The American Political System

The American Political System

Those who know me know that I don't usually like to talk about politics. I find myself fitting neither with the general stance of the Republican party, nor with that of the Democratic party. I feel that, in my experience, the moment a hot topic in contemporary politics gets brought up, both sides retreat to their talking points, which is an incredibly defensive position. There are people with whom I am friends on Facebook who are otherwise calm and considerate people who try to understand issues from every point of view who I am hesitant (not to say frightened) to engage in dialogue on political issues as I have found that they tend to gravitate, just like most people, into extreme positions.

One day, I found myself wandering on a YouTube trail (where one video leads to another, without any overarching goal in mind), which I usually try to avoid and I ended up watching part of a video of a presentation by Christopher Hitchens. The presentation in question took place during the Clinton administration and Hitchens (who is British) was functioning as a journalist and cultural commentator and not primarily as a militant atheist (which he also does from time to time). How I ended up on this particular clip, I cannot explain, especially as it was only one part out of ten or so, and the only one I watched was somewhere in the middle. I do not know exactly what issue was going on at the time that prompted the observation, but Hitchens made an incredibly insightful comment. He said (words to the effect of), "In America, I have noticed that the word 'partisan' has a distinctly negative connotation, whereas 'bi-partisan' has a distinctly positive connotation." He ultimately concluded by saying, "I think that America is afraid that it might one day become a two-party system."

Now, this comment got some laughs from the (American) audience, because, as everyone in America knows, we do have a two-party system. We have some other parties that show up every once in a while, but they tend to not do very well. Even though we may have more than two parties on paper, in practice, there are two parties in America.

But Hitchens' comment cuts deeper than that. In spite of the fact that, in America, we have two parties that hold opposite views on a multitude of issues, the idea that we ought to strive for truly bi-partisan politics as the ideal, whereas partisan politics is a problem is very much the product of the Enlightenment. Hitchens, who is from England where there are many viable political parties, sees the truth perhaps a bit more clearly than we Americans do.

I think that we in American desperately want to believe that there is one position that is objectively and completely "right," and that, if we all just got together and shared all our opinions and brought forward all the arguments and checked all the facts, we would all come to the same conclusion, we would all agree on what is right, what is wrong, and how we should proceed so that we can be right and not wrong. The contemporary issues surrounding taxation of the wealthy and organized labor, among other things, seems to operate with the presupposition that, if all the facts could be on the table, nobody would be confused as to what we should do. We would all agree. There is clearly a "right" way to go about these things and a "wrong" way to do so. What we need is to get beyond all our political platforms and discern this together.

But there is a problem with this. The fact of the matter is that, while a good portion of Americans can get along most of the time and make compromises on most things, there are certain communities that simply cannot get along. To give some fairly extreme examples, radical Fundamentalists simply cannot get along with the homosexual community (and vice versa) without in some significant manner changing who they are and what they believe. Another example is the KKK and the African-American community. These are two communities that, because of who they are and what they believe, simply cannot exist side by side, short of bloodshed, without some kind of external restraint.

But what happens in the application of external restraint, which must be applied, if for no other reason, than to keep the peace? One group is given privilege over the other, at whose expense this privilege is purchased. Now, the question is, which side do you choose? In the examples I have provided (which are extreme to make the point clearer, though this happens on smaller scales as well), most contemporary people would say that we ought to side with the homosexual community and the African-American community, respectively, if for no other reason than because those groups have tended to be less driven to violence toward their opponents, but, though this is firmly in line with our constitution as classically interpreted (you have rights until your exercise of them infringes on the rights of others) it is still the prioritizing of one community's desires over another.

By the way, we can see, especially in the case of the KKK, where the de-facto decision was in favor of the more violent group and was only later overturned. There is nothing in our law or society that guarantees that we will always operate in the same way.

The reason why I bring up these issues is that there are certain communities that no amount of conferencing and "compromising" will yield a solution that is fully acceptable to both parties (think, for example, about whether it would be possible to find a solution that is fully acceptable to both the KKK and the African-American community). Decision between such communities always has to be made, and made by a third party, who does not necessarily agree completely with either party.

I think that this is the case more often than we would like to admit. If I am particularly wealthy, I am likely (though not guaranteed) to oppose high taxes on the wealthy. Yes it is true that such taxation might be aimed at the greater good, but my willing participation is based on a few presuppositions. First, I would have to believe that the taxes actually do aim at the greater good. It is entirely possible that I might conclude that what we call "the greater good" might actually simply be "what is good for this community in which I do not find myself," only with an absolutized name and a noble sound. Secondly, I would have to believe that this is actually the best way to reach this greater good. Third, I would have to believe that the elected officials would know better how to spend my money than I do for the greater good they are seeking. Fourth, I have to actually believe in this greater good exists and agree that it is something worth striving for. None of these is guaranteed, and the absence of any one of them (let alone more than one) could result in the opposition of such taxation in the defense of self-interest (which, by the way, is what Adam Smith says is the driving force behind capitalism. It seems to be built into our economic system, that we dogmatically export all over the world).

In a similar way, one could easily make the argument that organized labor is not for the greater good, but for the good of those engaged in labor. On some levels, it is not good, or at least is perceived not to be good, to certain businesspeople. If this were not so, there would be no argument about it. A victory for upper management is paid for by labor, but it is equally true that a victory for labor is paid for by upper management. Perhaps we can dress it up in noble garments, that it is the right thing to do, that really, it is the best for everyone involved, or at least the best for enough of a majority (or supermajority) to make it worthwhile. It might also be claimed that upper management can afford to pay for this victory, whereas the opposite cannot be said. All these things might be true, and might be judged as true by those who get to make such decisions, but it does not change the fact that no statement of "better" or "worse" political decisions is made in a vacuum, but reflects the interests of a certain community.

The point that Christopher Hitchens saw so clearly is that we in America want desperately to believe that, if we just work together, we will come to a conclusion that satisfies everyone involved, that, even if we have to settle for something less than our personal ideal, it is acceptable because our desire for the best for the totality of our society is our primary concern. It is a kind of political pluralism. We sincerely hope that both political parties are equally dedicated to independent "ideal" political decisions, but are simply talking past one another, or are momentarily distracted, but can and should be set right. Hitchens was able to see what we often cannot: We are different people with different interests, some of which are mutually exclusive. A victory for one community carries with it the defeat of another community. No political gain is made without a corresponding political loss somewhere else. Nobody gains power unless someone else loses power.

I think that, until we can throw off the mask and see how our own interests color the whole political process, we will never be able to see other people as real human beings, albeit human beings with different, sometimes mutually exclusive, interests and desires, but human beings who are just as self-consistent and just as passionate about their convictions as we are. And I believe it is only when we can do this that we can really move forward in civility and love.

Who Exactly Is Jesus Christ?

09/18/11 Mark 8:27-33 Grace UMC

A. W. Tozer begins the first chapter of his classic work, The Knowledge of the Holy with these words, "What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." He makes the point that, so long as we think that God is a really big deal, we will give everything we have to worship with our whole hearts. On the other hand, however, if we don't really think that God has all that much to say to us, or that we can learn what we need to know just as well from another source, we will not take our worship seriously. God will simply not play that much of a role in our lives.

In spite of the fact that Tozer's book has played an important part in my Christian life, I want to be just a bit critical of what he has to say, not because I think it is fundamentally wrong, so far as it goes, but rather because I think he is being just a bit vague. It is clear that, when Tozer says "God," he means the Christian God borne witness to in the Bible, but he also says things like this. "The history of [humanity] will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and [humanity's] spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God." Is Tozer suggesting that we should focus more on whether our view of God is "high" than on whether our view of God is "true?" I don't think that he would say that, but I think, if we want to think about God as Christians, we must ask a little more precise question. Instead of asking, "Who is God?" or even the old pagan question, "What is God," I want to pose the question, "Just who, exactly, is Jesus Christ?"

This is a question that Jesus himself asks in our passage for this morning, in a story that is at the same time well known and also surprising. Jesus asks his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" And the disciples answer him and say, "John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others one of the prophets." Clearly, the people think that Jesus is a mighty prophet, sent by God, to deliver the word of God to the people of God. In spite of the fact that we want to emphasize that the people are missing some of the point, we must realize that the people did not think that Jesus was just an ordinary man. He is being compared to the most dramatic prophet of contemporary times as well as to the most famous, miracle-working prophet of the Old Testament. To paraphrase the peoples' response to Jesus' question, "Who do people say I am," we might say, "A mighty prophet, nearly without parallel in history. You are the one through whom God is delivering his word and saving his people." Clearly, the people had a fairly high view of Christ. It is unlikely that they spoke of anyone else around like this.

That is an interesting response, but it is clearly not what Jesus is looking for. He then turns to his own disciples and says, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answers, saying, "You are the Messiah." Peter says that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ who has been promised to Israel from long ago. In the church throughout the ages, this response of Peter has been widely held to be correct. After all, we all confess Jesus to be the Christ, the Messiah of God, come to save his people, do we not? Now, you know what you mean when you say "Messiah," and I know what I mean when I say "Messiah," but what does Peter mean when he says "Messiah?" It might not be totally clear, because Peter lived in a very different culture than we do.

You see, the word "Messiah" or "Christ" did not mean, at the time, "The Incarnate Son of God who takes the sin of the world on his shoulders and redeems us from sin and brokenness." The Hebrew word "Messiah" and the Greek word "Christ" simply mean, "One who is anointed." Prophets were often anointed into their office, priests had a kind of anointing. However, most people, when they spoke of someone being an anointed one, would be referring to kings. Now, Israel was not self-governed at the time, but was ruled by the Romans. For Peter to say that Jesus is the Christ is to say that he is the instrument that God will use to radically deliver the Israelites from foreign oppression, not unlike when God delivered Israel from Egypt. When we understand this, we realize that Peter's confession could be paraphrased this way. "You are the Christ, the son of David, who will conquer like David did, who will rescue us from evil rulers like David did, who will extend our borders like David did. You are the mighty king who will set up God's kingdom here on earth by making Israel the most glorious nation in the world."

Biblical scholars have long noticed a tendency of Jesus to not want to speak of himself as the Christ. When unclean spirits call him Christ or Messiah, he silences them, when other people call him by that title, he brushes past it, and he nearly never takes the title on his own lips. Why would Jesus do this? Why would Jesus, whom the church has always confessed as the Christ, not allow himself to be called the Christ? Why keep this Messianic secret? Some have argued that the reason that Jesus did not want to be called the Christ is because he wasn't the Christ, that he refused the title because it simply wasn't true. I think there might be something more to it and we can use this passage as the best example I can think of.

I am more and more convinced that Jesus refuses to be called "Messiah" here because Peter has absolutely no idea what he is saying when he uses the term. This is made clear when Jesus begins to tell about how he is going to suffer, be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and finally be killed and raised from the dead. When he hears this, we read that Peter begins to rebuke Jesus. However, Jesus does not then change his mind and say, "You're right. I don't know what came over me, those things aren't going to happen." Instead, he rebukes him, a word that is often used for exorcisms in the New Testament, and says, "Get behind me, Satan!" Peter went from seeming like he understood Jesus better than anyone else to being called demonic. Clearly, the desire to make Jesus merely an earthly king is to miss the point.

So, who exactly is Jesus? According, even to this passage, Jesus is not merely a prophet and he is not merely an earthly ruler. How else might we understand Jesus? Let us look at how Jesus confronts us and wrestle with it. We will find that, when we do this, we find ourselves confronted by all the main ways people throughout history have understood this issue.

In the New Testament, especially in the gospels, we are confronted with a Jesus who encounters his disciples as God in human flesh; we even have Thomas fall to the ground and cry out, "My Lord and my God!" Repeatedly, we see Paul and others speak of Jesus alongside of God, ascribing the same qualities to each. We read that Jesus is absolutely vital to our encounter with God, that our knowing of God is absolutely identified with our knowing of Jesus. We see the opponents of Jesus complaining that, in doing the miracles he did, and by forgiving sin, he is doing what only God can do. They say things like, "It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God."

Even in the New Testament documents, we see that the church not only thinks that Jesus is a great teacher, but that he is God among them, and we read that they are worshipping him as God. The only problem is that Jesus himself prays and worships as well, and he worships and prays to a God he calls Father. Now, we have a God the Father and a God the Son. But remember, the first disciples were radically monotheist Jews, who had one and only one God. How were they to deal with this fact that there was still a God called Father, but now there was also a God the Son? This is a real problem, and one that cannot be brushed aside. The early Christians had to work out where they stood in their confession of the Father and the Son as well as their confession of the One God.

How might they deal with it? Well, they might have argued that, borrowing from what they had learned from Greek culture and philosophy, there is a heavenly realm where God lives and an earthly realm where we live and the two never touch. We cannot have anything to do with heaven, for we are broken and sinful; heaven cannot really have anything to do with us for the same reason. If this is so, then Jesus cannot possibly be God, the argument went, for if God were to come among us and take on our humanity, the corruption in which we find ourselves would taint God and make him less than he was before, and this is unentertainable. So, if the one who came among us as Jesus of Nazareth was not God, who is he? Well, he is a creature, but not just any creature, not just like everyone else. Jesus would have to be the greatest of all creatures, the firstborn of all creation, the greatest and most glorious creature in all the universe.

But does that really do justice to the New Testament? Is Jesus really different from us in degree, but not in kind? If that were so, what could we make of Jesus' forgiveness of sins? What could we make of the worship of the church? Brothers and sisters, we come here to worship Christ, not just to say he was a great teacher. Are we committing idolatry in our worship of Christ, which we surely are if he is anything less than very God of very God? When we see Jesus on the cross, does that actually tell us anything about the love of God, or is it nothing more than an example of human compassion? No, I am convinced, as was the early church, that, unless Jesus is an actual incarnation of God in our midst, we've got better things to do on a Sunday morning.

So, if that solution doesn't work, if it destroys the very fabric of the gospel, then what can we say? What if we were to say that Jesus and the Father are both God, but, since we want to affirm that there is only one God, that even though, when God interacts with us, he does so as Father and as Son (and also as Holy Spirit), those distinctions have nothing to do with who God actually is in God's own life? God interacts with us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but God actually is only the One God, totally isolated, the abstract, all-powerful, totally free individual who is unhindered by relationships, except those which he freely chooses to participate in. In this way, we can honor the fact that God actually interacts with us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, without having to deal with the messy three-ness of it all.

And you know what? That sounds pretty good. But it is actually a disaster. Yes we can say that God is three in one way, but is one in another sense, but if we take this route, we have once again destroyed the gospel. What we are saying is that, when God comes among us and reveals himself to us in his fullness, it doesn't actually bear any resemblance whatsoever to who God is. If the single most profound revelation of God, Jesus Christ, portrays a God who is three-in-one, but that Triunity has absolutely no relation to who God actually is, is it really a real revelation of God? It seems that, if Jesus tells us that there is a God the Father, personally distinct from himself, and that simply is not true, then we cannot trust Jesus in the most important part of his ministry. We see Jesus in the gospels continually trying to teach humanity about God, about how we ought to be in relationship with him, but if his words aren't actually backed up with reality, what good is it? If Jesus does not actually reveal God to us, even in his prayer life, then whatever else he might be, he is not really God, for he is only a manifestation of God that bears no real and deep relation to who God actually is.

There is a third option, and that is to say that God the Father and God the Son are two separate Gods, who might work together, who might agree in just about everything, but who are not united in the sense that we could say with the Nicene Creed that Jesus is of one and the same being as the Father. If we were to choose this solution, however, it would mean that we have left monotheism behind. When we remember that one of the most important prayers in Israel's history, is "Hear, O Israel: The Lord is your God, the Lord is One," and we have to understand Jesus in the history of Israel, then we can't really say this, either.

What are we left with? If starting with a preconceived notion of holiness and the transcendence of God did not work, and if starting with a preconceived notion of the unity of God that we cling to tenaciously, even in contradiction to what we see in the actual life of Jesus didn't work, and if utterly rejecting any commitment to monotheism didn't work, what can we say? What can we do?

It is my firm conviction that we need to set aside our preconceived notions altogether, and allow them to be reshaped, not by pure argument, not by wishful thinking, but by the actual life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. When we actually look and listen to Jesus and take him seriously as Immanuel, God with us, God in flesh, then we find that our preconceived understanding of the holiness and transcendence of God is flawed. As Athanasius of Alexandria pointed out in the fourth century, when God comes among us as a human being, when he enters his creation as a creature, he does not become tainted and made any less God. After all, when Jesus touches the lepers, he is not made unclean, as the law says he should, but rather, he cleanses the leper. God is not brought down by our brokenness, but heals it by entering into it.

We also find that our preconceived notion of the unity of God is challenged by Jesus Christ. Jesus has no intention of overthrowing monotheism. After all, he takes that prayer, declaring the unity of God, on his own lips, affirming it just as the Israelites had done for hundreds of years. However, he also says things like "Whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise," "The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands," "Anyone who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him," "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me...I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also...Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father?' Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?" He prays, saying, "As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me." Perhaps most astonishingly, he says, "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have reveled them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him." Jesus and the God he calls Father are personally distinct; they both call the other "you" as opposed to "me," but they are so closely bound in unity, that, if we know Jesus, we know the Father, and not otherwise.

The moment we try to fit Jesus into a box, we find that he bursts out of it in glory as he did out of the tomb on Easter morning. We find that Jesus is always greater, always more remarkably profound, always more challenging, than we expect him to be. If we come back to our question with which we started, "Just who exactly is Jesus Christ," we find that we have something of an answer. It is not an answer that allows us to rest in the comfort of our success, as if we had solved a difficult puzzle that now requires no more thought. It is an answer that demands everything of us. Jesus is nothing less than the God of the universe. As the creed says, Jesus Christ is "the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one being with the Father; by whom all things were made."

Brothers and sisters, if this is true, how amazing the gospel really is! It means that God has not abandoned us in our sin and death, but has come close, to shoulder our burdens, to bear our pain, to overcome our enemies, even enemies such as death itself, and to offer himself up on our behalf and in our place. It means that there is indeed a God and that this God does indeed love us, that he loves us with a love that will not let us go, that, as he was willing to die rather than be without us, we must say, though we must clap our hand over our mouths and say it with fear and trembling, that God loves us even more than God loves God's self.

This is the God we proclaim, this is the Jesus Christ whom we worship. And if Jesus is God, then we cannot think of God in any way that bypasses God's actual self-revelation in Christ. And brothers and sisters, it changes everything. Let us invite the Holy Spirit to transform us, that we might truly become fellow heirs of Christ, that is, heirs of God. Let us pray.

AMEN

Thoughts on the Consequences of Certain Neurological Experiments

There is a set of experiments that show that, when asked to do a simple task, the brain certainly seems to show that it has made its decision to do it quite a long time (several hundred milliseconds), not only before the action is carried out, but also before the person is even aware of the decision. The question that is being raised is whether this overturns the concept of free will. I have written elsewhere about free will in sermons, so I won't write it out now (though it might become the topic for a future note). Suffice it to say that I am neither a radical predestinarian nor a radical libertarian.

The key issue at stake seems to be, if our brains make decisions even before we know we have made a decision, can we really have any kind of freedom, as it would seem that all our decisions were made before we even made them. Yes, it is true that we do eventually come to make them in time, but that is no different than certain brands of philosophical and theological predestination where people end up making decisions freely, but only make the decisions that were made ahead of time for them, whether by the nature of the universe or by God.

And yet, I don't think of this as being a real threat. First, I want to discuss, briefly, some concrete issues that may bear on the situation (they may not, as I am neither a neuroscientist, or am I in particularly close dialogue with neuroscientists), then by attempting to put the whole question in a larger philosophical and scientific context.

First, and perhaps least significantly, I question whether such experiments really show the relationship between the mind and brain (which I am not attempting to posit a dualism between). For example, the textbooks for my biology and psychology classes (which, I admit, might be mistaken, as any textbook might be, in light of subsequent research) taught me that the nervous system functions in a multi-form way. Sometimes, we make conscious, voluntary decisions and sometimes, our body makes decisions for us (this was even demonstrated in Mel Brooks' film, Young Frankenstein). There are other distinctions, such as between sympathetic nervous response and parasympathetic, but we will not go into them here (not least because I do not trust my memory to speak accurately about them).

The question I would raise is whether or not simple tasks such as lifting a finger, pushing a button, and the like, might be handled in a different way than difficult reasoning and weighing of arguments. After all, where do our spontaneous reactions come from? Surely they are not innate, but are the result of multiple experiences that have taught us to respond in certain ways when certain things happen. As the father of a two year old, I can tell you that reflexes and reactions are not nearly so developed in my son as they are in myself.

The point is, it certainly seems as though we kind of "wear tracks" in our nervous system, where we make similar decisions and movements over and over again, making our reactions quicker and more confident. This is something that we can see as adults any time we learn a new skill. As a guitar player, there are chords and scales and other skills that took painful practicing to even contort my hand to do what I wanted it to do that have become second nature to me. Surely we can all recall learning to drive a car and we know that we can drive with a confidence and skill that was not only not done our first time, but was not possible until we had practiced, like any other skill. My argument is to raise the possibility that the kinds of experiments being done are too simple to really test the relation between consciousness and decision beyond simple, commonplace motions.

This is not to say that I blame the experiments for this or that this critique makes them any less useful. After all, before they were conducted, there was no evidence that there would be such a difference in time. My critique is simply pointing out where there is room and need for further research before we can make confident statements about the absence of free-will in anything worthy of that name.

Related to this, I am interested to see if there is a similar correlation when the action is not simply of the kind where we do one of two simple options "whenever you feel like it," but when the subject has to actually think through things before they make a decision. However, even if it were to show that the decision is made nearly a second before the person is aware of it, that could merely show that the body was aware of the ultimate conclusion before the person was aware of it, not that the reasoning process was independent of conscious effort. I would be interested to see if the beginning of the wrestling with a complicated issue has the same kind of "delay" in the consciousness, and whether the same "delay" applies throughout the whole process. That is, I am interested whether the entire argument and decision making process could be said to already be "contained" in the brain independently of any consciousness.

The philosophical issue at stake here, as I see it, is that of radical reductionism. Granted, nobody (or almost nobody) would say that merely looking at a reading of brainwaves is the best, or most efficient way to find out what is going on in someone's head. The real question is not whether it is desirable (in the sense that we would actually make widespread use of it) to predict behavior and thought in this way, but whether it is possible in principle. If it can be done, even if we never fully do it, it has significant philosophical implications.

This is a step back into the old, in my opinion, false ideal of Pierre Simon de LaPlace, who argued that there was no reason to have any external "hypotheses" (or theoretical constructions) to explain the behavior of anything in the universe, and especially had no need of that hypothesis, God (this is a reference to Newton, who said that he "framed no hypotheses" in his explanation of classical physics. LaPlace's statement affirmed that Newton actually did have hypotheses that he may or may not have been aware of). Ultimately, the claim was made that, if we were to know every piece of relevant information throughout the whole universe, we could not only predict the events of the universe forward to infinity, but also backward to infinity. The fact that this was in practice impossible did not hinder the claiming that it was possible in principle. This LaPlacean ideal has been largely abandoned by scientists but is still held on to by some though I only seem to hear about it in neuroscience. It is as if reductionist determinism is on its last legs and is holding out in this one last discipline, hoping that it will vindicate their claims, even if it has to take the form that the universe is not deterministic but our knowing of it is (This bears a remarkable resemblance to Kant's taking of absolute time and space, as well as other concepts, from being objective in the external world, to being a priori constructs of the human mind).

(It should be noted that LaPlace lived in a time before the Big Bang theory. He believed in an infinite, eternal universe that has always existed and always will exist. To apply the LaPlacean ideal to the modern understanding of a "finite but unbounded universe" (to use an Einsteinian term) would have to be able to predict backwards to the Big Bang, and, given only the initial conditions of the universe, should be able to predict, to the millisecond, when the Big Bang would have occurred. It seems to me, though I am not competent to judge with any authority, that this would not be possible in principle, but if it was, it would be the most darling discovery of such reductionistic deterministic scientists.)

It seems to me that this whole endeavor (much like the LaPlacean ideal), aims to make the relation between our neurological processes (or natural processes) effectively isomorphic to axiomatic mathematics, such as Euclidean Geometry, to give a familiar example. Just as the whole apparatus of Euclidean Geometry is effectively "contained" within the first five postulates, such a view of the brain or nature is "contained" in the initial conditions of the brain (or nature). At this point, the connections are not merely ontological (that they are what they are, simply because they are), but are logical, connected in an unbroken system of cause and effect (the only difference between such a system and a rigid system of mathematical logic is there is a time element that cannot be discarded in the former which can in the latter).

If this were the case, it would actually destroy empirical science as we know it, for nature (or the processes of the brain) would not actually need to be investigated anew in new situations, but simply analyzed on paper. The moment we really understand a single moment in the life of the brain, we could calculate both forwards and backwards, every thought, every decision, every action made by the individual, with such accuracy that it could be used in a court of law to flawlessly determine whether someone had actually committed a crime, or even whether they would commit one in the future. This is the case because volition no longer plays a role, but only internal and external conditions, all of which can be made with calculations as precise as you which (within ε of an arbitrarily chosen value, to use a concept from analysis). Such a move would ultimately remove natural science from being an investigatory discipline to being nothing more than mathematical manipulation. It is precisely because science does not actually believe that it is possible, and certainly not practical, that we do not engage in scientific inquiry in this way.

The Role of Community in Personhood

09/07/11 Role of Community in Personhood GUMC Youth

Last week, we spent some time thinking about the people that Jesus called to be his disciples. We noticed how incredibly different they were from each other and how they all had their own problems, just like we do, but that through following Christ, they were challenged to grow and become who God had called them to be. I want to take tonight and look at the big picture issue of the role that the communities in which we find ourselves shape who we are. It is particularly appropriate to do this now, since we were just thinking about the community that Jesus called into existence to follow him.

In America, we have a long tradition of seeing ourselves as isolated individuals, who do whatever we want. We tend to see the individual as more important than the community in which that individual finds itself. We have some basic rules about how we live together, but by and large, we consider our individuality to be more important than who we are in relation to others. We like our constitution because it shows us that our community values individuality.

In spite of that, what we are finding more and more is that the community plays an incredibly important role in who we are. Perhaps one of the most important ways it shapes us is in the way our community plays a role in what we can know. Did you know that there are some things that you simply can't know unless you are in a community of people who knows them? That you have to live in the right place and with the right kind of people, and live in the right way to even see certain things and to know certain things?

To give a somewhat simple example of what I am talking about, how many different words do we have in English for "snow?" Just one. However, even though we have only one word for snow, we can actually identify a few different types of snow, can't we? I have not yet experienced a Spencer winter, but I've been led to believe you get a fair amount of snow, so you might know more about snow than I do, but most people I've met can identify about four or five types of snow. There is light, powdery snow, there is wet and heavy snow, there is slushy snow that is hard to drive in, and a few others. But if we are really pressed, we can't come up with too many more types of snow that we experience.

But, if you were to travel into parts of Alaska and meet with certain tribes of Eskimos, you would find that they have over forty different words for snow. But if you looked at the different types of snow, you probably wouldn't be able to tell much difference between them. After all, you can only identify four or five kinds of snow. You wouldn't be able to tell the difference, in fact, you might even think that the whole tribe is playing a trick on you, but to the natives, it would be as plain as could be. They have absolutely no trouble telling the difference between the forty-odd types of snow they have; it is as natural to them as breathing.

So, what is the difference between them and us? Why can they see what we cannot? Is there really a distinction that we just can't see or are they just tricking themselves into seeing what isn't really there? Well, there isn't a real difference in their eyes or their brains, so there is no biological reason why they should be able to see what we can't, so what could it be? Well, if we were to move away from Iowa and move in with the Eskimos with the many words for snow, and we not only saw the same snow as they did, but lived the way they did and experienced snow like they did for a period of several years, you would start to be able to tell the difference between some more of them, but you still might not ever have quite as many words for snow as they do.

The reason for this is that the Eskimos have a deep need to be able to tell the difference between the forty types of snow. Their very lives depend on it. If they aren't careful about what kind of snow they go out in, they might very well die. But the reason I bring all this up is because, even though it is as clear as night and day to the Eskimos, people like you and me simply can't see it. They might be able to break down the differences so that you have some idea of what to look for, but even with a great guide, it would take quite some time before you were able to really see what you are looking for. You have to indwell, to use the term of scientist, Michael Polanyi, a way of life and experience before you can really know what is there. It is something like the process of learning an instrument or a sport, or any new subject. It takes time to get used to the rules or how you move your body before you can really do or know it.

The fact of the matter is that knowing is much more complex than we often give it credit for being. You will find militant atheists who try to hide behind the advances of sciences to be the reason why they can't bring themselves to believe in God. They say that, unlike the claims of Christian faith, anybody who simply does the experiment can see the truth of science. Well, this simply isn't true. As it turns out, most people, even if they had access to a world-class laboratory, couldn't actually reproduce the experiments and, even if they managed to pull it off, wouldn't even be able to see what they were looking for. It is only when people have spent years of their lives being trained in a particular field of inquiry that they can actually understand and experience what is really there. Unless you are a trained scientist, the claims of natural science are not any more accessible to you than the claims of Christian faith. You know, even if you were a trained scientist, only a small portion of the findings of science would be open to you. In fact, if you have been a Christian for a while and have your thoughts and life transformed by the gospel, you might be able to understand the claims of Christian faith far better than you could do lab work.

But the trick to all of this is that it means that you can only know the truth if you are part of the right kind of community. If you want to know the truth, you need to be surrounded by people who are also seeking the truth. If you want to really understand what Jesus says, you need to be in a community of people who are passionately committed to what Jesus says. One of the greatest thinkers in the history of the church, Athanasius, wrote a book on God becoming a human being in Jesus Christ. At the very end, after he had written for pages and pages explaining the biblical and theological issues, he says this in his last paragraph.

"But for the searching and right understanding of the Scriptures there is need of a good life and a pure soul, and for Christian virtue to guide the mind to grasp, so far as human nature can, the truth concerning God the Word. One cannot possibly understand the teaching of the saints unless one has a pure mind and is trying to imitate their life. Anyone who wants to look at sunlight naturally wipes his eye clear first, in order to make, at any rate, some approximation to the purity of that on which he looks; and a person wishing to see a city or country goes to the place in order to do so. Similarly, anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life, and approach the saints by copying their deeds."

I want to make absolutely sure that you understand what he is saying. He is saying that, if you insist on living in sin and doing what you know to be wrong and making a habit of breaking God's laws, you will never be able to understand what the Bible says. If you knowingly and lovingly engage in sin on a regular basis, don't be surprised if you can't make any sense out of the Bible. If we want to know things, we have to live in a way that is consistent with them.

You know, this emphasis on community really shouldn't surprise us all that much. After all, one of the core claims of Christian faith is that God is, in God's own life, a community of Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For God, community isn't just an extra options that he can choose to be in or not; community is rooted in the very being of God, and we are made in God's image. How can we be surprised when we find out that the communities in which we find ourselves make up part of who we are? God is who God is because of the community that God is.

You know what? Even natural science supports this idea that who we are is partly shaped by those we are around. It used to be, according to a Newtonian view of the universe, that everything could be broken down into atoms that just bumped into one another. They were individual particles that had no real connection to any other particles, unless they all just happened to move in the same direction at the same time. With the insights of James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, and others, we have come to see that we can't really think of things this way. All of what we call matter can be understood as knots of energy in a continuous field of energy. Remember the equation E = mc^2? It is saying that energy and matter are not finally separate things, but that matter is a form of energy and energy is a form of matter. The point is that particles aren't just free-floating individual things, but are only what they are in their interrelations with each other.

So, if we can only know certain things if we live in certain ways, and if God wanted to reveal himself to humanity, what would he have to do? Well, he would have to mould and shape a whole culture from the very beginning. So, he would have to pick one person and take him out of his context, so he could start to reshape their basic ways of thought and life bit by bit. God would have to establish a special relationship that is unlike his relationship with another nation, not because God does not also love those other nations, but because God has to start somewhere. Over thousands of years, God would have to teach the people how to live so they might be able to understand him. He would have to give them a law, a distinctive form of thought and life, would have to continually call them back whenever they went astray, and carefully and slowly reveal himself using these transformed words that mean something different in that nation than they do anywhere else. Only after this culture is shaped over a long period of time would God be able to really reveal himself in his fullness.

I don't know if you remember back to Sunday School and confirmation, but this is exactly what God has, in fact, done. God selected Abraham and took him from his home, gave himself to his descendants in a particular way, delivered them from Egypt and gave them a law, sent prophets to call the people back to faithfulness. Eventually, Jesus came, but he couldn't have come until Israel's culture was ready to understand him, at least brokenly. That is why Jesus came in Israel. Not because they were better than other people, nor because they were worse, but simply because they were better equipped to understand him and this is only because God had been moulding and shaping them, sometimes painfully, over the last several thousand years.

The question you might be asking yourself is, "What does all this have to do with me? What difference does this make for my life?" It actually makes a lot of difference, especially as someone who comes to youth group and goes to church. You see, youth group isn't just a place where we can come and hang out with friends or meet new people. It isn't just a place where we can eat some food and play some games. It isn't just a place where we can sing some songs. We are about the business of creating and shaping a whole culture, a community of young people who follow the Lord. There is a sense in which we are constantly trying to develop culture that has been established earlier, since none of us were here with this youth ministry was started, but it is also a culture which, through the power of the Holy Spirit, is continually being established anew.

Another reason why this stuff about community affects you is because you are profoundly shaped by your communities outside of youth group as well. If you surround yourself with people who love the Lord, who are passionately committed to the gospel and allowing it to impact every aspect of their lives, you will find that is is so much easier to be faithful yourself. When there are people you can go to for support, when you know that you aren't alone in your seeking after God, it is much easier to do what you are supposed to do, to live right, to read your Bible, to pray. If you, on the other hand, surround yourself with people who don't really care about God, who like to do all kinds of things that are contrary to what God calls us to do and be, you will find that it is incredibly difficult to be a faithful Christian. In fact, if you spend all your free time in destructive communities, it doesn't really matter what your influences are at home or at church, it will be nearly impossible to really follow Jesus.

This is why we need to all work together. If any of us decides that we are going to be lazy, to just show up and go through the motions, it affects the rest of us. It is only when we all work together and support one another in our daily lives that we can really be who God has called us to be. There is no substitute for being part of a group of people who love God. As we work together and as we grow together, do not be surprised if you begin to look at the world differently, that you begin to see and understand things that you never could before. I am going to challenge you to think hard about what you believe and why you believe it. The reason for this is because we simply cannot assume that our secular culture has prepared us to know God.

If we want to study the heavens, we need to go where the telescopes are. If we want to study exotic plants, we need to go where they are found. If we want to know about microscopic life, we need to put ourselves in the places where we can learn about them. As Athanasius said, if we want to see a particular place, we have to go there. If we want to know God, we need to meet with God where he has met with us, which is, above all, in Jesus Christ and in the Bible. Not only that, we need to do it together. So let us join together, as people of different ages, with different backgrounds, and help one another meet with and come to know God in deeper ways every day. Let us pray.

AMEN

Mark 3:7-19a

08/31/11 Mark 3:7-19a GUMC Youth

This passage in Mark's gospel is interesting because we start to see the difference between what it means to be part of the crowd that is following Jesus around and what it means to be one that Jesus has specifically called to join him in a deeper way. We are going to see this interplay between the crowd of followers and the twelve disciples over and over again, but this is where Jesus first separates the twelve out from everyone else.

We need to understand just how popular Jesus was. He really had a crowd of people following him wherever he went. Remember, he is ministering primarily in Galilee at this time, which isn't much to write home about. Galilee is the kind of place where you only really go to because you need to go through it to get where you actually want to go. It is kind of the backwater place that has nothing about it that really draws people to it other than the fact that Jesus is there. We get people from all over the place coming to see Jesus; we read about people coming from Judea, Jerusalem, and Idumea in the South and Tyre and Sidon in the North. It seems that everyone in the world wants to come to see Jesus. Somehow, the mere presence of Christ makes Galilee the most important place in the universe, the center of the world.

However, it is at this moment, where Jesus is more popular than he has ever been before, that he calls out twelve people to be his close disciples. So, at every point after now, we have this idea that there are some people who are in the inside and some who are on the outside. In general, we will see that the disciples are on the "inside" and the crowd is on the "outside." But before we get too rooted in that way of thinking, I want to give you a head's up, that the question of who is on the inside and who is on the outside is going to get taken up over and over again. Even though Jesus makes this distinction between the crowd and the disciples, we are going to continually be asking the question, "Who really is on the inside or outside?" and the answer to that question might surprise you as we explore it.

However, be that as it may, I want to take tonight and look at the people that Jesus called. The fact of the matter is that history has tended to venerate the disciples and put them up on a pedestal, but it was a bizarre bunch of people. I want to talk about several of them. You might find that one of them reminds you of yourself in one way or another. You might even find that some of them resemble people you know, which should encourage you to remember that God is calling them, too.

Let's start with people we talked about a few weeks ago, Levi the tax-collector and Simon the Cananean, also called the zealot. The Cananeans were a group of radically nationalistic Jews, who hated the Romans more than anyone else. There had been armed uprisings over the years, for which they were at least partially responsible. They were not the folks who were just mad at the fact that they were ruled by a foreign power, they were prepared to put their money where their mouth is and to even attack the Romans, even though they were far more powerful.

On the other hand, Levi is a tax-collector, a person who is employed by the Roman government in order to collect the high taxes from their neighbors, who even were known to take more than they were supposed to and just pocket the rest. If there were two kinds of people in the world that would have hated each other, it would be the tax-collectors and the Cananeans. And yet Jesus calls them both. The call of Christ commands them, and us, to set aside our differences, even our deep differences, because few of us can have deeper differences than Levi and Simon did, and join together in following Jesus. We could name all kinds of opinions that divide us Americans today, but when Jesus calls us, and he does call us, we must lay them down, not because they are unimportant, and not because we do not have strong feelings about them, but because, compared to Christ, everything else is unimportant by comparison. To use modern language, Jesus calls both the most conservative Republican and the most liberal democrat and, even though they will probably continue to disagree, they must not allow their serious differences to tear the body of Christ. In fact, Jesus is the only one who can actually make that work. Certainly, nothing else seems to.

The next disciples I want to mention are James and John, the ones that Jesus calls the "Sons of Thunder." These are people who are extremely fiery and dominating. There is a moment, when Jesus and his disciples go and preach in a town, and nobody seems to listen. When faced with this frustration, James and John ask Jesus if they can pray that God would send down fire from heaven and consume the people. Jesus just rebukes them and moves on to the next town. There is another moment, that we will see later, when James and John go up to Jesus and ask if, when he comes into his kingdom (which, by the way, they thought was an earthly kingdom, not a heavenly one), they can sit at his right and left hand, that is, they wanted to be the most powerful people in the kingdom, after Jesus. As you can imagine, that kind of annoyed the other disciples. We will talk about what Jesus said to them when we get there, but these are the kinds of people that James and John were.

And yet, both of them become people who laid down their lives for others. James is ultimately killed for his faith, as an early Christian leader. John is not killed, and he is either the only one who wasn't killed or one of only two who weren't. The point is that, when we look at the writings of John, we find him to have become one of the most deeply loving leaders in Christian history. The story goes that, when John was too old to be able to actually deliver sermons, and had to be helped around by others, he just came into the church and said, "Children, love each other," and left it at that. This man who had been so completely obsessed with power had been transformed into one of the most humble people in history.

Next, I want to talk about someone who does not appear in the lists of Jesus' disciples. His name was Nathanael, and he was a bigot. When his friends, Simon Peter and Andrew, told him they had found the Messiah who had been promised, Nathanael's response was, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" He didn't think that those people could do anything good. He certainly didn't think that God would save humanity through someone who grew up in Nazareth, of all places. When he actually met with Christ, Nathanael was so overwhelmed by him, that he cried out, saying, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" Christ, being who he is, challenged and overcame, even some deep prejudices.

Jesus had a disciple named Thomas, called "The Twin," who, it seems to me, is something of the disciple of our modern age. Church history has called him "Doubting Thomas," because of a famous scene in the gospel of John. After Jesus had been resurrected from the dead, he met with the disciples, but Thomas wasn't with them at that time. Everyone was making a big deal about the fact that they had met with Jesus, but Thomas wouldn't believe it. He said, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe." Thomas said, in so many words, "Seeing is believing." Even though Jesus did indeed show up and allow him to satisfy his curiosity, people can't do that in the same way today. He shows us that the disciples were not only a bunch of people who would simply believe everything they heard, regardless of how far-fetched it might be. Instead, we have an example of someone who refused to believe until God proved it to him.

But, though Thomas was a skeptic, he did not remain one forever. There are people who say they need proof, when in fact, they have already made up their minds that nothing can ever really be proof. They say, basically, "You will not convince me, even if you convince me," and they can always find a way out of believing if they find themselves in a corner. That was not the case with Thomas. The Eastern Orthodox Church actually calls him, not "Doubting Thomas," but "Believing Thomas," because he finally believed Christ, crying out, "My Lord and my God!"

There are just two more disciples that I want to lift up for your consideration, and these last two are the most interesting for us today. The first one is Peter, who I like to call "The Bold Bumbler." Peter very quickly became something of a spokesman for the disciples, so we hear him speak up as the one who tells us what the disciples were thinking. He was probably the oldest of the disciples, since he was married and most of the others, as far as we can tell, were not. He has something of a strong personality and is really excited about being involved with following Jesus. It is Peter who, when Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is, responds with, "You are the Christ." It is Peter who actually gets out of the boat and walks on the water when Jesus calls to him. It was Peter who made it clear that he was going to follow Jesus to the very end; even if everyone else abandoned him, Peter would not, he would stay and he would fight for his master.

But Peter isn't exactly always, in fact, the great and mighty leader that he wanted to be. We read about Jesus asking his disciples who they say he is and Peter gives what certainly seems to be the right answer; but right after that, when Jesus is explaining that he was going to be handed over and killed, Peter takes him aside and begins to rebuke him. Jesus' response is to turn around and return the rebuke, saying, "Get behind me, Satan." In one moment, Peter went from seeming like he understood Jesus better than anyone else did to being called Satan. Later on, he promises that he would die rather than abandon Jesus. Unfortunately, before that night is over, within just a few hours, he not only abandons Jesus, but denies him three times. Peter might be one of the most famous Christian leaders in history, but he wasn't always that great. He messed up an awful lot.

The last disciple I want to mention by name is Judas. He is different from the others because he is not a name that shows up again at all after the Gospels. He completely drops out of the narrative because he does not live until the church really began at Pentecost. In fact, he even died before Jesus did, and did not even get to see the resurrection. You see, Judas was the one who betrayed Jesus, who handed him over to be killed by those who hated him. His death was either, depending on who you are talking to, the result of suicide or divine judgment. There are many people who use Judas as the greatest example of someone who has been rejected by God. Dante, the famous poet, in his Inferno, speaks of a special place in hell for people like Judas.

And yet, Judas was one of the twelve, one of those who was hand-picked by Jesus to follow him, to be part of the community set up by God himself to spread the good news to everyone. Jesus called Judas, walked along side of him, entrusted him with the money bag, included him in his last supper; Jesus even washed Judas' feet. Can you imagine that? Jesus, God in flesh, God with us, bent down and washed the feet of the one who was going to leave any moment to hand him over to death. Even though Judas would be responsible for his death, Jesus was not ashamed to be associated with him. He had called him and made him one of his own.

The reason why I bring this up is that Jesus calls all kinds of people. When we first heard about Levi and Simon being called a few weeks ago, I mentioned that Jesus not only calls us, but he calls our enemies. We are called, and so are the people that we hate, regardless of who those people might be. The thing that we need to deal with is that we are not the ones who get to choose who Jesus calls and who he does not call. We have to be able to live with the fact that, just as Jesus calls us when we didn't deserve it, he calls other people when they do not deserve it. That doesn't seem so bad until we realize that, because Jesus calls us and because Jesus calls them, we have to deal with them, too! In fact, if we let them, it is actually the other Christians who drive us crazy who are able to help us the most, because it is when we realize how deeply we disagree with other people who love Jesus that we realize just how strong the blood of Christ really is and how far mercy and grace really extend.

The fact of the matter is that it shouldn't take too much effort to see yourself in the disciples. In many ways, we are just like they are. I can see my own impulsiveness in Peter, my own skepticism in Thomas, my own fear of the unknown in Nathanael, my own pride in James and John, my own zeal for my own tradition in Simon and my own desire to just blend in with the culture in Levi. Perhaps you see yourself in more than one of the disciples. I want to encourage you to identify as deeply as possible with the disciples and I want you to do this for two reasons. First, the more we identify ourselves with the disciples, the more we will be humble. Even these people who we hold up as great examples of faithful Christians were real human beings, just like we are. When we make mistakes, we can be reminded that Jesus didn't call perfect people, in fact, not that it is a contest, we might even say that Jesus called people who were even more imperfect than we are, regardless of how imperfect we might seem to be. The second reason we should identify with the disciples is because they did not always remain weak and broken, but did become mighty heroes of the faith.

The Jesus that we worship and cling to is a Jesus who invites everyone to come to him, who extends his arms to the weak, to the broken, to the sinner, to the fallen, to the awkward, to the people who have problems. It wasn't the people who had it all together who followed Jesus. In fact, those people didn't like him, because he told them that, unless they followed him and came to know the Father through him, they didn't actually have it all together. Jesus consistently calls the people the world doesn't think all that much about. For goodness sake, he even called Judas and washed his feet. He put up with Peter's bull-headedness and was patient when he stuck his foot in his mouth over and over again; he dealt with the sharp conflict between Levi's connection with the Roman government and Simon's hatred of the Romans; he overcome bigotry, he knew how to put arrogant people back into their place while still loving them.

Wherever you are tonight, whoever you think you are, know that Jesus loves you and calls you, even as you are, and we know this because of the people he called when he was physically present on earth. However, we also need to remember that, though he called all kinds of people, regardless of how messed up they were, he did not leave them that way, but sent his Holy Spirit into them, and transformed them from the inside out. They were joined to Christ's own ministry and empowered by the Spirit to do it. Just as we are broken like those first disciples, the only thing we need to be great heroes of the faith like they became is the same Spirit they received, and that Spirit is promised to us in abundance. Let us pray.

AMEN