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Foundry United Rev. |
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Sermon Series:
Christianity Without Easy Answers “Christianity: An Art, not a Science” Sunday, February 1,
2009 |
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Philippians 2: 5-13
Rev.
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In his
movie Religulous, he says with
great frustration as though we just don’t get it, that there is no way to
know the things religion talks about. There is no way to know whether there
is life after death or whether God hears our prayers or, if God does, whether
it makes any difference. There is no way I can know these kinds of things, he
says, and there is no way for anybody to know these kinds of things;
therefore, religion is at best useless and at worst a fraud. Well,
he is right that religion talks about things that we can not know. This is precisely
what religion talks about. Religion is the means we use to think about and
act on the things in life that we can absolutely not know. Because
there are things about existence and about life we can not know, it does not
mean those things are unimportant or don’t matter. In fact, it seems to me
that the realms of life about which we can not have knowledge in the sense of
hard facts – the things we cannot know – are some of the most important parts
of our lives. Religion is the language we use to talk about these things.
Religious language and practices are the means we use to try to make sense
and to make decisions in these realms where we cannot have knowledge. We are
beginning a new sermon series today on the theme: “Christianity without Easy
Answers.” I think some of our friends who are not active in church sometimes
have mistaken impressions about what we believe and do as Christians. Like
Bill Maher, they may think we make claims that we may not be making. They may
think we believe things we may not believe the way they think we believe
them. So between now and the Sunday after Easter I want to try to make my way
through a number of areas of the Christian faith where I think there may be
misunderstanding. My hope
is that these sermons might help you to think through what Christianity means
to you and that they will help us talk together about our faith. Bill
Maher is absolutely right. Religion talks about things that I can not know
and that you can not know and that nobody can know. What caused the universe
to exist? Is its existence an accident or intentional? Is my existence
accidental or part of some bigger picture? Is there a Supreme Being? If so,
does the Supreme Being know I exist? Does the Supreme Being have any feelings
toward me? Does it matter whether I get out of bed in the morning? Does it
matter if I try or just get by? Does it matter if I live or die? Does it
matter whether I tell the truth or keep my commitments or am honest? The
questions are endless and we can not know with certainty the right answer…or
even if there is a “right” answer. Sometimes the questions are very specific.
Should I work another hour on this work project that I don’t think is very
important but that will make me more successful professionally or should I
spend the hour with a friend who is lonely? How much should I spend on a haircut
this week? How should I respond to the man who asks me for money every
morning on my way to the Metro? How should I respond to the person who seems
to be flirting with me who is not my partner or who is somebody else’s
partner? How do I relate to the co-worker who is driving me crazy? What do I
do about the person who has deeply hurt me? How do I handle the feelings in
my stomach when I think about dying? What do I do with my grief and pain when
a loved one dies? What do I do when the doctor tells me the test has come
back positive? How do I decide on a vocation? What do I do with my anxiety
about maybe losing my job? Responding
to some of these kinds of questions in certain ways can become habitual and
hardly even conscious anymore unless we stop to reflect on them. We can develop
habitual ways of thinking: Positivity or negativity can become habits.
Affirmation or criticism can become habitual. Shame or self-esteem can become
habits. We can live out the answers to some of life’s deepest questions
without actually stopping to think much about them. Our attitudes become
almost automatic. Have you ever known anyone who when you begin a
conversation with them you know they are almost surely going to complain or
someone who you can be sure is going to be optimistic? And
there are even questions that we cannot put into words but that gnaw away
inside us in a place deeper than words. “Sighs too deep for words,” the Apostle
Paul called them. (Rom. 8: 26). So religion
is about the aspects of life where there are no clear and easy answers but that
we still need to think about and talk about and act on. The way we talk about
these things is through stories, poems, memories from the past, speculations
about the future, myths, laws, reasoning and logic, jokes, hymns, rites,
rituals, habits, practices and silences. The
particular set of stories and poems and rites and rituals and all the rest
that we use here to try to figure out how to live in regard to those things
we can not know is Christianity. Christianity is the stories, poems, memories
from the past, speculations about the future, myths, laws, reasoning and
logic, jokes, hymns, rites, rituals, habits, practices and silences that Christians
use to deal with the aspects of life about which we can not really know but that
we still need to deal with and think about and talk about and make choices
about. Most of our stories and memories and speculations and rituals have in
some way to do with Jesus Christ, who has helped us – we who are Christians –
more than anyone else with the questions to which there are no verifiable
absolute answers. Religion,
or what the Apostle Paul called faith, is about how we live when we cannot
know. Paul was aware of this as much as anybody. “We walk by faith not by
sight,” he said. (II Cor. 5: 7) “For now we see through a mirror dimly,” he
wrote, “now I know in part.” (I Cor. 13: 12) “Work out your own salvation
with fear and trembling,” he said. (Phil. 2:12) Eighteen times the Pauline
corpus uses the word mystery. But
every time Paul talks about not being able to know, in each case, he also
affirms that because of the faith we have through Jesus Christ we can manage
to live with purpose and direction. “We
walk by faith not sight [but] we do have confidence,” Paul says. “For now we
see through a mirror dimly but then we shall see face to face,” he says. “Now
I know in part but then I will know fully even as I have been fully known. Work
out your own salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who is at work
in you.” “Without
any doubt, the mystery of our religion is great,” Paul writes to Timothy, but
then he immediately repeats the Christ story, saying: “He was revealed in
flesh, vindicated in spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among Gentiles,
believed in throughout the world, taken up in glory.” (I Tim. 3: 16) This is
the story that guides us in the presence of mystery. The
first epistle of John says it beautifully: “What we will be has not yet been
revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him,
for we will see him as he is.” (I John 3: 2) We don’t know what we shall be
but we trust that we shall be like him. We can
not know, but the stories, poems, rituals, habits, reasoning and logic of
Christianity help us find a way to live with faith, hope and love even when
we can not know…even when nobody can know…especially when no one can know. We also
have to acknowledge that not knowing is uncomfortable. We like to know things.
The more certainty we can have the better we feel. I pretty much know the
stock market is likely to rebound before I start drawing my pension but I’d
rather be certain. Right? Knowing is much more comfortable than having faith.
Not knowing gives us a sense of “fear and trembling,” as Paul said. The
American philosopher who has influenced American education more than any
other single person John Dewey delivered the Gifford Lectures on Natural
Religion in 1929 on the topic of the relationship between knowing and doing.
He entitled the lectures “The Quest for Certainty.” There
is within the human soul a longing for certainty. It is this quest for
certainty that drives philosophy and science and learning. The great
temptation for all religion, including Christianity, is to try to claim
certainty when all we can really have is faith. We have stories and
speculations and rites and rituals that help us to think about and talk about
and emotionally deal with and make decisions in the realms of life where we
cannot know, but we would rather have certainty. Not knowing is
uncomfortable. So the great temptation is to persuade ourselves that we can
know when we really can’t. The
sociologist of religion Peter Berger says that Christianity has three great
temptations to abandon faith for a false certainty.[i]
One he calls the temptation of trying to find certainty in the institution of
the church. He calls this the Roman Catholic temptation. If the church says
it, it must be infallible, so you can have certainty if you agree with what
the church says. The
second temptation Dr. Berger writes about is the temptation of trying to find
certainty in the biblical text. This is the Protestant temptation to which
Protestantism and especially evangelicalism is most prone. If the Bible says
it, it must be absolutely true. The Bible is an inerrant – without error – source
of certainty. The
third temptation is to try to find certainty in one’s own religious
experience. This Berger calls the Methodism temptation and it is seen most
clearly, he says, in the derivative of Methodism called Pentecostalism. “Yes,
God is real.” How do I know God is real? “Because I can feel God in my soul.”
Inward experience is a source of absolute certainty. The
church, the Bible and religious experience are, of course, all very, very
important parts of Christianity. We use the teachings of the church, and the
Bible and our own experience to help us think about and talk about how to
live when we can not know. But neither the church, nor the Bible, nor our own
religious experiences are infallible, inerrant or absolute. They do not take
away the uncertainty of not knowing absolutely. The
institution of the church from generation to generation informs our faith. What
would it be like to be dropped into the world without any one before us having
thought about or talked about the great imponderables of life? What would it
be like if we were dropped into the world and had no rituals or practices to
help us deal with the anxiety of life’s big unanswerable questions? There were
those who wrestled with these questions before us. There are those who
wrestle with these questions with us. There will be those who will wrestle
with these questions after we are gone. The church is a great gift, but the
church is not infallible. Do I need to argue this with anybody here? The
Bible is a powerful collection of stories, poems and affirmations that
informs our faith. It is a book which contains literature that has spoken
powerfully to humans throughout the ages and continues to do so. It contains
themes that help us in our efforts to figure out how to live in the face of
things like injustice and evil and death. The Bible has had such an impact on
so many of us that it is hard not to see it as an inspired collection of
writings, but the Bible is not inerrant. It contains internal conflicts and
factual mistakes and assumptions that we no longer believe to be true. It
contains ideas that reflect the culture in which it was written. Some of
these ideas, such as slavery and patriarchy and homophobia, we now reject,
often on the basis of other ideas we find in the Bible, such as justice,
inclusion and compassion. The text of the Bible is not inerrant. Our
spiritual and religious experiences are great gifts. There are moments when
we can experience a divine presence with something almost like certainty. We
call these transcendent experiences – experiences that take us out of the
ordinary and give us a sense of a larger reality. We say here at Foundry in
our statement of call that we want our worship to be transcendent – that in
music, prayer, speech, architecture, ritual, we want to connect with a deeper
reality. We want worship to be a “thin place” where the curtain between earth
and heaven becomes thin. Transcendent experiences are great gifts that
sometimes give us a taste of something very close to certainty, but they only
last moments and then they are gone. The
Apostle Paul talks in II Corinthians about a transcendent experience … about
being caught up to the third level of heaven and hearing things that “no
mortal is permitted to repeat.” “Therefore,” he says, “to keep me from being
too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh … to keep me,” he says again,
“from being too elated.” (II Cor. 12:1-7) The Greek word uperairomai translated “elated” here means haughty, arrogant,
over-confident, too certain. Our religious experiences are not meant to give
us certainty. They are not infallible or inerrant either. My suspicion is
that those of us who are most gifted in experiencing the presence of God may
be most likely to most intensely also experience the absence of God. The
great temptation of religion is to try to claim certainty instead of faith.
The three great temptations to a false sense of certainty in Christianity are
to make the church, the Bible or religious experience absolute. The Bible
consistently teaches that anything we try to make absolute becomes an idol. Loren
Meade thinks that there is a fourth temptation to certainty. He believes it
is a temptation to which American Christianity is particularly prone. It is
the temptation to try to find certainty in success. If it is successful it
must be true. If it is a best-seller; if it is growing; if it is full, it
must be right. Success is not necessarily a bad thing, most of us prefer it
to failure, but it is not infallible or inerrant either. Sometimes
I think that people outside the church think that Christianity is about
knowing. Maybe even some of us here think so too. I am suggesting this
morning that Christianity is about figuring out how to live when we can’t
know. The really big questions of life are the ones for which we will never
find certainty. I have
a clergy friend. When he was a student in a systematic theology course in
seminary, someone asked the professor what he believed about heaven. The
professor answered that he hadn’t really thought about it much because he was
focused on how to live in the world here and now. My friend thought that was
a pretty good answer. Why not focus on life in the here and now? He spent
many years focused on making the world a better place and not worrying about
what happens after we die. Then my friend’s brother died at 40 years of age.
My friend said he suddenly realized that he needed some kind of theology of
heaven. There
are questions we will never answer with certainty in this life but that we
need some way to think about and talk about and make decisions about. My
friend needed help managing despair and hope in the face of his brother’s
death. Bill
Coffin when he was chaplain at Yale was once asked by a student if religion
wasn’t just a crutch. Bill answered, “Yes it is, but who isn’t limping?” Christianity
is not so much like the sciences as it is like the arts. There are those
things we believe with a high degree of certainty because science has
discovered they are true to a high degree of probability. But then there is
another kind of truth that comes from the arts. John Keats wrote: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”[ii]
There is a truth we learn from a sunset or a night sky full or stars or an
anthem sung by the choir or a poem or a dance. The
truth of science gives us information. The truth of beauty gives us courage
and hope. Of course, it turns out that one of the tests of a mathematical
equation is whether it is beautiful and one of the tests of a scientific
theory is whether it is elegant. So the distinction is in some ways
artificial. Faith
is how we live with the ambiguities of life. There is no escaping the
ambiguities in this life. There are questions we can not answer absolutely
but life still compels us to think about them and talk about them and act on
them. Let Christopher
Hitchens speak for some of our friends outside the church who may not
understand what we do here. Hitchens says he has had more late night
discussions with his religious friends than anyone else. From reading him, he
seems to me to be a nice guy…someone we’d enjoy hanging out with. In his book GOD is NOT GREAT: How Religion Poisons Everything Hitchens says
that the “most radical and the most devastating” criticism of religion is
this: “Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what
their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did…. And yet – the believers
still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to
know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise,
but also to know what ‘he’ demands of us – from our diet to our observances
to our sexual morality.” Hitches calls this “stupidity, combined with…pride.”[iii] But
Christianity says just the opposite. It says we don’t know…we know in part…we
see through a mirror dimly…we do not know what we shall be…we work out our
salvation with fear and trembling. Certainty is not faith; it is the enemy of
faith. Biblically, certainty is idolatry. We
don’t know, but we’ve been given this gift of stories, poems, memories from
the past, speculations about the future, myths, laws, reasoning and logic,
jokes, hymns, rites, rituals, habits, practices and silences to help us. Do
we find certainty in these things? No. But we can find faith. We can find
beauty. We can find enough truth to live by. “Work
out your own salvation with fear and trembling [don’t claim certainty] for it
is God who is at work in you,” Paul writes to the Then he
ended his letter to them with these words: And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, beloved,
whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure,
whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and
if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on
doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me,
and the God of peace will be with you. (Phil. 4: 7-9) To find
absolute answers, you’ll need to give yourself is an idol whether the idol be
the church, the Bible, religious experience, success or something else. But
in Christianity we can find truth, justice, beauty, excellence, and a peace
that passes understanding. www.foundryumc.org |
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