See It to Believe It, or Believe It to See It?

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See It to Believe It, or Believe It to See It?
Luke 24:36-49
April 26, 2009

While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, ‘Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’ And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.
Then he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.’

I don’t know about you, but I’m not really a puzzle person. A lot of people love puzzles, whether sudoku, crossword puzzles, word problems, and things like that. I like jigsaw puzzles, but that’s probably because they are more visual and less linear. I really don’t like linear puzzles. What I mean by that is that I just don’t’ resonate with the kind of logical progression that goes into these kinds of puzzles. They are linear in that you have to build one piece on another. My mind just doesn’t work that way. For whatever reason, I tend to be much better at seeing relationships between things as a whole, rather than looking at pieces.

As a result, I love optical illusions. You know what I’m talking about. I love pictures that look like one thing, but turn out also to be another. I’m fascinated with them. For instance, look at the illusion below:

For whatever reason, I’ve always loved this illusion. From one perspective it looks like an old woman looking down. From another it looks like a young woman with a feather in her hair, looking back and to the right.

How about this illusion? It’s a painting by Bev Doolittle titled “Pintos.” Her paintings are often of the western United States, and they often have optical illusions in them. Can you see the pintos in this picture?

Another favorite of mine is the one below that shows trees on a shoreline reflected in a lake or river:

What makes this picture so special? Flip it and you’ll see that what you thought was reality was actually the reflection. Finally, look at this one below. It’s a strange picture, but if you stare at it for thirty seconds, and then shut your eyes, you’ll slowly see the face of Jesus on the back of your eyelids.

You know what the key to seeing any of these things is? You have to be willing to believe in the possibility of seeing them in order to see them. With the first one, if you don’t believe that the other woman exists in the picture, then you probably won’t look for her. In the second, if you glance quickly, and don’t know to look for the pintos, you probably won’t see them. In the third, if you are unwilling to flip the page and look at the picture in another way, you won’t see reality. Finally, if you are unwilling to stare at the picture above and shut your eyes, you won’t see. You have to be willing to believe to see.

You now, in so many ways true faith is a matter of believing in order to see. The main problem of faith for so many people is that they want to see first, then believe. People want proof for everything before they are willing to accept. There’s something about modern Americans that make it hard for us to believe first and see later.

I think it has to do with the dominance of scientific thinking; a kind of thinking that is mainly a good kind of thinking. Scientific thinking has led to so many technological, medical, and industrial advances. Our economy, in many ways, is based on this kind of thinking. But when it comes to the life of faith, scientific thinking can kill faith. Scientific thinking is skeptical thinking. It says, “prove it first, then I’ll believe. Let me see it, then I’ll believe it.”

Scientific thinking kills faith because faith often requires belief in order to see. The kind of belief that leads to faith is related to the illusions above. The illusions above only reveal another reality once we are willing to look with belief. As long as we don’t believe, we also can’t see the deeper reality that God wants to reveal to us.

What’s ironic about scientific thinking is that even science understands at times that you have to believe in order to see. For instance, let’s take the problem of light. When light shines on our eyes, the reason we see the light is that small particles of light strike the rods and cones of our eyes, allowing us to see. So light is a collection of particles, right? It’s what scientists believed for a long time. Then a few pioneering scientists ran experiments and noticed that light moved in waves, much like electricity. I don’t mean waves of particles but electric waves. They noticed that under certain experimental conditions, light moved in waves. So, which is it? Is light a collection of particles, or is it a series of waves? It all depends on what you believe. You will see what you believe in when you run experiments. If you look for particles in your experiments, you’ll see particles. If you look for waves, you’ll find waves. If you look for both, you’ll find both. What you believe is what you’ll see, even scientifically.

When it comes to the life of faith, just like in much of physics, seeing isn’t believing. Believing is seeing. It all comes down to one simple question: What do you believe you see when you look at life around you? Do you see a Spirit-filled world, or just a world?

If you think like atheists and agnostics, then all you see is the world. The thing that bothers me about many atheists and agnostics isn’t that they don’t believe. What bothers me about many of them is that they believe in only what they see, and they believe that any who don’t share their limited view are somehow naïve and not too bright. Because they don’t believe what we believe, they can’t see what we see. Their response is to denigrate what we see by saying that we are only seeing what we believe. Well,… duh! So are they. They believe in a world absent of God, so that’s what they see. I’m able to see that world, too, if I shut off my belief. It’s just that I’m also able to see and experience more.

We still see what they see. They see a world of biology, chemistry, and physics. So do we. They see the world as it is. We see that world, too. There’s nothing that they see that we don’t. The difference is that we see more than they do, not less. We see what they see, but because we believe, we can also see the spiritual world permeating the physical world

The real difference is that we see a lot that they don’t see, because we believe. They can’t see because they don’t believe, and so their sight is limited. They certainly wouldn’t see what Tommy, an atheist, eventually saw once he believed.

Dr. John Powell, a professor of religion, originally got to know Tommy from a class he taught, titled “Theology and Faith.” Tommy was the kind of student that drives professors crazy. He was obviously bright, but also disruptive. Tommy was only taking the class because he had to take a religion class as part of his liberal arts education requirements. He didn’t believe, and so he figured that the class was pointless. He would sit in the back of the class, looking defiant. Often, when Dr. Powell made a point, Tommy would smirk, laugh, or say something snarky to the person sitting next to him, causing her or him to laugh. Powell began to really dislike Tommy, but he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to bring attention to Tommy’s antics, especially since so many people seemed to be engaged in the class.

On the day final papers were to be turned in, Tommy knocked on Powell’s door and handed him his final paper. He smirked a bit and said condescendingly, “Professor, do you think I’ll ever find God?” Powell just looked at Tommy in silence. As Tommy walked toward the door, Powell said, “No, Tommy, I don’t think you’ll ever find God. But God will find you.” Tommy paused, then walked out. Powell was relieved to be through with him.

Several years later, Powell heard that Tommy had terminal cancer. He often thought that he should contact Tommy, but life just kept getting in the way. Then one day he heard a knock on the door. It was Tommy, but he looked drastically different. Three years before he had been tall and robust, with long, black hair. He was now gaunt and thin, with tufts of scraggly hair on a mostly bald head. Tommy said, “Got a minute?”

Powell welcomed Tommy in, sat him down, and Tommy began to tell his story. He said, “You know, when I took your class I thought I knew everything. The whole time I was in college I thought I knew everything. When I graduated from college I was ready to make my mark. Then, one day, I found a lump in my groin. It turned out to be terminal cancer. I was devastated. It was then I turned to God. I begged God to care for me, to heal me, but nothing happened. I prayed and prayed, but nothing happened. It confirmed my thoughts: God wasn’t out there. But I still remembered something you once said in class: ‘The essential sadness of life is to have lived life without really having loved.’ I decided that even if God didn’t exist, I could love. So one evening, as my father read the paper, I asked to speak to him. I said to him, ‘Dad, I love you.’ He put down his paper, and he cried. We talked all night. I did the same with my mother, my sister, and with my friends. And then it happened. Remember what you said to me years ago when I turned in my final paper? You said that I wouldn’t find God, but God would find me. God found me in my love. The more I loved people, the more God found me. Now I experience God all around me everyday.”

Powell asked Tommy to come to his class and talk about his experiences. Tommy agreed. About a week before the class, though, Tommy called and said he was too sick to do it. But he did ask Dr. Powell to do him a favor. He said, “Tell the class about my story and about God finding me. Tell the world about me” (adapted from “Tell the World about Me,” by John Powell, in Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul, 1997).

We’ve been invited to see a world of possibility that is all around us. This is what the whole idea of the kingdom of heaven is all about. The kingdom of heaven isn’t a realm we enter when we die. It’s a reality we can see, experience, and live in right now,… if we believe.

The real question is: do you believe enough to see?

Amen.

Does History Get in the Way of Faith?

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1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you—unless you have come to believe in vain. For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe.

Paul! That filthy, stinking liar! What do you make of a man who would willingly dupe all of those people in Corinth, and, by extension, all of us today? He had to be a liar, right? How else would you explain his preposterous claim that Jesus, after being horrifically crucified, was resurrected? How else to explain his claim that Jesus appeared to Peter, then to the eleven apostles, then to 500 people (many of whom were alive when Paul wrote to the Corinthians), then to Jesus’ brother James, then to the eleven apostles again, and then to Paul himself? Has to be a liar, right? Human logic says so. God can’t possibly be stronger than the rules of Creation that God created when God created Creation, right? God isn’t powerful enough to overcome the laws of the universe, right?

A lot of people must think Paul lied because Jesus’ resurrection is a huuuuge sticking point for them. Many of these people have no problem with Jesus as having been a great man, mystic, or prophet, but the idea that God could overcome the laws of physics to resurrect Jesus seems ridiculous to them. I certainly used to think this way, back when I was much more mature ☺. When I went into seminary I struggled with the resurrection. I had so many doubts. It took a long time before I was able to say, “You know, I’m not sure all these people would have been such fanatical followers of Jesus if he hadn’t been resurrected. If the resurrection was false, wouldn’t he be pretty much be as well-followed today as John the Baptist is, which is to say, not at all?”

The resurrection is a problem for many. For example, a number of years ago I received an e-mail from a visitor to Calvin Church after the Easter service. I had preached on Jesus’ resurrection during the service. The person asked me, in a very polite way, whether I really believed in the resurrection. I said that I did, and I explained why. The response I got back was that the person was disappointed in me because I had seemed like such an intelligent, open-minded person. How could I then be naïve enough to believe in the resurrection? As far as he was concerned, this was a major flaw in my thinking. Suffice to say that he didn’t come back to Calvin Church after that.

So why do so many of us modern people have a problem with Jesus’ resurrection? I have a theory. Simply put, I believe that modern history and science get in the way of truth. We are very sophisticated in our thinking today, but with that sophistication comes some blinders. The main blinder is that we have a tendency to compartmentalize both our thinking and truth. What I mean by that is that we have a tendency to continually compartmentalize truth into categories, and as a result we get caught up in constant either/or thinking. You can see this everywhere in our culture. For instance, we think in rigid compartments such as:
• Republican or Democrat
• Scientific truth or religious truth
• Biology vs. chemistry vs. psychology vs. physics vs. religion
• Black or white or Hispanic or Asian or something else
• Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist
• Atheist or Religious

We’re so used to thinking in compartments that we don’t even realize how much we do it. There is a huge advantage of thinking in this way. The advantage is that it allows to separate things into categories so that we understand detail so much better. Our compartmentalization has led to huge advances in science and technology, allowing us to become world leaders in science and technology. The downside is that it has decreased our understanding of life, God, and the universe beyond the universe.

We may be more sophisticated scientifically and technologically than the people of Jesus’ day, but they were much more sophisticated than us in their ability to see life as a whole and as holy. People of Jesus’ time didn’t compartmentalize. They weren’t stuck in either/or thinking, but could maintain a both/and mindset. The temptation is to think that in their naivety they just weren’t very logical. If we think that way, we aren’t very logical. Where do you think modern, western logic was created? It was created in Greece through the writings of great philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle.

Now think about the people Paul was writing to: the Corinthians. Where was Corinth? In Greece. These people understood logical thinking. But they also understood that logic only went so far, and that there were mysteries that transcend human logic. So, for example, they weren’t caught up in seeking only historical truth, a truth based on the truth of “what happened.” When they spoke about what happened historically, they combined it with myth as a way of also showing what God was doing in history. They weren’t just seeking historical truth. They also wanted theological truth. They wanted to tell what God was doing in history. They didn’t compartmentalize. They integrated. But we are stuck in compartmentalization.

Think about some of the ways we compartmentalize today. For example, we tend to see the world as divided into the secular and the sacred. Where is the sacred? In church on Sundays, right? Where’s the secular? Everywhere else at all other times. That’s not the way people of Jesus’ day, and especially the early Christians, saw they world. They saw this world as a God-permeated world. They understood that there is no place that isn’t also bursting with the sacred.

We also tend to divide heaven from earth. We see heaven as the place of God, and the earth as the place of humans. We think that we only enter heaven when we die. That is not how the ancients saw it. They understood that we can live in the kingdom of heaven here on earth. They believed that when we live a life that is open to God in every part, we can live simultaneously on earth and in the kingdom of heaven in this life. From their perspective, there’s no separation between heaven and earth unless we cut heaven off from earth.

They also didn’t separate the ideal from the real. I hear so often people saying that religion is too idealistic, and that we have to live in real life. Neither the early Christians nor the Jews believed this. We can criticize the Sadducees and the Pharisees for a lot of things, but they did not separate the ideal from the real. They strove to bring the ideal and the real together. So did the early Christians, except in a different way. They weren’t focused on living out ideal laws in everyday life. They wanted to become open to God in everything, to let God become alive in them, so that God would allow the ideal to become real. As a result, they believed that Jesus was incarnated in everyone. They weren’t hung up on whether or not Jesus was resurrected so much as they were hung up on how to let the resurrected Christ become alive in them.

It wasn’t just the early church who believed this way. This way of seeing life has persisted throughout Christian history, but we have to constantly be reminded of this. For example, look at the words of St. Patrick’s great prayer, written in the 5th century. It conveys so much how the resurrected Christ can come alive in us today:
May Christ be with us,
Christ before us,
Christ in us,
Christ over us.
May your salvation, O Lord,
be always ours this day and forevermore….

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

If this doesn’t convey the idea of the resurrected Christ becoming alive in us, of heaven being united with the earthly, of the ideal becoming on with the real, and the sacred permeating the secular, I don’t know what does.

Patrick isn’t the only one who experienced the incarnation of the risen Christ in the world. George Ritchie also experienced this. I don’t know if you remember George Ritchie, but I’ve spoken of him before. His story is a remarkable one. Until he died in 2007, he was a prominent psychiatrist in Virginia and Alabama, gaining respect from colleagues around the country. But it was his experiences in the Army during World War II that gave him international renown. In 1941, when he was twenty years old, and a new recruit in the Army, he contracted pneumonia, which progressed to the point at which he died and was clinically dead for over twenty minutes. He had an experience in death in which he came face-to-face with Jesus, who then led him through an experience of hell, the future, and then of heaven. He wrote about these experiences in his book, Return from Tomorrow. This experience changed his life, leading him to live a life of love.

What I find really interesting about his story, and what connects with what I’m saying here, is what happened a few years later. He ended up being an Army medic in the follow-up operation to D-Day during World War II. At one point he was tending to a sergeant major named Jack, who had lost his leg by stepping on a land mine. Ritchie was amazed at how, when he visited him, Jack cared more about Ritchie than his own condition. Over the next few weeks Ritchie saw Jack caring for the other soldiers around him, even though he was hurt much worse than most of them. Ritchie also saw something strange about Jack. Jack’s face looked so familiar, but Ritchie couldn’t quite place him. Where had he seen him before? After a week or so he finally figured it out. The sergeant major seemed to have the same face as Jesus, even though their faces were completely different.

Months later Ritchie was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp to help the victims recover. He noticed one particular man, a Jew, who seemed to be in better health than the others, and who spent all his time helping the others. He discovered that this man had been in the camp longer than all the others, yet there was also something familiar about him. Again, Ritchie realized that this man, too, had the face of Jesus. Over time Ritchie discovered something else that was fascinating. If he chose to look with spiritual eyes, he could see the face of Jesus in people all around him: the concentration camp victims, the other soldiers and officers, the townspeople, and even in the German prisoners. He saw Jesus everywhere. He realized that Christ was incarnated in everyone and everything, and if he chose to look for Jesus in the faces all around him, he would see Jesus. What he discovered is very similar to something Mother Teresa used to say: that she saw the face of Jesus in the poor. She wasn’t just saying this. She meant it. She saw Jesus in the poor because she also understood what Paul was saying: Christ is everywhere. The point of all this is that we get so caught up in the question of whether or not Jesus was resurrected that we miss an even larger possibility, which is that Christ is incarnated in the world everywhere.

Let me close by opening you to possibilities this morning. Can you go beyond the more simplistic thinking to mystical thinking? We’ve all heard that Jesus died for our sins. I don’t have a problem with that belief, although I think there are other ways of understanding Jesus that take us waaaaay beyond this basic idea. Jesus not only died for our sin, but he died because of sin and forgave anyway. Jesus didn’t just die for sin. It was human sin that killed him. It was the sin of people who were religious but didn’t really want to hear God’s word and voice. So, in their sin, they killed him. And Jesus’ response: “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.”

Take a step even further. Jesus lived and was raised to break down barriers between God and us. The point of the resurrection was that God knew that there were barriers of misconception, guilt, and selfishness that separate us from God by causing us to cut God out of life. God wanted to overcome those barriers through Christ, so God broke down the barriers of sin and death through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. God showed us to that whatever barriers we think are there, they aren’t.

Go even further. Jesus was raised to let his Spirit enter and act through us. This is what we learn through the story of Pentecost. Jesus ascended into heaven and the Spirit of Christ descended into his followers. The Spirit became part of everyone who was open to it, and the Spirit still is part of us if we are open to it. The point is that Christ’s Spirit can become alive in us. Christ’s resurrection wasn’t just about forgiving sin. It was about opening us to the possibility of living with the Spirit, and letting the Spirit become alive in and through us.

Finally, Jesus was raised to unite us in body, mind, and soul with God. God wants to be united with us in everything and everyway. Jesus came to show us that way by saying that just as Christ is in us and we are in Christ, that the Father is in us and we are in the Father. There is a kind of divine union that’s possible with God.

The point is that when we get caught up in the question of the resurrection, we miss the possibility of everything else. Are you stuck in the debates, or are you able to open to what’s beyond the debates, to the truth that lives beyond history?

Amen.

Stars of the Faith: Thomas Merton

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Psalm 46
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear,
though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble with its tumult.
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved;
God will help it when the morning dawns.
The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice, the earth melts.
The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Come, behold the works of the Lord;
see what desolations he has brought on the earth.
He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.
"Be still, and know that I am God!
I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth."
The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.

Psalm 131
O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things too great
and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore.

Why do so many Christians only form a deep faith after going through some sort of terrible pain, loss, or struggle? It’s a theme that I see so often throughout Christian history. I see it here at Calvin Church. For example, I look out in this congregation, and I see something very different from what most people might see by looking at our congregation. I think that some people would look around and think that everyone here has it all so together. They’d look at how you are dressed, how you stand, and how you talk, and they would conclude that this is a place for perfect people, not for those who are struggling and hurting.

When I look out at you, I see something very different. I don’t see perfect people. I see wounded people trying their best to let God in, people trying to let God lead them to better ways of living. I see people who have cancer, who suffer from depression, who are going through a divorce, or who are single parents raising children. I see people who have lost their jobs or are worried they may lose their jobs. I see people who struggle with addiction, a number of whom have gone through rehab. I see people who have children who are addicted—some who’ve gone through rehab four or five times, and others whose lives are spinning out of control leaving their parents powerless to stop the decline. I see people who have done things in their lives they are neither proud of, nor are willing to share with others. I see people whose parents have died, brothers or sisters have died, spouses have died, or children have died. I see people who struggle, but have a hope that God will lead them to better ways. I’ve pretty much described about 70% of you in my last few sentences. I see this much more as a hospital for sinners than as a country club for the perfect.

In a lot of ways you all are so much like the great Christians we’ve been talking about during Lent. For example, Benedict of Nursia, who is considered the father of the monastic movement, lived during a time in which the western Roman Empire was crumbling all around him, causing everyone to struggle in poverty. Hannah Whitall Smith wrote about faith despite the fact that her husband was a constant adulterer, leaving her to raise children by herself. John Calvin’s mother died when he was six, his father was austere and overbearing, and he was ill most of his life. Hannah Hurnard struggled with a speech impediment and other ailments most of her life. And St. Francis was imprisoned for a year in a dank cell, and suffered with tuberculosis as well as hepatitis and trachoma throughout his life. All had their struggles, and all sought God throughout their lives.

When I think about our star for today, Thomas Merton, I see a man who fits this profile of people of deep faith perfectly. And he shows us that no matter how much we struggle, we can find God if we are open enough.

Thomas Merton was born in France in 1915 to a New Zealand artist father, and an American Quaker mother. They moved to France because Merton’s father wanted his art to be inspired by the places of his favorite artists, such as Monet, Manet, and Van Gogh. Thomas Merton was bright and gifted from an early age, but he also had to struggle through a tremendously unstable childhood. Due to the outbreak of World War I in 1916, his family moved to Long Island, where he lived with his grandparents. About age six his mother died. His father then left for several years to travel throughout Europe, pursuing his art, and leaving Thomas and his younger brother, John Paul, to be raised by grandparents. You can imagine that Merton grew up feeling a bit lost.

When he was ten, his father came back to get him, and they moved to France, where Thomas lived for several years. These were inspiring years in which Thomas drank in the French joie de vivre. At age thirteen, Thomas and his father moved to London, and Thomas attended school there, quickly gaining a reputation as a bright, precocious student. Then his father was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Soon afterwards, he died. Thomas was left feeling adrift.

He continued his schooling in Britain, and afterwards attended Cambridge University, one of the world’s great universities. Thomas never really settled in there. He spent as much time partying as he did studying, and after a year decided to take time off from school.

Never very religious, Thomas was pretty much an agnostic bordering on atheist. He didn’t think much about God. The seeds of change came when he spent several months in Rome, where he was exposed to some of the great churches and cathedrals. He had a special attraction to them, even if he didn’t think it was spiritual or religious. He would go into a cathedral and sit for hours, immersed in the silence and the atmosphere. He still didn’t think about God much, but he did think about the architecture and the impact it had on him, wondering why the stillness affected him so.

Soon it was decided that he would move back to the U.S. and attend Columbia University, studying literature and writing. At Columbia he had the opportunity to learn from some truly great professors, and he blossomed. It was also at this time that he secretly became a Roman Catholic. Despite his drinking and partying, he secretly attended mass every Sunday. Sometimes he would go with a hangover, but he went anyway. Then he decided to join the church, and secretly (from his friends, who were agnostics and proudly so) attended the catechism classes. Eventually he let everyone know that he had joined the church, and that the life of faith was important to him. His friends were dumbfounded. How could he, so bright and aware, be duped by the opiate of the masses? They were dumbfounded because many of them were Marxists. Merton himself became a communist for at least one party meeting. The meeting was devoted to a discussion of who didn’t attend the last meeting, and why. Merton realized that he couldn’t be a communist if this is all they cared about.

After graduation he got a job teaching literature at St. Bonaventure University in Olean, New York. While there he slowly sensed a calling to join a religious order—to become a monk or a friar. He even went so far as to approach the Franciscans at St. Bonaventure about entering the novitiate (a training program for monks-to-be). They initially accepted him. Then he got cold feet, worrying that he hadn’t come completely clean about his previous life. So he went back to the abbot and told him in detail everything about his life. You know the old joke about the man who gave his confession, and it turned the priest hair white? I think Merton’s story had that effect on the abbot. The abbot got back to Merton and told him that they no longer had space for him. Merton was crushed.

Speaking to friends, he was told about a Trappist monastery (part of the Cistercian order) in Gethsemane, Kentucky. So on December 10, 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, and exactly 27 years before his death, Merton joined the Abbey of Gethsemane, becoming a novice, and then a monk.

In the monastery, Merton thrived. His abbot saw in him a unique gift for writing, and so encouraged Merton to write about his own spiritual life and insights. The first book he wrote was Seven Story Mountain, a memoir of his early life until his conversion. When it came out in the last 1940s, it changed many lives. This wasn’t the story of a saint. It was the story of an all-too-human man who lived as much of us have, yet who chose a life devoted to God. Over the course of 27 years, Merton wrote close to fifty books, many of which transformed Christianity. He was a monk who lived in silence in a small hermitage, spending his days praying, worshiping, and writing, and from a small abbey in Kentucky, Merton changed the Christian world.

During this time, churches of all denominations had become very functional. The focus had become on doing good deeds for Christ, going to church out of obligation, doing all the right things and looking like the right kind of people. Merton changed this by writing about the spiritual life—the importance of solitude, silence, prayer, personal reflection, discernment, and commitment to a life of spiritual growth. Many people have written about these things over the years, including me. But Merton was the first to really recover this focus on prayer and spirituality. He not only influenced other monks, nuns, friars, and sisters, but he influenced Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, and Evangelicals. And he did it simply—by writing about his own personal struggles, while also sharing basic insights into life gleaned from time spent in prayer and contemplation.

Some of his greatest books are books such as The Wisdom of the Desert, Thoughts in Solitude, New Seeds of Contemplation, and Life and Holiness. He was criticized by many Protestants for being merely a “person of prayer” who wasn’t on the front lines of ministry. Yet his writings allowed those same Protestants to reconnect spiritually with God in the midst of ministries that they had pushed God out of.

Thomas Merton made his own life a spiritual laboratory of prayer, and out of that he shared with others what he had learned. Let me close out this sermon by sharing with you two of the greatest gifts he gave back to Christianity. He led Christians back to meditation and contemplative prayer.

What is meditation? For Christians it is reading scripture or spiritual writings in a slow, prayerful, reflective, and open way that opens us to what God has to say to us through them. When we meditate on a piece of writing (we can also meditate on nature, life, and events, but often Merton’s focus was on scripture) we read it slowly, and then mull it over, reflecting prayerfully on what it says to us about life, God, and ourselves. We think about what the writing means, how it calls us to change our lives, and how we are to apply these insights into our lives.

Contemplative prayer is different (it is similar to what the Buddhists call “meditation”). Contemplation means sitting in silence with God as we let go of thoughts, agendas, emotions, insights, concerns, anxieties, and everything else. We simply sit with God in openness and stillness. It is the embodiment of our passages for this morning, where we hear,
Be still, and know that I am God!...
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

Merton believed that it was in solitude and silence that we hear God most clearly. He believed that our lives developed a deeper connection with God when we stilled, calmed, and quieted our souls. What I want to do for the rest of this morning is to introduce you to some of his thoughts, and in the process lead you into meditation and contemplation. First, I want to share with you this quote, and I’d like you to meditate on it. It’s from his book, Thoughts in Solitude. Read it slowly and then spend time reflecting on what God is saying to you through it about your life:

To keep ourselves spiritually alive we must constantly renew our faith. We are like pilots of fog-bound steamers, peering into the gloom in front of us, listening for the sounds of other ships, and we can only reach our harbor if we keep alert. The spiritual life is, then, first of all a matter of keeping awake. We must not lose our sensitivity to spiritual inspirations. We must always be able to respond to the slightest warnings that speak, as though by hidden instinct, in the depth of the soul that is spiritually alive.
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Finally, I’d like you to experience a bit of contemplative prayer. Sit in a comfortable place with both feet on the floor, hands in lap, and everything else put aside. Let go of your thoughts, worries, and agendas. Let go of everything, including the need to experience God in this time. Just sit with God. Create space just to be with God and to let God in. Close out this sermon just sitting in silence, and as thoughts come, let them go. Close this sermon out just by being with God. Do it for just two minutes, and see what being still can do.

Amen.