The First Word FROM FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF BONITA SPRINGS SERMON BY REV. DOUG PRATT NOVEMBER 10, 2013 PART 5 OF 6 Learning the Common Core Today s message is Part 5 of a six-part series, working our way together through the brilliant insights and concepts presented in the classic book by C.S. Lewis called Mere Christianity. We are calling it Pure Christianity because these truths represent the essence or the core of what we believe. In a big and diverse society like ours, there has been a great national discussion of what the basic ideas and skills are that we need especially in the area of education. If we are going to continue as the world leader in business, technology, and military power, we need each subsequent generation of Americans to be smart and competent. And so some experts in school curriculum have proposed a series of lessons and tests that have been given the label Common Core. The effort has been somewhat controversial, including here in Florida. Not everyone is in agreement with the Common Core plan, or how it should be implemented and administered. I will not take a side in that debate. But there is, I believe, a strong consensus that students need to all know and be able to apply certain universal core truths whether they live in Florida, Arkansas or Alaska. That is what C.S. Lewis sought to provide in the area of Christian beliefs and Christian living in his book. No matter what our faith tradition (Episcopalian, like Lewis, or Presbyterian, Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, non-denominational, etc.), these are the things that an educated and successful Christian needs to know and apply.
In the final section of Mere Christianity that we will consider today and next week, we learn what those core or pure understandings and convictions are. But first, let s let in the sunlight of a portion of God s Word (because everything Lewis wrote was based on scripture, and everything we teach and practice here at this church is likewise Bible-centered). Our text will be from Ephesians chapter 3, a letter written by the Apostle Paul to Christians in the first century. Having outlined in the previous couple chapters the common core of Christian beliefs, Paul senses that the minds of his readers may be a bit overwhelmed. So he expresses the following prayer for his readers (and us) that we will be able to absorb and appropriate everything he is teaching us. W hen I think of all of this, I fall to my knees and pray to the Father, the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. I pray that from His glorious, unlimited resources He will empower you with inner strength through His Spirit. Then Christ will make His home in your hearts as you trust in Him. Your roots will grow down into God s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God s people should, how wide, how long, how high and how deep His love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God. Ephesians 3:14-19 (NLT) The Paradox of Knowledge We are living in a time of phenomenal change in the fields of technology, knowledge and application. These changes are exploding all around us. It is as if we were at the town park at nightfall on the Fourth of July and happened to wander into the area where the fireworks were set up, just as they began to shoot off. Explosions are happening all around us, and it s dizzying and hard to keep up. 2
There are two counter-trends or opposite currents occurring simultaneously in technology in these exciting decades of the 21 st century. I ll call them the Paradox of Knowledge. They are the twin poles (or extremes) of Complexity and Simplicity. In the devices we use and the machines our lives depend upon, we are seeing both an increasing complexity in design and an opposite movement towards simplicity in usage. Think about the telephone. It was once a comparatively simple device: electrical impulses from a sending machine traveled over wires to a receiver and were re-translated back into human speech. No discredit to Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor, but old land-line phones were relatively easy to understand, and even to repair. Think of the complexity of an Apple iphone 5s. It can handle thousands of complex apps (as much knowledge as a Carnegie Public Library of a century ago), record and photograph, access the internet, and basically manage your life. The tiny inner workings are incredibly complex. Think about the automobile engine. It was once something that an average mechanic, working in his or her garage, could understand, repair and service on their own. Now engines are phenomenally complicated and sophisticated, with advanced circuitry and controls. Nobody can diagnose or repair the engine of the latest Mercedes or Honda without high-tech equipment. And yet, with complexity, has come greater simplicity of use for the consumer. Many of us remember the early days of the internet, with dial-up modems and primitive search engines. Today the use and application of technology by the leading companies is becoming more and more user-friendly and simple. In fact, in our highly-competitive global business world, if a product is not being constantly improved and made more simple and accessible, easier to use and more enjoyable an experience, it will be left in the dust by others. Look at Blackberry and Nokia once industry leaders, but now in big trouble. 3
The business books getting the most attention in executive suites and boardrooms today are focusing precisely on this paradox of complexity and simplicity. Best sellers include Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity by Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn, and The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. Just as technology grows ever more intricate, the opposite pressure is to make it ever simpler. The primitive computer that Bill Gates assembled in his Harvard dorm room in 1975 following a step-by-step guide in a Popular Mechanics article and with various crude parts the Advair 8800 is like a Model T compared to the latest computer products. And yet Gates computer was hard to use, with monochrome screen and code language. Now our smart phones and tablets are easy to see and use: bright colors, responding to simple touch or vocal commands. More complex yet more simple is the paradox of modern life. Which is precisely why the federal government has caused such frustration and brought such derision and disrespect upon itself. The IRS tax code is a hopelessly complex mess. But because the government is a monopoly and doesn t have to compete in a free market, it has no incentive to try to make its more than 14,000 pages of sometimescontradictory rules and procedures more user-friendly. That s the danger of a monopoly: bureaucrats are free to engage in ever-greater complexity of design with no correspondent pressure towards simplicity of use, as the competitive marketplace demands. The debacle of the launch of Affordable Health Care is the latest example. Only one percent of the 3.7 million who tried to register for coverage in the first week were successful. The best tech experts are now saying that the core mistake the government made was in deciding to use closed versus open source software. Most of the best software today is designed and continuously improved and perfected by using open source. But out of an obsessiveness with control and secrecy, the HHS department decided to keep its health care website completely out of the public eye. This was perhaps a predictable reaction in an era of Wikileaks and [NSA leaker] Edward Snowden, but the result has been disastrous and will be stunningly difficult to fix. 4
This is another paradox of modern technology: though security and secrecy concerns become greater because of potential theft of information, yet internet software needs to be an open secret to function best. The Spiritual Paradox While these examples may be rather technical, I believe they are relevant to what we find in Mere Christianity. Even though Lewis lived and died long before the smart phone and other current technology was developed, I m confident that he grasped this basic concept. Here s how the paradox of complexity and simplicity plays out in the realm of the spiritual world that is our focus: God is vastly more complex and greater than we can ever imagine, ever envision or ever understand Him; Yet accessing God, by enjoying an intimate daily relationship with Him, is far simpler than humans would ever expect. Though the mystery and wonder of the universe is a secret we will never be able to fully crack; Yet our Creator has made the basic truths so easily known that all of us can grasp the important truths His revelation is like an open source code of software, available to all mankind. Let s look at each of these components in closer detail. The Complexity of God When we dig into the inner workings of Christian theology (comparable to removing the back of a smart phone to see the circuitry, or lifting the hood of our car to study the engine), we come upon an irreducible and beyond-logic complexity. God the Creator, the Life-Force, the Sovereign Ruler and the Ultimate Purpose behind the incomprehensible universe, is somehow a Trinity: He is Three-and-yet-One. Our smartest minds have been trying for centuries to make sense of this. How can something be both Three and One? And yet God is and the Bible doesn t allow us to minimize it. In the brief passage we read in Ephesians 3 we find all the Persons of the Trinity. The Father 5
or Creator reigns supreme, the Spirit works within each of us, the Son has accomplished the vital work of redemption and now lives in each believer s heart. Their interaction is beyond what we can ever grasp more mysterious and interconnected than all the circuits in an iphone. You can t remove any of them without the whole biblical understanding of God collapsing. All we can do is just accept that God is infinitely more complex than the human mind can ever grasp. That should actually be a comfort and reassurance to us and a confirmation that the Christian description of reality is true and not dumbed-down or cheapened to be easy. For thousands of years humans have wanted to create an easy God. They have carved statues out of marble and stone and wood. They have worshiped and bowed down to created things: the holy rock in Mecca, the Hindu statues of their multiple but limited gods. They have wanted to put God in a nice, neat little box. But reality is too vast and complicated to fit into our finite minds. Indeed, any God you or I could understand would be too small and unworthy of our worship and adoration. The Simplicity of the Christian message Although God is unimaginably beyond us and greater than us, He has chosen to come down to our level and actually care about us human beings as individuals. He wants to know you and me and be part of our lives. He desires to forgive our sins, answer our prayers, guide us and comfort us, protect us from evil and temptation, and shepherd us all the way to an eternal existence in communion with Him. And through Christ s death and resurrection and the Holy Spirit s constant presence, He has made it unbelievably simple to access. We humans have always wanted to make it more complicated than God has. We have laid out complex sets of rules and regulations. The Pharisees of Jesus time were the First Century equivalent of the IRS bureaucrats: piling laws on top of laws, so complicated that no one could follow them all. The followers of Mohammed have made it complicated to please Allah: you have to pray five times a day, pilgrimage to Mecca, 6
fast during Ramadan, avoid certain foods and drinks, and participate in jihad and that s just to get a chance at eternal life. Even people who have grown up in a Christian tradition have been skeptical and suspicious that God s grace could be received by faith alone. Surely we have to do something to qualify or be worthy. It can t be that easy. Yet Paul and C.S. Lewis and other insightful Christian thinkers in each generation, have continued to show us that, in fact, God s offer is incredibly simple. Believe in Christ. Turn from trusting in yourself to trusting in Him. Just open the door, and keep it open all the time. You don t earn or deserve it. It s grace. Paul s prayer is that we will learn how to trust in the Lord, and keep trusting Him. He says, May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. In other words, you don t have to be an automotive engineer and understand every system under the hood of your car in order to drive it. Just get behind the wheel. You don t have to master the complicated technology of the smart phone. The way you learn to use it is by using it. The way you download apps is by pressing the screen and letting the technology do the work. Long before the modern business world discovered the paradox of complexity yet simplicity, God had already perfected it. The Open Source of God s Revelation What an incredible book the Bible is. Scripture is not just an ancient writing of ancient thinkers. Uniquely, it is God Himself who has revealed what we need to know and guided the thoughts and the hands of those who put it down in writing. We don t have to go through some secret or esoteric initiation to have access to God s Word. We don t need to go to graduate school. Nothing has been hidden, locked behind firewalls of security. It s available to the whole human race. This is what we need. Lewis ends this portion of Mere Christianity by moving from the nature of God (the Trinity, His vastness and infinite dimensions, His incomprehensible power and mind-boggling genius) to the complexity and unpredictability of human life and experience. We are never able 7
to see all that is happening at any given moment, nor can we see with 20/20 foresight what tomorrow will bring. This is frustrating to us, because we like to be able to control our little worlds. But we never can completely. So how does a Christian make sense of the ups and downs and unexpected swings and turns of life? Why was one person s life long and another s cut short? Why am I sick or injured? Why is that person not being properly punished by God s justice? How could that individual be allowed to do that to me? Why is somebody more successful than I am? Why isn t life fair? Why did God stick me with my body and my dysfunctional family and all my problems? Those are questions we will only get, at best, partial answers to and in many cases only after much time passes. Those are questions that, though they feel at times so urgent and pressing, are ones we can only put in the almighty hands of God. If we don t, they will imprison us. If we don t let them go, they will keep their hands around our throats. The only question we should focus our limited minds upon is this: What, God, do you want me to do now? In other words, how should a faithful Christian respond in my current circumstances? God can t answer our demand to know and understand everything, because we re simply not able to. But He always will answer through His Word, through His Spirit, and through the example, encouragement and wisdom of other believers our questions of What should I do next? 9751 Bonita Beach Road Bonita Springs, Florida 34135 239 992 3233 fpcbonita.org