In the name of the God who finds the lost. Amen.
“The
fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” In our modern context, it might
seem like the opposite of that is true. Many people find faith to be antiquated
superstitions and younger generations aren’t walking away from religion as much
as they’re not even engaging with it in the first place. Atheism is no longer a
concept, it is the fastest-growing religion in America. So for much of society,
they look at the church and they say “How foolish and silly that all is.”
This
morning I want to use this line from the Psalm to talk about what faith is all
about and why believing in God isn’t foolish at all. You all know that I love
The Episcopal Church, but I wish we took this task a little more seriously. The
field known as “apologetics,” which is about defending and understanding our
faith, is not something that we put much time into. And that’s a shame. Far too
many of us can’t really describe or defend our beliefs in the face of atheism
and doubt and the result is that faith ends up being rejected and people end up
saying, “There is no God.” Or, if they don’t say it, they live as if that’s the
truth. And studies show that this is particularly the case for young people –
they get to college and encounter skeptical professors, they engage with the
work of brilliant philosophers, they maybe take a religion course that
challenges many of the things they took for granted about their faith and the
whole thing crumbles. So what is a reasonable basis for having faith?
To
be clear, this is a personal question. The reasons that I have for my faith may
or may not resonate with you, and so I really do commend giving this question
some intentional prayer, thought, and conversation with others. That being
said, there are three main “buckets” of rationales for faith that these sorts
of arguments fall into and they are that faith is about that which is
ultimately good, and true, and beautiful.
First
– goodness. One reason for believing is that we encounter goodness in this
world, and as we know from science and experience that all things have a
source. We all agree that helping those in need is good and that kicking
puppies is bad, and that innate sense of morality is implanted within us
because we are created in the image of God. For others, goodness is about the
order of the created world. We live in a universe that is precisely constructed
to allow for life as we know it. If any of the many mathematical constants,
such as the speed of light, the force of gravity, the attractional forces
within a nucleus were different by even a minuscule amount, then we would not
be here. That sense of order and purpose in Creation points many towards a
Creator. Yes, philosophers have rebuttals against the arguments about goodness,
but they have no answer to the fact that there is goodness at all.
Second,
we have truth as an argument for God. Now I realize that might seem like
putting the cart before the horse – you can’t claim that God is true because
God is true, and that’s not what I’m claiming. Truth is more about alignment.
The reality is that the vast majority of humans that have ever lived on this
planet have experienced the divine. And studies show that a good majority of
Americans, including even those who claim to be not-religious, have experiences
of this truth. When we experience things like joy, harmony, peace, or
fulfillment it is because we are in sync with God. Even things like the truths
of science and math point us towards the fact that truth is real and so faith
becomes trusting in that which is ultimately and always true, and we call this
truth God.
Thirdly,
faith is about beauty, and this perhaps the easiest to see. A Beethoven
symphony, a sunset in the mountains, the giggle of an infant, the starry night,
a Shakespeare sonnet, a perfectly built sports car, the taste of an authentic
taco, the list could go on and on – we are surrounded by beauty. The most
beautiful thing there is though is love. One new mother commented after the
birth of her first child that she had discovered “a love much greater than
evolution requires.” What a beautiful way of putting it. There is a superfluous
overabundance of beauty and love in this world and that points us in the
direction of the God whom we know and experience as love.
Goodness,
truth, and beauty – none of these prove that God exists, just as no argument
can definitively prove or disprove God’s existence. But to keep the
conversation at this level is to completely misunderstand what faith is all
about. Faith is not about knowing that you know something, it is about our
allegiances, about where we place our trust, about what our heart is open to.
This is why the Psalmist doesn’t say “The fool has made the argument that there
is no God.” Instead, the Psalmist says that “The fool has said in his heart
that there is no God.” And “fool” really isn’t the best translation. One
translator has it as “scoundrel.” The idea behind the word isn’t that this
person has considered God as an object and then evaluated whether or not there
is sufficient evidence to give intellectual assent to this proposition. So
often though, we treat faith as if it’s a series of thoughts.
But it’s not. Faith isn’t
about what you think. I know some atheists who have better thoughts than
Christians and some Christians who really don’t understand what Christianity is
about. And while that’s not a great thing to have Christians who really don’t
understand the faith, we can deal with that because faith isn’t about your
thoughts – it’s about your priorities, your commitments, your allegiances, your
hope. But the fool, or the scoundrel, has distanced himself from a relationship
to goodness, truth, and beauty. Instead, he doesn’t see himself as being
accountable to God, as he’s determined that he will make his own meaning in
life and that’s what makes him a fool. And this sort of foolishness isn’t
reserved for those who stay at home on Sunday mornings, but we can all play the
part of the fool when we live with a story other than the love of God as the operating
narrative of our lives. We can all focus on ugliness instead of beauty, on
idols instead of truth, on selfish evil instead of goodness.
And when it comes to
goodness, truth, and beauty, these are things that have to be experienced. As
important as being able to make a reasonable and logical argument for our faith
is, intellectual arguments only get us so far. What stirs our hearts aren’t debates,
but experiences. But we cannot manufacture experiences of holiness, we can only
receive them. And there’s only one way to experience being found by God, and
that is to be lost.
The prophet Jeremiah says
“My people are foolish; they do not know me; they are stupid children, they
have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to
do good.” St. Paul says the same thing differently, “But I received mercy
because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord
overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying
is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to
save sinners- of whom I am the foremost.” Or as Jesus puts it, “I tell you,
there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
Even today’s Collect, which dates back to the 8th century and has
been in the Book of Common Prayer
since 1549 names this reality as it prays “O God, because without you we
are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all
things direct and rule our hearts.” What all of this says is that we are utterly
lost in sin, but that’s the perfect prerequisite to being found.
If we think that we are
not lost, we won’t be open to the grace of God. If we think that we are
self-sufficient, or like the scoundrel, not accountable to God and one another,
then we’ll think that we’ve got it all figured out. But the truth of the matter
is that every single one of us is lost. Without that which is good, true, and
beautiful, we have no direction or purpose in life. Without the mercy of God,
we have no prayer for overcoming Sin. Without the eternal love of God, we have
no hope of being anything other than lost in death.
What Jesus tells us in
these two parables is that God is in the business of doing absurd and crazy
things in order to find us who are lost. When Jesus asks, “Which of you, having
a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine and
search for the one?” the answer is “No one!” No one does that because it
doesn’t make sense. If you lose 1% of anything, you don’t jeopardize losing the
other 99% over it. Or think about the woman who loses a coin. When she finds
it, she throws a party and ends up spending so much more than the value of that
one coin to pay for the party. There is no world in which this makes sense. And
this should tell us that faith isn’t about what makes sense. It’s about what
makes whole. When goodness, truth, and beauty come together, we encounter a
peace that passes all understanding, a grace beyond all deserving, a love that
defies all explanation.
And the only thing that
God needs from us in order to bring us into Resurrected life is that we have to
die. That’s it. We don’t have to have answers or think the right things. God
raises the dead and finds the lost. So no matter how bad or unqualified you think
you are, you’ve already met the criteria for God’s salvation. The issue is that
it’s actually those who don’t think that they are lost who will struggle with
faith. The fool is the one who thinks they don’t need to be found. The fool isn’t
the person who rejects the God hypothesis, it’s the person who lives as if they
found themselves, as if they don’t need help, as if they have life figured out
and put together, as if they aren’t going to die.
Because what God does to
the lost is finds them. What God does to the sorrowful is to comfort them. What
God does to the forgotten is to remember them. What God does to the sinful is
to forgive and restore them. What God does to the dead is to raise them up. And
this isn’t in the past tense – it is present and active. Right now the Holy Spirit
is surging through this world in acts of goodness, in moments of beauty, in the
proclamation of the truth of love to seek the lost and raise the dead.
Faith isn’t about our
ability to think that this is so, it’s about our ability to be found by grace
and caught up in love. But to be found, we have to be lost. So faith really isn’t
about philosophical arguments, it’s about acknowledging that without God’s
grace and love that we’re lost with no hope for a future. The fact of the
matter is that all of us have been found by Jesus Christ. Now, if we insist
that we were never lost, we won’t be able to join that great party to celebrate
our redemption.
Our reading from Luke
cuts off in the middle of a chapter; these parables of the lost sheep and lost
coin are building towards something, the parable of the lost son, otherwise
known as the prodigal son. You all know the story – a man has two sons, one
asks for an advance on his inheritance, goes off and blows it on pleasure, and
then comes back home hoping to find work as a servant in his father’s house.
But the father is having none of it – he welcomes him back with open arms and kills
the fatted calf to celebrate that his son, who was lost, has been found. But in
a twist, it’s actually the dutiful and diligent older son who becomes lost. He
refuses to join the party because he’s upset that while his good-for-nothing
brothers gets rewarded with a grand banquet, he gets nothing. The older son
doesn’t think he’s lost, so he’s not able to be found by grace. The father
tells him that everything that is the father’s is his, and that’s always been
the case. But the older son can’t bring himself to recognize that he’s lost; he plays the part of the fool. And in this sense, these parables are showing us that atheism really isn’t
about what you think, it’s about whether or not you’re able to recognize God’s
amazing grace and proclaim “I once was lost but now am found.”
