A Politically Incorrect Gospel: eternity, really???
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. David McMaster
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Text: Romans 8:22-25, 28-39
I came across a story the other day about a man named George. George died and went to up to the gates of heaven for Judgment. St. Peter met him at the gates and said, "Before you meet with God, George, I thought I should tell you - we've looked at your life, and noted that you really didn't do anything particularly good or bad. So we're not quite sure what to do with you. Can you tell us anything you did that can help us make a decision?"
The newly arrived soul thought for a moment and replied, "Oh yes, absolutely. There was a time I was driving along and saw a poor woman being harassed by a group of evil-looking bikers. So I pulled over, got out my tire iron, and went up to the leader of the bikers. He was a big man, a muscular sort, a hairy guy with tattoos all over his body and a ring pierced through his nose. He stopped bothering the woman as I approached. I just tore the nose ring out of his nose, and told him he and his gang had better stop bothering her or they would have to deal with me!"
"I'm impressed, George," St. Peter responded, "When did this happen?"
"About five minutes ago," said George.
I don't know about you but apart from things like heavenly humour, more and more I find people rejecting Christian thought and ideas of, for instance, the afterlife along with it. Psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, in his book Love's Executioner, tells of two delusions, or “fixed false beliefs,” that help his cancer patients allay fears about death: the belief in personal specialness and in an ultimate rescuer. Like many modern thinkers, Yalom sees the afterlife as wishful thinking, an escapist way of denying the finality of death.
So too did Ben with whom I did graduate work a number of years ago. Ben had Pentecostal roots and initially, when I met him, he was quite conservative theologically. But over the course of a year's critical theological study, Ben started to change. By the end of our respective programs, Ben had given it all up. Christianity, which was once so dear to him became as nothing. In one conversation several of us were having about the resurrection, Ben blurted out, “Resurrection, come on, there is no resurrection.”
But my personal favourite story of this nature occurred when I was just starting ministry and was visiting a woman, recently widowed, in a small village in south-western Ontario. Her husband had been a United Church minister and she was missing him terribly. She was sad and lonely, she told me, among other things, that she had “visitations,” telling me that sometimes she thinks that her departed husband comes into her bedroom and stands at the foot of the bed watching over her. As we chatted for a while, I sensed her loss and tried to help by reminding her of our faith and the hope of seeing our loved ones again in eternity, when she looked at me incredulously and said, “You say that as if it's true!”
A lot of things are working against Christian faith and beliefs these days. Arch-atheists such as Richard Dawkins or the late Christopher Hitchens are but recent examples of where the broad philosophical trends have been leading since the dawn of “the Enlightenment.” Immanuel Kant distinguished between knowledge gained from science and that gained from religion, between the natural and the supernatural. Individuals began to focus on one or the other and it was not long before knowledge from the science and the natural became more highly valued than that of the religious and the supernatural. Scientists during this time have tended to view the universe as a closed system, with natural, cause-effect relationships accounting for all movement in the system. Everything has to have empirical and natural explanations and it has led to an unprecedented and valuable growth in human knowledge. Unfortunately, however, anything other-worldly, anything super-natural has gone from being not measurable, to implausible, and then to impossible and untrue. And so, it has been a most difficult time for people of faith in the midst of a dominant worldview and focus. Faith-knowledge and faith-matters are considered inferior. If I may use the phrase in a looser sense than I did last week, Christianity has become “politically incorrect in the world.” Confess that you are a Christian, that you believe in things like God, the resurrection, and heaven, and many times, eyes will begin to roll.
Yet there are great minds that have cried out in this world for deeper meaning and something more than this life. In the midst of all the developments and knowledge that humans have gained, most want something more. Nietzsche found none and some blame that for his depression and suicide. Tolstoy cried out for more and in A Confession wrote:
My question - that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide - was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man … a question without an answer to which one cannot live. It was: What will come of what I am doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?” It can also be expressed thus: Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?
Sometime later, the prolific author and thinker declared that he had found meaning in the simple Christian faith of the Russian peasant. I don't know if that can be described as the most rational of determinations in an age of positivism, but perhaps Tolstoy saw that there are realities that reason and empirical thought alone cannot comprehend.
I well remember my own journey of faith. As a person with a very logical, mathematical brain, I had no real interest in Christianity as a teenager. Like many of my peers, I had given up on church. Just as I was turning 20, however, a friend of mine who had grown up among the Christian Brothers on the Fife coast of Scotland, started talking about Christianity. He was no prude, a regular sort of dude whom I worked with and had the odd drink with. One night we were sitting in a pub and started talking about the afterlife. He told me about a book he was reading and I actually listened. I was going through a time of searching, to find myself, and so I too started reading. I read this and that and eventually found my way into my father's theological library. There were a number of things that happened that year but to make a long story short, one night I was up in Collingwood. It was the middle of winter and very late. I remember looking up into the snow covered hills lit up by the moon and the odd lamp going up the hills. It was a beautiful scene. I had seen it before but for some reason on that night it was different. It was as if God tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Can you have something as beautiful as this without a creating hand?” It was the beginning of my journey of faith. I could not prove God had spoken to me. I could not prove that there was a creating hand in the universe. These things were not empirically verifiable. Yet, whatever occurred that night, struck a “nerve” deep within my soul. Perhaps you have had an experience of your own that you have been hesitant to share with others because the spirit of the age does not really appreciate these things. And yet they are real to us as individuals. They have significant effects on us at times. There seems to be a knowledge from another plane, glimpses of another realm or eternity, and more to life than meets the eye.
Søren Kierkegaard told a parable once about a man who was travelling in days long ago. The man was riding inside a carriage. The carriage was driven by a peasant who sat outside, up front in the cold and dark. Inside, the man was warm with his blanket, the carriage was lit, so he could read or just pass the time with his thoughts or a snooze. One would have thought that the inside of that lit carriage was the place to be on a cold, dark night. But it was the clearest of clear nights and the stars and planets appeared like never before. The peasant driver wrapped himself up as best he could, but the view, the view was so amazing it took the cold away. The majestic beauty of the universe laid itself out before him as he drove the horses and carriage down the road. From the vantage point of the lit carriage, the traveller missed it all. The light and the carriage walls made him totally unaware of the spectacle that lay on the outside. The peasant driver took it all in.
One thinks of some other words of Tolstoy who once said that we tend to limit life and then mistake what limits life for life itself. We have lives like the inside of a carriage. We limit them, but need to get outside to see a bigger, greater picture of the universe and reality. So, when thinking about whether there is more to life than this, perhaps it is a question of perspective. Maybe there is more if we just get outside and look.
Jesus, and the biblical writers, kept pointing us to a reality that lies beyond. They spoke of a story beyond our earthly story, a much bigger story, a grander story; the story of God, a story of hope, a story of eternity. They say that, in this life we can catch glimpses of it every now and then. St. Paul writes that it is as though we “peer through a glass darkly.” (1 Cor.13:12) We see now only in part but there is more to life than this.
I grew up in Ireland, one of the centres of what is called Celtic spirituality, and there is within Celtic spirituality the concept of the “thin place.” The “thin place” is one of those places in which a person can almost reach out and touch or experience God. I think that I found one of those places when I travelled down the east coast of Ireland a few years ago, south of Dublin into County Wicklow, to a place called Glendalough. The ruins of an ancient monastery are in Glendalough. It is the place where the renowned St. Kevin was said to dwell. Hills sweep down into a lough and I remember, early one morning, staring out at the stillness of the water, a little mist off in the distance. It's beauty was stunning. Then as I wandered around the ancient buildings and chapels, there was this feeling, an inexplicable feeling, that there was something far greater than I in this place. I wondered if that was a glimpse of something beyond? Maybe there is more to life than this?
When it comes to the afterlife, I have sometimes wondered about the spiritual events that people claim to have and particularly near-death experiences. Science cannot confirm them but, are they all erroneous? I have two friends who are medical doctors. They do not know each other, they live in different parts of Ontario, one actually holds a Ph.d. in the field, the other is an Emergency Room physician. Both, to my surprise, have told me about their own personal near-death experiences. Each, with some variation, described leaving their body, seeing friends or family members in the hospital room. Each had a journey toward a great light, incredible peace and sadness about coming back to what they described as “this world.” One says that she now has no fear of death whatsoever, that she knows there is more. What are we to make of those things? Particularly when they are from people we know and trust, educated people, what are we to make of them? Are they all delusions? Or are they glimpses of something bigger, greater, a reality that lies beyond our reality?
Many years ago, there was something, perhaps a more distinct plane of knowledge that transformed the lives of a group of misfits forever. There was Peter and Andrew, James and John, Matthew and Thomas and others, and there was Paul. Paul, Saul as he was called at first, had grown up in a Jewish family far away from Judaea, in the Roman city of Tarsus. He was a Jew by birth and a Jew by desire and a Jew by education. He travelled to Jerusalem to get a higher education with the great Rabbi Gamaliel and from there served the priests and high priestly concerns by arresting and bringing to trial members of a new sect that was growing around the name Jesus. He said himself that he had blood on his hands from these endeavours. He had persecuted and been involved in the taking of the lives of Christians. (1 Cor. 15:9; Acts 7:57ff., 22:4ff.)
That makes Paul an interesting person to have become a Christian leader. He was on his way to Damascus when something happened to him. He said that he encountered the risen Lord (1 Cor.15:8) who declared, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”(Acts 9; Acts 22) It is difficult for us to determine what exactly happened on that road. Whatever it was it changed Paul's life entirely. No longer did he persecute Christ, he turned to serve Christ. No longer did he round up Christ's followers to take them to trial and maybe death in Jerusalem, he became an apostle of Christ. He spent time integrating this new, novel experience into his knowledge of God and faith and went out preaching salvation in Christ, resurrection, and that there was indeed something more to life than this.
Interesting choice, Paul. The thing about history and the past is that one can never prove scientifically that things happened the way a writer of old says. It doesn't matter whether it is Homer of St. Luke, without videotape, we are left to look at accounts of events and make determinations of probability. Historians look at the character of the reporters, how close they were to the events, how it affected them. They think of the nature of the witness, whether what they said would benefit them in any way. It is always helpful to have an independent witness to things and better yet to have what can be described as an enemy witness, someone who has nothing whatsoever to gain from their testimony, someone who might like nothing else than to testify to an alternate set of events. Think about it, Paul was an enemy witness. Paul did not like Jesus or what Jesus had done among those he considered the people of God. But something happened to him. Something turned his whole life on its head. Whatever it was it would have had to be overwhelming. Paul said that he encountered the risen Christ, that death had been overcome, and he preached that when one has Christ there is nothing, not even death that can separate one from the love of God. (Rom.8:38ff.) From that time on, Paul had great hope, he spoke of resurrection, that our bodies would be transformed beyond this life (Rom.8:23; 1 Cor. 15:35ff.), that there is indeed much more to life than this. Maybe, what happened to Paul cannot be proven empirically but there is a level of credibility to it.
The world may laugh. Paul, himself, said that the gospel was folly to the Gentiles, but when one considers faith and God and eternity, maybe more often, we need to change our perspective. Like Kierkegaard's carriage, maybe we need to get outside and explore a greater world than we have ever conceived.
We may not scientifically prove God or Christianity or the afterlife. Yet the experience of many seems to say that there is something going on out there, just beyond our reach. It is as though we look through a glass darkly and every so often catch glimpses of the greater reality that is. We get glimpses in experience, and in the experience of others. We find them in countless spiritual stories that people have experienced. There's something going on. It changed Paul's life. It gave Leo Tolstoy meaning. It gave my doctor friend no fear of death. And it gives me great hope: If we can just climb outside of the carriage.
Jesus said to his disciples:
Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. John 14.1-3
There is more to life than this!