Once again I find myself compelled at the outset,
and even in his absence, to thank Dean Hill for his gracious offering to me of
a preaching series during the late spring and early summer. Some of you may remember that we began on May
8, Mothers Day, with a reflection on life’s journeys in conversation with the
resurrection story of Jesus meeting the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Yes, here you are, whether you intended to be
here, or more likely not, on Memorial Day Sunday, right in the middle of Br. Larry’s
2011 secular holiday preaching series.
Whether you are here in person or listening over airwaves or internet
signals, it is good that you have come on Memorial Day weekend, so that you may
pray that what follows you might quickly forget. Speaking of prayer.
The Lord be with you.
And
also with you.
Let us pray.
God of memory and of mindfulness, guide our hearts
and minds in these moments of reflection that they may be turned to you, to
your wisdom and your grace, and that our lives may benefit from the beneficence
of your most Holy Spirit. In the name of
Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, we pray.
Amen.
Have you ever sat and watched as a baby, sitting in
the middle of the floor, attempts to get up and go after a ball or some other
toy that she has flung across the room? This
attempt at locomotion is often accompanied by a facial expression of some
degree of anguish. It is as if said baby
wants to say, “If only I could get up and go, I could get across the room and
get my toy. Alas, since I cannot get up
and go, I shall have to put on a show of consternation in order to motivate
someone around me to get it for me.”
Amazingly, as the facial expression of anguish turns to vocal
consternation, someone usually does just that.
And so it begins: life in the conditional. If the baby cries, then someone goes to get
the toy. If the child pushes the button,
then the screen comes on. If the adolescent
breaks curfew, then the parents ground him.
If the young adult gets a job, then she can pay the rent. If the politician commits adultery and his constituents find out about it,
then he will be voted out of office.
Well, maybe. Life in the
conditional is at the heart of the human endeavor. It is so much so that the great modern
philosopher Immanuel Kant put it at the heart of his articulation of the nature
of knowledge and experience alongside time and space: the conditional movement
of causality is constitutive of pure reason.
Actually, reality is a bit more complicated than
this. And so we ask, do you live in the
world of Sir Isaac Newton or the world of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr? This is an important question for us here at
Marsh Chapel who seek to live faithful lives, and not merely for the physicists
working in labs across the street. So,
let’s have it, do you live in the mechanistic universe of Newton, where things
move around bumping into each other like billiard balls such that when one
thing encounters another it causes the thing it runs into to alter course? Or do you live in the probabilistic universe
of Einstein and Bohr, which is to say the quantum universe, where outcomes of
interactions are only certain to a degree of probability? While it is probably best for us to leave it
to the physicists to demonstrate why the latter is the more robust view in the
laboratory, we can confirm it in our own lived experience. After all, does the adolescent not run a
rough calculus of the probability that his parents will ground him for staying
out past curfew? And does the politician
not calculate both the probability that he will get caught in adultery and the
probability that his constituents will find out about it? Perhaps we will address the question of why
it is that both adolescents and politicians are so likely to miscalculate their
respective probabilities when we gather for the third and final installment of
the 2011 secular preaching series on Independence Day weekend.
And so it is that we find ourselves living in a
probabilistic conditional world. It
should not be entirely surprising, then, that we carry the presuppositions of
our probabilistic conditional world over into our spiritual lives. Our lesson this morning from 1 Peter is an
excellent example of this phenomenon.
“Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good?” Transcription: If you do what is good, then
you will not be harmed. The fact that
the world is not merely conditional but probabilistically conditional comes
into play in the next sentence: “But even if you do suffer for doing what is
right, you are blessed.” That is, for
those of you who are good but fall outside of the probability of not being
harmed, and thus are in fact harmed, do not worry too much, because you are
still blessed. This is beginning to
sound a lot like the witch test: if she drowns, then she was clearly not a
witch! Oh dear.
It is an interesting thing to consider that
religious people figured out that the world is probabilistically conditional
long before the physicists did. After
all, how often have you heard stories of people praying, “God, if only you will
X, I promise to Y”? How often have you
prayed such yourself? Martin Luther
prayed in the forest that if he would survive a thunderstorm then he would
become a monk. He survived, so he did in
fact become an Augustinian. Of course, it
is notable that these promises tend to arise at the extremities of life. That is, these promises tend to come about
when life itself is at stake, taking the form of, “God, save my life and I will
give my life to you.” This has the side
effect of effectively negating the probabilistic quality of the
conditional. After all, if God does not
save them, then we never get to hear their story of praying that they will do
something if God saves them.
No, it is much better to look to the more mundane
spiritual conditionals to understand their probabilistic nature. These are more wont to take the form of,
“God, if you will only find me a parking spot, I promise to stop doing whatever
it was that I was doing that made me late in the first place.” Here in Boston, I am quite confident that
there are more such prayers offered daily in the confines of motor vehicles
than all of the prayers offered in all of the houses of worship in this city
combined. And multiply that number by
100 when the Red Sox are in town! This
mundane conditional is much more interesting because of the fact that it
frequently does not come true. How often
have you seen a host of angels swoop down and carry off a car so that you can take
its space? No, often as not you are left
driving around frustrated that your meeting is starting in a building mere feet
away and you are stuck outside trying to dispose of a massive hunk of metal.
Of course, not all non-mortal conditionals are so trivial. How many of you have offered prayers, perhaps
in this very nave, for family and friends who are terminally ill? And how many of them have died? How many of you have prayed for work? And how many of you are still
unemployed? How many of you have prayed
for peace? And how long will we remain
at war? The fact of the matter is that
these non-trivial conditionals do cause some people to abandon faith and
abandon God. That this happens should
not be surprising. But what is truly
fascinating is how many people do not flee from faith and God upon finding
themselves outside the desired probability. In religious and spiritual life we are
accustomed to the probabilistic conditional.
The movement from if to then that constitutes the
conditional is a place of deep anxiety in human life. The probability that the if will not come
about, and the probability that the then will not in fact follow, leaves a
great deal of uncertainty as to how and when to move. And the fact that the probabilistic conditional
figures in the literature of our spiritual heritage does not make living in the
midst of such instability any easier.
However, acknowledging the reality of the probabilistic conditional as
one of the primary modes of human engagement of experience is not the only
testimony of the religious and spiritual traditions. The good news offered in the spiritual quest
is precisely a transcendence of the if-then dichotomy of human affairs. There is more to life than predicting a
probability and then hoping for the best.
Our Gospel lesson from John highlights this point. “If you love me, keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give
you another Advocate, to be with you forever.”
The if-then conditional of the first sentence is not the last word. The uncertainty of Good Friday’s crucifixion
is transcended, but not eclipsed, in the confidence of the Easter
resurrection. The uncertainty Jesus’
departure in the Ascension is transcended, but not eclipsed, as we shall see in
the next weeks, in the confidence of the coming of the Holy Spirit at
Pentecost. The promise of the Holy
Spirit is not simply another conditioned clause. It is its own indicative statement. The Advocate will come in spite of our
fulfillment of the condition, not because of it. We are saved by faith, not by works.
This movement of transcendence-sans-eclipse is an
important one in our spiritual lives.
The transcendence of the if-then dichotomy is the source of the hope
that is in us, of which we are called to account in 1 Peter. And yet, we are called to give this account
“with gentleness and reverence.” This is
because in this life we never fully depart from the dichotomy of the
probabilistic conditional. We can never
escape the vicissitudes of life. At the
same time, the transcendence is not merely cast off into some future
afterlife. The
transcendence-sans-eclipse of our Easter and Pentecost experience is a source
of real hope and transformation in our lives now.
Paul testified to the importance of this
transcendence in his speech in front of the Areopagus in Athens, accounted in
our reading from the Acts of the Apostles.
Paul testified about the unknown god to which the Athenians had built a
temple. He testified that this unknown
god of the Athenians was “the God who made the world and everything in it, he
who is Lord of heaven and earth.”
Furthermore, he testified that the creator of the world cannot be bound
in shrines or works of human hands, or even served by human hands. Paul testified to a God who transcends the
conditional tense of daily life. God
“allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where
they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope and find
him – though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our
being.’” Our searching for the
transcendent God should not lead us to place our hope in something finite, but
it should also not lead us to place our hope in something to come in the
future, which is, after all, also finite.
No, the transcendence-sans-eclipse of the hope promised in Easter and
Pentecost provides a living hope in the midst of the probabilistic conditional
experience of life.
The hope that is in us is not that God will fulfill
all of our desires, no matter how mundane or extreme. It is not even that we will always come out
on the preferable side of the probabilities.
No, the hope that is in us does not transcend the conditional character
of life by resolving its dichotomies but transcends the conditional character
of life without eclipsing that life as it is.
After all, it is the life God gives us and calls good. Instead, the hope that is in us is the hope
of life and love. “Because I live, you
also will live,” Jesus proclaims in the voice of the fourth Evangelist. “I came that they may have life, and have it
abundantly” (John 10: 10). “They who
have my commandments and keep them are those who love me and those who love me
will be loved by my Father, and I will love them an reveal myself to them.”
The good news of Jesus Christ for us today is that
life and love are not faint hopes. They
are hopes in the power to overcome the brokenness of life in the conditional
tense. They are movements toward
wholeness that draws together not only the preferably possibilities but also
those we might wish to avoid. Life would
not be life without death. Love would
not be love without struggle, pain and loss.
“On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I
in you.” And is not the achievement of
holding such disparate and diverse realities of life together in a more awesome
whole far greater than finding a parking space?
Amen.
