Sunday Sermon, 29 January 2023

My friend, Steven Christoforou, wrote a piece recently in which he asks the question “Do our lives only make sense in light of the crucified Christ? Or do our lives makes perfect sense without God?” and the question has been getting under my skin. What bothers me is he’s right, for most of us our lives would make perfect sense if there were no God, and even we Christians who say we believe in God tend to speak and act as though He doesn’t exist, or at least has no role to play in our daily lives.

Much of the problem is one of Christianity’s own making. It was the insistence of the early Church Fathers, and brought to fullest expression in the scholasticism of the Western Church, that the universe was created and orderly, and therefore capable of being understood by man in a rational way. This is why the Church created universities, and why most of the early scientific discoveries in the West were made by Churchmen—even Galileo started out as a monk. It was the belief that the universe was created and thus operated by predictable, knowable laws that made possible science as we know it. Understanding the world in terms of reason, however, came with an inherent danger.

From prehistoric times, man’s knowledge of the world had come only through either experience or divine revelation, and the powers that move and control the earth and the environment seemed incomprehensibly mysterious and capricious, so man was forced to acknowledge his dependence upon and helplessness before the whims and indulgence of forces greater than himself. If, however, he can decode those forces, and understand the world and its mysteries in ways other than divine intervention, if in fact he needs only his reason, then man’s dependence upon the mercy of the gods diminishes. Or at least appears to do so. Thus, the balance of understanding begins to shift from a world infused, operated, and sustained by God to one composed of material, physical forces free of mind or intention that compose, order, and operate the universe.

As God’s role as necessary to the operation of the world around us diminishes, He also becomes less necessary to my life specifically until I get to the point where one can fairly ask the question Steve posed: do things make sense without God? do I need God to complete the picture of my life? Or is God optional?

Another recent indicator of this decline is the recent spate of high-profile Christian leaders who have quit the Church and faith altogether, people who have studied and taught others about God, and about Jesus, but at some point decided they could no longer sustain their faith intellectually, for one reason or another. Additionally, Church demographics are on the decline as people fail to see the relevance of faith. Why do I need Jesus? What does he do for me?

Unfortunately, when this happens, we in the Church often rush to intellectual defenses and proofs for God and Christianity. Mistaking the disagreement as an intellectual one, subject to reason, we leap to apologetics and attempt to persuade nay-sayers with logical arguments. But doing so actually cedes the ground to materialists by accepting the premise that God must be known (or knowable) by and through human reason.

I don’t deny the possibility. In fact, in Five Proofs of the Existence of God, Edward Feser lays out five philosophical proofs for the existence of God; the Aristotelian, the Neo-Platonic, the Augustinian, the Thomistic, and the Rationalist. All five show that one can, simply by thinking through the process, arrive at the truth that there must be a God, and that such a God must possess unity and simplicity, and be eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. Belief in God is rational.

And that’s not all! Stephen Meyer goes even further in The Return of the God Hypothesis, in which he presents recent scientific discoveries showing that the material universe had a beginning; that, from the beginning, the universe has been “finely tuned” to allow for the possibility of life; and that since the universe came into being, large amounts of genetic information present in DNA must have arisen to make life possible. He then shows that the best, most useful hypothesis to explain how such things could be true is the existence of God, hence The God Hypothesis. Scientific evidence has made theists out of otherwise skeptical scientists, because belief in God is also scientific.

But if belief in God is both rational and scientific, then why are more people leaving the Church than joining? Why are people rejecting faith? It is because believing in God isn’t just an intellectual exercise.

The Apostle Paul tried to tell this to the Athenians—who were not atheists, but thought of god as an idea—that God is not just a philosophical truth or intellectual idea, but far more than that. God is He in whom “we live and move and have our being.” God is Being. God is the breath in our lungs, the beat of our heart, the life in our soul.

Like the flower in Stephen Curtis Chapman’s Declaration of Dependence, all that we are and all we’re hoping to be is all and only what He’s given to us. 

We can only come to a lasting, saving faith in Christ when we stop reading the Gospel as an idea to be understood, and start treating it as the story of a Person we want to know. This is the key that unlocks belief in God: knowing that the pursuit of truth ends in a Person who is The Truth.

The best witness of the truth of the Gospel isn’t the fact that God’s existence can be proven true both philosophically and scientifically, it is that our lives demonstrate His existence, and that our lives would be meaningless and indecipherable apart from God. But first we have to believe it’s true. That our lives are utterly dependent upon God’s providence for the air we breath, the food we eat, the life we live. This is why the worship of the Church is eucharistic, we give thanks that even these gifts that we offer to God were first gifts from God to us.

The Canaanite woman of this Sunday’s Gospel reading didn’t believe in an idea, wasn’t persuaded by sermons or high philosophy. She had faith that this person, Jesus, was the answer to her daughter’s need, and was so absent of pride that she was willing to suffer being referred to as a dog if in the end it meant healing. The people we encounter every day have needs just as deep as this woman’s demon-possessed daughter. They are possessed with spirits of depression and loneliness and despair, and unlike the Canaanite woman they don’t know where to turn for healing.

They don’t know because when they look to the Church they see people more interested in being right, more interested in having the right answer to the intellectual questions, more interested in doctrine and apologetics, than in knowing our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ.

They don’t know because their encounters with Christ haven’t been life-giving interactions with a Person, but fearful exercises in self-defense and self-justification.

They don’t know, because we don’t know.

We’ve become so oriented to a materialist, rational view of the world that we’ve forgotten that the Holy Spirit is present everywhere, filling all things. We’ve lost this awareness because we’ve forgotten how to love each other, blinded by our attachments to the world. As Fr. Alexander Schmemann points out:

“To love is not easy, and mankind has chosen not to return God’s love. Man has loved the world, but as an end in itself and not as transparent to God. He has done it so consistently that it has become something that is ‘in the air’. It seems natural for man to experience the world as opaque, and not shot through with the presence of God. It seems natural not to live a life of thanksgiving for God’s gift of a world. It seems natural not to be eucharistic.” [emphasis added]

How many of us when we are sick or sad or lonely, think first call to the priest and to ask for prayer? Don’t we first call the doctor, or seek therapy, and only then, if at all, turn to God for comfort and healing? What does that say to others about our faith? How can we then say we believe in God? Of course, we should seek medical help when necessary, but it should be while we are praying, not before, and certainly not instead of praying. As my uncle once said “Sometimes prayer is all you can do, but it is ALWAYS the best thing to do.”

The answer to our decidedly materialist bent is to “descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord.” To pray. Not just the kind of intellectual prayer that lists our needs and those of others, or the kind that asks for guidance to take us where we want to go, but prayer of the heart, the kind of prayer that seeks an intimate relationship with our Creator. Prayer that listens and waits to be led. The kind of sacramental prayer that the Church teaches us and that Fr. Schmemman was talking about. And the sacrament par excellence is Holy Communion.

In Holy Communion we receive from His fullness, the fullness of life which is His Body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all. The difference between a sacramental view of the world and the materialist’s can be subtle. Both can agree that we are what we eat, but “for one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse.” Only Holy Communion is the living food that gives us Life, because we partake of Him who IS life. “In Christ, life-life in all its totality-was returned to man, given again as sacrament and communion, made Eucharist.”

According to St Symeon the New Theologian when the believer receives Communion without condemnation, his whole life

“is Pascha, a Passover: it is a transition from things visible to things intelligible…to the state in which we shall be pure, and shall enjoy eternally and in purity the most pure sacrifice-Christ-in God the Father and the Holy Spirit. For there we shall see Christ and be seen by Him. We shall be with Christ and shall reign with Him.” [emphasis added]

We go from simply seeing things to understanding them.

But we have to believe it. We have to have faith like that of the Canaanite woman that seeks the Source of Life for healing, no matter how foolish we look, no matter what our need. Faith like that of the Three Youths in the fiery furnace who told Nebuchadnezzar that “If the God whom we serve exists, then He is able to deliver us from the blazing fiery furnace and from your hand, O king. But even if He does not … we will not serve your gods or worship the golden statue you have set up.”

Do we believe Jesus is able to save us, that God is the Source of Life? Or are we giving in to the spirit of the age that looks to the creation rather than to the Creator for salvation? Do our lives demonstrate what we say we believe?

Anything else just doesn’t make sense.