Real Life

First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Sixth Sunday after Epiphany - February 11, 2007
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: 1 Corinthians 15:12-20/Luke 6:17-26 /]

“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

            My father was a man of great wisdom and humor. Over the years, especially since his death almost thirty years ago, I have come to appreciate his wit and wisdom even more. I see the truth of what Mark Twain’s comment that when he was in his teens he thought his father the stupidest man around and how amazed he was at what the old man had learned in just ten years’ time. You see, my father never finished high school, never had the chance to go to college. The death of his father, the Depression and then World War II all saw to that. However, as he liked to say, he was a student of real life and, while he encouraged me in my education, he also wanted me to be a student of real life, too. There were only two certainties in real life, Dad said, death and taxes. The other certainty was that grappling with real life, in all of its forms, is real hard.

            The texts from Paul and Luke both deal with real life. Paul confronts the reality of death squarely; not something most preachers like to do. The theologian Joseph Sittler once wrote, “We must stop this conspiracy of silence about death, and talk openly about it. One can go to church a whole life-time and never hear a sermon on death. If I were a young preacher again, I would preach the Christian gospel of eternal life in God, but I would preach it sooner in my ministry, preach it throughout, and I would preach it more realistically.” I agree with Sittler and confess that I have not preached about death as often as I should have.

            Death is real. Death is part what it means to be human, part of the total experience of what means to have lived. And, dear friends, death is inevitable; as surely as we are sitting here one day we’re going to die. Which reminds me of a cartoon I saw in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago; it depicted a woman pointing to her husband and saying, “Oh, Donald’s such a fatalist. He’s absolutely convinced that he’s going to grow old and die someday” It’s not fatalistic or pessimistic, it’s realistic. The question to us is what do we do with that knowledge? Or, to use a phrase from the Rabbis after reading from Scripture, “how then shall we live?”

            I would suggest to you, first of all, that we should live, period. We should live with abandon, enjoying life and everything that it has to offer. The good God has made us and a wonderful world and we are to enjoy ourselves and enjoying this world. Now, does that mean we are to live recklessly, the old “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die” clap-trap? No. But we are to remember that Jesus told us the reason he came among us what that we might have life and have it how? More abundantly. I would suggest to you that real abundant life is rooted in how we are oriented. If we live toward God and toward others, with open minds, open hearts and open hands, we will experience that real life is abundant life. The beginning of our resurrected life doesn’t have to wait until we experience physical death. Rather it begins with each new day when we get out of bed to greet that day. Real life begins for us when we come to understand that there s more to us than we can see or understand in the here and now. Real life begins for us when we realize and embrace that the center of life is not self, but that it is other-centered, and then look to be one with God and seek the good of the creation God made. Resurrection is, indeed, a rising to new life, but it first overcomes the death that is selfishness and narrowness long before it overcomes physical death.

            I bet I can tell what you’re thinking – ah, nice thoughts, good metaphors, nice thing to hope for, you sitting there in your study thinking surrounded by all those books, sipping a cup of tea and thinking great thoughts, so nice of you to offer us the fruit of your research and a few words of comfort, but modern science gives nothing in the way of proof. Well, all I can say in response to is that there really more to it than platitudes. For example, a professor of mathematical physics, and to be fair I’ll tell you he doesn’t endorse the Christian perspective, argues rather forcefully and exhaustively for The Physics of Immortality. In the back of his book are pages and pages of formulas which he says proves immortality. Add to that distinguished scientists like Paul Davies, John Polkinghorne, Michael Fuller and Francis Collins (head of the human genome project) are all believers and see absolutely no conflict between their science and their faith. As Collins says in his book The Language of God, “Even Albert Einstein saw the poverty of a purely naturalistic worldview. Choosing his words carefully, he wrote, ‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” [Collins, p. 228] Who am I to disagree with Einstein, especially when he’s correct!

            Science, you see, has not disproved the Resurrection of Christ or the eternal life we are promised in the gospel. It simply cannot replicate the data. Well, of course it can’t – we’re talking about the Transcendent God taking flesh and dwelling among us. It’s never happened before and we can’t use scientific methods – which historians of science like the late Stephen Jay Gould (in The Mismeasure of Man) or Thomas Kuhn (who gave us the concept of the paradigm shift in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) have shown us can be skewed with subjectivism and are far from pure in their empiricism – to prove something that transcends our experience of reality. The truth of the matter is there is as much, if not more, faith involved in doing science as there is in religion. Our Christian faith is based on the testimony of those who experienced the Risen, living Lord. We rely on their testimony, their evidence if you will, just as we rely on the testimony of physicists who tell us that the world, which we see as solid, is actually a mass of moving particles. The truth is that no one has ever seen an atom, a proton, or a neutrino; we have only seen their effects using Scanning Tunneling Microscopes, Scanning Probe Microscopes and now Spectroscopy and we surmise from that how they look. When people open themselves up to the presence of the Risen Christ, we also see an effect. There is testimony to the reality of the Resurrection all around us.

            As Collins says, science is not the only way of knowing, nor is it the only way of pursuing truth. Perhaps the essence of what I’m trying to say is found in something the seventeenth century spiritual writer Angelus Silesius said, “Man has two eyes/One only sees what moves in fleeting time/The other what is eternal and divine.” We feel what we feel, this sense that there is more to us, because of the imprint of the Creator on us, because there is the Divine spark in each of us and thus a void in us that only God’s presence can fill. Sometimes the “why” is more important than the “how” in coming to understand the truth about our world and about us. Let me explain.

            Years ago I was at a conference where someone asked the speaker, an English theologian, to address the conflict between faith and science. I can’t remember his name, but I can still remember the amused look on his face and his answer. He said, “No. I can’t address it, because there isn’t a conflict between faith and science.” He illustrated in this manner. “Suppose you come to my house and you ask me, ‘Why is the tea kettle boiling?’ Well, I would respond that there is a transfer of heat going on from the stove through the copper to the water. Diffusion allows the heat transfer to be uniform within the water and when it reaches its vapor-liquid equilibrium turning the water to steam, it is boiling.” You go and ask my wife that same question and she’ll say, ‘Why, because you wanted a cup of tea, dear.’ Science tells us how. Faith tells us why.” I’ve never forgotten what he said and think he’s absolutely correct. Science seeks the ‘how,’ faith the ‘why’ and there are times when the only way that we actually come to know the ‘why’ is through revelation, through knowledge that comes to us from beyond us or from deep within us.

            Mysticism is about a direct or immediate knowledge of the divine. Physicist Paul Davies in his book The Mind of God points out that there are even times when scientists experience mystical knowledge. He writes: “In other cases mystical experiences seem to be more direct and revelatory. Russell Stannard writes of the impression of facing an overpowering force of some kind, ‘of a nature to command respect and awe. . . . There is a sense of urgency about it; the power is volcanic, pent up, ready to be unleashed.’ Science writer David Peat describes ‘a remarkable feeling of intensity that seems to flood the whole world around us with meaning. . . . We sense that we are touching something universal and perhaps eternal, so that the particular moment in time takes on a numinous character and seems to expand in time without limit. We sense that all boundaries between ourselves and the outer world vanish, for what we are experiencing lies beyond all categories and all attempts to be captured in logical thought.” [p. 227] What Stannard and Peat describe is the essence of what we can know – that we aren’t to be pitied – Christ is Risen and so are we.

            As people of the Resurrection we then have an obligation to live in a certain manner. It is this manner or way of living that Jesus addresses in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes. Here Jesus talks about real life and real living as opposed to that which, for lack of a better expression is false or half life. Notice he addresses all the things that we like to avoid in polite company in church like money and other worldly things. He addresses these things precisely because, as we will sing at the end of our worship service today, “This is my Father’s world” and everything we do – whether it’s economics or politics or anything else is to be approached from the real life view of our life in God. Now I could go off here about the sociology of knowledge and the social construction of reality, but I won’t and simply suffice it to say that our social reality should be built upon the bedrock of spiritual truth that our life is to be in sync with God. God made the world and everything in it and if we are to be blessed we are to live in accord with God’s mind and God’s will, otherwise our life will be less than real and far less than abundant.

What we read in the First Letter to Timothy (6:17-19) lays out this spiritual foundation quite well: “As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.”  The real foundation for our future – and for our present – is based on “life that is really life” and then living it out. Thus, we look beyond self to the service of God and others. We give of ourselves, giving to God what’s right and not simply what’s left after we’ve done what we like and in that way we “take hold of life that is really life.”

Yes, Dad was right, death and taxes are certainties of real life, but our faith teaches us that there are even greater certainties for life that really is life. Let me offer just a sample of what I believe these certainties of real life in God are. One, there is a God who made and ordered this world and all that is within it. Two, God loves us and cares for us and our life has purpose and meaning. Three, that God invites us to share the Divine life and to live in a way that is at once loving and life-giving; humanity has potential for goodness both in the here-now and in the hereafter that leads us to an urgency to live unselfish lives. We are not pitiable, for Christ IS Risen, blessed are we and real life is within our world, within our reach, within us.

Now today there are many churches and clergy who are saying that there is no conflict between science and faith. Today the Clergy Project, out of Butler University in Indianapolis, is celebrating ‘Evolution Sunday.’ I am a signatory on the ‘Clergy Letter, because I do not hold that the teaching of science is incompatible with classical Christian faith or with the Bible. As I have said, I believe that both science and our faith give us different ways of knowing and that we need both to experience the fullness of real life. Head and heart are not in conflict in our tradition; in fact, a favorite saying of mine speaks to that. “Why were the doors of Congregational meeting houses made so tall?” “So you knew that you could bring your head in along with your heart.

Our Congregational forebears were students both of Scripture and of nature. Jonathan Edwards said that one reads God’s will in both the book of nature and the book of Scripture. Edwards was an accomplished naturalist, did a definitive study on arachnids and was made a fellow of the Royal Society. Jedidiah Morse, Congregational minister and father of Samuel F. B. Morse, was a noted geographer. The list of the “learned clergy” who included science in their learning could go on and on. Science and faith go together.

I appreciated something I saw done by CrossWalk America that ended with this statement, because it reflects how I feel: “We celebrate the God of faith and science, who loves our hearts and our minds. We pray for the day when truth is not restricted by anyone and mystery is embraced by all.”  Real life sees humanity in all of its fullness and knows that there is more. Real life may be hard, but heart and head working together make it abundant, make it blessed. Live real life, live abundantly and be blessed.