Philippians 4:4-7
November 20, 2011
Because of the interactive nature of this sermon, it's difficult to write it out. it is better heard. If you would like to listen to the sermon,
Matthew 6:7-15
November 13, 2011
“When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
“Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
You probably already know this because I’ve mentioned it perhaps too many times in my sermons, but I had a hard time in church when I was growing up. Somewhere between my childhood and adolescence, I became very cynical about church. A large part of it was that the seeds of the “I’m spiritual but not religious” movement were being sown at the time, seeds that have now grown into numerous crops. The surrounding youth culture was questioning everything about church, and it made me question.
So I became cynical about the need for church, while also being cynical and critical about the motivations of the people in church. I wasn’t sure that people needed to be in church, but as I looked around I became convinced that so many of the people I saw in church on Sundays were there for the wrong reasons. Looking around at those attending worship, I was convinced that they were there as much to be seen as they were to worship. I’m not sure I was entirely right, but it was what I saw.
My experience, or at least my perceptions as a teen, of people in church wasn’t far off from what Jesus saw in the Jews of his time. When Jesus taught his followers about prayer, he was reacting to something specific to the Jewish faith: they were praying more for prestige than to connect with God. And Jesus taught that praying for the wrong reasons was as bad as not praying at all.
To understand what I mean, it helps to transport yourself back to Jesus’ time, and to see what Jesus saw. First, he was critical of the Gentiles. The Gentiles, or non-Jews, had a faith that revolved both around the Greco-Roman gods, and a vague understanding of one God (depending on what movement you followed). The practice among Gentiles was to offer long, flowery, expressive prayers. They believed that to get the gods’ or God’s attention, they needed to pray in the right way, which meant being wordy and eloquent. So, as Jesus said, “they think that they will be heard because of their many words.”
Second, he was critical of the Jewish way of praying. This passage in Luke’s gospel is critical of the Jewish prayers for different reasons. The Jewish faith of the time was a very rigid faith, especially when it came to prayer. The Jews, to be righteous, were required to recite a number of memorized prayers, which many did in public so that others would see how holy they were.
For example, they were required to say the Shema at least twice a day, and the most righteous would say them three times a day. They were to say them upon rising and before going to bed. Many of the Jewish men would choose to be seen in public reciting their prayers, so they would emerge from their houses in the early morning, stand in the marketplace, and pray so that everyone could see. The Jewish culture was a religious culture, so prestige was heaped upon those who were seen as righteously religious. The Shema, which means “Hear,” as in “Hear, O Israel, The Lord is our God, the Lord alone,” is a recitation of the following three passages of scripture:
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Deuteronomy 11:13-21
If you will only heed his every commandment that I am commanding you today—loving the Lord your God, and serving him with all your heart and with all your soul— then he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine, and your oil; and he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you will eat your fill. Take care, or you will be seduced into turning away, serving other gods and worshiping them, for then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain and the land will yield no fruit; then you will perish quickly off the good land that the Lord is giving you. You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth.
Numbers 15:37–41
The Lord said to Moses: Speak to the Israelites, and tell them to make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a blue cord on the fringe at each corner. You have the fringe so that, when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them, and not follow the lust of your own heart and your own eyes. So you shall remember and do all my commandments, and you shall be holy to your God. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the Lord your God.
In addition, they Jews were required to recite the Shemoneh ‘esreh, which means “The Eighteen.” These are nineteen prayers (one was added later to the original eighteen) that cover a whole variety of topics, many of which repeat the history of Israel. For instance, here is a sample of Number One:
"Blessed be Thou, O Lord, our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, the great, the mighty, and the fearful God—God Most High—who bestow goodly kindnesses, and art the Creator of all, and remember the love of the Fathers and bring a redeemer for their children's children for the sake of Thy name in love. King, Helper, Savior, and Shield; blessed be Thou, Shield of Abraham"
Many Jewish men chose to recite their prayers in public so that they could be seen as being righteous. In addition, when they prayed they wore their phylacteries, which were two boxes—one worn on the head, the other on the arm—containing tiny scrolls with the Ten Commandments written on them. The latter was wrapped around the arm with a cord that extended down to the fingers.
Jesus wanted people to move away from memorized and wordy prayers to ones that really connect us with God. I believe that what Christ wanted was for people of faith to simplify their prayers, to make it more natural, and to get the focus back on God, not on how we were praying. That’s why he taught this simple prayer to take the place of all the prayers, the Lord’s Prayer.
This prayer wasn’t just a short memorized prayer to take the place of long memorized prayers. It was an attempt to get people to pray about what matters. It wasn’t just a prayer, it was an outline for prayer. The prayer wasn’t just meant to be said in one piece, the way we typically pray it, which can lead us to pray it in the way the ancient Jews prayed their prayers—without passion or emphasis. He wanted people to dwell on each facet. Let me go over the prayer and show you what I mean.
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. What does Jesus mean by this? It’s not just a starting line, something to get us going, by calling God sacred name. Jesus was saying that when we pray, we need to start from a place of humility where we hallow God. What does it mean to say we “hallow” God? It isn’t just saying that God is holy. It’s starting in a place of awe and reverence, where we recognize God’s greatness. It overcomes the tendency to be so familiar with God that we fail to recognize God’s greatness, wonder, and mystery. Jesus was saying that when we pray, we need to stand in awe of how wonderful and great God is, for that sets the context for our surrendering to God. So start your prayer from a place of awe and reverence.
Your kingdom come. Of all the lines in the prayer, this is the one that is most misunderstood. What do you think it means? My guess is that you fall into one of two categories. First, you may think it means that we are asking God to let us into heaven when we die, but there’s a problem with this. If that’s what Jesus meant, he would have said, “Your kingdom be open to us when we die.” It’s speaking about God’s kingdom coming to us here. It’s not about death, it’s about now. This leads to the second thought: that it is asking that Jesus return in what are called the end-times, which so many people think of in relationship to the book of Revelation. They think that what Jesus is telling us to do is to pray for his return. There’s a HUGE problem with this idea, though. Why would Jesus have them pray for his return when he was already there, and before he had even taught about his return? Remember, this is in the beginning of his ministry. He hadn’t even mentioned his going and returning.
Jesus is actually teaching a concept that appears all throughout the gospels, which is the idea that when we are living the right way in complete openness to God, we can simultaneously live in the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God. Jesus taught that while we all live in the material realm, the realm of the earthly reality, those of faith can live simultaneously in a spiritual kingdom that helps us see and experience God and God’s blessings all around us. When we live in that kingdom, we become open to everything God has to offer us. We begin to see with God’s eyes, love with God’s love, and do what God wills. Which leads us to the next part of the prayer. So in this part of the prayer, pray that you can live always in God’s realm as much as you live in the earthly one.
Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. This phrase flows out of the idea of God’s kingdom coming. It’s the idea that when we live fully in God’s kingdom, God’s will becomes done on earth through us, in the way that it becomes done in heaven. So pray always that you will be doing God’s will in everything.
Give us this day our daily bread. This is a reminder that God’s concerns aren’t only spiritual. God cares about our material needs, and not just bread. God cares about us being healthy physically, and that what we eat, drink, and where we live matters. So pray that God will care for your physical needs.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. Several months ago someone asked me why we Presbyterians pray “debts” and “debtors,” rather than “trespasses,” or “sins,” which is what the original translation says. I kiddingly said to them that I believe it all has to do with our heritage. I figure the Episcopalians, being originally English, prayed “trespasses” because they tended to be the wealthy landowners who constantly had trespassers on their property. Meanwhile, the Scottish (who were the original Presbyterians) were always poor and in debt to the English (causing them to trespass), and so they were obsessed with getting their debts forgiven. Really, though, I have no idea why we don’t translate these as “sins.” The point of the prayer is that Christ wants us to pray that we can let go of our sins into God’s forgiveness, but that we would also steep ourselves in God by extending God’s forgiveness onto others. We all struggle to forgive, but when we forgive we live in God’s kingdom. And to forgive we have to be rooted in God’s kingdom. So pray that you will be forgiving just as you have been forgiven.
And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. This part of the prayer recognizes that we struggle with testings and temptations, and it is a call to remember that we don’t face life’s challenges alone. God is with us. And so we need to pray for God to be with us when we struggle.
Personally, in my prayers, and even in the way I approach leading this church, I strive for Simplicity and Naturality. I realize that “naturality” isn’t a real word, but it rhymes so nicely with simplicity. I believe that when we pray, we need to be as simple and natural as possible, because the combination of the two opens us up the best to God. One of the problems with us pastors is that we are trained to be eloquent in our praying, and this can intimidate people, resulting in them feeling as though they can’t pray properly. God wants simple prayers, not necessarily eloquent prayers.
The point of our whole passage for this morning is that prayer is the foundation of the Christian life—even more than scripture is. Why? Because prayer is the stuff of our relationship with God. It is how we speak, listen, and love God. If you want to learn how to pray, learn from the Lord’s prayer: Keep it simple—Keep it natural—Make it constant.
Amen.
November 13, 2011
“When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
“Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
You probably already know this because I’ve mentioned it perhaps too many times in my sermons, but I had a hard time in church when I was growing up. Somewhere between my childhood and adolescence, I became very cynical about church. A large part of it was that the seeds of the “I’m spiritual but not religious” movement were being sown at the time, seeds that have now grown into numerous crops. The surrounding youth culture was questioning everything about church, and it made me question.
So I became cynical about the need for church, while also being cynical and critical about the motivations of the people in church. I wasn’t sure that people needed to be in church, but as I looked around I became convinced that so many of the people I saw in church on Sundays were there for the wrong reasons. Looking around at those attending worship, I was convinced that they were there as much to be seen as they were to worship. I’m not sure I was entirely right, but it was what I saw.
My experience, or at least my perceptions as a teen, of people in church wasn’t far off from what Jesus saw in the Jews of his time. When Jesus taught his followers about prayer, he was reacting to something specific to the Jewish faith: they were praying more for prestige than to connect with God. And Jesus taught that praying for the wrong reasons was as bad as not praying at all.
To understand what I mean, it helps to transport yourself back to Jesus’ time, and to see what Jesus saw. First, he was critical of the Gentiles. The Gentiles, or non-Jews, had a faith that revolved both around the Greco-Roman gods, and a vague understanding of one God (depending on what movement you followed). The practice among Gentiles was to offer long, flowery, expressive prayers. They believed that to get the gods’ or God’s attention, they needed to pray in the right way, which meant being wordy and eloquent. So, as Jesus said, “they think that they will be heard because of their many words.”
Second, he was critical of the Jewish way of praying. This passage in Luke’s gospel is critical of the Jewish prayers for different reasons. The Jewish faith of the time was a very rigid faith, especially when it came to prayer. The Jews, to be righteous, were required to recite a number of memorized prayers, which many did in public so that others would see how holy they were.
For example, they were required to say the Shema at least twice a day, and the most righteous would say them three times a day. They were to say them upon rising and before going to bed. Many of the Jewish men would choose to be seen in public reciting their prayers, so they would emerge from their houses in the early morning, stand in the marketplace, and pray so that everyone could see. The Jewish culture was a religious culture, so prestige was heaped upon those who were seen as righteously religious. The Shema, which means “Hear,” as in “Hear, O Israel, The Lord is our God, the Lord alone,” is a recitation of the following three passages of scripture:
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Deuteronomy 11:13-21
If you will only heed his every commandment that I am commanding you today—loving the Lord your God, and serving him with all your heart and with all your soul— then he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine, and your oil; and he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you will eat your fill. Take care, or you will be seduced into turning away, serving other gods and worshiping them, for then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain and the land will yield no fruit; then you will perish quickly off the good land that the Lord is giving you. You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth.
Numbers 15:37–41
The Lord said to Moses: Speak to the Israelites, and tell them to make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a blue cord on the fringe at each corner. You have the fringe so that, when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them, and not follow the lust of your own heart and your own eyes. So you shall remember and do all my commandments, and you shall be holy to your God. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the Lord your God.
In addition, they Jews were required to recite the Shemoneh ‘esreh, which means “The Eighteen.” These are nineteen prayers (one was added later to the original eighteen) that cover a whole variety of topics, many of which repeat the history of Israel. For instance, here is a sample of Number One:
"Blessed be Thou, O Lord, our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, the great, the mighty, and the fearful God—God Most High—who bestow goodly kindnesses, and art the Creator of all, and remember the love of the Fathers and bring a redeemer for their children's children for the sake of Thy name in love. King, Helper, Savior, and Shield; blessed be Thou, Shield of Abraham"
Many Jewish men chose to recite their prayers in public so that they could be seen as being righteous. In addition, when they prayed they wore their phylacteries, which were two boxes—one worn on the head, the other on the arm—containing tiny scrolls with the Ten Commandments written on them. The latter was wrapped around the arm with a cord that extended down to the fingers.
Jesus wanted people to move away from memorized and wordy prayers to ones that really connect us with God. I believe that what Christ wanted was for people of faith to simplify their prayers, to make it more natural, and to get the focus back on God, not on how we were praying. That’s why he taught this simple prayer to take the place of all the prayers, the Lord’s Prayer.
This prayer wasn’t just a short memorized prayer to take the place of long memorized prayers. It was an attempt to get people to pray about what matters. It wasn’t just a prayer, it was an outline for prayer. The prayer wasn’t just meant to be said in one piece, the way we typically pray it, which can lead us to pray it in the way the ancient Jews prayed their prayers—without passion or emphasis. He wanted people to dwell on each facet. Let me go over the prayer and show you what I mean.
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. What does Jesus mean by this? It’s not just a starting line, something to get us going, by calling God sacred name. Jesus was saying that when we pray, we need to start from a place of humility where we hallow God. What does it mean to say we “hallow” God? It isn’t just saying that God is holy. It’s starting in a place of awe and reverence, where we recognize God’s greatness. It overcomes the tendency to be so familiar with God that we fail to recognize God’s greatness, wonder, and mystery. Jesus was saying that when we pray, we need to stand in awe of how wonderful and great God is, for that sets the context for our surrendering to God. So start your prayer from a place of awe and reverence.
Your kingdom come. Of all the lines in the prayer, this is the one that is most misunderstood. What do you think it means? My guess is that you fall into one of two categories. First, you may think it means that we are asking God to let us into heaven when we die, but there’s a problem with this. If that’s what Jesus meant, he would have said, “Your kingdom be open to us when we die.” It’s speaking about God’s kingdom coming to us here. It’s not about death, it’s about now. This leads to the second thought: that it is asking that Jesus return in what are called the end-times, which so many people think of in relationship to the book of Revelation. They think that what Jesus is telling us to do is to pray for his return. There’s a HUGE problem with this idea, though. Why would Jesus have them pray for his return when he was already there, and before he had even taught about his return? Remember, this is in the beginning of his ministry. He hadn’t even mentioned his going and returning.
Jesus is actually teaching a concept that appears all throughout the gospels, which is the idea that when we are living the right way in complete openness to God, we can simultaneously live in the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God. Jesus taught that while we all live in the material realm, the realm of the earthly reality, those of faith can live simultaneously in a spiritual kingdom that helps us see and experience God and God’s blessings all around us. When we live in that kingdom, we become open to everything God has to offer us. We begin to see with God’s eyes, love with God’s love, and do what God wills. Which leads us to the next part of the prayer. So in this part of the prayer, pray that you can live always in God’s realm as much as you live in the earthly one.
Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. This phrase flows out of the idea of God’s kingdom coming. It’s the idea that when we live fully in God’s kingdom, God’s will becomes done on earth through us, in the way that it becomes done in heaven. So pray always that you will be doing God’s will in everything.
Give us this day our daily bread. This is a reminder that God’s concerns aren’t only spiritual. God cares about our material needs, and not just bread. God cares about us being healthy physically, and that what we eat, drink, and where we live matters. So pray that God will care for your physical needs.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. Several months ago someone asked me why we Presbyterians pray “debts” and “debtors,” rather than “trespasses,” or “sins,” which is what the original translation says. I kiddingly said to them that I believe it all has to do with our heritage. I figure the Episcopalians, being originally English, prayed “trespasses” because they tended to be the wealthy landowners who constantly had trespassers on their property. Meanwhile, the Scottish (who were the original Presbyterians) were always poor and in debt to the English (causing them to trespass), and so they were obsessed with getting their debts forgiven. Really, though, I have no idea why we don’t translate these as “sins.” The point of the prayer is that Christ wants us to pray that we can let go of our sins into God’s forgiveness, but that we would also steep ourselves in God by extending God’s forgiveness onto others. We all struggle to forgive, but when we forgive we live in God’s kingdom. And to forgive we have to be rooted in God’s kingdom. So pray that you will be forgiving just as you have been forgiven.
And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. This part of the prayer recognizes that we struggle with testings and temptations, and it is a call to remember that we don’t face life’s challenges alone. God is with us. And so we need to pray for God to be with us when we struggle.
Personally, in my prayers, and even in the way I approach leading this church, I strive for Simplicity and Naturality. I realize that “naturality” isn’t a real word, but it rhymes so nicely with simplicity. I believe that when we pray, we need to be as simple and natural as possible, because the combination of the two opens us up the best to God. One of the problems with us pastors is that we are trained to be eloquent in our praying, and this can intimidate people, resulting in them feeling as though they can’t pray properly. God wants simple prayers, not necessarily eloquent prayers.
The point of our whole passage for this morning is that prayer is the foundation of the Christian life—even more than scripture is. Why? Because prayer is the stuff of our relationship with God. It is how we speak, listen, and love God. If you want to learn how to pray, learn from the Lord’s prayer: Keep it simple—Keep it natural—Make it constant.
Amen.
What Do We Make of Miracles? Finding Miracles in the Mundane
Psalm 104:1-18
October 30, 2011
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Bless the Lord, O my soul.
O Lord my God, you are very great.
You are clothed with honor and majesty,
wrapped in light as with a garment.
You stretch out the heavens like a tent,
you set the beams of your chambers on the waters,
you make the clouds your chariot,
you ride on the wings of the wind,
you make the winds your messengers,
fire and flame your ministers.
You set the earth on its foundations,
so that it shall never be shaken.
You cover it with the deep as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.
At your rebuke they flee;
at the sound of your thunder they take to flight.
They rose up to the mountains,
ran down to the valleys to the place
that you appointed for them.
You set a boundary that they may not pass,
so that they might not again cover the earth.
You make springs gush forth in the valleys;
they flow between the hills,
giving drink to every wild animal;
the wild asses quench their thirst.
By the streams the birds of the air have their habitation;
they sing among the branches.
From your lofty abode you water the mountains;
the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.
You cause the grass to grow for the cattle,
and plants for people to use, to bring forth food from the earth,
and wine to gladden the human heart,
oil to make the face shine,
and bread to strengthen the human heart.
The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
In them the birds build their nests;
the stork has its home in the fir trees.
The high mountains are for the wild goats;
the rocks are a refuge for the coneys.
When I was eight years-old, I had a miraculous event happen to me. I’m going to tell you about it, and I think after I tell it to you, you’ll be tempted to say, “Oh,… that wasn’t all that miraculous.” But that may be because you tend to think of miracles as being much like fireworks. They’re only good if they’re spectacular. Sometimes miracles aren’t spectacular. They’re subtle. They pop like firecrackers.
At the time of my miracle, I was living outside of Philadelphia. We were renting a small house on the grounds of an old estate. Fields and woods surrounded the house. I loved the place. It was filled with natural wonders for an eight year-old boy. Various trees were my forts and spaceships. There were three ponds and a stream nearby where I could look at the fish, search for salamanders and crayfish, and skate on during the winter. I saw squirrels, rabbits, deer, turkeys, skunks (from a distance), and every once in a while, a small little pink hedgehog. I loved that place because I felt close to nature there, and to God—in an eight-year-old way.
My little miracle happened one day while climbing a particular beloved tree. It was a skinny little tree that was perhaps 12-feet high. I would shinny up the tree as far as I could go before it started to sway, bending under my weight. On this particular day, I went up about eight feet, and paused to look around. I could see the stream, the little mill house built in the 1920s where I would see the hedgehog, the old oak tree that I often dug peat moss out of. I then prayed to God: “God, please help me to always be kind to animals, trees, and everything else.” It was a simple prayer. What helps me remember it was that I felt as though God was profoundly with me in that moment. It was almost as though I could feel God hugging me. Not quite, but also not not quite,… if you get what I mean.
This experience has always stayed in my mind because it was the moment that I first recognized the miraculous in the mundane. It wasn’t like fireworks. It was like smelling flowers. I had an experience of oneness with God, with animals, with nature, and at some level it made me deeply aware that God is often found best in the mundane. I wouldn’t have said it that way when I was eight. Back then I just felt it. What this experience taught me for the first time was that too often we look for God’s miracles in big events, but where God is most often found is in the ordinary, the everyday,… the mundane.
Like everyone else, I’ve gone through all sorts of changes in my sensitivity to God over the years. I’ve had to struggle to find God in the ordinary. The fact is that all of us struggle with spiritual sensitivity. I believe our grappling with sensitivity begins as adolescents. That’s where we begin to lose a bit of our child-like innocence, and thus our ability to naturally sense God. There’s something about first becoming adolescents, and then adults, that makes us increasingly insensitive to God all around us.
As teenagers, we lose the sensitivity because we get caught up in school, which makes us more sensitive to what other people think of us, and less to what God is doing with us. Adolescences is a time of trying to figure out who we are, and so we spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing about how we either do or don’t fit in. We’re not thinking much about how we fit in with God. We’re thinking much more about whether he likes us, she likes us, what our parents are doing or not doing to/for us. Our brains undergo a tremendous amount of change, and we start developing the ability to think abstractly and philosophically, but that ability is spotty. Sometimes we flit into this more adult way of thinking, sometimes we snap back to childish ways of thinking. That’s why your teenage kids drive you nuts. You don’t know whether to treat them like adults or children.
What this does to us spiritually is that it causes many, many teens to put God on the shelf. You see evidence of this in the church. What typically happens to teens once they become confirmed? Often they stop coming to church. They may still see themselves as spiritual, but they put a halt to activities that are designed to help them grow spiritually. This isn’t true of all teens, but it is true of most. Adolescence through college age is the time of lowest church attendance.
Then, in adulthood, we get caught up with work and our careers, which makes us sensitive to how we’re going to make it in the world. Our focus becomes on our career, relationships, friends, and activities. In the process our sensitivity to God in the everyday gets lost, to the point that many people, when they struggle, have a hard time finding God. They look all around, but can’t find God even though God has been there all along. The problem isn’t that God is absent. It’s that they’ve taken God for granted, and have lost sensitivity to how we find God in the ordinary and mundane.
I’ve been reading a remarkable book lately that celebrates seeing God everywhere in a time when God seems nowhere. The book is The Life Journey of a Joyful Man. It is the memoirs of Adrian van Kaam, who died three years ago. I studied with van Kaam at Duquesne University for my Ph.D., and he’s probably the closest I have to a spiritual mentor. He was a brilliant man who probably understood as much about Christian spirituality and the spiritual life as anyone who’s ever lived, other than Jesus.
The first third of the memoir deal with his life in Holland during the Nazi occupation between 1939 and 1945. When the Nazis invaded Holland, things became difficult, but not radically. The Nazis saw the Dutch as being somewhat German, and therefore somewhat akin. But at the war progressed, and as the Dutch resisted German occupation and began hiding Jews from them, they oppressed the Dutch people more and more. Beginning with the Allied push after D-Day in 1944, life became truly oppressive. The southern part of Holland was liberated from Nazi control, leaving the northwestern portion in desperate straits while the Allies pushed on toward Germany. Van Kaam had been attending seminary in the south, but it was liberated while he was home visiting his family in the northern city of The Hague, leaving him trapped behind enemy lines. That’s when the devastation really began.
The Nazis, who were slowly losing the war, reacted by tightening control of the north. And as they did, they became more and more barbaric. It started with the Nazis demanding more and more food from the Dutch farms. They had to feed their armies, and they really didn’t care if the Dutch starved. As van Kaam wrote, the average person’s calorie-per-day quotient dropped from 2500 to 1300, then to 950. By winter of 1945 they were living on 450 calories a day. There was no meat, no fresh vegetables, no fruit. They lived on root vegetables at first—potatoes, carrots, turnips. When those were horded by the Nazis, they were left to eat sugar beets, which have no caloric value, and tulip bulbs, which were toxic when eaten in larger quantities. Van Kaam suffered the effects of that toxicity for the rest of his life. Then the Germans demanded that the Dutch population turn over their winter coats and blankets in order to give them to the German Army. The Germans also cut off electricity, coal, and oil. The Dutch people had no choice but to basically deforest most of the north to burn for heat, as well as burning siding from houses, shingles, window frames, furniture, and more. Anything that could be burned was. The Germans even confiscated pets and horses to use for food.
As the Dutch resistance persisted in their call for a nationwide labor and railroad strike, the Germans responded by killing men at random. Van Kaam writes about walking through the streets of The Hague one day as it sat eerily quiet and empty. Two women in an alley nervously motioned for him to come to them. When he walked over to them, they rushed him inside because the Germans were grabbing every tenth man off the street and shooting him in reprisal for Dutch Resistance activities.
Van Kaam went into hiding in general, while also being part of a network that hid Jews, anyone accused of hiding Jews, anyone caught speaking against the German government, or anyone who refused to cooperate with the Nazis. During this time he started an underground newsletter to speak words of faith and hope during the winter and spring of 1945. He would have been shot if he had been found out. The Germans, faltering on both the front lines and in Germany, posted announcements demanding that all men, ages 16-40, had to report to be conscripted to be shipped to German factories, to clean up German cities ravaged by Allied bombing, or to build German defenses on the front lines. Many men were taken. Many more went into permanent hiding. The women, in most cities, were left to do almost everything because the men were either gone or in hiding. Millions of Dutch were starving, freezing, plagued by diphtheria and dysentery, conscripted, slaughtered, and left to struggle for survival.
Still, despite of all of this, van Kaam discovered God’s grace everywhere. The Germans, exercising their God-bestowed free will to choose evil continued through their atrocities, did not kill van Kaam’s ability to sense God everywhere. In fact, the worse it got, the more he found Christ in the acts of thousands of self-sacrificing Dutch people, Protestant and Catholic.
Ultimately, his experiences under the Nazi occupation actually opened him more to the miraculous in the mundane. He sensed Christ’s presence in the simple acts of the Dutch people sharing their scarce food with each other. He sensed God’s presence in his increasing awareness of beauty of grass, trees, plants, flowers.
Van Kaam wasn’t alone in his discovering God in the mundane under German occupation and atrocities. Many other books chronicling events of the same era wrote about their authors’ sense of presence. Elie Weisel, the renowned Holocaust survivor and writer, tells in his book, Night, of a man being hanged in the center of the Auschwitz concentration camp where he was a prisoner. As the Jews all stood in formation, looking at this hanging from the branch of a tree, a man yelled out, “Where is God now?” Another yelled out, “Hanging on the tree!”
Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor, spoke of how they discovered God in the profound beauty of a sunset while standing in the court of the concentration camp. Corrie ten Boom, whom I’ve mentioned many times before, discovered God in dinners shared with the Jews they were hiding, in Old Testament Bible studies with them, and in the concentration camp with the small little miracles that happened everyday to bring beauty to their devastation.
For a number of years I’ve been fascinated with a phrase I hear people speak on occasion: “God is nowhere.” So many people think this is the case, that God is absent, whether because there is no God, or because God doesn’t care. What fascinates me about the phrase is that if you change your perspective on the phrase just a little bit, the phrase is transformed from
GOD IS NOWHERE
to
GOD IS NOW HERE
The difference between the two is adding a little space to sense God’s miraculous presence.
If we really want to see miracles of God, it doesn’t take much. It just takes the willingness to cultivate the ability to look for God’s work in the mundane, the everyday, the ordinary; because it’s in the ordinary that we begin to lay the groundwork for seeing the extraordinary.
Amen
October 30, 2011
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Bless the Lord, O my soul.
O Lord my God, you are very great.
You are clothed with honor and majesty,
wrapped in light as with a garment.
You stretch out the heavens like a tent,
you set the beams of your chambers on the waters,
you make the clouds your chariot,
you ride on the wings of the wind,
you make the winds your messengers,
fire and flame your ministers.
You set the earth on its foundations,
so that it shall never be shaken.
You cover it with the deep as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.
At your rebuke they flee;
at the sound of your thunder they take to flight.
They rose up to the mountains,
ran down to the valleys to the place
that you appointed for them.
You set a boundary that they may not pass,
so that they might not again cover the earth.
You make springs gush forth in the valleys;
they flow between the hills,
giving drink to every wild animal;
the wild asses quench their thirst.
By the streams the birds of the air have their habitation;
they sing among the branches.
From your lofty abode you water the mountains;
the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.
You cause the grass to grow for the cattle,
and plants for people to use, to bring forth food from the earth,
and wine to gladden the human heart,
oil to make the face shine,
and bread to strengthen the human heart.
The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
In them the birds build their nests;
the stork has its home in the fir trees.
The high mountains are for the wild goats;
the rocks are a refuge for the coneys.
When I was eight years-old, I had a miraculous event happen to me. I’m going to tell you about it, and I think after I tell it to you, you’ll be tempted to say, “Oh,… that wasn’t all that miraculous.” But that may be because you tend to think of miracles as being much like fireworks. They’re only good if they’re spectacular. Sometimes miracles aren’t spectacular. They’re subtle. They pop like firecrackers.
At the time of my miracle, I was living outside of Philadelphia. We were renting a small house on the grounds of an old estate. Fields and woods surrounded the house. I loved the place. It was filled with natural wonders for an eight year-old boy. Various trees were my forts and spaceships. There were three ponds and a stream nearby where I could look at the fish, search for salamanders and crayfish, and skate on during the winter. I saw squirrels, rabbits, deer, turkeys, skunks (from a distance), and every once in a while, a small little pink hedgehog. I loved that place because I felt close to nature there, and to God—in an eight-year-old way.
My little miracle happened one day while climbing a particular beloved tree. It was a skinny little tree that was perhaps 12-feet high. I would shinny up the tree as far as I could go before it started to sway, bending under my weight. On this particular day, I went up about eight feet, and paused to look around. I could see the stream, the little mill house built in the 1920s where I would see the hedgehog, the old oak tree that I often dug peat moss out of. I then prayed to God: “God, please help me to always be kind to animals, trees, and everything else.” It was a simple prayer. What helps me remember it was that I felt as though God was profoundly with me in that moment. It was almost as though I could feel God hugging me. Not quite, but also not not quite,… if you get what I mean.
This experience has always stayed in my mind because it was the moment that I first recognized the miraculous in the mundane. It wasn’t like fireworks. It was like smelling flowers. I had an experience of oneness with God, with animals, with nature, and at some level it made me deeply aware that God is often found best in the mundane. I wouldn’t have said it that way when I was eight. Back then I just felt it. What this experience taught me for the first time was that too often we look for God’s miracles in big events, but where God is most often found is in the ordinary, the everyday,… the mundane.
Like everyone else, I’ve gone through all sorts of changes in my sensitivity to God over the years. I’ve had to struggle to find God in the ordinary. The fact is that all of us struggle with spiritual sensitivity. I believe our grappling with sensitivity begins as adolescents. That’s where we begin to lose a bit of our child-like innocence, and thus our ability to naturally sense God. There’s something about first becoming adolescents, and then adults, that makes us increasingly insensitive to God all around us.
As teenagers, we lose the sensitivity because we get caught up in school, which makes us more sensitive to what other people think of us, and less to what God is doing with us. Adolescences is a time of trying to figure out who we are, and so we spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing about how we either do or don’t fit in. We’re not thinking much about how we fit in with God. We’re thinking much more about whether he likes us, she likes us, what our parents are doing or not doing to/for us. Our brains undergo a tremendous amount of change, and we start developing the ability to think abstractly and philosophically, but that ability is spotty. Sometimes we flit into this more adult way of thinking, sometimes we snap back to childish ways of thinking. That’s why your teenage kids drive you nuts. You don’t know whether to treat them like adults or children.
What this does to us spiritually is that it causes many, many teens to put God on the shelf. You see evidence of this in the church. What typically happens to teens once they become confirmed? Often they stop coming to church. They may still see themselves as spiritual, but they put a halt to activities that are designed to help them grow spiritually. This isn’t true of all teens, but it is true of most. Adolescence through college age is the time of lowest church attendance.
Then, in adulthood, we get caught up with work and our careers, which makes us sensitive to how we’re going to make it in the world. Our focus becomes on our career, relationships, friends, and activities. In the process our sensitivity to God in the everyday gets lost, to the point that many people, when they struggle, have a hard time finding God. They look all around, but can’t find God even though God has been there all along. The problem isn’t that God is absent. It’s that they’ve taken God for granted, and have lost sensitivity to how we find God in the ordinary and mundane.
I’ve been reading a remarkable book lately that celebrates seeing God everywhere in a time when God seems nowhere. The book is The Life Journey of a Joyful Man. It is the memoirs of Adrian van Kaam, who died three years ago. I studied with van Kaam at Duquesne University for my Ph.D., and he’s probably the closest I have to a spiritual mentor. He was a brilliant man who probably understood as much about Christian spirituality and the spiritual life as anyone who’s ever lived, other than Jesus.
The first third of the memoir deal with his life in Holland during the Nazi occupation between 1939 and 1945. When the Nazis invaded Holland, things became difficult, but not radically. The Nazis saw the Dutch as being somewhat German, and therefore somewhat akin. But at the war progressed, and as the Dutch resisted German occupation and began hiding Jews from them, they oppressed the Dutch people more and more. Beginning with the Allied push after D-Day in 1944, life became truly oppressive. The southern part of Holland was liberated from Nazi control, leaving the northwestern portion in desperate straits while the Allies pushed on toward Germany. Van Kaam had been attending seminary in the south, but it was liberated while he was home visiting his family in the northern city of The Hague, leaving him trapped behind enemy lines. That’s when the devastation really began.
The Nazis, who were slowly losing the war, reacted by tightening control of the north. And as they did, they became more and more barbaric. It started with the Nazis demanding more and more food from the Dutch farms. They had to feed their armies, and they really didn’t care if the Dutch starved. As van Kaam wrote, the average person’s calorie-per-day quotient dropped from 2500 to 1300, then to 950. By winter of 1945 they were living on 450 calories a day. There was no meat, no fresh vegetables, no fruit. They lived on root vegetables at first—potatoes, carrots, turnips. When those were horded by the Nazis, they were left to eat sugar beets, which have no caloric value, and tulip bulbs, which were toxic when eaten in larger quantities. Van Kaam suffered the effects of that toxicity for the rest of his life. Then the Germans demanded that the Dutch population turn over their winter coats and blankets in order to give them to the German Army. The Germans also cut off electricity, coal, and oil. The Dutch people had no choice but to basically deforest most of the north to burn for heat, as well as burning siding from houses, shingles, window frames, furniture, and more. Anything that could be burned was. The Germans even confiscated pets and horses to use for food.
As the Dutch resistance persisted in their call for a nationwide labor and railroad strike, the Germans responded by killing men at random. Van Kaam writes about walking through the streets of The Hague one day as it sat eerily quiet and empty. Two women in an alley nervously motioned for him to come to them. When he walked over to them, they rushed him inside because the Germans were grabbing every tenth man off the street and shooting him in reprisal for Dutch Resistance activities.
Van Kaam went into hiding in general, while also being part of a network that hid Jews, anyone accused of hiding Jews, anyone caught speaking against the German government, or anyone who refused to cooperate with the Nazis. During this time he started an underground newsletter to speak words of faith and hope during the winter and spring of 1945. He would have been shot if he had been found out. The Germans, faltering on both the front lines and in Germany, posted announcements demanding that all men, ages 16-40, had to report to be conscripted to be shipped to German factories, to clean up German cities ravaged by Allied bombing, or to build German defenses on the front lines. Many men were taken. Many more went into permanent hiding. The women, in most cities, were left to do almost everything because the men were either gone or in hiding. Millions of Dutch were starving, freezing, plagued by diphtheria and dysentery, conscripted, slaughtered, and left to struggle for survival.
Still, despite of all of this, van Kaam discovered God’s grace everywhere. The Germans, exercising their God-bestowed free will to choose evil continued through their atrocities, did not kill van Kaam’s ability to sense God everywhere. In fact, the worse it got, the more he found Christ in the acts of thousands of self-sacrificing Dutch people, Protestant and Catholic.
Ultimately, his experiences under the Nazi occupation actually opened him more to the miraculous in the mundane. He sensed Christ’s presence in the simple acts of the Dutch people sharing their scarce food with each other. He sensed God’s presence in his increasing awareness of beauty of grass, trees, plants, flowers.
Van Kaam wasn’t alone in his discovering God in the mundane under German occupation and atrocities. Many other books chronicling events of the same era wrote about their authors’ sense of presence. Elie Weisel, the renowned Holocaust survivor and writer, tells in his book, Night, of a man being hanged in the center of the Auschwitz concentration camp where he was a prisoner. As the Jews all stood in formation, looking at this hanging from the branch of a tree, a man yelled out, “Where is God now?” Another yelled out, “Hanging on the tree!”
Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor, spoke of how they discovered God in the profound beauty of a sunset while standing in the court of the concentration camp. Corrie ten Boom, whom I’ve mentioned many times before, discovered God in dinners shared with the Jews they were hiding, in Old Testament Bible studies with them, and in the concentration camp with the small little miracles that happened everyday to bring beauty to their devastation.
For a number of years I’ve been fascinated with a phrase I hear people speak on occasion: “God is nowhere.” So many people think this is the case, that God is absent, whether because there is no God, or because God doesn’t care. What fascinates me about the phrase is that if you change your perspective on the phrase just a little bit, the phrase is transformed from
GOD IS NOWHERE
to
GOD IS NOW HERE
The difference between the two is adding a little space to sense God’s miraculous presence.
If we really want to see miracles of God, it doesn’t take much. It just takes the willingness to cultivate the ability to look for God’s work in the mundane, the everyday, the ordinary; because it’s in the ordinary that we begin to lay the groundwork for seeing the extraordinary.
Amen
What Do We Make of Miracles? Transforming MIracles
John 2:1-12
October 23, 2011
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
I’ve always considered this miracle to be one of the strangest miracles ever. Put aside your normal way of looking at it. Most of us have grown accepting Bible miracles like this at face value. We don’t think deeply about it. And maybe we make jokes about it at parties, saying things like, “Gee, we’re out of wine? Can’t we find someone religious who can turn a jug of water into wine?” At least that’s a joke they say to us pastors.
I want you to look at it from a more objective perspective. If you do that, there’s really only one conclusion: it doesn’t really make much sense. Why would Jesus waste his time changing water into wine? Is the point that he’s really good at helping people get drunk at the end of a party? That he’s a great party guy as well as a savior?
This miracle is so different from his other miracles. All of his other miracles much make life substantially better for people. He helps the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the mute to speak, the lepers to be clean, the possessed to be free, and the lame to walk. He feeds the hungry. These are miracles with substance that relieve suffering. Compared to these kinds of miracles, his changing the water into wine almost seems trivial.
There’s more here than meets the eye. To understand the miracle you have to get out of an objective view, and to look at it from a different perspective. Jesus’ changing water into wine is a transforming miracle, and it reveals something about life in Christ. When you look at it from this perspective you realize that this miracle fits in with all of his others miracles. You see, every one of his miracles is a transforming miracle. The point isn’t just to make lives better. The point of all of his miracles is that Jesus is leading people to become transformed in some substantial way, and even this miracle transforms people.
A transforming miracle takes a person from one way of living life, and opens up a whole new, better way of living. The Christian life is full of these kinds of miracles. Talk with Cheryl Shotts and her son, Mohammed ag Albakaye. They’ll tell you.
Cheryl’s life was transformed in 1985 while doing the dishes. At the time she was in her early forties, married, and her three children were on their own or in college. Cleaning up after dinner, she turned on the television to watch 60 Minutes. Diane Sawyer was doing a piece on a famine ravaging Africa. She interviewed an emaciated young boy of 12. The boy had a clubfoot, a scoliosis, the aftereffects of polio, and tuberculosis of the spine. He was 5’4” tall, but weighed only 65 pounds. He spoke with Diane Sawyer in broken English for all of 18 seconds as Cheryl watched with her mouth open. Cheryl thought to herself, “My Lord, that’s my son! I have to find my child and bring him home.”
She couldn’t get the thought out of her mind. This young boy of a different ethnicity, thousands of miles away, was her son. Cheryl knew that this was what she had been praying for. For years she had prayed to God, asking, “God, is this all there is for me? Is this what you want me to do with my life?” She always had a feeling that there was something more. When she would pray, though, she often would sense an answer: “You’ll know what to do, but now’s not the right time.”
Seeing Mohammed on 60 Minutes, she knew that now was the right time. She convinced her husband that this was her mission in life, so they set out to find her son. They traveled to Africa and contacted missionaries in Mali, where Mohammed was. It took some time, and some help from CBS and Diane Sawyer, but they finally tracked him down. They took out a loan for the $12,000 it would cost to adopt him.
When the missionaries told Mohammed that a family in America wanted to adopt him, he didn’t really understand, but he was excited. Coming to his new home in Indianapolis, he saw the big banner hung outside the house saying, “WELCOME TO AMERICA. YOU’LL NEVER BE HUNGRY AGAIN.” The next morning, after his welcoming party, Mohammed asked Cheryl, “Where’s the rug-cleaning machine?” Cheryl said, “I don’t understand. You want to clean my house?” He replied, “Didn’t you bring me here to be your houseboy?” She said, “No, to be my son.” He looked at her for a while, and then said, “I don’t know what it means to be a son. You have to teach me. But I promise to learn.” You see, Mohammed’s father had been killed when he was seven, and he had been separated from his mother when he was eight. They had been refugees in Nigeria, and when a famine hit that nation, soldiers had grabbed him and took him back to Mali (his light skin, as part of the Taureg ethnic group, made it easy to recognize him as non-Nigerian) where he survived through begging.
Over the course of the next three years, Mohammed had five major surgeries to rebuild his back and foot. The orthopedic surgeon removed ten spinal discs in two surgeries, seven days apart. He replaced Mohammed's discs with one rib, part of one hipbone and metal rods. After three weeks in intensive care Mohammed left the hospital in a full body brace that he wore the next 18 months.
Mohammed complained once, immediately after the first back surgery, saying in the recovery room, "This is a hell of a pain Mom." He never said another word about pain. He was simply grateful to have his body repaired. Once, while recuperating and sitting outside in a lawn chair, Mohammed asked for a glass of water. He held it up to the sky and said, "This is the life Mom, the sun is shining, my belly is full and I have clean water to drink."
Not knowing how to read or write, he had to start first grade as a 13-year-old. It didn’t matter to him that he was learning with children half his age. He was grateful. In 1998, Mohammed graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Since then he has lived in Florida and the DC area. He now works with the Americans for African Adoptions to help with development and translations for the agency his American mother founded. His long term goal is to work for peace in the Middle East and Africa, and to eventually become Secretary of State.
This is the kind of miracle that our miracle from our passage stands for. Jesus is about transforming lives, which you saw in both Cheryl’s and Mohammed’s life. You may not recognize this kind of transformation in the changing of water into wine, but that’s because you’re not Jewish, you’ve never lived in Cana, you didn’t live in the first century, and you never went to one of these kinds of weddings.
Let me take you back to the first century. The ancient Jewish weddings were not like our modern weddings. In our modern weddings, we have the wedding ceremony, and then we have a reception that lasts for several hours. Afterwards everyone goes home and the couple begins their honeymoon. The weddings and receptions last about five hours total. Ancient weddings lasted a week.
This particular wedding would have begun early in the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday morning. The bridesmaids would have sat in waiting, lamps lit in the darkness, waiting for the parade of men carrying the groom to meet her and her bridesmaids. Slowly, the groom’s party would have wound their way through the streets of the village as anticipation of the wedding built among the townspeople joining the parade. Eventually they would come to the bride’s home and the great wedding feast began. Wine was an important part of the feast. It was considered essential. Running out of wine would have been a huge humiliation,… but more on that later.
In an ancient Jewish wedding everyone in the village was invited, as were visitors. Weddings were THE big event of the year. This wedding, in a town of about 200, would have a big event, and running out of wine was embarrassing.
The folks at the wedding weren’t drinking to get drunk. Wine had special significance in Jewish and ancient cultures. Among the Jews, it was considered to be an essential part of life and a gift from God. There is an ancient rabbinical saying, “Without wine there is no joy.” The people of Jesus’ time drank wine with everything. In fact, they probably drank wine all day long. Their wine was a bit different from ours. The ancient wine was a concentrated wine that was mixed with water. At feasts they would mix two parts wine with three parts water. But for everyday use they mixed one part wine with about five parts water. There was a practical reason for this. The water quality in the ancient world was not good, and mixing wine with the water killed parasites and germs in the water (although they didn’t know the science of it—they just knew that it made the water healthier).
Despite the fact that wine was ubiquitous, the Jews had a strict understanding about drinking wine. Unlike many people of our age, the ancient Jews believed that drunkenness was a sin. It was considered shameful for someone to be publicly drunk. A person who had gotten drunk would have been severely criticized, and a person who was regularly drunk would have been ostracized. These are lessons of moderation that many could learn today. They considered wine to be a gift from God that facilitated relationships and laughter, but to be drunk was to abuse that gift. As I mentioned, wine was considered to be essential, and the humiliation of running out of wine at a wedding feast would have stigmatized the couple for the rest of their lives. By changing the water into wine, Jesus was basically saving the family from humiliation.
Still, Jesus had another reason for performing this miracle, and it was essential to the message John, the writer of our gospel, wanted to get across. Changing the water into wine was powerfully symbolic. This miracle was a statement about the Christian faith versus the Jewish faith.
Do you remember the stone purification jars and how many there were? There were six of them, each containing about 30 gallons. The jars were for a Jewish rite. Before each meal and between each course everyone was required to wash his or her hands in the water. By saying that there were six stone purification jars, John was telling his readers symbolically that the Jewish law was incomplete and that the Jewish religious practice had become corrupt. The law could not purify you because sin was always there. Only the grace of God in Christ could purify. The Greeks and the Jews reading this miracle would have picked up on how the wine represented grace. As mentioned before, wine was considered to be a gift from God, and it was something that brought a spirit of grace. By taking the water of those jars and turning them into wine, Jesus was transforming the incomplete law of the Jews into God’s grace. John was saying that through Christ, God had taken the incompleteness of the Jewish faith, a faith focused on trying to purify ourselves so that we can be acceptable to God, and transformed it into a faith focused on grace. A faith focused on letting God transform us. John was telling us, through this miracle, that Jesus brings grace that overcomes the law, and leads us to a religion of celebration and joy rather than one of obsession and self-righteousness.
The transformation of water into wine was a message about God’s grace. If you take all the water in those jars and do the math, you realize that Jesus created up to 180 gallons of wine. That’s an tremendous amount of wine. In most weddings, even the large, I’d be surprised if more than ten gallons of wine was consumed. 180 gallons is a lot of wine. The ancient people would have immediately understood that this was John’s way of saying, “Not only has Jesus transformed the old faith of the Jews with grace, but Jesus has done it so thoroughly that God’s blessings are now overflowing all over the place. We have grace in abundance!” The fact that it was the best wine meant that God’s grace is better than anything humans can manufacture.
I think the point of this miracle, but also of all transforming miracles, is that God isn’t content for our lives to remain the same, just as God wasn’t content to leave the Jewish faith the same. Most people are content for their lives to remain the same. In fact, most of us invest a lot of time and energy trying to keep our lives the same. But the nature of life is that change and transformation are inevitable. If you need proof, look at your body. Is it the same as it was twenty years ago, ten, five, three, one? Is your family the same, whether you and your kids, or you and your original family? Look at your life. How many jobs have you had? How many grades and schools have you gone to? Life is about constant change, but God’s miracles channel our lives into specific kinds of change.
What this miracle tells us is that God is always calling us to stretch, to grow, to become someone constantly new. Do you fight against transformation? Do you embrace it? If you think about the whole way this church is set up, it’s designed to move you through this transformation. My sermons are always meant to lead you through transformation. The music we play isn’t meant to just move you emotionally and spiritually, it’s meant to move you transformationally. The classes we teach are designed to help you change. Even our meetings have that focus. Every committee and task force in this church spends the first 20 to 30 minutes doing a study so that we can become open to God’s transforming power in our personal lives and the church’s.
I think that one of the points of our miracle for today is that God is both calling and leading us into constant change. The question is whether we embrace this transformation, or brace ourselves against it.
Amen.
October 23, 2011
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
I’ve always considered this miracle to be one of the strangest miracles ever. Put aside your normal way of looking at it. Most of us have grown accepting Bible miracles like this at face value. We don’t think deeply about it. And maybe we make jokes about it at parties, saying things like, “Gee, we’re out of wine? Can’t we find someone religious who can turn a jug of water into wine?” At least that’s a joke they say to us pastors.
I want you to look at it from a more objective perspective. If you do that, there’s really only one conclusion: it doesn’t really make much sense. Why would Jesus waste his time changing water into wine? Is the point that he’s really good at helping people get drunk at the end of a party? That he’s a great party guy as well as a savior?
This miracle is so different from his other miracles. All of his other miracles much make life substantially better for people. He helps the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the mute to speak, the lepers to be clean, the possessed to be free, and the lame to walk. He feeds the hungry. These are miracles with substance that relieve suffering. Compared to these kinds of miracles, his changing the water into wine almost seems trivial.
There’s more here than meets the eye. To understand the miracle you have to get out of an objective view, and to look at it from a different perspective. Jesus’ changing water into wine is a transforming miracle, and it reveals something about life in Christ. When you look at it from this perspective you realize that this miracle fits in with all of his others miracles. You see, every one of his miracles is a transforming miracle. The point isn’t just to make lives better. The point of all of his miracles is that Jesus is leading people to become transformed in some substantial way, and even this miracle transforms people.
A transforming miracle takes a person from one way of living life, and opens up a whole new, better way of living. The Christian life is full of these kinds of miracles. Talk with Cheryl Shotts and her son, Mohammed ag Albakaye. They’ll tell you.
Cheryl’s life was transformed in 1985 while doing the dishes. At the time she was in her early forties, married, and her three children were on their own or in college. Cleaning up after dinner, she turned on the television to watch 60 Minutes. Diane Sawyer was doing a piece on a famine ravaging Africa. She interviewed an emaciated young boy of 12. The boy had a clubfoot, a scoliosis, the aftereffects of polio, and tuberculosis of the spine. He was 5’4” tall, but weighed only 65 pounds. He spoke with Diane Sawyer in broken English for all of 18 seconds as Cheryl watched with her mouth open. Cheryl thought to herself, “My Lord, that’s my son! I have to find my child and bring him home.”
She couldn’t get the thought out of her mind. This young boy of a different ethnicity, thousands of miles away, was her son. Cheryl knew that this was what she had been praying for. For years she had prayed to God, asking, “God, is this all there is for me? Is this what you want me to do with my life?” She always had a feeling that there was something more. When she would pray, though, she often would sense an answer: “You’ll know what to do, but now’s not the right time.”
Seeing Mohammed on 60 Minutes, she knew that now was the right time. She convinced her husband that this was her mission in life, so they set out to find her son. They traveled to Africa and contacted missionaries in Mali, where Mohammed was. It took some time, and some help from CBS and Diane Sawyer, but they finally tracked him down. They took out a loan for the $12,000 it would cost to adopt him.
When the missionaries told Mohammed that a family in America wanted to adopt him, he didn’t really understand, but he was excited. Coming to his new home in Indianapolis, he saw the big banner hung outside the house saying, “WELCOME TO AMERICA. YOU’LL NEVER BE HUNGRY AGAIN.” The next morning, after his welcoming party, Mohammed asked Cheryl, “Where’s the rug-cleaning machine?” Cheryl said, “I don’t understand. You want to clean my house?” He replied, “Didn’t you bring me here to be your houseboy?” She said, “No, to be my son.” He looked at her for a while, and then said, “I don’t know what it means to be a son. You have to teach me. But I promise to learn.” You see, Mohammed’s father had been killed when he was seven, and he had been separated from his mother when he was eight. They had been refugees in Nigeria, and when a famine hit that nation, soldiers had grabbed him and took him back to Mali (his light skin, as part of the Taureg ethnic group, made it easy to recognize him as non-Nigerian) where he survived through begging.
Over the course of the next three years, Mohammed had five major surgeries to rebuild his back and foot. The orthopedic surgeon removed ten spinal discs in two surgeries, seven days apart. He replaced Mohammed's discs with one rib, part of one hipbone and metal rods. After three weeks in intensive care Mohammed left the hospital in a full body brace that he wore the next 18 months.
Mohammed complained once, immediately after the first back surgery, saying in the recovery room, "This is a hell of a pain Mom." He never said another word about pain. He was simply grateful to have his body repaired. Once, while recuperating and sitting outside in a lawn chair, Mohammed asked for a glass of water. He held it up to the sky and said, "This is the life Mom, the sun is shining, my belly is full and I have clean water to drink."
Not knowing how to read or write, he had to start first grade as a 13-year-old. It didn’t matter to him that he was learning with children half his age. He was grateful. In 1998, Mohammed graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Since then he has lived in Florida and the DC area. He now works with the Americans for African Adoptions to help with development and translations for the agency his American mother founded. His long term goal is to work for peace in the Middle East and Africa, and to eventually become Secretary of State.
This is the kind of miracle that our miracle from our passage stands for. Jesus is about transforming lives, which you saw in both Cheryl’s and Mohammed’s life. You may not recognize this kind of transformation in the changing of water into wine, but that’s because you’re not Jewish, you’ve never lived in Cana, you didn’t live in the first century, and you never went to one of these kinds of weddings.
Let me take you back to the first century. The ancient Jewish weddings were not like our modern weddings. In our modern weddings, we have the wedding ceremony, and then we have a reception that lasts for several hours. Afterwards everyone goes home and the couple begins their honeymoon. The weddings and receptions last about five hours total. Ancient weddings lasted a week.
This particular wedding would have begun early in the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday morning. The bridesmaids would have sat in waiting, lamps lit in the darkness, waiting for the parade of men carrying the groom to meet her and her bridesmaids. Slowly, the groom’s party would have wound their way through the streets of the village as anticipation of the wedding built among the townspeople joining the parade. Eventually they would come to the bride’s home and the great wedding feast began. Wine was an important part of the feast. It was considered essential. Running out of wine would have been a huge humiliation,… but more on that later.
In an ancient Jewish wedding everyone in the village was invited, as were visitors. Weddings were THE big event of the year. This wedding, in a town of about 200, would have a big event, and running out of wine was embarrassing.
The folks at the wedding weren’t drinking to get drunk. Wine had special significance in Jewish and ancient cultures. Among the Jews, it was considered to be an essential part of life and a gift from God. There is an ancient rabbinical saying, “Without wine there is no joy.” The people of Jesus’ time drank wine with everything. In fact, they probably drank wine all day long. Their wine was a bit different from ours. The ancient wine was a concentrated wine that was mixed with water. At feasts they would mix two parts wine with three parts water. But for everyday use they mixed one part wine with about five parts water. There was a practical reason for this. The water quality in the ancient world was not good, and mixing wine with the water killed parasites and germs in the water (although they didn’t know the science of it—they just knew that it made the water healthier).
Despite the fact that wine was ubiquitous, the Jews had a strict understanding about drinking wine. Unlike many people of our age, the ancient Jews believed that drunkenness was a sin. It was considered shameful for someone to be publicly drunk. A person who had gotten drunk would have been severely criticized, and a person who was regularly drunk would have been ostracized. These are lessons of moderation that many could learn today. They considered wine to be a gift from God that facilitated relationships and laughter, but to be drunk was to abuse that gift. As I mentioned, wine was considered to be essential, and the humiliation of running out of wine at a wedding feast would have stigmatized the couple for the rest of their lives. By changing the water into wine, Jesus was basically saving the family from humiliation.
Still, Jesus had another reason for performing this miracle, and it was essential to the message John, the writer of our gospel, wanted to get across. Changing the water into wine was powerfully symbolic. This miracle was a statement about the Christian faith versus the Jewish faith.
Do you remember the stone purification jars and how many there were? There were six of them, each containing about 30 gallons. The jars were for a Jewish rite. Before each meal and between each course everyone was required to wash his or her hands in the water. By saying that there were six stone purification jars, John was telling his readers symbolically that the Jewish law was incomplete and that the Jewish religious practice had become corrupt. The law could not purify you because sin was always there. Only the grace of God in Christ could purify. The Greeks and the Jews reading this miracle would have picked up on how the wine represented grace. As mentioned before, wine was considered to be a gift from God, and it was something that brought a spirit of grace. By taking the water of those jars and turning them into wine, Jesus was transforming the incomplete law of the Jews into God’s grace. John was saying that through Christ, God had taken the incompleteness of the Jewish faith, a faith focused on trying to purify ourselves so that we can be acceptable to God, and transformed it into a faith focused on grace. A faith focused on letting God transform us. John was telling us, through this miracle, that Jesus brings grace that overcomes the law, and leads us to a religion of celebration and joy rather than one of obsession and self-righteousness.
The transformation of water into wine was a message about God’s grace. If you take all the water in those jars and do the math, you realize that Jesus created up to 180 gallons of wine. That’s an tremendous amount of wine. In most weddings, even the large, I’d be surprised if more than ten gallons of wine was consumed. 180 gallons is a lot of wine. The ancient people would have immediately understood that this was John’s way of saying, “Not only has Jesus transformed the old faith of the Jews with grace, but Jesus has done it so thoroughly that God’s blessings are now overflowing all over the place. We have grace in abundance!” The fact that it was the best wine meant that God’s grace is better than anything humans can manufacture.
I think the point of this miracle, but also of all transforming miracles, is that God isn’t content for our lives to remain the same, just as God wasn’t content to leave the Jewish faith the same. Most people are content for their lives to remain the same. In fact, most of us invest a lot of time and energy trying to keep our lives the same. But the nature of life is that change and transformation are inevitable. If you need proof, look at your body. Is it the same as it was twenty years ago, ten, five, three, one? Is your family the same, whether you and your kids, or you and your original family? Look at your life. How many jobs have you had? How many grades and schools have you gone to? Life is about constant change, but God’s miracles channel our lives into specific kinds of change.
What this miracle tells us is that God is always calling us to stretch, to grow, to become someone constantly new. Do you fight against transformation? Do you embrace it? If you think about the whole way this church is set up, it’s designed to move you through this transformation. My sermons are always meant to lead you through transformation. The music we play isn’t meant to just move you emotionally and spiritually, it’s meant to move you transformationally. The classes we teach are designed to help you change. Even our meetings have that focus. Every committee and task force in this church spends the first 20 to 30 minutes doing a study so that we can become open to God’s transforming power in our personal lives and the church’s.
I think that one of the points of our miracle for today is that God is both calling and leading us into constant change. The question is whether we embrace this transformation, or brace ourselves against it.
Amen.
What Do We Make of MIracles? I Believe. Help My Unbelief!
to read this sermon, please go to
http://www.ngrahamstandish.org/Site/Sermons/Entries/2011/10/20_What_Do_We_Make_of_Miracles_I_Believe._Help_My_Unbelief!.html
http://www.ngrahamstandish.org/Site/Sermons/Entries/2011/10/20_What_Do_We_Make_of_Miracles_I_Believe._Help_My_Unbelief!.html
What Dow We Say to Skeptics? Seeking "More Than"
Genesis 11:27-12:5
October 2, 2011
Now these are the descendants of Terah. Terah was the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran was the father of Lot. Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans. Abram and Nahor took wives; the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife was Milcah. She was the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah. Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.
Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and they went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there. The days of Terah were two hundred and five years; and Terah died in Haran.
Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’
So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan.
Back in December of 1946, a businessman named Stuart Luhan checked into the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Luhan regularly made trips there, and his custom was to get a room on the 10th floor so that he could be away from the street noises. Settling in for the night he looked forward to a good night’s rest before doing business the next day. So off he went to sleep.
Sometime in the early morning hours he woke up and saw a red glow out the window. Something was wrong. He heard a commotion outside his door and opened it to find the hallway thick with black smoke. Shutting the door he began to panic. He opened the window to see if there was a way down, but looking down from ten stories only increased his panic. What should he do? He couldn’t go into the hallway, and he couldn’t jump. Not knowing what else to do he retreated to the center of his room and tried to practice something he had been doing every morning for years, which is to calm himself and pray.
Seeking God’s help he said, “God, I put myself into your care and keeping. Let your presence be my fortress. I await your instructions on how to get out of this crisis.” He felt calm, despite the fact that the other voices in the hotel were becoming more frantic. Soon, he sensed a voice, a presence, telling him to calmly get dressed. Then he was to make a rope out of the sheets, blanket, and bedspread. He was getting ready to tie it to the center post on the window and throw the rope down, but from the same presence he sensed, “No. Not yet. Trust me.” He waited. Panic clutched at him, trying to get him to give in, but he stayed calm. After what seemed like forever he sensed the voice saying, “Now! Put the rope out the window and climb out.” As he did, Luhan recited words from the psalms: “God is my life and my salvation. I shall not fear. God is my life and salvation. I shall not fear.”
Climbing down he only reached the eighth floor. There was nowhere to go. Then he saw a fireman extending his ladder to the eighth floor, but it was too far away. Climbing up the ladder, the fireman saw Luhan, signaled him, and swung a rope hanging from the window above. He swung it once, and Luhan missed. Again he swung it, but it was just out of his reach. Finally a third time he swung it, and Luhan caught it. Twisting it around his right hand, he let go of his homemade rope and swung to the fireman, who caught him. Looking back he noticed that his homemade rope had caught fire and was now falling toward the earth. Luhan realized that if he had gone out too soon, he would have hung there to the point at which he couldn’t hold on any longer. He would have died. If he had waited, his own rope would have burned, causing him to fall and die. The timing was absolutely perfect.
How do you explain something like this? For a skeptic the answer is that there was no involvement by God. What Luhan experienced was just some inner working of the brain guiding him out of a fire. So, do you think Luhan was just ignorant in thinking that God was helping him, or are skeptics arrogant in thinking no God exists to have helped him?
One of the foundational problems of all humans, not only skeptics, is to think that at our present time in history we know all there is to know. Humans have done this in every day and age. We suffer from an arrogance of sophistication. At any age we think we’re so sophisticated, and that people of the past were so ignorant. The Medieval church suffered from arrogance of sophistication when it came how they treated people like Copernicus and Galileo. Those two recognized that the earth and other planets revolved around the sun. But the Church believed that it’s theological views held all the answers. The early church was often arrogant in its ignorance
This same kind of arrogance was present in the development of Communism. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and all the rest were so sure that they understood human nature, and that both religion and Capitalism were remnants of flawed, past thinking. And in their ignorance they created a system that oppressed creativity, ingenuity, and life. Whether we’re talking about the Industrial Revolution, flat earthers, or African colonialism, the people of those ages were convinced that they knew what there was to know, and that made them right. We humans don't like not knowing, and so we're really good at assuming that our present explanations are THE explanations.
The fact is that there are things that happen in life that can't be explained fully either by people of science or by people of faith. We’ve had some great examples of this here at Calvin Church. Many of you picked up copies of our “Calvin Stories” that we made available last year during Lent. These are stories of God experiences that people of our church have had. Let me share one of those stories with you by Bill Frank. Those of you who know Bill know that he’s not one given to flights of fancy. He’s president of Busch International, and an engineer by training and temperament. He headed up our building expansion program, and his calmness, insightfulness, and level-headedness made it an incredible success.
When Bill’s two boys, Wendell and Garrett, were 8 and 9, he took them hiking with his friend (also named Bill) and Bill’s son Robby. They planned to go to McConnell’s Mill State Park, but then decided to go further upstream to Kennedy Mill. Kennedy Mill is a beautiful, secluded spot on private property bordering the Slippery Rock Creek a mile or so further upstream. There was a swimming hole that Bill hoped to take them all to, one he had gone to as a kid.
The walk was further than he had remembered and the boys were getting tired and bored. When they finally reached the swimming hole, it was less protected from the fast moving water than he had remembered. The water was deep and the rapids too close. He had to say no to swimming. The boys all whined, but Bill had to make the smart call that a responsible dad should make.
He knew that they were disappointed, so he kept an eye out for a fun, but safer, place where they could swim. He saw a neat looking spot where water shot over a flat rock and dropped into a little whirlpool. He told his boys to wait on the bank with Bill and Robby while he jumped in and checked it out. He stood on a submerged rock just off shore and told them to jump in. Both boys jumped in. Soon it became apparent that the water was faster than expected. Bill slipped on the moss-covered rock, and the three of them fell back into the water just outside of the rocks that protected the little whirlpool from the main current. Bill couldn’t touch bottom, and told the boys to swim for the rocks and shore. There was a strong eddy current, and no matter how hard they swam, they couldn’t make any forward progress. He tried to push one with each hand, but couldn’t swim hard enough without using his arms.
Bill’s friend Bill jumped in and swam to the boys. He was closest to Wendell and each man pushed a kid and swam hard, but they could make no progress against the strong current. They tried over and over. Bill’s heart was racing. Bill’s friend went under twice as Wendell grabbed him for help. Suddenly everyone was in a struggle for life or death. Bill’s friend went under twice more and had to push away from Wendell. He yelled, choking, that he was drowning and began to swim desperately for shore.
Bill knew that we were in serious trouble. He thought about his wife, Karen, and how terrible it would be to tell her the kids were dead, and it was his fault. He looked to the sky and said a prayer. He screamed for the boys to swim for shore. They heard the seriousness in his voice. Somehow they summoned more energy and swam hard, but again made no headway against the current. Then it happened.
He didn’t see God’s physical hand, but he clearly saw the impression that it made in the water and against the boys’ backs. Their shoulders bent forward with his push. The water broke in front of them in a gentle “V,” like you would see in front of a canoe under power. Their flailing strokes suddenly became effective and they both moved steadily together toward shore. He watched as their hands sunk into the soft mud. Then he swam.
As they crawled together up the mud bank, all were in a state of shock. They had been in the water maybe a few minutes, but everything had changed. Bill had seen God’s hand.
A skeptic might say that Bill just helped the kids to summon the strength to swim harder. Those of us with faith know that sometimes things happen beyond our understanding.
Marie Campbell, another member of our church, also had a hard-to-explain story. She was living outside of Boulder, Colorado at the time, and was part of a Bible study group called the Bible Study Fellowship. One particular evening in December they had studied the story of the stoning of Stephen Acts 7:54-56.
As she drove home with her 3-year-old son along Boulder Canyon to her home in Sugarloaf Mountain, she was pondering the teaching of Stephen experiencing the presence of God as “he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” She wondered, “is there truly is a living presence of God, or is it all about rules and regulations and reading the Bible religiously?”
The road through Boulder Canyon was adjacent to Boulder Creek. It was about a 20-foot drop off the edge of the road, and in the 1970’s they did not have many sections of the road with guardrails. As she went around a curve, the sun dipped behind a mountain and the road turned into black ice. Her car was sliding toward the edge of Boulder Creek, and there was nothing she could do to change the course. She remembered the lesson of the day and decided to pray to God to “be with me” like God seemed to be with Stephen that day.
Suddenly everything went into slow motion. The car was flying off a cliff and into Boulder Creek, headed for the huge boulders below, but it was as if time slowed to a crawl. She heard in her mind a very clear and authoritative voice saying, “Let go of the steering wheel.” She inwardly chuckled at the picture of her holding tightly to a steering wheel with a car that was now in mid-air.
As she let go of the steering wheel, a huge presence and peace came upon her. It felt as if the car was now sitting on the palm of a hand that lowered it into Boulder Creek. The car came to a rest in the almost dry creek. They were alive and unharmed. Suddenly she remembered that there was a power station further up the creek, and at any moment they could release massive amounts of water into the creek.
She jumped out of the car and opened the back seat door to get her son out of his car seat. She yelled, “Get out, get out!” He later remembered it differently, as “Mean Mom made him leave my favorite stuffed animal in the car.”
The next problem was that she had on heeled boots and they were both standing 20 feet down from the road. Did anyone see her going over? How would she get up the steep bank with her son?
Looking up she saw three men peering over the edge. A Public Service truck had been behind her and had seen the whole thing. They had already gotten out ropes and where ready to help in anyway they could. The men kept saying, “I can’t believe it. That car looks like nothing happened to it after all that!” They pulled both up to safety and were able to radio for a tow truck.
Having been rescued, she began to worry about the next thing: how would she get home? At that moment her next-door neighbor, driving by, saw her and pulled over. He said, “I usually never travel down town this time of day, but today I just felt an urge to go to Boulder. And then I saw you standing there.”
The next time she went to the Bible study and told her story, a lady in the group smiled and said, “Marie, that is not the end of the story… My husband came home from work and told me how his three co-workers could not believe what had happened to them on the road up to Nederland. Her husband had heard the story through his wife and was able to tell them about Bible Study Fellowship and how they now believe in a living, active God. Those men signed up for the Bible Study Group because they wanted to learn more.”
Later, when Marie got the car from the shop, the mechanic asked who was driving it. “I was,” she said. He looked at her in a weird way and said “The front struts hit with such an impact that whoever was holding onto the steering wheel would have had two broken arms. Your arms look fine.”
What do you do with stories like these? I've grown up with feet in two realms: the realm of rationality through my background in psychology and social work, and the realm of religion and spirituality. I’ve learned to look at life both through human logic and with an appreciation for the “more than,” the beyond. I've learned over time that the biggest problem so many skeptics have—when faced with events that go beyond, with events that are "more than”—is that they don't know what to do with them because the "more than" is beyond their thinking. But we're fortunate that we have a faith that follows those who were open to the beyond, to the "more than."
We're fortunate that we follow folks like Abraham, who didn't question God's calling to go into the wilderness. He simply followed and discovered a God who goes beyond our normal, rational thinking.
So what do we say to skeptics in the face of their doubts about God interevening in life? We simply tell them that we are open to answers that go beyond our awareness, and because we don’t have to have nice, neat answers, we are free to see things that are more than humans can understand.
Amen
October 2, 2011
Now these are the descendants of Terah. Terah was the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran was the father of Lot. Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans. Abram and Nahor took wives; the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife was Milcah. She was the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah. Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.
Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and they went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there. The days of Terah were two hundred and five years; and Terah died in Haran.
Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’
So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan.
Back in December of 1946, a businessman named Stuart Luhan checked into the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Luhan regularly made trips there, and his custom was to get a room on the 10th floor so that he could be away from the street noises. Settling in for the night he looked forward to a good night’s rest before doing business the next day. So off he went to sleep.
Sometime in the early morning hours he woke up and saw a red glow out the window. Something was wrong. He heard a commotion outside his door and opened it to find the hallway thick with black smoke. Shutting the door he began to panic. He opened the window to see if there was a way down, but looking down from ten stories only increased his panic. What should he do? He couldn’t go into the hallway, and he couldn’t jump. Not knowing what else to do he retreated to the center of his room and tried to practice something he had been doing every morning for years, which is to calm himself and pray.
Seeking God’s help he said, “God, I put myself into your care and keeping. Let your presence be my fortress. I await your instructions on how to get out of this crisis.” He felt calm, despite the fact that the other voices in the hotel were becoming more frantic. Soon, he sensed a voice, a presence, telling him to calmly get dressed. Then he was to make a rope out of the sheets, blanket, and bedspread. He was getting ready to tie it to the center post on the window and throw the rope down, but from the same presence he sensed, “No. Not yet. Trust me.” He waited. Panic clutched at him, trying to get him to give in, but he stayed calm. After what seemed like forever he sensed the voice saying, “Now! Put the rope out the window and climb out.” As he did, Luhan recited words from the psalms: “God is my life and my salvation. I shall not fear. God is my life and salvation. I shall not fear.”
Climbing down he only reached the eighth floor. There was nowhere to go. Then he saw a fireman extending his ladder to the eighth floor, but it was too far away. Climbing up the ladder, the fireman saw Luhan, signaled him, and swung a rope hanging from the window above. He swung it once, and Luhan missed. Again he swung it, but it was just out of his reach. Finally a third time he swung it, and Luhan caught it. Twisting it around his right hand, he let go of his homemade rope and swung to the fireman, who caught him. Looking back he noticed that his homemade rope had caught fire and was now falling toward the earth. Luhan realized that if he had gone out too soon, he would have hung there to the point at which he couldn’t hold on any longer. He would have died. If he had waited, his own rope would have burned, causing him to fall and die. The timing was absolutely perfect.
How do you explain something like this? For a skeptic the answer is that there was no involvement by God. What Luhan experienced was just some inner working of the brain guiding him out of a fire. So, do you think Luhan was just ignorant in thinking that God was helping him, or are skeptics arrogant in thinking no God exists to have helped him?
One of the foundational problems of all humans, not only skeptics, is to think that at our present time in history we know all there is to know. Humans have done this in every day and age. We suffer from an arrogance of sophistication. At any age we think we’re so sophisticated, and that people of the past were so ignorant. The Medieval church suffered from arrogance of sophistication when it came how they treated people like Copernicus and Galileo. Those two recognized that the earth and other planets revolved around the sun. But the Church believed that it’s theological views held all the answers. The early church was often arrogant in its ignorance
This same kind of arrogance was present in the development of Communism. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and all the rest were so sure that they understood human nature, and that both religion and Capitalism were remnants of flawed, past thinking. And in their ignorance they created a system that oppressed creativity, ingenuity, and life. Whether we’re talking about the Industrial Revolution, flat earthers, or African colonialism, the people of those ages were convinced that they knew what there was to know, and that made them right. We humans don't like not knowing, and so we're really good at assuming that our present explanations are THE explanations.
The fact is that there are things that happen in life that can't be explained fully either by people of science or by people of faith. We’ve had some great examples of this here at Calvin Church. Many of you picked up copies of our “Calvin Stories” that we made available last year during Lent. These are stories of God experiences that people of our church have had. Let me share one of those stories with you by Bill Frank. Those of you who know Bill know that he’s not one given to flights of fancy. He’s president of Busch International, and an engineer by training and temperament. He headed up our building expansion program, and his calmness, insightfulness, and level-headedness made it an incredible success.
When Bill’s two boys, Wendell and Garrett, were 8 and 9, he took them hiking with his friend (also named Bill) and Bill’s son Robby. They planned to go to McConnell’s Mill State Park, but then decided to go further upstream to Kennedy Mill. Kennedy Mill is a beautiful, secluded spot on private property bordering the Slippery Rock Creek a mile or so further upstream. There was a swimming hole that Bill hoped to take them all to, one he had gone to as a kid.
The walk was further than he had remembered and the boys were getting tired and bored. When they finally reached the swimming hole, it was less protected from the fast moving water than he had remembered. The water was deep and the rapids too close. He had to say no to swimming. The boys all whined, but Bill had to make the smart call that a responsible dad should make.
He knew that they were disappointed, so he kept an eye out for a fun, but safer, place where they could swim. He saw a neat looking spot where water shot over a flat rock and dropped into a little whirlpool. He told his boys to wait on the bank with Bill and Robby while he jumped in and checked it out. He stood on a submerged rock just off shore and told them to jump in. Both boys jumped in. Soon it became apparent that the water was faster than expected. Bill slipped on the moss-covered rock, and the three of them fell back into the water just outside of the rocks that protected the little whirlpool from the main current. Bill couldn’t touch bottom, and told the boys to swim for the rocks and shore. There was a strong eddy current, and no matter how hard they swam, they couldn’t make any forward progress. He tried to push one with each hand, but couldn’t swim hard enough without using his arms.
Bill’s friend Bill jumped in and swam to the boys. He was closest to Wendell and each man pushed a kid and swam hard, but they could make no progress against the strong current. They tried over and over. Bill’s heart was racing. Bill’s friend went under twice as Wendell grabbed him for help. Suddenly everyone was in a struggle for life or death. Bill’s friend went under twice more and had to push away from Wendell. He yelled, choking, that he was drowning and began to swim desperately for shore.
Bill knew that we were in serious trouble. He thought about his wife, Karen, and how terrible it would be to tell her the kids were dead, and it was his fault. He looked to the sky and said a prayer. He screamed for the boys to swim for shore. They heard the seriousness in his voice. Somehow they summoned more energy and swam hard, but again made no headway against the current. Then it happened.
He didn’t see God’s physical hand, but he clearly saw the impression that it made in the water and against the boys’ backs. Their shoulders bent forward with his push. The water broke in front of them in a gentle “V,” like you would see in front of a canoe under power. Their flailing strokes suddenly became effective and they both moved steadily together toward shore. He watched as their hands sunk into the soft mud. Then he swam.
As they crawled together up the mud bank, all were in a state of shock. They had been in the water maybe a few minutes, but everything had changed. Bill had seen God’s hand.
A skeptic might say that Bill just helped the kids to summon the strength to swim harder. Those of us with faith know that sometimes things happen beyond our understanding.
Marie Campbell, another member of our church, also had a hard-to-explain story. She was living outside of Boulder, Colorado at the time, and was part of a Bible study group called the Bible Study Fellowship. One particular evening in December they had studied the story of the stoning of Stephen Acts 7:54-56.
As she drove home with her 3-year-old son along Boulder Canyon to her home in Sugarloaf Mountain, she was pondering the teaching of Stephen experiencing the presence of God as “he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” She wondered, “is there truly is a living presence of God, or is it all about rules and regulations and reading the Bible religiously?”
The road through Boulder Canyon was adjacent to Boulder Creek. It was about a 20-foot drop off the edge of the road, and in the 1970’s they did not have many sections of the road with guardrails. As she went around a curve, the sun dipped behind a mountain and the road turned into black ice. Her car was sliding toward the edge of Boulder Creek, and there was nothing she could do to change the course. She remembered the lesson of the day and decided to pray to God to “be with me” like God seemed to be with Stephen that day.
Suddenly everything went into slow motion. The car was flying off a cliff and into Boulder Creek, headed for the huge boulders below, but it was as if time slowed to a crawl. She heard in her mind a very clear and authoritative voice saying, “Let go of the steering wheel.” She inwardly chuckled at the picture of her holding tightly to a steering wheel with a car that was now in mid-air.
As she let go of the steering wheel, a huge presence and peace came upon her. It felt as if the car was now sitting on the palm of a hand that lowered it into Boulder Creek. The car came to a rest in the almost dry creek. They were alive and unharmed. Suddenly she remembered that there was a power station further up the creek, and at any moment they could release massive amounts of water into the creek.
She jumped out of the car and opened the back seat door to get her son out of his car seat. She yelled, “Get out, get out!” He later remembered it differently, as “Mean Mom made him leave my favorite stuffed animal in the car.”
The next problem was that she had on heeled boots and they were both standing 20 feet down from the road. Did anyone see her going over? How would she get up the steep bank with her son?
Looking up she saw three men peering over the edge. A Public Service truck had been behind her and had seen the whole thing. They had already gotten out ropes and where ready to help in anyway they could. The men kept saying, “I can’t believe it. That car looks like nothing happened to it after all that!” They pulled both up to safety and were able to radio for a tow truck.
Having been rescued, she began to worry about the next thing: how would she get home? At that moment her next-door neighbor, driving by, saw her and pulled over. He said, “I usually never travel down town this time of day, but today I just felt an urge to go to Boulder. And then I saw you standing there.”
The next time she went to the Bible study and told her story, a lady in the group smiled and said, “Marie, that is not the end of the story… My husband came home from work and told me how his three co-workers could not believe what had happened to them on the road up to Nederland. Her husband had heard the story through his wife and was able to tell them about Bible Study Fellowship and how they now believe in a living, active God. Those men signed up for the Bible Study Group because they wanted to learn more.”
Later, when Marie got the car from the shop, the mechanic asked who was driving it. “I was,” she said. He looked at her in a weird way and said “The front struts hit with such an impact that whoever was holding onto the steering wheel would have had two broken arms. Your arms look fine.”
What do you do with stories like these? I've grown up with feet in two realms: the realm of rationality through my background in psychology and social work, and the realm of religion and spirituality. I’ve learned to look at life both through human logic and with an appreciation for the “more than,” the beyond. I've learned over time that the biggest problem so many skeptics have—when faced with events that go beyond, with events that are "more than”—is that they don't know what to do with them because the "more than" is beyond their thinking. But we're fortunate that we have a faith that follows those who were open to the beyond, to the "more than."
We're fortunate that we follow folks like Abraham, who didn't question God's calling to go into the wilderness. He simply followed and discovered a God who goes beyond our normal, rational thinking.
So what do we say to skeptics in the face of their doubts about God interevening in life? We simply tell them that we are open to answers that go beyond our awareness, and because we don’t have to have nice, neat answers, we are free to see things that are more than humans can understand.
Amen
What Do We Say to Skeptics? Mythos and Logos
Genesis 3:1-7
September 25, 2011
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’“ But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
Last summer I had an interesting, online conversation with a guy about the place of religion in public discourse. We struck up the conversation after I had written an op-ed piece for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, titled “God or No God Is Not the Only Choice.” I had written the piece in response to a previous op-ed piece in which an atheist wrote that religious people, when discussing and debating policy in the public sphere, should leave their religious ideas out of the dialogue. He was basically saying that Christians should check their religion when it comes to private matters of faith. We should only engage in religion-neutral language in politics.
My article argued against that, asking how we can ask someone to put aside perspectives and rationales that were developed out of their religious convictions. Why should a seemingly scientific logic and rational be allowed, while asking religious people to put aside thoughts that come from other sources as well?
When you write op-ed pieces, you expect a lot of emails afterwards. My articles in the past have almost always appeared in the Sunday paper, so often when I get home from church there are lots of emails waiting for me. Typically about 60% are nice, thanking me for the articles. Another 30 are respectful, telling me where I went wrong. Then there are the 10% that are rude, telling me how stupid I am. Fortunately, the original email I mentioned from the man above was one of the 30%. He was an atheist, and he was adamant that because religious and theological thought is rooted in thinking that lacks logic and rationality, it should be left by the wayside. He wrote, “Faith and belief, by their very definitions, mean accepting things without sufficient evidence. And that's fine in the privacy of your own home. But should we decide court cases without sufficient evidence? Should we decide to go to war without sufficient evidence? Should we pass financial laws without sufficient evidence? Tell me what topical issue or policy debate cannot be resolved empirically and morally without needing to invoke metaphysical beliefs. It may sound cold, and it may not be aesthetically pleasing, but when it comes to public discourse and policy we should stick to ‘just the facts.’"
I’m certainly not going to disagree with him about deciding court cases based on the facts and rational thinking. We should. Still, our religious convictions can lead us to offer mercy at times. But that’s not what our discussion was really about. He assumed that being religious meant being irrational, illogical. What I ended up arguing with him about was how truly logical and rational any of us can be. The fact is that as logical and rational as we might like to be, we aren’t built for merely that kind of thinking. Humans were created with the ability to think logically and rationally, but we were also created to think in another way. The ancient Greeks, Jews, Romans, Persians, and others understood that we humans balance two ways of thinking. All of them certainly embraced logic, but they also embraced “myth,” and they knew that myth opened us to a whole different way of thinking.
Quite simply, ancient people balanced both logos (or rational logic) and mythos (mythological thinking). The problem we have in the modern world is that we are so logos-oriented, we’re so oriented to logical, rational, empirical, and scientific thinking that we don’t see the need for mythological thinking. As a result, we dismiss mythological thinking. For example, whenever you hear that something is a “myth,” what does that mean to you? It means that something isn’t true, right?
We think that because we are stuck in a logos-only thinking culture that prizes logic and rationality. We only see value in logic. But ancient people knew that wisdom isn’t truly gained through rational thinking. Wisdom is gained from myth that moves us into a deeper kind of wisdom.
So what’s the difference between logos and mythos? Logos, as I’ve already said, is logical, rational thinking. It is the thinking that undergirds so many of the wonderful technological miracles that we’ve had in the past 500 years. Logos underlies things that we take for granted today: rockets, electric power, digital music, movies, television, cameras, telephones, cellphones, computers, houses, buildings, cars, and everything else surrounding us on a day-to-day basis. Without logos, we cannot have all the conveniences we love. Logos is good, and logical thinking is good, especially in the religious and theological spheres. Logos helps us to think things through, and to test ideas. The Bible embraces logos in John’s gospel, where he calls Jesus the Logos.
The problem with logos is that it advances knowledge, but not necessarily wisdom. Logos doesn’t tell us how we should use all of those technological advances. It doesn’t tell us how to balance life, it doesn’t tell us how to love, it doesn’t tell us how to care. People come up with logical reasons for these, but they are justifications, not wisdom.
Mythos is a more ancient, symbolic, metaphorical way of coming to understand life. Mythos underlies stories, legends, art, music, poetry, and everything else that tries to communicate something deeper. It taps us into a way of understanding that we can’t access through logos. It tells us how to live, it tells us about God, and it tells us about life. The stories of Genesis aren’t really trying to teach us history. History is a discipline developed out of logos. In fact (and this may be hard to grasp), history as a discipline really didn’t exist till the Age of Enlightenment, beginning in the 17th century. People didn’t study history, or even really write history, till the economy was such that people could carve out a living studying history. To do so requires time to read, time to investigate, and time to study. Prior to the Age of Enlightenment few had time for any of those things. Coming out of the Dark Ages, and the Medieval period, it was hard enough for people to survive. Ancient people didn’t think historically. They though mythologically.
The writers of Genesis were more interested in mythos than in history. They were trying to teach us about God and us. They were telling us, in the story, that God wants to walk among us and live in a state of blissful innocence, but we don’t want that. We want more than were ready for. So when God says, “Don’t eat of that fruit,” or when God says don’t in general, we become consumed with it. It also tells us of our tendency to blame others for what we do. When Adam gets caught, he blames Eve. And when she gets caught, she blames the serpent. The poor serpent had no one left to blame. The story also tells us that we constantly reject bliss and peace, instead pursuing ways of life that lead to struggle and pain. But the rest of the Bible teaches us how to live in the midst of that struggling and pain.
In the end, logos gives us knowledge, but mythos gives us wisdom. Wisdom without knowledge makes us misguided, while knowledge without wisdom makes us fools
So what does this teach us about how to deal with skeptics? Skeptics want us to cut off one whole way of thinking when we talk with them. They want us to stick just to logos, which is what they value, while dismissing mythos, which is part of what we value. Ironically, many of them do value mythos in the form of movies and video games. Many love movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and The Matrix, which are all films that appeal to mythos. But what they don’t like is ancient mythos.
So what do you say to skeptics? Well,… you can talk extensively about mythos and logos, but they’re going to probably dismiss you. What I would simply say is that our faith is rooted in something beyond just human logic and knowledge. We’re rooted also in ancient wisdom.
Amen.
September 25, 2011
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’“ But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
Last summer I had an interesting, online conversation with a guy about the place of religion in public discourse. We struck up the conversation after I had written an op-ed piece for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, titled “God or No God Is Not the Only Choice.” I had written the piece in response to a previous op-ed piece in which an atheist wrote that religious people, when discussing and debating policy in the public sphere, should leave their religious ideas out of the dialogue. He was basically saying that Christians should check their religion when it comes to private matters of faith. We should only engage in religion-neutral language in politics.
My article argued against that, asking how we can ask someone to put aside perspectives and rationales that were developed out of their religious convictions. Why should a seemingly scientific logic and rational be allowed, while asking religious people to put aside thoughts that come from other sources as well?
When you write op-ed pieces, you expect a lot of emails afterwards. My articles in the past have almost always appeared in the Sunday paper, so often when I get home from church there are lots of emails waiting for me. Typically about 60% are nice, thanking me for the articles. Another 30 are respectful, telling me where I went wrong. Then there are the 10% that are rude, telling me how stupid I am. Fortunately, the original email I mentioned from the man above was one of the 30%. He was an atheist, and he was adamant that because religious and theological thought is rooted in thinking that lacks logic and rationality, it should be left by the wayside. He wrote, “Faith and belief, by their very definitions, mean accepting things without sufficient evidence. And that's fine in the privacy of your own home. But should we decide court cases without sufficient evidence? Should we decide to go to war without sufficient evidence? Should we pass financial laws without sufficient evidence? Tell me what topical issue or policy debate cannot be resolved empirically and morally without needing to invoke metaphysical beliefs. It may sound cold, and it may not be aesthetically pleasing, but when it comes to public discourse and policy we should stick to ‘just the facts.’"
I’m certainly not going to disagree with him about deciding court cases based on the facts and rational thinking. We should. Still, our religious convictions can lead us to offer mercy at times. But that’s not what our discussion was really about. He assumed that being religious meant being irrational, illogical. What I ended up arguing with him about was how truly logical and rational any of us can be. The fact is that as logical and rational as we might like to be, we aren’t built for merely that kind of thinking. Humans were created with the ability to think logically and rationally, but we were also created to think in another way. The ancient Greeks, Jews, Romans, Persians, and others understood that we humans balance two ways of thinking. All of them certainly embraced logic, but they also embraced “myth,” and they knew that myth opened us to a whole different way of thinking.
Quite simply, ancient people balanced both logos (or rational logic) and mythos (mythological thinking). The problem we have in the modern world is that we are so logos-oriented, we’re so oriented to logical, rational, empirical, and scientific thinking that we don’t see the need for mythological thinking. As a result, we dismiss mythological thinking. For example, whenever you hear that something is a “myth,” what does that mean to you? It means that something isn’t true, right?
We think that because we are stuck in a logos-only thinking culture that prizes logic and rationality. We only see value in logic. But ancient people knew that wisdom isn’t truly gained through rational thinking. Wisdom is gained from myth that moves us into a deeper kind of wisdom.
So what’s the difference between logos and mythos? Logos, as I’ve already said, is logical, rational thinking. It is the thinking that undergirds so many of the wonderful technological miracles that we’ve had in the past 500 years. Logos underlies things that we take for granted today: rockets, electric power, digital music, movies, television, cameras, telephones, cellphones, computers, houses, buildings, cars, and everything else surrounding us on a day-to-day basis. Without logos, we cannot have all the conveniences we love. Logos is good, and logical thinking is good, especially in the religious and theological spheres. Logos helps us to think things through, and to test ideas. The Bible embraces logos in John’s gospel, where he calls Jesus the Logos.
The problem with logos is that it advances knowledge, but not necessarily wisdom. Logos doesn’t tell us how we should use all of those technological advances. It doesn’t tell us how to balance life, it doesn’t tell us how to love, it doesn’t tell us how to care. People come up with logical reasons for these, but they are justifications, not wisdom.
Mythos is a more ancient, symbolic, metaphorical way of coming to understand life. Mythos underlies stories, legends, art, music, poetry, and everything else that tries to communicate something deeper. It taps us into a way of understanding that we can’t access through logos. It tells us how to live, it tells us about God, and it tells us about life. The stories of Genesis aren’t really trying to teach us history. History is a discipline developed out of logos. In fact (and this may be hard to grasp), history as a discipline really didn’t exist till the Age of Enlightenment, beginning in the 17th century. People didn’t study history, or even really write history, till the economy was such that people could carve out a living studying history. To do so requires time to read, time to investigate, and time to study. Prior to the Age of Enlightenment few had time for any of those things. Coming out of the Dark Ages, and the Medieval period, it was hard enough for people to survive. Ancient people didn’t think historically. They though mythologically.
The writers of Genesis were more interested in mythos than in history. They were trying to teach us about God and us. They were telling us, in the story, that God wants to walk among us and live in a state of blissful innocence, but we don’t want that. We want more than were ready for. So when God says, “Don’t eat of that fruit,” or when God says don’t in general, we become consumed with it. It also tells us of our tendency to blame others for what we do. When Adam gets caught, he blames Eve. And when she gets caught, she blames the serpent. The poor serpent had no one left to blame. The story also tells us that we constantly reject bliss and peace, instead pursuing ways of life that lead to struggle and pain. But the rest of the Bible teaches us how to live in the midst of that struggling and pain.
In the end, logos gives us knowledge, but mythos gives us wisdom. Wisdom without knowledge makes us misguided, while knowledge without wisdom makes us fools
So what does this teach us about how to deal with skeptics? Skeptics want us to cut off one whole way of thinking when we talk with them. They want us to stick just to logos, which is what they value, while dismissing mythos, which is part of what we value. Ironically, many of them do value mythos in the form of movies and video games. Many love movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and The Matrix, which are all films that appeal to mythos. But what they don’t like is ancient mythos.
So what do you say to skeptics? Well,… you can talk extensively about mythos and logos, but they’re going to probably dismiss you. What I would simply say is that our faith is rooted in something beyond just human logic and knowledge. We’re rooted also in ancient wisdom.
Amen.
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