What Do We Say about,... Atheism?

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Acts 17:16-34

January 22, 2012

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said, “What does this babbler want to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.” (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.) So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus and asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.” Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” At that point Paul left them. But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

For the past several months, knowing that I’d be doing this sermon this morning, I began reading what atheists have to say about religion and Christianity.  Overwhelmingly, I came across quotes like these that show little but disdain for those of us who are religions. For example, Abu’l-Ala-Al-Ma’arri, a tenth-century philosopher wrote this, a quote that appears on many modern atheism t-shirts, mugs, hats, and websites:  "The world holds two classes of men—intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence."  Also, Douglas Adams, the writer of the popular sci-fi novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wrote, "I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously."

So, what do we respond to folks who say things like this?  What do we say to people who are this convinced that we Christians and religious people are all so stupid?  What do we say to people whose basic attitude toward us seems to be that we’re all superstitious, misguided, naïve, hypocritical, and dumb, and that we don’t even know that we’re so dumb? 

I do understand them a bit because I dabbled with atheism back in college.  I had become discouraged with Christianity specifically and religion in general, although I’m not sure if I was discouraged because of my own insights, or because I was mimicking the culture.  Back when I was a teen and a college student, the anti-Christianity and religion movement was beginning to grow.  Today it’s grown to be very strong among younger people, with it almost becoming an accepted fact that Christianity and religion are bad things.

What kept me from becoming a permanent atheist wasn’t that I was getting dumber as I got older.  Instead, it was that as I studied more and more about everything, I found that I didn’t like limiting my thinking the way atheism demands that we do.  I had too much curiosity about life to just dismiss everything about faith and religion as pious nonsense.  I didn’t want to limit my thinking to some sort of rigid, reductionistic way of thinking that can only see life from one perspective.  I wanted to understand life from many perspectives because I wanted to grow. 

Most atheists would never admit this, but they’re generally the ones who aren’t open-minded, even though they often see themselves as being brilliantly open-minded.   Because they deny a whole way of seeing, experiencing, and thinking about life and the cosmos, they shut down the possibility of knowing and experiencing life in a different way.  It would be very similar to saying that we will no longer listen to music or look at art because they lack rationality. 

What I’ve noticed is that many atheists, if not most, suffer from three basic problems when it comes to their thinking about religion.  First is that they have put so much of their faith in human rational thinking that they’ve become what I call rationalist fundamentalists.  To understand what that means, you have to first understand what it means to be a fundamentalist.  I believe that in our modern age, fundamentalism is one of the biggest threats we face.  Every religion and movement has its fundamentalists who try to hijack that faith.  Fundamentalism is the attempt to reduce truth to basic “fundamentals”—simplistic ideals and concepts that give followers a sense of clarity about life and how to live it.  By adhering to basic, simple fundamentals, and renouncing and diminishing all other beliefs and ways of thinking, they simplify their lives, even if they do so by creating conflict with all those who believe differently from them.  Fundamentalists always denigrate and diminish those who think differently from them. 

You find this kind of reductionism and diminishment of all other belief systems among Christian fundamentalists.  They deny much of scientific thinking, they diminish other religions and their belief systems, and they denigrate any who disagree with their basic fundamentals (fundamentalism got its name with the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the 19^th century, which outlined a set of “fundamental” Christian truths that one must adhere to in order to be saved).  You also have Islamic fundamentalists, such as the terrorists of 9/11 as well as the Taliban.  Like all fundamentalists, they believe so much in the purity of their thought that it excuses all the violence they do.  You also find Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, many of whom live in the occupied territories and refuse to leave, believing that they have a divine right to these territories and that they are actually hastening the coming of the Messiah by provoking conflict with Muslims. 

So many atheists have become rational fundamentalists who believe religiously in human rational thinking.  They’ve reduced all ways of knowing to basic rationalistic principles (fundamentals) that become the basis for all their arguments.  Like all fundamentalists, they demand that we see the world only from their perspective, and that our thinking follow only their lines of logic.  As Karen Armstrong, one of the best writers today on understanding religion, has written in her book, A Case for God, that “Typical of the fundamentalist mind-set is the belief that there is only one way of interpreting reality. For the new atheists, scientism alone can lead us to truth. But science depends upon faith, intuition, and aesthetic vision as well as on reason.”  She’s pointing out that atheistic faith in rationalism is a religious faith.  I think it’s a fundamentalist faith.

Second, most of the atheists I hear arguing in public (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Stephen Hawking, Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens—who just died) have little more than an elementary school understanding of religion.  When they argue against religion, their understanding of how we think and live is somewhat juvenile.  And to compound it, they tend to treat all of us as though we are fundamentalists, too.  When they argue against religion, they assume that all of us are biblical literalists.  Ironically, in their arguments they treat the Bible in a more literalistic way than Christian fundamentalists do.    

I believe that the problems they have with religion is a problem many people have when they grow up in the church but leave the church after being confirmed.  They become like high school dropouts, moving through life with a ninth-grade religious education.  They may go on to college and study business, science, literature, or engineering, and become very sophisticated in those fields, their religious knowledge remains at a ninth-grade level.  When I hear these atheists argue about religion, I hear ninth-grade level arguments.  They think they have a sophisticated understanding, but having them lecture us on religion would be like having a ninth-grade school dropout lecture a biology class in a college. 

As a person who has studied for nine years of post-graduate education in religious areas, I can tell you that there is SOOOO much more out there to know about religion and faith than any of them ever suspect.  For my master degrees and Ph.D., it’s not like we sat around and twiddled our thumbs, waiting to have our degrees conferred on us.  But I hear so many atheists say, “I grew up in the church, so I know what I’m talking about.”  Not really, any more than having taken a class in Chemistry in high school makes me an expert on discussing the nature of chemical amalgamations and transformations. 

Third, when arguing against religion, so many atheists tend to present Christianity at it’s worst, and atheism at its best.  I see this consistently.  They look at the worst things that have been done in the name of religion, and then generalize this to everything we are and do.  They don’t pay attention to all the good that is done.  Even more, they make arguments that from a rational perspective can’t be supported.  For instance, you’ve heard many atheists say that religion has caused more wars than any other source.  Really?  How do you test that theory?  Do you have a comparison group that has been persistently non-religious?  And how do you factor out human nature as a cause of war in that comment?  How do you know that religion is the cause, and not human nature?  Is human nature basically non-violent until it becomes religious? 

I do think there is some comparison we can do.  Let’s look at the record of atheistic nations in terms of violence and war.  For example, look at the how atheistic Soviet Union treated people under Stalin.  He had 25 million people killed (many because of their religious beliefs), and in war the Soviet Union was particularly brutal.  In atheistic China, Mao had 15 million Chinese killed.  In atheistic Cambodia under Pol Pot, 1.5 million were killed.  Nazi Germany, which was run by an atheistic Hitler and his minions, acting out of their weird nationalistic, atheistic ideology, exterminated 6 million Jews.  If atheists look to the best of themselves and the worst of ourselves, why shouldn’t we be able to do the same?  By the way, you can add up all the people who have been killed in supposedly religious wars, and they don’t come anywhere near the 47.5 million killed under those 4 atheistic regimes. 

What makes so many atheists limited in their thinking is that they assume that rational thinking is the only legitimate kind of human thinking and knowing.  They criticize us for having faith in unprovable assumptions, despite their faith in unprovable assumption that they can achieve objectivity.  They can’t, as the German theoretical physicist  Werner Heisenberg pointed out in his well-known principle, the uncertainty principle.  This principle is that when observing any kind of experimental event, “the more precisely one property is measured [such as the position or momentum of a property of a particle], the less precisely the other can be controlled, determined, or known” (Wikepedia).  In other words, no matter how objective an observer is, his or her observation always changes what it being observed.  That’s a very technical way of saying that we can never be purely objective about anything because once we put our attention to it we become part of it and change the nature of it.  Atheists can’t be rationally objective about religion because their beliefs change the nature of how they see religion.  In other words, by adopting atheistic beliefs, they no longer have the ability to be objective about religion.  We religious aren’t objective either, but then we never claim to be.  We base our beliefs on subjective experience, not objectivity. 

The biggest problem among atheist’s criticism of religious people like us is that they assume we have no legitimate reason for being religious.  And in the process they dismiss the one reason so many of us are religious and have faith, which is that we have experiences of God and the Holy.  Despite what atheists think about us, most of us aren’t religious because we love religious tradition, we’re superstitious, or we’re ignorant.  We come to church on Sundays because we’ve experienced God somehow in the music, in the sermon, in our prayers, or in the sacraments.  And we form our faith because we’ve experienced God and the divine in life—all throughout life.  In fact, those who are most committed to religion generally are those who’ve had the most consistent experiences of God in their lives. 

The irony among atheists is that they will accept as valid anyone’s experience of God’s absence, but not their experiences of God’s presence.  Why is it that not experiencing God in life is a valid experience, but experiencing God in life isn’t?  I will tell you that I’m religious and a Christian because of my experiences of God over the years.  I’m a pastor because of my profound and persistent experiences of God in my life.  These aren’t delusional experiences.  They are deep and transforming ones. 

So, what do we say about atheism? What I’ve learned over the years is that we often can’t say anything to an atheist because we won’t be heard, but we have a lot to say about atheism.

First, we’re not Christian or religious because we are naïve, weak, or stupid.  We are Christian and religious because faith deepens and expands our lives, and we experience that on a constant basis.  And we share our faith and evangelize because we want others to experience what we’ve experienced.  It’s kind of like when we see a really good movie or read a really good book.  We tell others because we want them to share our experiences.  Many atheists are similar in this way.  They want to share their experience of God’s absence, although I can honestly say that my experiences of God’s presence are more energizing and transforming. 

Second, if atheism is going to be true to it’s rationalistic, scientific understanding of life, it needs to be a bit more empirical in it’s understanding of religion.  They need to test their experiences by getting out of the armchair and empirically testing the validity of religion from the inside.  Something I’ve said to agnostics and atheists over the years is that if they really want to test whether God is real or not, run an experiment based on Christian experience.  Take forty days and pray three times a day.  And during that prayer, ask God to reveal God’s self.  If at the end of forty days nothing happens, so be it.  But I will tell you the experience of our associate pastor, Connie Frierson.  Fourteen years ago she came to Calvin Presbyterian Church as an agnostic.  She met with me, and we talked about religion and faith.  I suggested to her that she do the forty-day thing, and she did.  The result?  She not only experienced God, but felt a need to learn more.  It led her eventually to go to seminary, and from there to become a pastor.  This experiment can be dangerous because you never know what it may lead to. 

Paul called on the Athenians in our passage to do something similar.  Paul challenged them to experience God.   As we read in the passage, “When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” At that point Paul left them. But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.” 

I’d like to close by quoting Karen Armstrong again, and to let her have the final word.  She says, “We have become used to thinking that religion should provide us with information. Is there a God? How did the world come into being? But this is a modern preoccupation. Religion was never supposed to provide answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason… Religion’s task, closely allied to that of art, was to help us to live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve: mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life.”

            Amen. 

What Do We Say About,... Science?

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Proverbs 1:20-33

January 15, 2011

Wisdom cries out in the street;

   
in the squares she raises her voice.


At the busiest corner she cries out;


   at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:


      “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?

      
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing


         and fools hate knowledge?


Give heed to my reproof;

   
I will pour out my thoughts to you;

   
I will make my words known to you.


Because I have called and you refused,


   have stretched out my hand and no one heeded,


   and because you have ignored all my counsel


      and would have none of my reproof,


      I also will laugh at your calamity;


      I will mock when panic strikes you,

         
when panic strikes you like a storm,


            and your calamity comes like a whirlwind,


         when distress and anguish come upon you.


Then they will call upon me,

      but I will not answer;


   they will seek me diligently,

      but will not find me.


Because they hated knowledge

   
and did not choose the fear of the Lord,


      would have none of my counsel,


         and despised all my reproof,


      therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way

         
and be sated with their own devices.


For waywardness kills the simple,


   and the complacency of fools destroys them;


but those who listen to me will be secure

   
and will live at ease, without dread of disaster.”

This may or may not matter to all of you, but I’m not involved in our local ministerium.  For those who don’t know what a ministrerium, it’s a meeting of local pastors who meet to talk about what we can do together in the community.  I was very involved in the ministerium in Murrysville, as an associate pastor there before I came to Calvin Church.  And I became involved in the Zelienople ministerium when I first moved here, but a series of events caused me to stop going. 

The first was the attempt to get Christian Coalition voter guides into the hands of all of our members back in 1996.  As a registered independent, I don’t like the affiliation of church organizations with one political party, and it was clear to me that these voter guides were completely biased toward the Republican Party.  Then, there was a discussion in one of the meetings about who was saved or not, and two of the pastors in town declared that the interim pastor of Park Presbyterian Church, Maxime Pardee, wasn’t saved because she was a woman pastor, which was against the Bible.  Also, the fact that some of the pastors of the ministerium have periodically approached our members over the years, telling them that we don’t preach the Gospel in the right way here at Calvin Church, has kept me from rejoining over the years. 

What got me to stop being part of the ministerium in 1998 was something that happened then.  I was at the center of a little controversy.  It was nothing serious, but it was enough to cause me to reconsider how much of a connection there was between the ministry of Calvin Presbyterian Church and that of the local ministerium.  The ministerium had an idea that I thought was a good idea, until it was put into practice.  The idea was to have a weeklong event in the park in Zelienople, an event that would make people more aware of the churches in town and hopefully get people to think about attending our churches.

            The event would start with a weeklong vacation Bible school in the park during the week, and then on Friday and Saturday nights it would bring in inspirational guest speakers with great music. The hope was that after going to these events, people would want to begin visiting our churches. I was supportive at first, but then two problems arose.  I had suggested that one of the speakers should be evangelical like the evangelical churches in town, while the other would be more moderate.  That way the speakers would represent the diversity of churches.  Instead, they chose two evangelical pastors—one a fundamentalist, and one a little bit less than a fundamentalist.  But what really did it for me was the vacation Bible school program that was chosen.  It was one that taught Creationism, the belief that only the creation account in the Bible is right, and that the theory of evolution is wrong.  There was no way I could agree with sending our church’s kids to that kind of program, not only because I didn’t agree with what Creationism teaches, but also because I knew that many of our members wouldn’t agree.  How could I involve us in something that goes so completely against Presbyterian principles, which has no problem with the theory of evolution, recognizing that it’s a theory. 

            I voiced my discontent, saying that I could support the program if we simply agree to pick Bible school material that moved away from this topic and was agreeable to all churches.  What was the response?  They decided to keep the material, and then had one of the pastors in town come and talk with me.  He came to my office on a Friday morning and asked me to go for a walk.  We walked out of the church, down Division Street, into the park, up around the softball field, and then back to the church.  It took about an hour.  For pretty much the whole hour the pastor told me politely, but also pointedly, why I was wrong for believing in evolution.  Of course, I never told him I believed in evolution.  I just told him that I didn’t believe in strict Creationism.  I never said what I actually believed, which is that I believe in both biblical and scientific views on creation.

            He kept giving me argument after argument, telling me why evolution was wrong, why biblical creationism was the only answer.  He had an answer for every question I asked, although many of the answers weren’t very convincing.  In the end he got to his point, which was pretty much to say that to be a Christian meant believing only what the Bible said about creation.  To believe anything else was to degrade the Christian faith.  He said to me, “You know, I’ve studied this question a lot.  I have a master’s degree in religion, and know how to think through these things.  I’ve come to the conclusion that to be a Christian means accepting only the biblical account.”  My response was a polite, but just as pointed, “Yeah, I understand where you are coming from.  You also have to realize that I have a Ph.D. and three masters degrees.  I’m fairly sharp when it comes to thinking my way through these things myself, and nothing you have said is convincing.” 

Very early on in that walk I realized that there was nothing I could say in return because he wasn’t actually interested in hearing from someone who had studied science more than he had.  My training has been almost as much in the scientific fields as it has in the religious field.  I was a psychology major in college, and had to take courses in experimental psychology, research statistics, and the like.  Because of this background, I had a hard time initially at seminary because research at seminary was done in a very different way.  Theological research isn’t based on scientific study, but on citing the works of accepted and respected theologians as they interpret scripture based on rational and spiritual techniques.  The problem was that there were no indications for who was accepted and respected and who wasn’t.  It didn’t feel very objective for me. 

For my master in social work, I also had to take a number of classes in research, classes that emphasized how to do scientific research that could be validated, replicated, and declared reliable.  My Ph.D. wasn’t in traditional theological studies, but in formative spirituality, which was an attempt, among other things, to create a science of spirituality.  The focus there wasn’t on empirical science, but on a different kind of science—phenomenological science.  But more on that later. 

Due to my background in both science and religion, I found the pastor’s lack of interest in hearing from someone with a science background to be a problem, a problem that persists among many in both the religion and the science fields.  Too many scientists have too little religious training, and too many religious have too little scientific training.  As Gerard Schroeder, an MIT trained, Ph.D. physicist, who left his post as a professor at MIT to study and teach religion in Israel, has said, “Acknowledged experts in science may assume that although scientific research requires diligent intellectual effort, biblical wisdom can be attained through a simple reading of the Bible. Conversely, theologians who have devoted decades of plumbing the depths of biblical wisdom often satisfy their scientific curiosity through articles in the popular press and then assume they can evaluate the validity of scientific discoveries.  The “opposition” is viewed with a level of knowledge frozen at a high school or pre-high school level.  No wonder the “other side:” seems superficial, even naïve.  To relate these two fields in a meaningful way requires and in-depth understanding of both.”

The result of this advanced knowledge in one field, and elementary knowledge in the other, means that often the two fields compete when they really should converge.  The problem both fields have is a difficulty that all people with advanced education have.  It is called the Curse of Knowledge.  The term was coined by Chip and Dan Heath, two writers in the area of marketing and business.  They recognized that in any field, the more knowledge we gain about a subject, the more the education “curses” us to an extent.  The curse works in two ways.  First, the more knowledge we gain, the less we can remember what it was like before we gained the knowledge.  Second, the more knowledge we gain, the less we can explain what we know.  This impacts both scientists and theologians.  Each is very good at knowing their own field, and usually terrible at explaining it to those who don’t know their field.  Thus, when scientists and theologians talk science and faith, they are both cursed by their own knowledge and tend to talk past each other. 

What I’ve learned through studying both science and faith is that modern American culture doesn’t really understand science very well, which is at the root of the problem.  Let’s start with the basics.  What is science?  If you were to give a definition, how would you define it?  To really define it, you have to start with the root of the word itself, scientis.  What does scientis mean?  It means “knowledge.”  What is science?  It is the pursuit of knowledge.  That doesn’t mean that it’s a pursuit through objective means only.  It is the pursuit of knowledge through a variety of means. 

Throughout history there have been two basic kinds of science (it might surprise some that even in ancient times people pursued scientific knowledge).  The two kinds of science are the “science of measurement” and the “science of meaning.”  We’re used to the first kind, but not the second.  The science of measurement is an attempt at objectivity through empirical and mathematical analysis of events.  It does so either through experiments or correlational studies (looking for relationships between variables that might indicate a possible cause and effect relationship).  The physical sciences are able to more directly measure something, while the social sciences have to “operationally define” variables in order to define them.  That means, for example, that we can’t measure anger, but if we operationally define anger as hitting, yelling, accelerated blood pressure and heart rate, we can measure those.  These are only one kind of scientific study pursuit.

Another kind is the science of meaning.  This is a scientific pursuit that philosophers, mathematicians, and even modern psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists have pursued.  When I studied at Duquesne, I was taught a kind of phenomenological scientific research, which meant diving into an experience and trying to understand it from the inside, rather than from the outside.  For instance, to study trust, we don’t operationally define it as “self-reporting that we are willing to rely on and depend upon another.”  We jump into the experience and ask people who have experienced trust, “what does deep trust feel like, and what is experienced by the person from her or his own perspective.”  This is just as legitimate a science as empirical science, but you wouldn’t know it from most Americans, who only know empirical science.  We are a scientific culture in many ways, but one with a limited scope in our scientific knowledge. 

The issue between faith and science is that American science often pursues empirical knowledge through measurement, while religious study often pursues experiential knowledge through meaning.  The two pursuits are exploring different areas of life. 

What many modern scientists also don’t understand about religious scholarship is that it has integrated empirical and measurement techniques into it.  For example, much of modern biblical scholarship uses the techniques of modern empirical science by integrating ideas and discoveries from archaeology, history, and anthropology.

The problem today is that people in each area of investigation, science and religion, tend to legitimize only the scientific exploration of their own area of expertise, while diminishing the legitimacy of other areas of expertise.  Thus, many biologists see their field of study as the preeminent one.  Many physicists see their field as preeminent.  Many psychologist see their field as preeminent.  Many theologians see their field of study as preeminent.  They all tend to suffer an arrogance of ignorance.  In other words, because they are ignorant of the other fields, they easily become arrogant about their own field. 

I’ve seen this many times.  For instance, I remember back in the early 1990s I was teaching a Sunday class in the church I was serving.  As part of the class I shared some psychological research.  An engineer, who worked at Westinghouse at the time, raised his hand and said, “You know, you’re citing stuff from a pseudo-science.  It’s not real science.”  There’s your arrogance of ignorance.  For him, only physical sciences were real.

So what are Christians to say about science?  For most of our history, we’ve had very little to say about it because our understanding—dating back to the Roman period—is that science and Christianity explore life in different ways.  Both want to unlock mysteries, both want to understand life, the world, ourselves, and both want to contribute tremendously to life.  Many people in the science field point to Christianity’s intolerance of science as evidence of our backwardness and ignorance.  But the reality is that these times have been rare.  There were short periods during the Renaissance when the church persecuted some scientific researchers, but that was the exception, not the rule.  For the most part, they looked at those doing biological, medical, or cosmological research as having little to say about religious life. 

The one growing area of intolerance toward science has been modern fundamentalism, which began in the late 1800s, and has always been an attempt at biblical science.  What fundamentalists have tried to do has been to turn the Bible into an objective document of scientific data regarding truth.  It has tried to reduce religious life to certain, “objective” fundamentals.  I’m not a fundamentalist because I don’t see these fundamentals as either fundamental or objective.  The Bible is about meaning, not measurement, and you can’t turn this book of meaning into one of measurement.  Unfortunately, many scientists, when they talk about Christianity, reduce us all to fundamentalists, believing that all of us think like that.  Not me. 

So what are we to say about science?  You can see our simple answer if you look at the majority of Christian colleges and universities.  If you had an opportunity to study biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, sociology, or some other science at Notre Dame University (Catholic) or Duke University (Methodist), would you consider it to be a lesser degree because it is a religious university?  What about studying at any of the Ivy League schools, which were all started as religious schools.  What about many of the area colleges such as Allegheny (Methodist), Westminster (Presbyterian), Thiel (Lutheran), or La Roche (Catholic), and most of the other area colleges?  Many of these universities and colleges have either good or great physical and social science departments. 

As Presbyterians, our approach is to respect every field of study in the same way we hope they respect us, and to integrate knowledge they offer into our own understanding of life.  Personally, my approach, as most of you who have taken classes with me recognize, is to integrate knowledge from different fields because I believe that this integration is what leads to wisdom.  Wisdom comes from gaining perspective, both scientific perspective and religious perspective.  And I think our approach should be in harmony with what Proverbs said to us this morning: 

Wisdom cries out in the street;

   
in the squares she raises her voice.


At the busiest corner she cries out;


   at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:


      “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?

      
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing


         and fools hate knowledge?


Amen.

Recognizing What Others Miss

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Matthew 2:1-12

January 8, 2012

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’” Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.”

When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

I think that the story of the magi is one of the most interesting in the Bible because it’s so mysterious.  And it’s so different from almost every other story of the Bible.  Everything about this small story is cloaked in mystery, a mystery that’s still hard for modern Christian scholars to decipher. 

First, what makes it odd is that it isn’t an “in-house” story.  What I mean is that most of the stories of the Bible are about Jews and/or Christians told from a Christian perspective.  Only very rarely do outsiders get much prominent mention, and almost never with a sense of respect.  These three mysterious magi are given a great amount of respect, despite the fact that they were part of a religion that the Jews would have been dismissive of and detested. 

These three “wise men” weren’t really wise men, nor were they “three kings,” which is what we sing in the hymn, “We Three Kings.”  They were “magi,” which is a word connected to “magic.”  They were priests in the Zoroastrian religion, which was a religion that gave us astrology.  They studied the stars, believing that the stars dictated world events and human behavior, and that the study of them could lead people to either understand their fate, or change it.  The Jews considered followers of this faith to basically be pagan and somewhat evil.  So for them to be prominent in the Gospel of Matthew is odd.  

What really strikes me about the magi is that they recognized things that others missed, and they were presented that way by Matthew.  They had studied the stars, and had seen something significant happening in the world.  They saw significance in something that others would have just seen as “interesting,” or not noticed at all, which is the “star” rising. 

This famed “star” is also a mystery.  We’ve grown up learning that the star was this great shining star that floated over Jesus’ home.  Well, that’s probably not true.  Scientists have studied whether a great supernova or comet appeared at Jesus’ birth, and most have pretty much determined that nothing of the kind happened.  What’s more, other than in the Bible, there is no other historical witness to this great star.  Even in the Bible it tells us that neither Herod, the temple priests, nor the people in Judea saw the star.  Why would they be the only ones to see it rising?  Why didn’t others of the time see it?  Other than mention of it in Matthew’s gospel, no other people of history report seeing a great star. 

            Scientists have studied whether a great supernova or comet appeared at Jesus’ birth, and most have pretty much determined that nothing of the kind happened.  What’s more, other than in the Bible, there is no other historical witness to this great star. So, why would Matthew talk about the star if it never existed?

Again, you have to go back to who the magi were.  The magi were astrologers, and as astrologers they noticed astral configurations that most others missed.  The star they saw was only great to them.  In all probability, the star they saw rising out of the East was a configuration of Jupiter, Saturn, and a star called Regulus, or the king star.  It would have come together in the constellation of Leo, which was considered to be a royal constellation.  This configuration, coming together in the early evening, would have been very bright, and Regulus would have seemed to travel westward out of the configuration.  Scientists who have studied the stars using computers have noted that this configuration occured back in 4 B.C., which is the year most scholars believe Jesus was born.  This great star was great only to the magi because they saw astrological significance in it that others missed.  In fact, most people would never have even noticed the early evening configuration at all, except as an oddity.

I believe that this ability to see what others miss is one of the most rare spiritual qualities in people.  Most people see only what they and others expect to see.  I see this all the time among Christians.  We develop our own theologies, our own beliefs, our own cherished philosophies, and they help us see what we expect, but they also blind us to what else may be there.  Our beliefs are both doorways and traps.  They open us to aspects of God, ourselves, and life that without them we miss.  But once we develop strong enough belief systems, they close us off to all other possibilities.  Herod, the Romans, and the Jews were not open to the significance of the star configuration because they dismissed the faith of the magis.  I have to admit that I do, too, but the magi were open to the possibility that something great was happening in the world, even outside of their own Persian kingdoms. 

All of us are guilty of closing off because of our belief systems.  We can hold onto our beliefs so tightly that it rigidly shuts us off to what God is doing.  Let me give you some analogies.

There was a man who suffered from terrible headaches.  Being a typical man, though, he refused to go to the doctor.  Finally, his wife had had enough and forced him to go.  The doctor began his questioning:  “Do you smoke?”  The man replied, “I would never touch that evil weed!  It is the devil’s plant”  “Do you drink?”  Again the man replied, “Booze is the devil’s drink.  Beer and wine shall never touch these lips of mine!”  “Do you dance?”  He replied, “Dancing is the devil’s playground.  It lets the devil into our bodies.”  “Do you watch movies?”  “Nothing they make nowadays is worthwhile.  It’s all about sex and violence.  The devil uses Hollywood to pollute our souls.” 

The doctor thought for a while and said, “I think I know what’s causing your headaches.  Your halo is on too tight!” 

Let me share another.  There was a church that didn’t take an offering the way we tend to.  They made their money for the year on the big worship days:  Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost.  Knowing that this is when people show up, they had a policy that to come to worship on those days, people had to by a “pew license,” which reserved a pew for them.  The policy was rigid:  no one into the sanctuary without a ticket showing that she or he has purchased a license. 

During Pentecost worship one year, a young boy came to the door during the service, saying to the usher, “I need to go in and talk to my father.”  The usher asked him if he had a ticket, the boy said no.  The usher said, “I’m sorry, but then you can’t go in.  We have a very rigid policy for worship.”  The boy looked at him and pleaded:  “But it’s an urgent matter.  I have to talk with him.”  The usher said, “I’m sorry, but no ticket no entry.” 

Finally, the boy begged:  “Puh-lease!  It’s really important!”  The usher relented:  “Okay, but only for a minute.  And DON’T let me catch you praying!” 

One more.  There was a priest in a parish who, every year right before Christmas, received gifts from the children after the children’s program.  He would sit in his chair, and each child would bring a present to him.  And he would correctly guess the contents because he typically knew what the parents did and what they would be giving him through their children. 

The first boy, Jonathan, came up to him with a package.  The priest took it, shook it, and knowing that his parents owned a clothing store, said, “This is a beautiful sweater, isn’t it?”  Jonathan, his eyes wide in amazement, said, “Yes, Father.  How did you know?”  The priest said, “Ahhh,… Father knows everything.” 

The next child, Sarah, came up and gave him her package.  Knowing that her parents owned a hardware store, he took it, shook it, and said, “Ah, you’ve given me some tools.”  “How did you know, Father?” she said.  He replied, “Ahhh,… Father knows everything.” 

Then Georgie gave the priest his gift.  It was an oddly shaped package leaking something.  The priest, knowing that Georgie’s parents owned a liquor store, said, “Oh, you’ve given me a fine bottle of scotch.”  “No, Father,” he replied.  “No?  Hmmm,… what is it?”  He touched the wet spot with his fingers and tasted it.  “Of course, this is a nice bottle of gin.”  “No, Father,” the boy again replied.  Confused, the priest tasted it again, and sitting back with a grin said, “I know, it’s a nice bottle of tequila.”  “No, Father, it isn’t.”  The priest, now confused, and a bit embarrassed, said, “Then what is it?”  The boy replied, “It’s a puppy.” 

All of us Christians have our belief blinders. They open our eyes to certain realities, but then close us off to what else God may be doing.  David Steindl-Rast once said that we hold our beliefs firmly but gently so that we can become open to God’s surprise.  Our beliefs are like an egg.  Hold onto them too tightly and they crack, making a mess.  Hold onto them too loosely they fall and break, making a mess.  We hold our beliefs firmly enough to let them guide us, but not so firmly that they become useless.  To be a Christian means have a firm belief system that opens us to God, but at the same time not turning these beliefs into false idols that actually prevent us from seeing God and what God is doing. 

I see this same kind of belief blinders with non-Christians, too.  We are living in a culture that has an ever-growing anti-Christian bias.  So many today are declaring themselves to be agnostic or atheistic, and in the process have decided that Christianity specifically, and religion in general, have nothing to say to them.  They’ve developed such strong binders that they can’t see the value of what we believe, and especially of what we do.  They’ve closed off.  And in the process, they lump all of us into a box, labeling most of us as fools and hypocrites. 

I experienced this about a year ago.  I was invited by a friend to lunch with one of his friends, who he thought I might enjoy talking to me because of her and my counseling background.  He didn’t realize she was an agnostic/atheist, and it didn’t occur to him that she might have a problem with me being a pastor.  At first, she was very stand-offish.  As we talked about a wide range of topics—culture, politics, interests—she warmed up to me, and finally said, “Are you sure you’re a Christian?”  I laughed and said, “Yeah,… why?”  She replied, “Because when I was invited to lunch with a pastor, I figured I’d be having lunch with some Jerry Fallwell kind of person.  I didn’t know that Christians thought like you.”  Her beliefs had given her blinders. 

The magi are a model for us. We need our beliefs, whatever they are, to point us to God, but we also need to cultivate the ability to look outside of our beliefs to see what God is doing all around us.  That’s what the magi did.

 Is it what you do? 

Amen. 

How Old is Your New Year, by The Rev. Connie Frierson

Click Here to Listen to This Sermon

How do you celebrate New Years? What New Years Traditions do you celebrate today or last night? I went to the Ball Drop in Harmony. It has the advantage of being 12 hours ahead of time so little grand nieces and nephews can celebrate early and get to bed before they are grumpy. I have a pork and sauerkraut in the Crockpot. I have a list of New Year’s resolutions. I’m wearing red underwear. These are my traditions. What are yours? Why do we do these things? We do traditions because they are fun. But more importantly, we do traditions and rituals to mark time as important. We use rituals and traditions to find meaning in life. We do traditions to remind us of who we are and where we come from. We do rituals because they ground us. They make us pause and think. We do rituals to tie the old with the new. We do traditions to celebrate the continuity of life and also the new pages and chapters of our life. As Christians we should be using traditions and ritual in a powerful way to bring the Holy into our lives.
     Our bible passage today is all about the new and the old. This story is about Simeon and Anna blessed with many, many years and a brand new baby Jesus. This story is about old, old traditions of the Jewish faith and a brand new thing that God is doing right now. This story points out how the Holy comes into ordinary traditions. Here in Luke we have our only accounts of some details in Jesus' early life. Although Luke is one of the most gifted storytellers of all time, he does not reveal these glimpses into Jesus' infancy just to give the Christian community fodder for fireside remembrances of Jesus' life. The event of Jesus' presentation at the temple and the prophesies of Simeon and Anna are told to show that the Holy is at work. The point here is not fireside tales, but faith's firepower. Luke uses this story to weave the birth narrative of Jesus with the story of the great prophet Samuel's own birth and the story of God’s deliverance of the slaves in Egypt. Luke takes two separate rituals here, merging them together. The first ritual was "purification” of Mary and the second ritual was “dedication” of Jesus. The first ritual was Mary's ritual purification after the birth of a child. 

As detailed in Leviticus 12:1-8, a woman was considered unclean for 40 days after the baby's birth, and thus, unable to enter the temple. Actually, I like to think that in childbirth a woman encounters the Holy and needs some time off from all other duties. So this period allows for some mommy time. But at the end of 40 days the mother was to bring a lamb, or two pigeons or two turtledoves to the temple as a sacrifice and a sign that she was once again ritually clean. Luke's details make it clear that Mary and Joseph are, at least at this point in their lives, quite poor -- for instead of a lamb, Mary brings instead two doves.
     But while the baby Jesus did not have to be present for this ceremony, he did need to be brought to the temple for another reason. Symbolic of the living link binding Jews to their great history of exodus from Egypt, all first- born male infants were automatically considered dedicated to the Lord's service. This tradition recalled the miraculous night in which all the first- born sons of Egypt were destroyed by Yahweh's hand, but the Hebrew children were "passed over," and saved by the Lord. After acknowledging Jesus' first-born status and dedicating him to the Lord, Joseph and Mary were required to offer five shekels in order to "buy" him back from temple service. But Luke doesn’t mention any five shekels. Jesus is dedicated to the Lord’s service in the same way that the little boy Samuel was dedicated. We sophisticates of the twenty first century don’t hear this story with the same years as a Jew in the time of Luke would have heard. In the first century the audience would have heard the echos of the great exodus from Egypt and the Passover story of God’s salvation. In the first century the listener would have heard the echos of the story of little Samuel being called by God in the temple. Hannah was barren and longed for and prayed for a child. When God answered her prayer with the gift of baby boy Hannah brought the baby Samuel to the temple and dedicated him to God’s service. And there in the temple with Jesus was another Hannah. The prophetess Anna is a Greek form of the name Hannah. So read carefully. Jesus is dedicated to the Lord just as Samuel was. This story shows who Jesus was, what God has done in the past and what God will do in the future. This is the best sort of tradition. It brings together old and new, the past and the future. It reminds us of the Holy thing God is doing now.
     So how as Christians do we make rituals significant? Let’s figure this out because without God at the center of our rituals they become dead dogma and rote obligations. There is a story about a woman who always cut the end off the roast for Christmas. She did this because her mom did this, and her grandmother did it. But one Christmas she asked her grandmother why they always cut that end off the roast. And the grandmother answered that she only had a roaster that was only so long and she cut the end off to fit in that old roaster. So all these years, they had been doing a silly thing that no longer had any real meaning. How do we use traditions that don’t uselessly cut the end off the roast? We want something better. We need a tradition that is alive with meaning. How do we use tradition to put us in a place where we acknowledge God, give thanks to God and draw all of our life into a celebration of God with us, Immanuel? You see that is what was happening to the holy family, the rituals that brought them to the temple put them in exactly the right place to hear the amazing prophesies about Jesus. That is what good traditions do, they put us in the right place to encounter God.
     One way to use traditions to open us up to God is to follow Jesus advice, become like little children. Be thrilled with both the new and the old. Christmas is a marvelous example of how to do this. Kids love surprises, the new. But kids love ritual and tradition too. On Christmas day did any of you sleep in until noon? No the shining surprise of what might be under the tree got everyone out of bed. Yet in the midst of the new surprise there was the comfort and warmth of the same Christmas brunch or the present that you get every year, like the Christmas jammies, or the familiar ornaments that all have a story. A child’s eye view on life always asks the question, “why.” So ask the questions that get to why you do the celebrations you do. When you are eating pork and sauerkraut you remember that this is because you are thankful for the plenty that pork represents and the fertility and new things that cabbage represents. If you ask the question why and you don’t get a good answer, you need to change your tradition. You need to re-tradition.
     One of the best things about children is acceptance that a kid is a kid. You accept that you are a child, a child of God. Jesus came as the literal child of God so that we could all become children of God. So as a child you have to have a little humility and you have to trust your parent. Jesus said you must become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven. Philip Schroder paraphrased that this way, “Verily, Verily I say unto you, there will be no grown ups in heaven.” The good news is that it doesn’t matter how old you are you can always be the child of God. You can be part of the old, old story of God’s love and healing and part of the New Year that God is preparing for you. Simeon and Anna were chronologically gifted, really ancient for their day. But God opened their eyes to what God was doing right there before them in a new baby boy and what God would do in the future. It is never too late to re-tradition a good tradition. Simeon’s words of praise to God is a prayer the church has used for two thousand years. Yet this cry from the heart can be new to us. Simeon’s prayer is called the Nunc Dimittis which is Latin for permission to depart. This is the prayer. Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; For my eyes have seen your salvation, Which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, A light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel. This old, old, traditional prayer can become a new prayer when we use tradition well. When we use it to say yes, we are servants of God, When we pray from the heart that we are free to go in peace. We are free to lay down at night in peace, to get up in peace, to go about the work of our day in peace. Let’s use this prayer to help us remember when our eyes have seen the salvation. We review our day or our life and say yes that is when I saw God’s salvation. Let’s use this prayer to know that God’s light is for all peoples. Simeon’s prayer new when he said them but now 2000 years old can be new again if we pray them with God’s spirit.
     G. K. Chesterton said, “The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul” So what traditions or rituals or daily habits will you use to remind yourself that you have a new soul? Will you give thanks in your coming and going from your house? Will you ask that you honor God in all you do at your work or school? Will you look for the thrill of what gift God has set before you? Amen.