There are some conversations that just stick in the mind. I may have already shared this story with some of you before, but this just sticks in the mind so please excuse any repetition.
Three or four years ago, I was out shopping and I bumped into an old workmate. Twenty-five years is a long time between drinks and so he invited me to his house for a cup of tea and the opportunity to catch up. Now, I need to say up front that this friend of mine was never a religious person. Well, over that cup of tea, I was drawn into conversation, not with my friend, but with his wife.
His wife is a self-confessed atheist, a card-carrying disbeliever in God, not just an atheist but a born-again atheist. And she set out to convert me!
Let me tell you, this was a truly scary experience. This highly articulate, well-researched, intelligent woman put forward a litany of reasons why faith is irrational, why belief is not just unhelpful but is positively bad for us. With unerring accuracy, she pointed out all of the shortcomings and fallacies of organised religion: the hypocrisy, the inconsistency, the evil that has been done in the name of the gods over the centuries. Everything from creation in six days to the resurrection was held up for question and ridicule.
Time and again, she asked me, “Do you really believe in these things?” And if I seemed at any point less than a hundred percent convinced, she would pounce, “Well, what do you believe in?”
[I now have a high degree of compassion for anyone who is set upon by another person intent upon converting them to their set of beliefs. It is a truly disturbing experience.]
So, for the next few days, I was haunted by the question, “What do you believe in?”
It’s a good question.
For my friend’s wife, there was the explicit assumption that, as a Christian, I would believe everything contained in the bible as the inerrant, literal word of God. However, if I wanted to express anything other than that black and white approach to scripture, I was immediately accused of “picking and choosing” which bits I want to believe. And that’s not a bad challenge either.
Do I pick and choose which bits I want to believe? In fact, are we all guilty of picking and choosing which bits we believe? I would have to state that I don’t know any Christians who believe unreservedly in a literal interpretation of every single portion of the scriptures. I know some who may claim to hold that position, but who seem to practise their faith with much greater emphasis on some things than on others. I don’t know any Christians at all who follow the strict injunctions of the Hebrew Scriptures concerning food, clothing, Sabbath observance and so on.
Now, before you think I’m only interested in questioning the position of Christians, let me add that I think that atheists are just as guilty of the picking and choosing phenomenon. After all, there is such an amazing hodge-podge of secular beliefs circulating in our society that no one is capable of believing them all. Everyone chooses to believe some bits and not others. Economic theory? Take your pick. Theories of healing? You can take your pick there too. The best recipe for rock cakes? Take your pick.
So what do we believe? Or, more to the point, what do we believe?
This is pretty much what today’s gospel reading is all about. And what the gospel readings for the previous two weeks have been about as well.
Jesus is alive. Do you believe it or not?
We are told that Jesus said to his disciples: “Why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see…” This is, in many respects, the pivotal challenge of the whole of the Christian scriptures. If Jesus has not risen from the tomb, then what meaning is there at all for our faith? Following Jesus is reduced to nothing more than, as my friend’s wife puts it, “Jesus was just a good bloke.” Is that it? Is that all there is, or do we grasp the hands and feet of a risen Christ?
What difference does it make if we do “touch and see” a Jesus who has emerged from the tomb of death? Apart from all of those things associated with salvation and life after death, believing in a resurrected Christ has some major implications for the here and now. After all, Jesus says to those who believe, “You are witnesses of these things.”
The Macquarie dictionary gives eleven definitions for the word “witness”. They are all variants of one of two broad definitions: a witness is either someone who sees something, or they are someone who tells others about something they have seen. I think the first definition is wishy-washy.
Someone who is simply present and who sees something is not, in my book, a witness. They are an observer. A witness has to testify to what they have seen. There has to be some personal account given to others who were not there.
And Jesus says to his followers, “You are witnesses.”
Now I have a question: How is it possible for me to be a witness when I was not there?
This is the problem I was having with the accusations of my friend’s wife: I wasn’t there! How do I know which bits to believe? I wasn’t there. Was the earth created in six days? I don’t know. I wasn’t there.
What do I believe in? What am I willing to testify to? Which of “these things” am I prepared to witness to?
This is my short answer: I am a witness to the unconditional love of God.
I am a witness to the unconditional love of God.
This is for me the one thing I know beyond all doubt, and the one thing I am prepared to stand up in a court of law and bear witness to, because I have been present! The grace of God is real. The willingness to love so much that even death is no barrier is real. The power of God which transcends human limitations, which returns Jesus from beyond the very worst that humanity can do, is real.
A love which accepts; a love without strings attached; a love able to embrace the unembraceable: that is what makes me a Christian.
That is what I have touched. That is what I have seen. That is what I bear witness to.
It’s strange, you know, that I never remember, in my first thirty-odd years of being a Christian, I never remember hearing anyone talk about the grace of God. I do remember lots of sermons and talks and bible studies on the judgment of God, of the price of Jesus’ death being my guilt and need for repentance. But nothing about the unconditional love of God, the grace of God.
Why is that? Why are we so focussed upon what we deserve or don’t deserve that we fail to see the only thing that is worth witnessing: we are loved.
For me, the scales fell from my eyes the moment I was touched by unconditional love. The moment I experienced, not just saw but felt, the truth of what it means to be loved without strings attached. The moment I knew that I was loved without reservation, without condition, regardless of the past, no matter what the future may bring, the moment I was touched by grace I became a witness to the resurrection.
I became a witness to the truth that life always triumphs over death, that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness can never overcome it, that the grace of God is here … to stay.
Daily, the resurrection is witnessed to. Daily we are able to proclaim, “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” Amen.
2 comments:
I had a roommate once who was about as extreme as your friend's wife, but in the other direction. He really did believe that he followed the Bible as strictly as absolutely possible, that every single word of it was the literal word of God, he believed in predetermination, justice, judgement, all of that. We used to get into discussions all night, and it got interesting to say the least.
He would tell me that my entire denomination is wrong and evil because I said we practiced open communion, that we have an openly lesbian couple in our church and don't try to make them repent. We discussed rapture, social justice, mission work, repentance, grace, love, just about everything under the sun. We didn't agree on things more than we did, but one thing I definitely got out of it was that I am much more articulate about what I specifically believe.
If I said something at all vague he would immediately pounce on it. He made me much more comfortable discussing religion, made me more able to discuss the points, the reasoning, the arguments. So while I do commiserate with you on trying to be converted, there is a lot to be gained from people like that too, if you're willing to try to get there.
Wonderful sermon, thank you for sharing! I'm so glad that you do put your sermons online, I enjoy reading them.
-Charis
Thanks, Colin. I think grace is actually the hardest thing to really 'get' in life.
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