THE OCULAR PROOF
1 Corinthians 1:17-25, John 20:19-29
The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear, is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties--this knowledge, this feelingÖthat is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men. -- Albert Einstein [Since spoken communication differs from written, some of the grammar and syntax of this transcript may seem awkward in written form. To keep integrity with the spirit of the original delivery, the transcript seeks to stay close to the exact words spoken.]
Today is Christ the King Sunday, or as I like to refer to it, Reign of Christ Sunday. Rolls around this time every year, the Sunday just before Advent, and it's a time when we consider the question: Who's running the show? Who's the ruler of this big blue marble where we live? Who governs this universe in which we are living?
It's a good question for us to ponder on this Sunday, as we contemplate the transfer of power in Washington from one administration to the next. Many who voted for Mr. Obama seem to have very high hopes for the time to come. Sometimes I sense that many feel that our new leader will play the part of a savior, given all the problems that we are facing as a nation and as a world. And I have to say in some ways, that worries me. It reminds me of something I heard Shane Claiborne say, in one of the talks I heard him give before the election. He said, "Vote. Go ahead and vote. But if you do vote, realize that the real vote is what you do the 364 days when you are not voting." Your real vote is what you do with your life. Realize that the people in Washington are not going to be our savior...that the ruler to which we deserve to devote our allegiance is Christ. The question is, will you vote for him every day of your life?
So today we ask ourselves the question, in what sense is Christ the king? In what sense is Christ the ruler of the world, of the universe? How is it possible that a Galilean peasant, who lived over two millennia ago, who was crucified and who we believe rose from the dead...someone who walked, and talked, and ate, just like us--how do we believe that he is the ruler of the universe? How is it we believe that he is--as the writer of John's gospel claims--that he was, in the beginning, with God?
A Galilean peasant is the ruler of the universe? It is an absurd claim. How is that possible? That's what we're going to explore today, and in doing that, I'm going to explore the theme of faith in science. This is my annual faith and science sermon. And before we get into all this stuff, I want to give a little bit of a warning. You're probably not going to cry today, unless it is of boredom. I'm not going to be playing on the heartstrings today--I call this my "neck up" sermon. I'm going to open up the philosophical playground, and we're going to play around on the monkey bars a little bit today. So I hope that you'll hang with me. Those of you who are junior or senior philosophers, maybe this will appeal to you, I don't know. But I like having fun with it. We're going to explore the relationship between faith and science as we look at this question: how is it possible that we can believe in this absurd notion, the Lordship of Christ?
That's where we're going to begin: by admitting that that is an absurd thing...that we believe as Christians that a crucified Galilean is the ruler of the world. Christ the logos of God is the governing principle of the universe. It's obvious that people today are more than willing to point out the absurdity of what we believe as Christians. There are a number of people...it's become quite fashionable these days to debunk Christianity. Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are making quite a lot of money deconstructing Christianity and pointing out the ridiculousness of some folk who believe. And, actually, I think that that's not all bad. I happen to make a distinction between Christianity and Jesus. They're not the same thing, and some people who practice Christianity are indeed ridiculous, and we need to, in some ways, be willing to admit that. We should concede the fact that it's absurd, what we believe; and the way some believe and practice it is indeed ridiculous. And so we should thank Mr. Dawkins and Mr. Hitchens in some ways, and concede that territory to them. And say...it's always been so.
My best friend from college, Alan Jacobs...he's a brain surgeon now. I actually looked him up on Facebook. (It's a wonderful thing, by the way. I feel like an immigrant to the Web 2.0 world, but an old guy like me, I find it's a great way to get in touch with people that I've lost touch with.) But anyway...Alan Jacobs. I had coffee with him. Because one time I told him, "I'm a believer. I believe in Jesus." And he said, "Isn't it just like believing in the great pumpkin? You know, how can you possibly believe that stuff?" Anyway, I had coffee with him, and I thanked him, and told him that I think he's right! Such a challenge is in a strange way necessary to believers. It's called the scandal of the gospel. We need to admit that our belief is like faith in the Flying Spaghetti Monster in a lot of ways. It seems ridiculous to people who don't understand or see the truth of it, because you can only see the truth of the gospel with the eyes of the heart.
We might not realize that Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins, and Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche--their spirit was alive at the beginning of the Christian movement. People from the very beginning realized that what they believed was foolishness. Did you catch the words in this letter written in this letter by Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, the Corinthian church: one of the most brilliant theological works available to us. It's an incredible work of theology. But Paul says that, "To those who are Jewish, it s a stumbling block. To the Greeks who demand wisdom, it is foolishness, moria--it's absurd." He said, "We preach Christ crucified." He said [paraphrasing] "For those who are dying, it doesn't make any sense. It's like describing the color orange to someone who has been born blind."
What was happening, though, in early Christianity, was that people came in contact with this message--with what Paul calls the gospel--and strangely enough, it transformed their lives. For the purposes of this morning, we might say that this strange story enabled them to see the universe as it really is. Not a random place controlled by capricious gods, but a place infused with the self-giving love of a crucified God. You might say that it gave them, and us, a glimpse of the universe as it really is--which we can't see with our eyes--we can only see with the eyes of our heart.
In a way it seems just the opposite of our post-enlightenment search for the real truth of the universe. Now I'm not going to knock the enlightenment, but the enlightenment--which in many ways was brought about by a culture of Christianity--this amazing and wonderful creative ferment that flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries, in many ways that flourishing of human creativity led us to the rejection of the myths of Christianity, of a world of symbols that had mediated the truth to human beings before that time. So the spirit, the idea, was we can get now to the real truth if we cast off all of that superstitious hooey.
And how do we get to what's real about the universe? The answer is really quite simple--through these, through our eyes! All we have to do is just look, and investigate, what this stuff is, and we can get to the truth. We don't need our intuition, we don't need symbols, to tell us what's true--what we need is simply what Shakespeare would call, "the ocular proof." He uses that phrase in Othello, if you're familiar with the playÖwhen Othello says, "I won't believe in my wife's infidelity unless I have the ocular proof." And of course, Iago gives it to him, and it's false. The proof of his eyes is false, and yet that's become the only mediator of truth in our post-enlightenment era. The idea is, post-enlightenment--that we can get to what's really true by observing--by simply looking at the universe with our eyes. The ocular proof. All our scientific knowledge is based on that, on observation--what comes into our brains through these two things at the front of our face.
And that's not a new thing--it precedes the enlightenment, to be sure. In fact, it began with Thomas. Thomas was the first logical positivist. That's a fancy way of talking about a school of philosophy that simply believes that all that exists is what we can see. That's all there is, so deal with it. Thomas says, "I'm not going to believe this story unless I see it with my own eyes...Unless I see it with my own eyes, I will not believe."
Now I want to be clear here that I'm not trying to knock science today. Because I don't think that there's any conflict between faith and science. As I said in a sermon a couple of years ago, we should be championing the cause of science, because it is science that is discovering the mysteriousness of the universe. I like watching all of these programs about science, and reading about it. A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing for a small mind. But I was interested to find out that scientists are talking about the fact that most of the universe, most of the stuff the universe is made of, we don't know about and can't observe. They said that 80% to 90% of the universe is made of this stuff called "dark matter" and "dark energy," which cannot be detected with our human senses--it can only be inferred through logic. Basically, if the universe makes any sense, it has to be there, this stuff that we can't observe.
Science can tell us an awful lot about human consciousness, and how it works, but it can't explain how we have consciousness, and I don't think it ever will. So we should thank Thomas, because we need his doubting spirit. We need him to say what he says, "I will not believe, unless I put my fingers in the mark of the nails." It's interesting, by the way, if you notice about that scripture...he says I have to put my finger in the nails, and not just see it with my eyes, but feel it with my fingers. And when he sees the risen Christ, he never does touch. Somehow in that encounter, he comes to believe, he gives up the need to see, to feel....
But we need Thomas, lest Christianity be based on some sort of groupthink, some sort of group hallucination. We need people who will use our eyes, insist on using our eyes, to verify what the truth is. Sometimes I think about, you know, here I am a religious professional, and my job depends on believing a story that was told by witnesses who actually saw it thousands of years ago. And I think how cool would it have been to be Thomas, to be one of those people who actually saw for themselves the truth of what it is that has called us together on this Sunday. But did you catch what Jesus said, and what really that implies? He says, "Blessed are those who have not seen. Do you believe me only because you see me? Because blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe." What that really says is that Thomas is at a disadvantage to the rest of us, because he says, "By seeing me, you're not really able to see it with the eyes that exist in your heart."
In a way, what happened with Thomas was like looking at the Medusa in some strange way. We all have some familiarity with that myth, the ancient Greek myth of Medusa. We all know that if you look at the Medusa, you turn to stone. But did you know that Medusa, in that myth, originally was a very beautiful woman. And we might consider, why would we want to look at the Medusa, if we're not curious about beauty? The Medusa elicits in us our imagination about what beauty is, what the essence of beauty might be. But notice that at the moment we actually succumb to our temptation to look at the Medusa, we turn to stone. Looking at the Medusa freezes our imagination on what's seen and what's actual, as opposed to the thing that's real, which might be only detectable through the eyes of our heart.
The danger of modern science is that it becomes our Medusa. Not that it's bad--it's a fantastic thing--but if we look upon it as the source of beauty and truth, it has the habit of freezing our imagination and our vision, because the only way we can see what is real is through the vision of our heart.
I think my favorite Shakespeare play is King Lear. And one of the most fascinating characters in that play is Gloucester, who is a friend and kinsman of Lear's. And Gloucester is a foil for Lear's blindness. King Lear is unable to see the evil that's obvious to everybody in the audience. And neither can Gloucester see it. And at one point in the play, he's blinded by his son--his eyes are literally gouged out--and the irony in the play is that only going through that painful experience of losing his eyes, is Gloucester able to see. Stumbling along in the field of Dover with King Lear, crazy King Lear, he begins to understand what it means to see. He says, "I see, feelingly."
Paul is only able to see the truth of the universe by becoming blind on his trip to Damascus when he encounters the risen Christ. In some strange way, the only way we might see the truth of the universe is if we give up looking at it with our eyes. Because we know the truth through our heart, and not with our eyes.
Science is important. What we see is important. But relying on science to tell us what we see is like looking at a picture in 2-D. It lacks a dimension that enables us to see it as it is. And what's the third dimension? What is that 3rd dimension? All this philosophical jungle gym stuff boils down to this, I think: the way we are really able to see the universe as it is--in three dimensions--is only if we add the third dimension, which is love. The love we can only detect through the organ of faith.
The only way we can see the universe as it really is, is in the light of Christ. Somebody may be the smartest human being in the entire world, and miss the point of what living is all about. Someone might know everything there is about history, but not know the point of history, which is a cross.
Scientists will never discover, using the tools that they use, what's already been revealed to Plato, and Dante, and us--that the universe isn't held together by matter and energy and gravity--the universe is held together by love. That's the governing principle of it. And we can only see that through the vision of our heart.
There's a very simple lesson today. The only way to see the universe as it really is is to live in light of that. If you live in faithfulness to that love that has been given to us, you literally start seeing things differently. You might start seeing that that person who's out to get you at the office is not such an evil person, but a child of God, for whom Christ died. You might see that you are not just the creation of some random forces in the universe--you are the creation of a loving God, and you are made for love. And you can only see that truth, not with these eyes, but with the eyes of your heart.
May it be so.
Amen.
November 23 , 2008
The Reverend Jeffrey A. Vamos
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