PRACTICAL ATHEISM March 30, 2014, The Fourth Sunday in Lent John 9: 1-16, 24-25, 39-40 Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Theme: God not only exists, but exists in the here and now. God of light, in the blindness of our hearts we too have refused to see wonder to be wonder, beauty to be beauty, miracle to be miracle, your nearness to be real. Open our eyes that we may see, O God. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen. Convinced atheists are rare birds, even in New York. You can t even scrape together huge numbers of unconvinced agnostics these days. For decades, George Gallup s famous polling organization has been asking people what they believe about God. Even though fewer Americans are part of a church and more classify themselves as nones meaning no specific religious identity some 90% of Americans say they believe that a Higher Power exists. If George had been around 2,000 years ago and had conducted his theological poll in Jerusalem, my guess is that it would have been 100%. The whole cast in today s story that Sarah just read from the Ninth Chapter of John would have doubtless checked the I believe in God box on the Gallup form: Jesus, of course, his disciples, the blind man, even in fact, especially the Pharisees would have voted for God. So if everybody in the story believes that God exists, what s the big issue? Traditionally, there have been three multiple-choice answers to the Is There a God question. Answer A: There is no such thing as God atheism. Answer B: Maybe there is a God, who knows? agnosticism, and answer C: I believe God - 1 -
exists theism. But the truth laid bare in today s very long tale from John s Gospel is that this last answer yes, God exists may not be so simple. The Ninth Chapter of John is a sharp-edged little play-within-a-play; it s a rhetorical sword that slices Answer C, the theism answer, into two answers. The story actually forces a distinction within the God exists answer. In effect, the story says that are really two Answer C s. Call them answer C.1. and answer C.2. More on C.1. and C.2. in a minute, but first the story. The drama unfolds in several scenes. It opens with Jesus disciples asking what sounds to us like a horrible question, but exactly the kind of theologically puzzler that religious technicians loved to fuss over back then. They see a blind man and ask who is to blame for such a tragedy. Was it something he did, or was it something his parents did? Jesus says, Neither. He says that the question is not Who did what to deserve this? Rather, the question is How can even this somehow come to reveal God? The healing that follows is more than a simple miracle story. It s an enacted parable. It s theology clothed in drama. That is to say, it s not just about the physical disability of literal blindness. John s Gospel is one long metaphor, and at its deepest this episode is about spiritual blindness blindness of the heart, as it were. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann describes this passage as a satire of a blind man who comes to see and sees people who prove themselves blind. The tale makes its plot twist when those Pharisees, the most super-religious people around, fail to see God at work right in front of them. They re ironically blind to the possibility that God could actually be present in Jesus near them, in their midst. Remember, these are the guys would have broken the lead on their No. 2 pencils blackening in the little box by Answer C: I believe God exists! But for all their adamant theism, they will not believe that God could actually be near to them. Their skeptical logic went like this: Jesus whoever he is healed on the Sabbath, and that makes Jesus a sinner because it was a sin to doctor on the Sabbath. And everybody knows sinners can t perform miracles, so ipso facto, God has nothing to - 2 -
do with this. They speculate that the guy really wasn t ever blind; maybe he was pretending. Or maybe he s not the same guy. The plot twists as the most religious of the religious interrogate the man and his parents, and in spite of what has unfolded right before their eyes, refuse to see the possibility of God in the here and now. In the last act of the story Jesus points this out to them. They indignantly put their hands on their hips, squint at him, and ask the most ironic of questions, Are you saying that we re blind? I said that this story is designed to cut answer C in half. That slice in two goes something like this: Answer C.1. to the Is there a God question might read, Yes, I believe God exists theoretically anyway. I believe in God up there. I believe in God back then. I believe in God in the abstract. This answer is effectively what you might name practical atheism. That is to say, God exists, but God doesn t have much anything to do with me and my life in the here and now. God s just an idea, not a present reality. So you might as well be an atheist. Answer C.2., on the other hand, might read like this: I trust in God here and now, God alive and present, not nailed down, God outside the box, God beyond expectation, God not limited to my understanding. The Pharisees are an easy mark. But the itchy truth is that we re often a lot like them ourselves. In the Gospels, the Pharisees often serve as the living emblem of religious people of any stripe who confine God to their own boundaries. Pharisees had their God neat; they packaged Divinity up in a Pharisee box. Their elaborate system of ritual purity told them who was on God s side and who wasn t. Their expectations of God were limited to their limited expectations. And Jesus just didn t fit. His God-beyond-categories ruptured their categories The 17th and 18th centuries, that putative age of reason, often labored with an oddly small-minded reason. These years saw the emergence of a theological movement known as Deism. Deists believed in God, but a God confined to the limits of the human mind. Some Deists likened God to a cosmic clockmaker who had created the universe and then retired to heaven. The clock just ticks away, following the immutable laws of its internal mechanical workings. The Clockmaker, if he cares at all, merely watches from afar. The Clockmaker never - 3 -
gets involved. The Deists would have checked box C.1. on the questionnaire. I believe in God God up there and back then. For us, the sharp point of today s story from John s Gospel is that it s not just Pharisees and Deists who box God up as a distant abstraction; we often do it ourselves. We Christians sometimes shut Jesus up in a book; we keep Him back in the New Testament and out of our hair. We make Him a wise historical teacher dead and gone. We shrink Him to mere memory. We compress Him into dogma. Like the ancient Pharisees and the not-so-ancient Deists, we too want to keep Him in an up there and back then box. But the whole inexorable press of the Gospel I mean the point of Incarnation, the point of the Cross, the implication of Resurrection is that God is not simply out there or back then. The Gospel s center of gravity is a God present in our place, present in our time, in your life, in my life. Back in my Ann Arbor congregation, a senior physician at the University of Michigan, once dropped me a note in which he the scientist encouraged me the minister to be very bold on the topic of miracles not just back then, but miracles here and now. As a physician he said that time and again in his long career he had seen with his eyes what he could not understand: tumors that disappeared, damaged hearts beyond healing that healed, addicts beyond recovery who recovered. Oh, he d also seen prayers go seemingly unanswered, but he simply wanted to tell me that there were things out there that were outside the box. We began worship today with the 23 rd Psalm as our Call to Worship. Then we sang a paraphrase of it. We ll close worship with yet another sung version of what is doubtless the most familiar and beloved of the 150 Psalms. The 23 rd has come to be loved, memorized, and recited in dark nights for one clear reason: it sings of the C.2. God, God as near to me as my own breath, God who cares like a shepherd. Back then, to speak of God as a shepherd offered a culturally proximate image of Divine loving intimacy, a picture of a God who lies me down in green pastures and leads me beside still waters, a God who walks beside me in the fearsome valley of the shadow, a God who invites me to a feast spread at life s table and fills my cup to overflowing. These are all images of Divine nearness and compassion, a poetry - 4 -
picture of a God who is the polar opposite of the distant theoretical God of answer C.1. Answer C.1. does admit to the existence of God, but merely a Deity disconnected from our days. Answer C.2. says that not only is there is a God, but a God with dirt and spit on His hands, living and present, exploding puny imagination, dancing with surprise, wiggling outside the box, moving along side us. But if C.2. is as true, if the Psalmist is to be trusted, if God is close and real, not afar and abstract, the great question is this. How can we come to see some trace of the Divine in the here and now? Theologian Belden Lane once said that in order to see the presence of God in your life, two things are needed. I ve told you this before and doubtless will again. Maybe I m mostly reminding myself. Belden Lane said that to see the present God, the God of here and now, the God of answer C. 2., requires two things attention and love. Lane said that you have to look with great attention and great love. Look into the routine of the days and nights with attention and love. Look into the faces of those you love with attention and love. Look into the strange and wondrous movement of things with attention and love. Look right into the dirt and spit of life as it is with attention and love. Look everywhere with great attention and great love. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. - 5 -