"A Perfect Storm... Almost"
Christ remains our anchor in a post-modern, pluralistic age
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. David McMaster
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Text: 1 John 2:24-29
As a child, I was taken almost every week to my grandmother's house in Portavogie, on the northeast coast of Northern Ireland. Portavogie is a small fishing village where the paternal side of my family and many others had toiled for generations.
What I learned there made the film based on a true story, The Perfect Storm, a poignant film for me. Set in the fishery of Gloucester, Massachusetts, I knew a little about the challenges of fishermen, their economic struggles, the drive to meet quotas, and the risks of the sea. My relatives ensured that I respected the sea, and so I knew what was being said when one of the townsfolk said to Captain Billy Tynes that the Grand Banks was no place to be in October. But Billy took the Andrea Gail to the Grand Banks and then far beyond, right out to the Flemish Cap. About 560 km east of St. Johns, the Flemish Cap is a large plateau of shallow water where the fishing used to be good until it was over-fished by international trawlers. The film portrayed Tynes, under pressure to make quotas, ignoring the warnings of storms brewing and unprepared, as he headed home, for what weather experts in Boston called “the perfect storm.” In 1991, Hurricane Grace was heading up the eastern seaboard from Bermuda. A cold front was coming in from the Canadian Shield. And a storm was brewing around Sable Island. They fed each other to form what was also called “the storm of the century,” an enormous extra-tropical low, a “nor'-easter” of “nor'-easters” that created havoc. Much damage was caused. The Andrea Gail was lost. The sea is a dangerous place.
I tell you this story in order to use it as a metaphor for the plight of the church. In some ways the church today is at sea and it is almost as if a number of storms have come together, as if the perfect storm is about to envelope us, and is threatening to shipwreck the church and the faith of Christian believers.
The first storm that threatens is the storm caused by a widespread world-view created, in part, by modern and post-modern thought. It probably began in the 17th and 18th centuries; the Enlightenment held up human reason as the seat of knowledge. In philosophy, rationalism held sway and beyond, science was blossoming. Modern people were taught to differentiate between knowledge gained from science and that gained from religion such that a great philosophical division was put in place with the implicit assumption that scientific thinking was better than religious thinking, reason better than faith, what can be known in nature better than what can be known from “the supernatural.” The world was seen almost as piece of machinery, an enclosed causal system. Every effect had a natural explanation. Science and reason ruled and there was no room for the supernatural, God, or unique events, let alone material from ancient culture from which the Bible came. Darwin, for instance, “proved,” it is thought, that Genesis and the Bible were lacking and everything super-natural was tossed into a bin labelled myth.
Then, in the latter part of the 20th century, a reaction to science and reason began to surface. Changes in scientific theories over time, it has been noted, suggest that what scientists think today may not be what scientists will think tomorrow, and future science may correct and laugh at what scientists hold to be true today. Thus, we ought to be much more humble about what we think we know and what we perceive to be true. Something called post-modernism began to surface, holding that truth may be more elusive than we think and that there may be many truths. Post-modernism sees the world with no clear, central hierarchy or organizing principle. It embodies extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality. Post-modernism is pluralistic, if not relativistic, such that truth and value only exist in the apprehension of them by the individual.
I recall a third-year student coming into my office at McMaster University a number of years ago. She had written a paper on the ethical issues associated with the topic of euthanasia and was not happy with the “A-” grade that I had given her. As we chatted about her paper and the topic in general, we began to speak of ethical models. I must have inferred that one of them had a ring of truth about it, for she retorted quickly with a wonderful post-modern assertion, “But, there is no truth!” I paused before asking her, “Is that true?” I am not sure that a post-modernist would be bothered by that question of logic, though one post-modern writer suggests that he is not entirely against absolute truth. He says, “I just doubt anyone's ability to apprehend truth, and comprehend it, and remember it, and encode it in language, and communicate it to others and have them understand it in an absolutely accurate way. As a result, post-moderns tend to be entirely open to the views of others, they hesitate to stir up controversy, they appreciate diversity, and most of our society is immersed in this kind of thought or a variation of it. It represents a great challenge to a church that, in many ways, believes in “absolutes.” So that's one storm that is moving in on us. And it's not all bad, but it presents us with challenges.
A second storm has joined with post-modernism and is threatening the vessel of the church at sea. It is a storm brought on by globalization, the global village, and specifically the inter-religious experiences we now have as a result of widespread global travel and awareness.
While I was in graduate school, one of my professors invited the graduate students in Religion over for a barbeque one evening. He lived close to the university in a beautiful, older house that he and his wife had renovated. His pride and joy in the home was the attic. It was stark - hardwood floors with a few mats, quaint dormer-windows looking out over the yard and neighbourhood, a few candles, incense sticks, a Buddha figure, and a few other religious symbols. As we chatted, I found out that he had been a Christian. He had gone to seminary to become a minister, but his studies had led him into Buddhism and other Eastern practices. His attic was the place where he now engaged these practices. “I meditate here,” he said, “and feed my soul.”
That probably wouldn't have happened 50 years ago. That was when Christianity was still, pretty much, the only game in town for the western world. We knew about other religions but never really ran into anyone who actually believed in one. We considered the Christian faith to be superior; the others were pagan and wrong. This thought was so rampant that in its early years, the goal of the United Church of Canada was to Christianize the entire social order of the country.
This, of course, is no longer true. Forty-plus years ago, Departments of Religion were springing up in universities and an influx of people of other cultures and faiths in more recent years has caused the wider community to encounter alternate beliefs. Initially there were calls for respect and tolerance of other faiths. Then these morphed into calls for acceptance of other beliefs and a post-modern recognition of other faiths as bearers of truth. Christianity became one faith among others, and with the loss of the idea of our exclusive hold on truth, the whole faith was brought into question.
With a perceived loss of authority in terms of the things of God, individuals have cast off religion with all its trappings and have pursued spirituality, dabbling in this and that. At that same graduate school, I was friendly with a group of women who had cast off traditional faith and moved into a feminist, Wiccan spirituality. Pat was their “priestess” and Pat borrowed from a number of sources as she led the group through a variety of ritual practices. Again, candles, incense, and meditation were very much a part of what they did. Over coffee, I remember Pat's excitement about what they were doing, and my questions: “Yes, Pat, but what grounds it? What makes it valid?” But those questions did not matter; it was feeding their spiritual needs in the midst of the void that occurred when the church was perceived to have lost authority. So the second storm is a loss of authority with the awareness of the plurality of religions.
There is one other storm that is feeding into this “perfect storm” that threatens to envelope us and shipwreck the church. Perhaps the strongest of the three, it is that caused by an über-critical biblical scholarship that has torn the Bible apart.
Again, it probably started with the Enlightenment and the rationalist philosophical school. As reason became the primary basis for knowledge, scholars began to use reason and logic to engage the sacred text. They looked at historical background, they looked at evidence of sources behind the text, they found literary types and forms, they uncovered the work of redactors, and their knowledge grew. Reason taught them to look at the world and expect that things would not be that different in biblical times than they are now, and since every effect has a natural cause, they ruled out by presupposition the possibility of miracle and interventions of the super-natural. Where the Bible speaks of miracle and supernatural event, it was brought into question and de-mythologized in an effort to draw some “truth” out of story. Other scholars began to question what was known about Jesus. Little by little they took this away, and that away, culminating in the Jesus Seminar, c.1990, which found that very, very few of the sayings of Jesus could actually be attributed to him with certainty. Yet other scholars, in recent years, have gone back to the Gnostic documents, found earlier in the century, and from third, fourth, fifth century documents have begun to re-envision early Christian history. What has been said by them has been popularized by Dan Brown in the novel, The Da Vinci Code and has been great fodder for sensationalist headlines in our newspapers, especially at Christmas and Easter.
Ãœber-critical biblical scholarship, I fear, is causing even greater damage than the other storms, for it is continually battering the ship of faith and has caused many to jump off into the great deep. If we consider all that it has taught, it is not surprising that we have Bishop Spong calling for a complete overhaul of Christianity into something that most Christians would scarcely recognize. A United Church minister has joined the call with a recent publication, With or Without God, which takes über-criticism to its logical consequence. The book deconstructs the biblical message, the faith and the church. Instead of a bodily resurrection of Jesus, for instance, Easter is seen merely as a resurrection of hope in people's hearts. Whereas some would argue that this thinking would bring an end to the church, the book describes a future that envisions a church free from absolutism and the supernatural, a body that continues to push for justice in the world and the care of the earth. It was all too much for one young Emmanuel College student, who said to me last week, “Well, if that's all it is, what the heck are we doing here?” Yet this thought is the thought that is out there, with extensive write-ups in The Globe and Mail, Maclean's, and The United Church Observer, among others, over the last week.
So here we are. Three storms coming together - the “perfect storm” is set against us. The clouds of another world-view that champions reason, science and a causal world; other religious expressions and post-modernism that cause us to wonder about the church as exclusive bearer of truth; über-criticism of the Bible that attacks our very foundation. The clouds are circling and getting darker and darker. The winds howl around us, the rain beats down upon us; the waves are growing ever larger. Dorothy may have said, “Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.” We may well say, “I guess we're not in Sunday School anymore.” Everything seemed so easy, so certain there. But are things as bleak as they seem? Is the storm as perfect as it appears?
The real question, it seems to me, is still the question of truth. While we may have learned a great deal from all the progress that has been made in the past few centuries in philosophy, in science, with global awareness, and in biblical studies, we may well ask if the opposition to the church should go without critique. We can ask, for instance, if it is valid to draw hard and fast lines between science and religion, reason and faith, natural and supernatural. In an age of “random particles,” when, philosophically, the unique is more palatable, can unique, supra-natural events be ruled out? Likewise, we may ask post-moderns if all truths are equally valid. Or is it possible that one, or more, are better than others? Are all faiths are equally valid? Or is it possible that one, or more, are more valid than others? And when it comes to the biblical critics and historical revisionists, there are questions about their presuppositions and assumptions that have not been answered. While I may not have time here to go into great arguments in support of a more orthodox understanding of faith, I can assure you that there are many great biblical and theological scholars, such as Tom Wright and Wolfhart Pannenberg, who can and do hold to more traditional understandings of faith and belief. They are as great scholars as those who make the sensationalist press.
Where I would like to go, however, with regard to this question of truth is this: Christianity, unlike many other religious traditions, is not so much founded upon thought as it is on event; on the acts of God. We can take the Jesus event, for instance, and think through it. If Jesus just died like any other person, I don't think that Christianity would have survived. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, if only hope was raised in the hearts of the disciples, Christianity would not have made it through the fourth decade of the first century. Something had to happen back then to give an impetus to this great vessel we call the church. Something had to happen back then to cause the disciples to go out and risk their very lives for what they had “seen, and heard and touched with their hands,” (1 John.1:1-4). Something had to happen to give them the desire to do what they did at no benefit to themselves.
Long ago, I determined that I would not worry whether biblical scholars disputed this fact or that, this detail or that, because it seemed to change from one year to another. I didn't worry about what they would dismiss, because what they could not dismiss was the whole - the thrust of the evidence in general. They cannot dismiss the fact that the church was born and has grown into a great, world-wide body. I became less interested in individual details and more interested in the general picture - the gist of the gospel account. Something happened. Something happened in our time and space, in our history, that knocked the socks of those disciples and sent them out into the world, and if it wasn't a resurrection, I don't know what it was. Once a person reaches that conclusion - a plausible conclusion that something dramatic happened at Calvary and in Judaea 2,000 years ago - then the world has to deal with it. In this post-modern, pluralistic age, people can speak of other truths, modernity can rule out by presupposition the supernatural. But if something happens in history, unique as it may be, that event has to be faced. The world must face a random event and deal with what actually happened.
So I put it to you that maybe this perfect storm is not as perfect as it seems. The winds may be blowing, the surf may be rising, but we have a surer foundation than many would like us to believe. We have a great anchor of the soul in Christ. John alludes to this as he encourages believers in the first century to carry on with Christ. He says,
“I write this to you about those who would deceive you … abide in him so that when he appears we may have confidence … at his coming (v.26, 28). Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you…and this is what he has promised us, eternal life (vv.24, 25).”
And so, friends, the waters may be rough, but this ship is going to make it through. And though we may struggle, a safe harbour awaits those who abide in Christ. Amen.