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Suspended Disbelief

By Charles Rush

May 31, 2009

ery year one of my Confirmands raises a serious question about the nature of miracles and what to do with them. They are used pervasively in every religious tradition in the ancient world.

This question has been around at least since the Enlightenment that began around 1700. As a point of fact, people would generally be surprised at the freedom our founding fathers took with the Bible. Thomas Jefferson was a good Episcopalian but he took a pen knife to his personal bible and cut out all the passages that have miracles in them. It is a much shorter read. Literally, the Bible itself sort of falls apart, as I've heard many earnest Clergymen remind us..

In one of his wittier essays, the great empirical Philosopher David Hume, begins by saying something like “I went to Church today- (Now the year is 1750)- I went to Church today and heard our eminent Scottish Divine preach a sermon on the recent hurricane that hit Edinburgh. The Minister informed us that this hurricane was God's judgment upon Scotland for our sins of pride.”

The great philosopher then proceeds to explain in the next 80 pages the essentials of cause and effect, particularly as they relate to nature. Piece by piece, he argues that it is not possible to suspend the laws of nature under any circumstances and he takes begins to take apart the Minister's sermon one argument at a time until the sermon itself is shredded on the floor. He finally concludes that even if God wanted to punish us with a hurricane, God couldn't because the world doesn't operate that way.

After this devastating critique, he concludes, tongue planted firmly in cheek, ‘Thank God for the inspiration of our Scottish Ministers, for they can explain to us by means of faith, insights that we could never understand by mere reason alone.'

This credulity towards things miraculous has so seeped into the consciousness of all educated people that the faithful in every tradition- Protestant and Catholic- have a wave of intellectual embarrassment wash over them every time we have to read those articles in the New York Times, written in prose filled with incredulity, of yet another Orthodox icon of the Virgin Mary that appears to be weeping, prompting hundreds upon hundreds of people to visit some worn down basilica to request special intercession. We understand credulity. We accept it. If we err these days, it is likely to be on this side of the equation- somewhat overly skeptical…

Our text this morning reminds us of the spiritual disposition that is the yang to the ying of skepticism- wonder. To find a spiritual and mental balance in our selves we need to attend and practice both- skepticism but also wonder.

Our text this morning contains the profound theological teaching of the universality of the Christian faith. Right after Jesus dies, the disciples meet together and they are afraid. Something happened to them that changed them from being fearful to being quite courageous.

The story that they left behind about that event is filled with symbolism. So to speak, miraculously, they can speak in languages from the far ends of the world. The Spirit of God is, so to speak, moving the disciples out to the utter ends of the earth. The message of God's love and reconciliation is for everyone. God kind of pushes the disciples out of their parochial comfort zone to explore with daring missions to people they never even thought about. That is why we are all Christians today.

Years later, they recorded this story for us to remember the time that they became filled with such courage that they actually devoted the rest of their lives traveling to India, to Ireland, to Armenia, to Ethiopia to start churches. After they were killed for their faith, and so many of them were, they wanted to remember that they had this time early on when a change swept over them that changed them in ways they never would have predicted and cannot entirely explain by the sum of the parts alone.

It was a season in their life together that was filled with wonder. You have them to. These are moments that are spiritually rich, the thick times of life, where you can sense the life-force coursing through you. And it is amazing indeed.

Almost all of us are great at skepticism. We need help paying attention to the wonder that is in our midst and naming that for what it is. These are moments of transcendent blessing when the ineffable life force coheres in moments of serendipity and wonder. And we are changed.

We need to name them and remember them to balance our credulity and skepticism. Skepticism and credulity left to themselves start veer over towards cynicism. And that is not a healthy spiritual demeanor. Wonder keeps us ‘open to the transcendent'. It is the moments of your life when you ask yourself ‘What do you make of that? Can you believe it?'

I remember visiting Pat Calhoun many, many moons ago, just after Max was born. She had this glow about her, not ecstatic, but a kind of pervasive happiness that radiated out of her. It is a deeper contentment and peace, filled with gratitude, a gratitude that is rich enough that it cannot simply be eradicated by a sudden downturn in circumstances because it cannot entirely be explained by the particular circumstances either. It is the inexpressibly blessing of the life force.

She was holding little Max in her arms and he had this shock of brunette hair like his mothers. I'm looking at the baby. I said, “Pat, I know this sounds crazy… but this may be the most beautiful baby I've ever seen.”

Pat looked at me with surprise. Finally she said, “You know, I was just thinking the same thing…” New life is genuinely so marvelous and precious.

I have had this same exchange over several decades, each with the same incredible sense of blessing and gratitude. I've had it with Mother's who adopt as well as those who give birth naturally. Older, younger, having waited for years, not really quite ready for this- all shades of nuance.

Maternal Hormones? Yeah, yeah, yeah… we know there is a complex little biological explanation for this phenomenon. But the sum is bigger than the parts.

And, the sheer fact that this is part of the process… the sheer fact that the life force coheres in us at these moments- it is so palpable that our life suddenly starts coming into focus. We stumble upon our meaning and purpose so profoundly that we simply know what we are supposed to be about, we just know what our job is. We start to dream the future. We have visions of where we are headed. And we have this energy in our bones so that we move about the house with almost frantic pace. We become renewed in aliveness. The life-force (the Bible calls is the Spirit of God) coheres and concentrates itself and we feel ourselves healing, getting stronger. It is amazing.

And sometimes these things happen socially that belong in these brackets of wonderful things that are also open to the transcendent. [Roll the film] This is from when I was a child. Sometimes, you have these moments when things come together in a way that you never thought imaginable. This is 1968. Bobby Kennedy was running for President. He was shot and killed in California.

The decision was made to bring his coffin across the country by train. It is hard for me to describe to young people exactly how sad this time was. Our whole country was working to bring down the barriers of racism that were still large in our land, particularly in the South where I grew up. Racism was so pervasive that as a child, we certainly never imagined that it would ever come to an end. Bobby Kennedy had really lived integration, he was a genuine leader in the movement and a national symbol of sorts. And when he was killed, it was like the hope of the movement was dealt this mortal blow.

Then you had this moment, people coming out to honor what he stood for, all across our country, little towns in the middle of nowhere filled with people. And the beautiful thing about that moment was they were black and white. It was one of the most integrated moments in our country's history. This wasn't supposed to happen… but it did.

This tragedy brought about a spontaneous moment. And in that moment, we saw, we could visibly be part of this moment that we wanted to change.

There was something powerful and healing about it, so moving that we might actually be able to transcend the past and come together, united by the strength of our character and our resolve to be inclusive and accepting.

In these moments, you can feel the palpable Spirit, the strength of things coming together. It is the power of the life-force in our midst. Things just turn suddenly and the world is different.

Again, for all of us of that are my age and older, we grew up absolutely certain that we would live our entire lives in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. It was like the permanent winter in ‘The Chronicles of Narnia', we simply had no reason to believe that spring would ever appear on the horizon.

[Roll the tape] There were protests in 1989 in East Berlin. There had been protests before- many times in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland. They had never amounted to anything serious. Then, really completely out of the blue, on the 9th of November, the people spilled up on top of the Berlin Wall, the huge symbol of the divide between the East and the West in our world. And the feared Stasi, the East German police-, who didn't have any human rights standards they needed to adhere to- the feared Stasi, just let them go.

Suddenly there were hundreds, then thousands of people on top of that wall with little hammers and sledge hammers, knocking this huge wall down bit by bit, piece by piece. They had champagne in their hands. T.V. crews came from around the world as fast as they could but none of us were really prepared for this to happen, so most of it was actually captured on home videos and broadcast to the rest of the world.

We just sat up that night- in wonder and amazement- that this was happening. And we were all, like that lovely line about Mary when Jesus was born, the bible says, ‘she pondered these things in her heart and wondered what they might mean?'

That night, Mitslav Rostopovich was watching from his apartment in Paris. Rostopovitch was a Russian exile, the Conductor of the august Moscow Symphony. He had fled the country that he loved to protest for the dissidents in the Gulag throughout Russia and had to leave behind his wife, his family, the country that he loved. For many, many years he lived in exile in the West, assuming he would never go home, never see his family again. He was a living symbol of the tragedy and sorrow that Communism had wreaked upon it's citizens.

He is watching these people on the Berlin Wall, relatives reaching through a wall that had divided them for almost 50 years, welling up with the joy of reconciliation and reunion. He gets the next flight from Paris to Berlin and he brings his cello. He sets up on the Wall the next day and he plays. The concert was impromptu. This is what he played…

He was channeling the Spirit of the Life-force that takes up the pathos of our tragic lives and heals it and opens before us a new, really unimaginable future.

The prophet Joel has this wonderful line that says “in those days I will pour out my Spirit upon you and your young men will dream dreams and your young women will see visions”. Sometimes the possibilities of life just swing wide open before us. [End the tape]

Whatever happened to those disciples that day, they remembered as the time that they were changed from scared little boys into courageous men, full of a conviction so profound they were willing to die for it, and do so without reserve. And after most of them really were killed for their convictions; after they were gone and they had left behind these vital churches that were conduits of healing and restoration for so many people, they wanted to remember how they had been blessed- even in and through tragedy- they had lived a life of blessing.

That is what I hope for you. I hope you can stumble on a purpose for living that brings your life into focus, fills you with courage to pursue it no matter what difficulties lie in your immediate way, that your veins course with gratitude and thankful wonder that you get to be part of all of this, and opens a vision before you could not have imagined from way back there. I hope those moments rich with the life-force guide you and keep you going when you find yourself surrounded by the petty, the boring, the banal. That is what is really real. And may, peace be with you. Amen.