Exodus 3:1-14
September 18, 2011
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”
But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’“
Twenty years ago I had a surprising phone call from John, a guy I went to high school with. He and I knew each other somewhat well since we had played some sports together. He was a couple of years behind me, so we didn’t hang out a whole lot together, other than after lacrosse games. He told me that he wanted to set an appointment come over to my condo and talk about something.
Having been a pastor for a few years, I wasn’t sure what his agenda was. Did he want talk with me about a problem? Did he want to ask me about something perplexing religious issue? Or was it something else?
On the appointed day, we sat down, exchanged a bit of chit/chat, and then he got down to business. John wanted to talk with me about water. Specifically, he wanted to talk about me buying a water filter from him. It was a bit surprising. That’s not what I expected. But being a person who likes clean water, I bought one from him.
After I wrote the check, we started talking about other things. Specifically, he asked me a bunch of questions about why I became a pastor, and what attracted me to ministry. At one point he said something interesting. He asked me, “Do you really believe in love—that love is real and that people really love each other?” I replied, “Sure, I wouldn’t be very good at what I do if I didn’t believe in it.” He said, “I don’t believe love is real. I think people do good deeds and act in ways we call ‘love’ because of what they hope to get in return. We call it love, but it’s really self-interest. People do nice things for each other because of what they hope for in return.”
I told him that I had met a lot of people in church who did things without concern for their own benefit. He replied, “Yeah, but they really do those good deeds because they believe God will let them into heaven for doing them. They’re doing it for what they hope to get in return.” I said to him that Presbyterians don’t believe that good deeds get us into heaven; that we believe God lets us in based on God’s love.” He pushed that idea aside, saying, “You say that, but all Christians do good deeds to get into heaven.” I tried to convince him otherwise, but no matter what I said, he dismissed me. At the end he said, “Sorry about all that. Do you still want the water filter?” I said, “Sure, John, but only because I love you.”
I thought about John’s visit for a long time afterwards. I realized, knowing a bit about his background, that he hadn’t had a lot of real loving experiences growing up. So it made sense that he didn’t believe in love. His father had been an alcoholic, and his mother remained a bit distant as she tried to maintain normalcy in the face of dysfunction. John hadn’t experienced much love. He believed what he believed because he hadn’t had a self-sacrificing, altruistic love experience. Simply put, he couldn't believe in what he hadn’t experienced.
So what do you think? If you don’t experience love personally, does it really exist? What about joy, contentment, depression, hope, and more? If you don’t experience any of those states of being, do they really exist? For example, many people look at those with depression and think, “Why doesn’t he just snap out of it?” That’s certainly an attitude saying that depression really doesn’t exist—that it’s just a sadness that we can choose to quit feeling if we want to.
The question of whether experiences really exist if we don’t experience them is like the old philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the woods, and there’s no one there, does it make a sound?” If we don’t experience something personally, does it really exist? We would probably say that it does, even if we don’t experience them. But when the topic gets to God, so many people say that God doesn’t exist because they don’t experience God.
It's this whole issue of experience that really gets to the heart of our struggle in dealing with skeptics. They don't believe what they don't experience. And they don't experience God because they don't believe anyone can really experience God. They argue with us over beliefs, but when it really comes down to it, faith is about our experiences of God, not our beliefs. And that’s what gets in the way of talking with skeptics about our faith.
The fact is that we don’t form our faith because someone told us, in a logical, rational way, that we must believe in something. We develop faith because we’ve experienced God in some way. I don’t even mean that we’ve had some great, “throw-away-the-crutches-I’m-healed” experience. I’m talking about just small experiences of God. Have you ever been touched or inspired by a piece of music or a hymn? Have you felt God’s stillness and peace during communion? Have you sensed God whispering something to you during a sermon? Have you sensed God while walking in the woods, reading a book, watching television, talking with a friend, or somewhere else? These are the kinds of experiences most of us have. They are experiences of God.
What's so frustrating about skeptical agnostics (people who aren’t sure about God) and atheists (people who adamantly don’t believe in God) is that they generally diminish our experiences by dismissing our beliefs. When we talk with them about God and religion, they set a subtle trap. They lure us into defending our beliefs about God, Christ, the Bible, church, and the rest by getting us to talk about these things on a rational, logical level. They want to debate us on our logic. The problem is that experiences of faith aren’t logical. When we experience God, either dramatically or subtly, it’s rarely a rational experience. It’s a deep, inspiring experience, but it doesn’t follow logical rules, much like love doesn’t follow logical rules.
Also, our beliefs don’t follow human logic, they follow God’s logic, which is often paradoxical. I wrote a book on this, Paradoxes for Living. In it I talked about how much of what Jesus taught us goes against human logic: to be strong we have to be weak; to be mature we have to become like children; to gain our lives we have to lose our lives; to become masters we have to become servants. We also believe that God is one and God is three, and that God was born of a virgin, died, and was resurrected by God. These things don’t make rational sense. But they can be experienced as true.
Basically, by their reactions to our experiences of God, faith, church, and prayer, skeptics suggest that our experiences either don’t matter, are mildly delusional, or are not rooted in the real world. They never deny their own experiences, but they do deny ours by suggesting that we are either naïve or intellectually misguided.
There are reasons why skeptics are skeptical. Some are skeptical because they had bad experiences in church. They may have grown up in a judgmental church, an uncaring church, or even an abusive church. They’ve become skeptical because of growing up in a context that makes faith hard.
Some are skeptical because they've been criticized by Christians, and they see us as being judgmental. Our judgmentalism can be our worst trait, and it turns off so many people. Dave Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, Christians social researchers, have studied the perceptions of 18-35 year-old non-Christians, and wrote about them in their book, UnChristian. They say that 87% of non-Christians in that age range say we Christians are judgmental. And there’s good reason for them to think this. Many Christians are judgmental not only towards non-Christians, but especially towards our own. So many Christians look down their judgmental noses at Christians who don’t believe what they believe. Many of us Christians have earned the judgmental label.
So what do we say to a skeptic, whether a stranger, a friend, or a family member, especially when they diminish our experiences? Let me offer three thoughts.
First, don’t say anything—let you be the experience that opens them up to the possibility of experiencing God. Sometimes talking about faith and Christianity can be our worst enemy because we say things that unwittingly push people away. St. Francis once said, “Preach the Gospel always, and when necessary use words.” What he meant by this is that we should let our lives be an expression of the Gospel. How we live, how we treat others, our compassion and caring, should be an example of what it means to be a Christian. This puts pressure on us to live out Christ’s teachings throughout our lives so that people will experience God’s presence through us. That opens the door to sharing our faith.
Second, when openings present themselves, share our experiences of God, even if we don’t understand them. We don’t have to have dramatic experiences of God to share stories of our faith. All we need to do is to chip away at them. I’ve had so many people chip away at me by sharing their faith, and it’s their stories and faith that led me to return to the church at age 24 after leaving it at age 15. It was my first girlfriend in high school. It was a woman in college my freshman year talking about her faith and experiences of God. It was my father talking about his faith and experiences of God. None of them talked to me much about their theological beliefs. They talked simply about how they’ve experienced God in their lives and how church was a part of their experiences. This opened me back up to the possibility that God could be found in church.
Finally, live a life that allows us to experience God. We can’t actually share experiences that we don’t have. To have these experiences, we have to live lives that cultivate them. Going to worship regularly is one practice. Others are praying regularly, reading scripture, looking for God everywhere, taking time for stillness and balance in our lives, and just doing anything that opens us to God. We can also offer this same challenge to skeptics. Something that I’ve often said to skeptics is that if they are going to discover if God is real or not they need to run an experiment. Pray to God three times a day, everyday, for forty days. Ask God to reveal God’s self. See if that helps them to discover for themselves whether or not God is real (while preaching this sermon, Connie Frierson, our associate pastor, blurted out, “Graham, that’s what you did with me 12 years ago. I was a skeptic, and now I’m a pastor).
We cannot force a skeptic to believe, but if we are willing to let our lives be an example of the Gospel, if we are willing to share our experiences of God, and if we are able to live lives that build up those experiences, we can be well on our way to helping skeptics discover what we’ve discovered.
Amen.
