric. Sure, we get the part about not putting God into a box that limits our understanding to only what we find safe and fitting of the God we want to worship, but what about the whole entering as a community into the biblical narrative spiel? The words may flow smoothly off the tongue, but how is the idea to be made manifest in our lives? And if we somehow manage to do this, and somehow manage to accept the beauty of an unknowable God whom the biblical greats have wrestled with since ages past, what would it mean to let this understanding infiltrate our lives as Christians?

It seems that perhaps we are able to enter the biblical narrative and experience the unknowable God when we recognize that what has been preserved for us in the Bible is something so much grander than a moral codebook. To relegate the content as such would be to unwittingly strip away the bits of reality that permeate the text—bits of reality that encompass the good, the bad, and the ugly of the lives of God’s people. When we pick apart any one of the biblical character’s lives in order to find moral messages that we can apply to our own—whether it be Rahab, or David, or Elisha, or whoever—we effectively objectify the characters and neuter the stark reality of the part they play as human beings in God’s grand plan of redemption. That is not at all to say that no moral messages can be pulled from the biblical text; I don’t mean at all to say that the stories therein aren’t applicable to our lives today. Rather, I am saying that we must embrace and appreciate the reality of both the failures and the triumphs that come part and parcel with the faith. The value that comes through the less glamorous parts of the Bible—the parts in which sin and apostasy run rampant—is not in that these stories tell us “what not to do.” Rather, the value comes through in that God’s people who have been revealed to us in Scripture were living, breathing, and thinking screw-ups through which God still willingly worked. Some comfort can surely be derived from recognizing that God does not require pure and holy vessels to bring great plans to fruition. Indeed, it seems that having recognized our parallels to the biblical characters, we might then be able to enter the biblical narrative as the modern day installment on the continuum of God’s Kingdom work.


Even though I perhaps made it sound as though I had learned to put my insatiable desire to know behind me, I undoubtedly have not. I still sometimes wish that I had tried and tested, comfortable answers to fall back on when facing biblical questions. But I know that not having answers at hand all the time has revealed to me the opportunity of the mysterious God that I cannot, and do not want to, know. I have hopefully left behind the horribly annoying bits of freshman Sara as I have transitioned into senior Sara with a dream. Critique and questioning is, and will always remain, an absolutely healthy and necessary part of our lives as Christians. But sometimes, I have found, it is better to observe and appreciate the nuances of the Christ-life than it is to critique it. Sometimes it’s better to experience God than to “know” God. Faith need not be balanced on a sturdy foundation of conventional knowledge; I have chosen to find mine through the narrative that God enacted with the biblical greats of the past and continues to enact with people like you and me today. What is my dream then? May we move from the “someday” of knowing God that perhaps we hope for into the “present” of experiencing God together through community and together through narrative.

Amen.