The Chapel of St. James the Fisherman

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen............

From the Letter to the Hebrews 11:1

IN THE NAME................

It is a great blessing for me to be standing in this pulpit for a second time.

But thrilled though I was to be asked back, I had a tough time coming up with an idea for a sermon.

Summer propers are not the most inspiring. I think the people who made up the Leccionary knew that many church pews would stand empty in July and August, because a lot of fairly uninspiring, often difficult, texts get read during the summer – like that thing we heard from Isaiah, with all the blood and smoke and curses.

I actually picked today for my visit because the alternative Hebrew Scripture (which you all did not read) was from Genesis. I love Genesis. It is an extended soap opera about a highly dysfunctional family’s dealings with each other and the Lord – sort of a Scriptural Sopranos. I figured to get an idea from Abram-whose-faith-was-reckoned-as-righteous.

But I was blocked.

When that happens, I try to find my “hook” in the psalm, or even the Collect of the Day. One particular Sunday morning, at a dry moment during services in my own parish, I read today’s collect and tried to imagine a sermon built around that wonderful line: “That we who cannot exist without you may be enabled to live according to your will.”

Still nothing.

After church, I went home and picked up the Sunday New York Times Book Review – and there, on the front cover, was the review of one of the most talked about books of the summer: Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. “Eureka!” I said to myself. “There’s my sermon! I will do Hitchens versus the Collect and explain why the Collect wins!”

This plan I announced in an e-mail to Jack Smith. Being wiser and more experienced than I, Jack voiced doubt in the mildest possible terms, but wished me well. I went to Barnes and Noble, bought the book, and embarked on my appointed task.

A few weeks later, after I had devoured Hitchens’ screed and was wallowing in its unwelcome implications, I came across a cartoon in The New Yorker. Some of you may have seen it. A man in a clerical collar is walking in the front door of his home, misery written all over his face, a lightning bolt sticking out of his neck. His wife, seated on the sofa, looks up from her magazine and says, “I begged you not to buy that book by Christopher Hitchens.”

I got the joke right away.

If you are, as I have always fancied myself, a thinking believer, reading Hitchens’ book is a lot like being struck by a bolt from the blue. Encapsulated between its distinctive yellow covers are all the doubts you have ever entertained, magnified 100 times because they are all set down in one place, by a clever and persuasive writer.

In case you have not read the book: Christopher Hitchens does not believe in God. He does not believe in God because, in his opinion, the evidence that people cite to prove God’s existence proves exactly the opposite – no matter which faith tradition you look at.

Take our own tradition. Hitchens points out that our deity, while ostensibly the creator of all, was from the beginning a tribal partisan with a taste for blood sacrifice (forget about what he supposedly said to Isaiah). This tribal god had no qualms about endorsing genocide in order to facilitate the triumph of his chosen people – or ordering the murder of anyone who called the national orthodoxy into question. The historical veracity of this deity’s scriptures, both Hebrew and Christian, has been negated by archeology, textual deconstruction, modern science and otherwise verifiable facts. And far from inducing human beings to behave, vindication of the God of Moses and Jesus Christ has been and is still used to justify the most barbaric acts: war, slavery, colonial conquest, inferior status for half the planet’s residents, barriers to scientific progress – even the refusal to take steps that could save lives, because those steps might legitimize non-procreative sex.

But as Hitchens observes, Jews and Christians are not alone in these things. Every primitive society’s deity is a tribal partisan who prefers his own “true” believers to everyone else. The stories we hold dear about destruction, salvation, and even resurrection, have their counterparts in dozens of other religious traditions. Elements of every variety of belief system are hopelessly at odds with things that are incontrovertible. And since religion is one of the many axes humans have used since the beginning of time to demarcate friend from foe, and to convince ourselves that we are better than the next guy, all of them have sparked calamitous wars, tragedy and devastation.

All the things Hitchens rails about I know to be true. Which makes it difficult to argue against his ultimate conclusion: God did not make us in his image and likeness, but we made him in ours; it is not we who cannot exist without God, but God who could not exist without us to invent him; and since the whole religious thing has not turned out terribly well for mankind, we should just let it go.

Now Hitchens’ book is predicated on a logical fallacy that is apparent from the title: because religion – which is clearly a human construct – has been a potent source of division, discrimination and destruction in this world, the God that religion celebrates must also be a purely human construct. The fallacy is so obvious that I’ll bet each of us hears a sermon to that effect this fall, back in our own churches.

But so facile a rebuttal does not end the matter for me. It does not alter the fact that, after reading Hitchens’ book, I, too, wished I had not bought it.

Why?

Because, when I read Hitchens, I am forced to acknowledge that I cannot beat him on his own terms....by citing evidence.

For one thing, there is much about my religious tradition’s understanding of God that I do not believe.

I do not subscribe to the theory of God as an “invisible man in the sky,” the master puppeteer who is pulling the strings of the universe from above, and who exercises ultimate control over life via some sort of master plan.

I do not believe in a partisan God who takes sides in human disputes, or who favors one group of people over another group that is essentially indistinguishable from the first group at the molecular level.

I do not believe in any description of the workings of a deity, whether creative or salvific or sanctifying, that are flatly contradicted by science, or that are predicated on the suspension of the laws by which the universe works.

And I do not believe in a divinity who resents human curiosity about the secrets of the universe – or who requires us to behave as though we had not mastered many of them.

So I guess I don’t believe in the God that Hitchens doesn’t believe in.

But does that mean, as he concludes, that I can – and should – exist without God?

Does Hitchens trump the Collect after all?

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this over the past couple of months, and it has been about as uncomfortable as having a bolt of lightning hit me in the neck. As recently as last weekend, I thought seriously about giving up on my idea for this sermon and trying to find something innocuous to say about the confluence between the heart and the pocketbook.

But then I started ruminating on Abraham – which is, after all, why I chose to preach today.

On various occasions – one of which we heard this morning – it occurred to a primitive man named Abram that there were possibilities in the world of which he could not begin to conceive. Far away places. Undreamed of prosperity. Uncountable progeny.

These unseen possibilities beckoned to Abram. Whenever he felt that beckoning, he left what he knew and moved forward toward what he did not know. He abandoned his birthplace to go live in a strange land. He dealt with people outside his own tribe in order to secure a better life for himself and his family. He cut his flesh because he heard that it would increase his fertility. The faith that was reckoned to Abram as righteousness was not belief in God, as some seem to think, but belief in the possibility of what he did not know – what the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews calls “the conviction of things not seen.”

Abram’s God was nothing less than the mysterious custodian of those things not seen. God was the force that beckoned Abram to move forward into the possiblity. And Abram did, again and again, until, at a liminal moment in history, this primitive man took a new name – Abraham – as a sign that he had forged a new and more mature relationship with his beckoner.

I think that humanity may have arrived at another liminal moment – an Abrahamic moment, if you will – in its relationship with the concept of the divine.

In just the last two decades, science has given us unbelievable insights into who and what human beings – and all other creatures – really are, and how we really came to be this way.

As a result, thinking believers must acknowledge, at a minimum, that certain aspects of our prior understanding about God are simply too primitive and uninformed to be accepted any longer.

That, it seems to me, leaves us with three choices.

We can stop thinking and become literalists.

We can reject God altogether, as Hitchens does.

Or we can take the Abrahamic next step, by starting to rethink what God might be if God is not quite what we thought he was.

Very few of us have been willing to take that next step. Indeed, many of us (including but hardly limited to all those who are literalists about religion, whatever their religious tradition) believe – or fear – that it would be heresy to take the next step.

That result is a vacuum between what we thinking believers still believe and what we know we cannot still believe. That vacuum is being filled by Hitchens and a half dozen other writers, with their recent spate of “God is Dead” books – all of which use what we cannot believe to try to convince us that we can indeed exist without God.

Our reluctance to go beyond old understandings is entirely human. I read recently, in another issue of the Times Book Review, that doctors refused to abandon Galen’s theory of the four humours for three centuries after they knew it could not possibly be true – because it would upset the way they practiced medicine. So it is not surprising that most of us resist the challenge of re-envisioning something as fundamental as deity. Doing so might upset the way we worship, or see the world – or even believe.

But as aspects of that old-time religion become more and more uncomfortable, I’m afraid that we will cede the field to the literalists (who do not think) or to the Hitchens’ (who do not believe), unless we respond to our discomfort in a creative way.

So it is time for us thinking believers to take back our inner Abrams and get excited about moving forward toward a less imperfectly imagined God.

I can get excited about that exercise. I happen to believe that there is a custodian of all those things not seen, some of which I cannot begin to fathom. I further believe that this mysterious custodian – which I, like most of humanity throughout time, call God – is beckoning us to embrace those things not seen, to move forward toward whatever those things might be. And I believe that, like Abram, if we embrace the unknown possibility, we too can enter into a new understanding of God and a new relationship with God.

Far from being a bad thing, I think this is what we are supposed to do. In fact, I think that is what we were created to do. The God described in the poetic opening lines of Genesis told humanity to, “Fill the earth and subdue it.” That God did not demand that we hide behind primitive superstition, or that we subscribe literally to the musings of the best minds of the fourth century, or any past era, about any subject. That God WANTS US TO FIGURE IT OUT, to acquire an ever more sophisticated knowledge about creation and our place in it – because that is how we, who were created in his image and likeness, will draw ever closer to whoever and whatever he may be.

Of course, I have no proof that what humanity is moving toward is God, and Hitchens probably wouldn’t accept it if I did. In fact, Hitchens has thrown down the gauntlet to believers: he asks that “.........the advocates and partisans of religion rely on faith alone, and ....be brave enough to admit that this is what they are doing.” (122)

Well, he is right about that.

We are relying on faith alone.

Are we up to that challenge?

Abram was.

And his faith was reckoned as righteous.

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