Hilton Head Island, SC – October 27, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Job 14:1-10; Genesis 3:1-5; 17-19
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And to Adam God said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.” – Genesis 3:17 (RSV)
There are two kinds of people. The first kind are those who know they don’t know everything and are not bothered by it. The other kind are those who think they know everything and are only too happy to let everyone else know everything they know. I confess I am the second kind, but I never thought of myself in that light until someone pointed out that’s what I am. Reluctantly I had to agree with him that I am a typical know-it-all who all too often pontificates on almost anything that anyone does --- or doesn’t --- want to know.
As years have turned into decades, however, I have become certain of less and less, and uncertain about more and more. When young, I had oodles of answers. Now that I’m old, I have multitudes of questions.
From the mid-1400s through the late-1800s, something called deism evolved. It would take the time of my normal sermon (which is longer than most people like anyway) adequately to explain deism, but I will say only three short things about it: First, deists believe that everything about God or religion must be totally rational. Second, God created the universe and the world, and then withdrew from it, and has never been heard by anybody. Third, God is only transcendent (out there, somewhere, wherever “there” might be); He is not immanent (close to us), nor can He be. None of these statements says everything that needs to be said about deism, but they are going to have to suffice.
Job was a deist of sorts. “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He comes forth like a flower, and withers; he flees like a shadow, and continues not….Man dies, and is laid low; man breaths his last, and where is he?” (Job 14: 1,2,10) The God who is portrayed in this singular biblical book with respect to humanity seems like a distant and disinterested deity.
Theism is similar to deism, but it declares that God is knowable through both reason and revelation. Furthermore, He is both transcendent and immanent. In other words, the God of theists is closer and more knowable than the God of the deists. In that sense theism is more like traditional Christianity than is deism. Probably more people are deists or theists than are agnostics or atheists, but they don’ know it, because they are not familiar with either word, and you may not be either.
I was a traditional Christian until I was forty or so. I believed that God created the universe, that for reasons known only to Him he chose the Hebrew people to be His people, and that eventually He sent Jesus into the world to be the Savior not only of the Jews but of everyone who would be saved, and that would not be everyone. After Jesus was crucified and resurrected, God sent the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, to be His presence among us from then to now. I tell you all this to try to explain why I am now a theist. At the outset, it is important for you to know I am not trying to convince you to be a theist too. You should be what you need to be to be you.
For half my life I considered the Bible to be correct in much, though not all, that was written in it. Bit by bit, though, I concluded that much of the Bible was historically highly hyperbolic. It was not rational, especially in large parts of the pictures it portrayed about God and Jesus. In my opinion, which is only an opinion, the biblical writers honestly wrote what they believed, but I think some of what they said was just - - - wrong. I hasten to add that is also true of some of the things all of us believe. There is and there always has been a huge smorgasbord of Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim doctrines and beliefs, and I doubt that anybody has selected all of the proper choices. Despite that, I see value in all religions.
You might reasonably ask, “Even if all this is true, why say it? Why not let all of us live with those truths and errors that suit us?” That is perfectly fine with me, and even if it were not, I want you to know that whatever you think is certainly think-worthy. But I also want to explain why for me, and perhaps for you too, I cannot subscribe to biblical literalism or biblical infallibility, or anything close to that. In fact, such notions are perhaps the primary reason why more and more educated people are rejecting all religion of whatever sort and all belief in God as being gullible nonsense. Sadly, they throw out the entire baby with all the murky bathwater, while multimillions swallow every word in holy writ, whether it be the Upanishads, the Dao De Jing, the Bible, or the Quran. We are all fallible in many respects, among them that our thinking on particular matters is flawed. It cannot be otherwise.
The first two chapters of Genesis are two related myths about how the universe and world were created. Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning of His creating, God created the heavens and the earth” (not really “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”) Presumably it implies that God hadn’t created anything yet, but He had always intended to Big Bang everything into existence, and He finally did it. Was God or physics the origin of the Big Bang? I believe it was God, but I don’t know it, because that can’t be known,
Chapter 3 continues the mythology by explaining how humans messed up the Edenic paradise. The serpent tempted Eve, she succumbed, Adam blamed Eve, God said a price had to be paid, and it has been a divine/human tussle ever since, according to this theological story.
The New Testament insists that God sent Jesus as His divine son into the world to save people from their sins. It further implies that those who don’t do the right things or believe the right things will be doomed to hell. That part of the story is a notion this old theist strongly rejects.
I have a close friend with whom I had coffee every Friday morning, during which time we would solve the problems of the world to our satisfaction, but to nobody else’s knowledge. He and his wife lived across the hall from us for a couple of years, and then they had the temerity to move away, leaving me high and dry. Recently he called me, and we had, for me at least, a very productive two-hour conversation, during which he gave me numerous helpful critiques and good advice. He reminded me that I am a know-it-all, which I needed to hear. He suggested that I am sometimes inflexible in my opinions. I always knew I had innumerable opinions, but I admit I did not realize I am too inflexible about them. Furthermore, he said, I frequently engage in “mansplaining.”
I had never read or heard that word before, but obviously other people have been familiar with it for some time, because when I typed it into this homiletic manuscript, the spellcheck did not underline it in red, which means that it is now an accepted noun and verb. In case you also are unfamiliar with the term, it has two meanings. The first is when a man explains something to a woman that she has known for years, but he thinks she will never understand it unless a man tells her what it means. The second meaning that I subsequently deduced is that know-it-alls are the type who either by nature are mansplainers or who evolve into them for reasons I shall not now take time to speculate upon. I never knew I was a mansplainer, but I suppose I am, at least (I hope) according to the second meaning.
It is a considerable adjustment for someone who thought he had it all together to realize he didn’t, and doesn’t. I’m definitely not suggesting that I have lost my faith, but I am saying that the nature of my faith has considerably changed. I no longer believe in a hands-on God who steps in to fix things up whenever they need to be fixed, or who intervenes when He knows that, left to our own devices, we will irreparably damage ourselves or others. He didn’t send fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah or make the waters of the Red Sea part. Furthermore, If He miraculously saves someone from a fatal disease, isn’t He obligated to save everyone else from such diseases? If not, why not? I don’t try to make life difficult for myself; it just seems to come naturally to me.
Heidi Haverkamp is an Episcopalian priest who occasionally writes articles for The Christian Century, a progressive magazine. In April she had a piece there entitled, “The Wisdom of Not Knowing.” In it she said this: “’I don’t know’ might be the truest creed we can confess in our modern age. We know (or think we know) so much. But we really cannot know who God is or why terrible things happen. We cannot know how to heal the world or save the church….To become a more just, loving, and wise people, we may need to let go of needing to know. Not to hide in ignorance, but to quit spending our energy grasping after information or defending our rightness or righteousness.” There is much thoughtful wisdom in those words.
As people draw closer to death, some seem to undergo a major reassessment of what they believe and about who they have been. In many things I have become more convinced of what I am convinced of, but in matters religious I am much more accepting of a broader range of religious truths, but less certain of which particular beliefs I espouse. Some old people become more convinced of what they had believed, and others are relieved that they no longer hold fast to ideas they had treasured for so long, but are now happy to have an altered worldview. If it appears as though I am bouncing in every direction in this sermon, it appears that way to me as well. and that surprises me. I have often been wrong, but I was never in doubt. Is it good now to be ambivalent, or should I be worried? Ambivalence is foreign to me; am I entering a new phase?
In the two-hour conversation with my coffee-quaffing chum, he reminded me that he knew I have been under a lot of recent stress, which is true. Am I stressed because The Chapel Without Walls will soon also be without existence? Is my stress because of my impending retirement? Are other things involved? What made me decide to address this homiletic stream-of-consciousness in the first place? Is this only for me, or is it for all of us? If it’s only for me, why I am doing this? Is it wise? Is it fair to you?
My friend said that God is a no-fault God. What an outstanding expression: a no-fault God! God watches over us, he said, but despite what the Bible frequently declares, God ultimately chooses to find no fault in any of us. Therefore we too should develop a no-fault attitude toward everyone else --- not their views necessarily, but for them. Holding a grudge against anyone, but especially against God, is self-defeating. We are often too hard on others and too easy on ourselves.
I ask myself if I am becoming pessimistic. If so, is it because I am old, or because there is now more to be pessimistic about? I have seen that tendency in many old people who become discouraged about the world in their advancing age. Is my current ambivalent and therefore more complicated mindset due to eighty-five-itude, or is it just a natural theological progression for such an odd duck as I? For example, turning into a theist may surprise you as much as it does me. It has considerably changed my thinking about prayer, the Church, universal salvation, the divinity of Jesus, and the Trinity.
The last two doctrines, the divinity of Jesus and the triune nature of God, enabled Christianity to make astonishing progress in converting the Roman Empire from its multiple gods and pagan tendencies into an entity that officially adopted Christianity as the religion of the empire at the Council of Nicea in 315 CE. Would that have happened without those two doctrines becoming dogmas? Probably not. They were brilliant marketing tools for establishing a new religion.
I would not be a Christian had I not been brought up in the Church. Having been a preacher for sixty years, my thinking likely changed far more than if I had retired after forty years. Maybe the longer the clergy occupy a pulpit, the more their views bend one way or another. St. Benedict was the founder of the oldest major monastic order in Catholicism. I just learned that he considered intellectual curiosity to be a sin. I guess he wanted his monks to be completely compliant. If Benedict was correct about curiosity, I am a grievous sinner. I have a hard time turning my mind off. Shakespeare put these words into the mouth of Julius Caesar: “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. Such men are dangerous; they think too much.” Mea culpa.
If entirely proper thought were the prerequisite for entering the kingdom of God, no one would be there. However, because God is a no-fault God, His grace is extended to all. We can trust that in the end, we shall be with God in an unimaginable existence where all the questions we are capable of having answered will be answered. Whoever God is, we humans will understand Him to the fullest extent possible.
Last week two ladies I visit each week in an assisted living facility said two interesting things to me. The first, who is 96 years old, said I should have been a professor. Through the years, many parishioners have told me that, but all I ever wanted to be was a rabbi/pastor. The other lady is a hundred years old. I have known her for forty years. Apropos of nothing, she said, “You don’t look or act like a minister.” I think she meant it as a compliment; at least I took it as one. If so, it is the best compliment I ever received. On the other hand, I don’t know how a minister is supposed to look or act, so I’m not sure she was making a positive statement.
I shall end this very dense sermon with the text of one of my favorite hymns, which also is one of those that no one else seems to know. (I remember the text of too many hymns, and forget too many other more important things.) The hymn was written by the Rev. Calvin Laufer, about whom I know nothing. The first stanza says this: “I sought the Lord/ And afterward I knew/ He moved my soul to seek him/ Seeking me;/ It was not I who found/ O Savior true/ No, I was found of Thee.” There is only one God, and He seeks all of us always. Because He does, in the end, all of us will be found. Thank God.