July 27, 2008

ONE DAY GOD’S CAUSES WILL TRIUMPH

                     Matthew 13:31-33

           Sermon presented on July 27, 2008

 

            Chekhov wrote:  “Conciseness is the sister of talent.”   Is there any passage in all of scripture as concise, as short and snappy and spot-on to-the-point, as the passage read today from the New Testament?  In a mere three verses, fewer than 100 words, Jesus tells two parables – the Parable of the Mustard Seed, and the Parable of the Yeast.  And these aren’t slight or inconsequential parables, which go by so quickly that we may dismiss them.  Rather, here Jesus counsels us to resist any inclination toward discouragement or defeatism, or weary resignation to the idea that our day-to-day lives are pointless or senseless.  Rather, in the words of Bible scholar Dr. Craig Blomberg, of Denver Seminary:  these parables declare that “one day many will be astonished . . . [for] one day God’s causes will triumph.” 

 

            These brief parables go-together in several ways.  First:  as a pair they use symbols associated with typical male and female tasks of Jesus’ day.  The image of the mustard seed is drawn from field work, which men typically did, and the image of yeast is associated with domestic routines, which was women’s work (I’m not saying that’s the way things should be now, only that it’s the way things were then!).  This reflects Jesus’ concern to relate to everyone in his audience.  In this way, they’re companion pieces.  And second: they’re tied together by a common theme – that from something small, inconspicuous and ordinary (a mustard seed, yeast), from something that may not look like much to the world, incredible abundance comes forth.

 

            The most immediate effect of these teachings is to transmit a great surge of encouragement to those who find themselves weary with work or worry, or burdened with brooding feelings of life’s futility.  And who doesn’t feel this way, from time-to-time, anyway?  The human spirit aspires for transcendence and significance.  By transcendence, I mean the confidence that life counts for something worthier and sturdier than daily routine, something that rises above mere existence and endures forever.  And by significance, I mean the wish that we actually may participate in this higher purpose, and our lives count for something that outlasts it, something significant.  But though the human spirit aspires to transcendence and significance, the demands of daily duty may quench the spirit.  Peter Drucker wrote that, “there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” 

 

            Yesterday morning we went to the Ottawa County Fair, in time to see the final rounds of the Mule Pull.  Do you know about Mule Pulls?  Here’s how it works.  Mules pull a sled that’s loaded with weights.  If the mules succeed in doing this, their reward is not a word of encouragement: “Well done, good and faithful mule, you get the rest of the day off, you’ve earned it.”  No, the reward is that they have to do it again, but with more weight!  As long as they keep doing it, weights keep getting added.  The last mule that fails, wins.  I couldn’t help but wonder:  what do the mules say to one another when they’re alone at night?  “How in the world did we ever let ourselves get talked into this?!”  But it also occurred to me how true-to-life this event is.  Sometimes it seems as though no matter how hard we work, or how well, it simply leads to more, and more difficult, work.  How on earth did we ever let our lives come down to this?

 

            Over against these feelings of uselessness, and the pervasive malaise such feelings may bring-about, there stand Jesus’ twin parables of the mustard seed and yeast.  These concise parables teach that the ordinary, the everyday, the routine, the commonplace are not distractions from the real purpose of living, but the particular activities through which goodness and mercy take form in the world, and the story of our lives is told.  Christian writer Eugene Peterson suggests that any kind of “spirituality . . . that doesn’t have anything to do with doing the dishes and changing diapers or going to work” is “a cheap shortcut” to the real thing, which is to see the purpose of our lives, not as something holy and set-apart from family and work and making a living and keeping at it each day, but as the grace to recognize purpose in the particularities of everyday life.

 

            These parables must have been especially encouraging to the audience to which the Book of Matthew seems to have been addressed originally.  The Bible, in its entirety, is meant for all people, of course, in all times and places.  But there are often contextual aspects that are instructive and useful to keep in mind, as well.  Scholars propose that Matthew’s Gospel appears to presuppose a situation of hostility toward believers, hostility from families and friends, criticizing and taunting them for abandoning the old religious ways.  To these beleaguered young Christians, struggling to keep the faith amid ridicule and rejection, it would have come as a surge of encouragement to be reminded that Jesus had spoken these parables, as though he foresaw their predicament:  that just as a mustard seed and yeast, appearing as nothing important in this world, yet bring-about abundance, so the humble, faithful, inconspicuous witness of a few believers will be used by God for great purposes.  One day God’s causes will triumph.

 

            The cause for encouragement is the confidence that God is actually at work in the processes of seedtime and harvest, and in the baking of bread.  God is actually at work in the unheralded, even unnoticed, service of ordinary people. 

 

            We often talk in the church about bigger-than-life, heroic figures of faith.  And that’s not only all right, but actually a good thing to do, because we need models and mentors of faithfulness, examples of men and women who have done great things in the name and for the cause of Jesus Christ.  Stories of courage and conviction arouse and sustain our own courage and conviction. 

 

            But we are also well-served to honor the teaching of these parables, calling to mind those of whose faithfulness few know, but through whom God has worked mustard-seed-like, yeast-like, in our lives. 

 

            John Wooden, the celebrated basketball coach at UCLA, whose teams won ten national championships in twelve years, says that, first day of practice each year, he’d gather the team together, and teach them how to put on their socks.   He believed that socks, improperly put-on, eventually start to bunch-up, causing discomfort, and in the final minutes of a close game, that discomfort can be the difference between winning and losing.  He recalls that this lesson caused unrest among first-year players, who’d all been high school superstars, recruited to play for mighty UCLA, and who now, first day, wanted to get onto the court and strut their stuff, being taught instead how to put on their socks.  But there’s no overstating the importance of doing the little things excellently.

 

            Let me ask you this:  who showed you how to put-on your spiritual socks?   Who planted in your spirit tiny seeds of grace which have matured now and flourished?  Who mixed-in some godly yeast?   And how might God be calling you or me, in our apparent ordinariness, to be agents of God’s love for others?    Mother Teresa said:  “I don’t do big things.  I do small things with big love.”   May we embrace this as our calling:  in the service of Christ, and in Christ-shaped relationships with others, we shall do small things in great love.

 

            There’s a final point to be made in regard to these parables, I think.  If God can be trusted to bring great good from the small good that we do, then we ought to do everything with faithful focus, integrity and commitment.

 

            Franz Rosenzweig was a great Jewish philosopher and theologian.  He died in 1929 of ALS, of which little was known at the time.  Toward the end of his life Rosenzweig had lost all muscle control other than his eyelids.  His wife Edith would sit by his bedside each day, and go through the alphabet until she got to the letter he wanted, at which point he’d blink his eyes, and she would write that letter.  In this way he translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into modern German, getting to Isaiah Chapter 53 when he died.  Rosenzweig wrote:  “Every act should be performed as though all eternity depended on it.”  Every blink of the eye, even?  Well, that may be an impossible ideal.   But the ideal lifts-up the truth of things:  that ordinary life is not to be lived as though God is disinterested or uninvolved in its ordinariness, and now-and-then, from time-to-time, we take a break and turn to God — on Sunday morning, say, when we go to church; or each evening, if we say a prayer before bed, or read a chapter from the Bible.  Rather, God is present all the time, in all of life – seed and yeast in our choices and decisions, our comings and goings, our thinking and feeling, our talking and listening, our dealings and relations.  “Seek the Lord and his strength,” Psalm 105 counsels, verse 4; “seek God’s presence continually.”  “Every act should be performed as though all eternity depended on it.”

 

Hudson Taylor, a great 19^th-century pioneer missionary to China, used to teach:  “A little thing is a little thing, but faithfulness in a little thing is a big thing.”  Let this be our resolve today:  that, remembering the lesson of the seeds and the yeast, we shall be faithful in little things, and so used by God to bring about the great ends He has promised and purposed.

 

July 20, 2008

                                    THE RABBI AND THE PHYSICIST

                                                            Psalm 8

                                      Sermon presented on July 20, 2008

 

            I enjoy reading the “Weddings” pages in the “Style” section of the Sunday New York Times.  There are too many wedding there to include announcement about them all, so each week the editors include an entertaining mix of the famous, the interesting and the quirky.  One Sunday last month an announcement appeared reporting the wedding of Beth, a rabbi, and Clifford, a physicist.  I don’t know these people, but found myself intrigued by their story.  They sound like a delightful couple.  After years of a long-distance relationship they’ve secured professional positions in the same New Hampshire city, so have decided to get married.  Good for them!   The rabbi and the physicist.  “What do they talk about?” I wonder.  I imagine Beth the rabbi and Cliff the physicist discussing faith and science, engaging each other with modesty and respect, as befits newlyweds, rather than in defensive, distrustful tones as often marks this topic.  Probably I’m idealistic about this.  Probably they’re like any other married couple, more likely to talk about dishes, diets, finances and in-laws than about the elegant and the eternal.  But the article quoted Beth as saying something slyly profound, I thought.  Asked about their relationship, she said:  “We both try to explain how the universe works.” (1)

 

            This wonderful statement counteracts our tendency to see science and faith as occupying wholly different, or even adversarial, spheres of inquiry and points-of-view, a difference made light of by Woody Allen, who quipped that religion has brought us the Pope while science has brought us air conditioning, and “between air conditioning and the Pope, I’d choose air conditioning.” (2)  It’s as though two groups have come to the gym, but each to play a different game.  On one side of the gym is a group warming-up and preparing to play volleyball.  On the other side is a group shooting baskets.  Each group handles the ball and performs skillfully among themselves.  But they never get together, because they’ve been schooled and equipped to play different games, governed by different roles and different rules.  What’s needed is to claim the insight of the rabbi and the physicist, that they’re in the same game together:  “we both try to explain how the universe works.”   This calls for a modest, respectful partnership.   Physicist Dr. Karol Musiol writes that “religion isolating itself from scientific insights is lame, but science failing to acknowledge other ways of understanding is blind.”  (3)  Since we would want to be neither lame nor blind — in fact, Jesus spent a great deal of time healing people of lameness and blindness — let’s think together for a few minutes about these things.

 

Thinking in the church begins with scripture, of course.  Psalm 8 is a soaring declaration of God’s creation. “O Lord, our Sovereign/how majestic is your name in all the earth.”  According to this Psalm, a person who reflects upon the universe will be stirred by three breathtaking impressions: 

+ first, by awe and wonder (“You have set your glory above the heavens”);

+ second, by an appreciation of human smallness and insignificance in relation to the cosmos (“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers/the moon and the stars that you have established/what are human beings, that you are mindful of them/mortals, that you care for them?”);

+ and, third, by an awareness of the duties and responsibilities of understanding the universe and exercising appropriate governance of it (“You have given [humans] dominion over the works of your hands.”)

 

The first of these impressions, awe and wonder, gives rise to praise.  A few years ago Betty and I took the funicular, or cogwheel train, to the top of Mount Pilatus, outside Lucerne, Switzerland.  It’s 7000 feet up, and at the top there unfolds a spectacular view of mountains, lakes, valleys and forests.  As we walked among the rocks on the mountaintop, exhilarated by the view, we noticed a boulder with a plaque on it.  We made our way over to it.  The plaque read:  “Come and see what God has done; He is awesome in all his deeds.”  Psalm 66, verse 5.   I don’t know who placed it there, but I know why.  “O Lord, our Sovereign/how majestic is your name in all the earth.”  Faith arouses, and for many actually originates with, an experience of awe and wonder.

 

And this may be said of science, as well.  Einstein said, famously:  “One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.”  (4)   This sublime idea is seconded by another scientist, Mr. Wizard, whose real name was Don Herbert.  He introduced a generation of us to science, on his television program, in the fifties and early sixties, and then again on Nicklodeon in the 1980s.  Do any of you remember Mr. Wizard?  In an interview shortly before his death last year, Don Herbert/Mr.Wizard said:  “Science is about the real world around us and it’s filled with fascinating wonders.”  (5)  Fascinating wonders, indeed.

 

The rabbi and the physicist, faith and science, both begin with a sense of abiding astonishment.

 

But with awe also comes humility.  As Billy Bigelow sings to Julie Jordan in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel:

            We’re not important.

            What are we?

            Just a couple o’ speaks of nothin’

            Look up there . . .

            There’s a whole lot of stars in the sky,

            And the sky’s so big the sea looks small,

            And two little people, you and I,

            We don’t count at all.  (6)

 

It’s an instinctive and natural response, which we hear echoed in the Psalm (“what are human beings, that you are mindful of them?”).  But here’s another point on which faith and science agree:  that the human spirit is appropriately “whelmed” by the vastness, beauty and intricacy of the cosmos, but ought never to be overwhelmed.  The human mind aspires to penetrate, unravel and understand the mysteries of the universe.

 

Christianity’s cultural despisers often put forth a different story at this point, arguing that while science honors the inquisitive, ever-expanding human mind, religion shuts it down, setting-up limits and boundaries to intellectual inquiry, so science is where the action is.  And, of course, there are historical instances of religion regarding science as enemy more than friend; most famously, I suppose, the church in 1616 directing Galileo not to “hold or defend the idea that the earth revolves around the sun.”  But the broader stream of history suggests that modern science actually emerged from fertile soil of Biblical faith.  Rodney Stark, of Baylor University, in his important book titled The Victory of Reason, writes:

            What the great figures involved in the 16^th and 17^th century

            blossoming of science – including Descartes, Galileo,

            Newton, and Kepler – did confess was their absolute faith

            in a creator God, whose work incorporated rational rules

            awaiting discovery.  The rise of science was . . . the natural

            outgrowth of Christian doctrine:  nature exists because it

            was created by God.  In order to love and honor God, it is

            necessary to fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork.

            Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord

            with immutable principles.  By the full use of our God-given

            powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible

            to discover these principles.  [He concludes] These were

            the crucial ideas that explain why science arose in Christian

            Europe and nowhere else. (7)

 

To affirm the truth of this is not to deny that religion and science require very different kinds of mental apparatus, and so tend to require different kinds of people, equipped by God with different gifts of talent and temperament.  My own academic experience with the sciences was undistinguished.  I remember one day my high school physics teacher told this joke.  Two atoms bumped into one another.  One said, “I think I lost an electron.”  The other asked, “are you sure?”  To which the first replied, “I’m positive.”  Do you “get” it?  Well, I didn’t.  But everyone else in the class did.  I knew then that God was not calling me to a career in science.  I not only didn’t understand the material.  I didn’t even get the jokes.

 

But though different in a great many ways, the rabbi and the physicist are alike in their basic worldview and life-purpose:  “We both try to explain how the universe works.”  Notice not only their mutual respect, but also their humility.  “We both try to explain how the universe works.”  “ . . . try to explain.” 

 

Humility is the only appropriate temperament, because we are mere limited beings seeking to know the unknowable, to explain the unexplainable, and to wrap our finite minds around the infinite.  Anything and everything we say is partial and provisional. 

 

In July 2005 the journal Science marked its 125^th year of continuous publication with a special edition, featuring the “125 Things Science Doesn’t Know.”  In his introduction to the magazine, editor Thomas Siegfried wrote:

            When science runs out of questions, it would seem, science

            will come to an end.  But there’s no real danger of that.  The

            highway of ignorance runs both ways.  As knowledge accumulates,

            diminishing the ignorance of the past, new questions arise,

            expanding the areas of ignorance to explore. (8)

 

In the same way, when it comes to faith the New Testament uses language every bit as humble in regard to what we can know.  The Apostle Paul, for one, speaks of our knowing now “only in part . . . as in a mirror, dimly,” whereas in heaven “we will see” clearly (I Corinthians 13).  He also declares that the cosmos is not the mere stage on which the human story is played-out, but is itself part of the story of God’s creative and redeeming love (Romans 8).  And he teaches that God’s plan for creation is mysterious and hidden in the mind of God (Ephesians 3).

 

Michael Heller is one of those rare individuals graced with such diversity of gifts that he can speak the language of faith to scientists and the language of science to the church.  He’s an ordained priest, who also has doctorates in mathematics and philosophy.  Heller writes:  “Science is a collective effort of the human mind to read the mind of God.” (9)   I like that, don’t you?  “Science is a collective effort of the human mind to read the mind of God.”

 

I saw a cartoon recently picturing two people, sharing a street corner, facing each other angrily.  Each holds a protest sign for passers-by to read.  One sign says:  “The end is near for religious reasons.”  The other says:  “The end is near for ecological reasons.”  A particular kind of bad, alarmist faith confronts a particular kind of bad, alarmist science.  The good news is that, whatever the end is, it is as it was at the beginning, is now, and ever shall be — that the cosmos is governed by God, who in creative love brought all things into being, who inspires and equips us to bring our best thinking to bear on unraveling creation’s endless mysteries and understanding its awesome wonders, and who is Himself Lord of the coming kingdom.

 

NOTES

 

(1)    New York Times, June 22, 2008, p. ST-18.

(2)    Movie Deconstructing Harry, 1997. 

(3)    www.independent.co.uk/news/science/cosmologist-wins-largest-prize-award-794673.html, March 12, 2008

      (4) quoted by Walter Isaacson,

      (5) www.networkperformancedaily.com/2007/06/

      (6) Oscar Hammerstein II, “If I Loved You,” from Carousel, 1945

      (7) Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success.  New York:  Random House, 2005.  pgs. 22-23

      (8) Science, Vol. 309, Issue 5731, July 1, 2005

      (9) same as (3) above

 

          

New Blog Content – Sermons

     I’ve been maintaining this blog for about six months now, finessing the content, trying different things and adapting to responses and suggestions.   I’ve decided to try something new — posting the sermon from the previous Sunday’s service, starting next week (July 20).  Hopefully this will be useful.  Let me know! 

      In Christ’s Service,

     Rev. Richard Raum, Forest Hills Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI