BELIEVING IS SEEING
Here is the message I presented for August 8, 2010.
Believing is Seeing
Today the scriptures from Hebrews and Luke deal with faith. In Hebrews, we hear about biblical figures who acted upon their faith, while in Luke we learn about one of the things we are to have faith in, which is the return of our Lord. We are called to act upon that faith by being prepared.
But I have to admit that when I hear the opening verse of Hebrews chapter 11, which states, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” my first thought is of the movie Star Wars. Yes, I am a fan of the original Star Wars trilogy. The movies with Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewbacca. What comes to my mind first when I hear this passage is the part of the movie where Luke is just beginning his instruction in learning about the force. He asks Han Solo “you don’t believe in the force, do you?” to which Han, the ultimate space cowboy, replies “Kid, I’ve flown around from one side of the galaxy to the other. I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff. But I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all powerful force controlling everything. There’s no mystical energy field controls my destiny. It’s all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.” Han is saying, in essence, is that “seeing is believing.” Yet we as Christians are called to have faith in things that aren’t readily seen. And this opens us up to criticism and ridicule by many nonbelievers.
When speaking about the force, Han Solo also declares “Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side.” Have you ever heard someone deride Christianity in a similar manner? I know I have, many times.
As I was thinking about the basis of our faith and the evidence we have to support what we believe, it brought to mind the workshop I attended called The Three Colors of Ministry. This is the workshop that we will be asking the entire congregation at Trinity to participate in on Sunday September 26th. In the workshop, they talk about how we experience God in different ways. Some are more God centered, some are more Christ centered, and some are more Holy Spirit centered. No one way is better than the other, although ideally we would strive for a greater balance between all three ways.
In this workshop, you take a short survey, and based on that information you are assigned a biblical figure to help you understand who and what you are. It is important to know how we experience God, and to recognize how other people may experience God in other ways, so that we can communicate effectively with each other, and so that the church and its programs can make everyone feel that their differences and interests and needs are being validated and met.
So my survey showed that I was more centered toward God the Creator, which made a lot of sense to me. But I was shocked to find out that my biblical figure was Thomas. My first thought was What? Doubting Thomas? Oh, come on, how can that be? After all, we know the story of how Jesus appeared to the disciples in the upper room after the resurrection. Thomas wasn’t there, and when he heard about it, he said he would have to touch Jesus’ hands and side in order to believe. And I thought, that really doesn’t sound like me. But as I learned more, I began to realize that it wasn’t so much that Thomas was lacking faith, but that he was more of a “show me” kind of guy, something of a detail oriented kind of guy. And that is me.
When we talked recently in a meeting about the possibility of having regular church dinners I thought: great idea! But who is going to do all the work without getting burned out? And how are we going to pay for it? That is Thomas all the way. And even my reaction, What? I’m Thomas? How can that be? Is a Thomas kind of response. It is a show me, let me learn more about it type of response. And I like to learn about the scientific evidence that supports our faith. In contrast, if you are Martha or Moses, you might not have much interest in these areas, because your experience of God and of faith is different from mine. Not better or worse, just different.
I recently heard a discussion on the radio show called Religion On the Line. A Rabbi and a Catholic Deacon currently host the show. They were talking about how so many churches and synagogues are seeing a decline in membership and attendance, particularly among the younger generations. And they were wondering why. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Well, I’m wondering if some of our teens and young adults might initially be experiencing God and religion from Thomas’ show-me type of approach because of their experiences in school. They are exposed early on to the scientific method and a vast array of knowledge and technological advances that they take for granted. Recently a 6th grader was telling me about the Power Point presentation he made for one of his classes. Power Point! Whatever happened to poster boards? I’d bet that some of you don’t even know what power point is! And here was this 11 year old student telling me about how he had to upload his presentation to the school computer using e-chalk, and then the teacher could use the smart board in the classroom to display it. And I couldn’t help wondering about how something called a Smart Board could make me feel so dumb and out of date. Now, what does this all have to do with declining membership and youth attendance, and our topic of faith? Well, just because faith involves things unseen doesn’t mean it has to be blind. But we may need to consider how we can move some of our young people from the “seeing is believing” approach to God to a “believing is seeing” approach.
In the 3 Colors of Ministry, they point out that Jesus did not initially react to Thomas’ doubts by criticizing Tomas for his weakness. Instead, he started by responding to Thomas’ strength, which was his desire for proof, and only after that did he say “stop doubting and believe.” And when he said “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” he was revealing to Thomas an area of growth that was still awaiting him, and made possible by the help of the Holy Spirit.
Now every week in worship we read the scriptures from the lectionary and learn about them and how they apply to our lives now. This makes me wonder what you believe about the scriptures. Are they divinely inspired by God, or are they created by man as a type of morality tale? Are they consistent or are there verses that contradict each other as many nonbelievers claim? Are they accurate or filled with inaccuracies due to errors in transcription over the centuries? These are questions that many youth and seekers and new Christians have about the Bible, and they are important because what you believe about the Bible will have a profound effect on everything else that you believe about Christianity.
For example, in his book “The Case for Faith” Lee Strobel writes about Charles Templeton, who preached alongside of Billy Graham for many years. Templeton’s faith faltered, however, and he became outspoken against the central beliefs of Christianity, writing books such as “Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith.” Templeton states that his loss of faith began when he started to use reason rather than faith to study the Bible, and this led to questions about the scriptures and their accuracy. And in those early years when they were together, Templeton began to sway Billy Graham, causing him to doubt the inerrancy and divine inspiration for the Bible. But Graham’s response was to pray and pray and pray, and eventually the answer came to him, that some things must be accepted by faith; that we won’t have all the answers now; just as Job learned this, when God essentially asked, who are you to question me? Were you here when the universe was created? Interestingly enough, Templeton describes Jesus as the most moral and most important human being who ever lived. But as we all know, being a moral being is very different from being God in human form. And so Billy Graham became stronger in his faith, while Templeton became an outspoken agnostic.
Fortunately, we now have a lot of evidence available to us which helps to support our belief in the reliability and divine inspiration for our scriptures. So how would you answer the questions some people have about the Bible? The Thomas in me, who values knowledge in addition to faith, wants to know just what evidence there is that supports the Bible as the inerrant Word of God. Lee Strobel’s book, The Case for Christ, is one of the many books available that deals with these and many other important questions. Issues such as: how long after Jesus’ crucifixion were the books of the New Testament written; what is the age of the oldest manuscript copies available to us and how accurate are these transcriptions; are there contradictions in the Gospel narratives; and what is the archaeological evidence that supports the Gospel accounts?
One apparent contradiction that I, Thomas, found interesting was that the gospels of Mark and Matthew state that Jesus healed a blind man on his way out of Jericho, while Luke reports that the miracle occurred as they approached Jericho. Well, archaeologists have discovered that Jericho was not just one cohesive city, but that there were sections of it that were separated by approximately one mile. So the healing obviously happened when Jesus was leaving one section of Jericho and entering the other section!
I also found it interesting to learn that when one error occurs in a manuscript, such as a spelling error, and that change is then repeated in 2000 manuscripts, most statistics would count this as 2000 errors! No wonder so many people think the Bible is full of errors! Norman Geisler and William Nix, who are noted Bible historians and authors, have estimated that the copies we have of the Bible are 99.5% pure if we look at differences between the manuscripts; and that most of the changes are in spelling or word order that do not affect the meaning of the text. Thomas likes that information!
As for Templeton, the man who once shook Billy Graham’s faith, he verbalizes another issue that many people have difficulty with, and that causes some to lose faith and reject the God of Christianity. Templeton reports that one day he saw a photo in Life magazine of a woman in northern Africa during a devastating drought. She was holding her dead baby in her arms, and he asked himself, “Is it possible to believe that there is a loving or caring Creator when all this woman needed was rain?” And he wondered “Where is God in this photo?”
There are many modern day examples of extreme suffering: a story from Haiti presented in the New York Times mentioned a man who was acting as translator for the reporter. He had recently lost his wife and then in the earthquake he lost a brother, three nephews, three aunts, and a niece who had been crushed to death with her newborn child. He told reporter Marc Lacey, “I’m crying in my head, but if I let tears come out, they won’t stop.”
What do we, as Christians, say to someone in these circumstances? What do we say when an observer asks us “Where was God when this horrible thing happened?” How do we answer the questions that people have about evil, and suffering that affect their ability to have faith? And how can we help them move from Seeing is Believing to Believing is Seeing, so that they can have an intimate relationship with God through the power of the Holy Spirit?
Lee Strobel, in The Case for Faith, interviewed professor and author Peter Kreeft and asked him how Christians can answer some of these difficult questions about a loving God and the existence of evil and suffering. Kreeft points out that to an observer, God may appear to be absent, but often the person who is suffering does feel God’s presence and comfort. Others realize later, as they look back on the situation, that God was there all the time. Kreeft states that, regarding suffering, the answer is the incarnation. Jesus, as God made flesh, experienced pain and suffering, betrayal and loss, and a horrible death on the cross. So, through His entering the world, he is able to feel our pain, and to know what we are going through. Kreeft believes that we grow from our experiences, and that even if we are not able to thank God for our suffering while we are here on earth, we will thank him when we are in heaven.
One person whom I have heard of who thanks God for her suffering, is Joni Eareckson Tada. In 1967 at the age of 17 she became a quadriplegic from a diving accident. Even after two years of rehabilitation she was still unable to use her hands. But instead of reacting in anger at God, or rejecting God, she has grown stronger in her walk with him. Her latest book “A Place of Healing” recounts her recent journey through physical pain and unanswered prayer, and her coming to terms with the fact that God, who could definitely heal her, once again chose not to do so.
Joni is the founder and CEO of the Joni and Friends International Disabilities Center. One of the programs supported by this foundation is called Wheels for the World and it repairs old wheelchairs, and provides them and the Gospel to disabled people throughout the world. I heard about this program on the radio, and the person was telling the story of a man in India who had been paralyzed. As a result, he was homeless and had been rejected by his family because he was no longer able to provide for them and therefore was considered to be worthless. He was given a wheelchair and the Gospel, and the help he needed to turn his life around. He is no longer homeless and he has become member of society once again. He in turn was sharing the good news with others.
So in summary, we are called to have faith in things that are not seen, and to act upon that faith. This is not always an easy thing to do. For those who are new to Christianity or who are still seeking God, it can be even more difficult. Learning about how we experience God and faith, and how this differs from person to person can help us to understand and nurture the people we come into contact with, at church, at home, at work, and in all parts of our lives. For example, some people, particularly our youth, may need to hear about the evidence that is available that supports our faith.
I’d like to close by reading from Romans 5:1-5 (New Living Translation):
Titled: Faith Brings Joy
Therefore, since we have been made right in God’s sight by faith, we have peace with God because of what Jesus Christ our Lord has done for us. Because of our faith, Christ has brought us into this place of undeserved privilege where we now stand, and we confidently and joyfully look forward to sharing God’s glory.
We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.
THANKS BE TO GOD.
LIVING WATER 
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