Joshua (4:19-24); 5:9-12
Psalm 34 or 34:1-8
2 Corinthians 5:17-21
Luke 15:11-32
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I once sat in on a panel of scientists and philosophers who were discussing whether Faith in God was relevant anymore. One of the scientists, a lapsed Episcopalian, was a biologist, known for his studies in the behavior of ant colonies. A student in the audience asked him if he had seen any evidence in his research that God existed. He answered no. What I wanted to ask was, “Dr. K, which do think more likely, that we would find God in your ant colony or that you would find ants in our campus religious center?”
We as a culture have fallen away from our spiritual inheritance and are looking for some coherent principle of meaning for our lives, some living spirituality. In some sense we are like the prodigal son who went to his father and said, “Father, give me all that falls to me.” And God has done so. And we have taken it and forgotten where we got it.
What an interesting phrase, ‘all that falls to me’? From whom did it fall? From his father, and we should say in our less paternalistic time, his mother. And how did his father and mother get it. Well, it fell to them also. It was earned only in the sense that he was born to it.
And so, if we follow back to the beginning of time, to the Big Bang, we are astounded that all that we work with today, fell from that one explosion. We have inherited the cosmos, the galaxy, the Solar System, this planet earth, our island home, this country and this village. And like the prodigal, we claim our right to use it as we want.
I like to read books about science and religion. I belonged once to a group that discussed these books one Sunday night a month. I tried without success to persuade this group to read God, Chance, and Necessity, by Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University.
Ward chooses to focus on a book written by an Oxford chemist named Peter Atkins (Not to be confused with he of the Atkins diet!) and the claim of Richard Dawkins, author of the God Delusion, that there is no meaningful purpose to the universe or to life. The evolution of life is simply the gradual working out over millennia of what Dawkins calls The Selfish Gene, the title of another of his books. Let me assure you that I find the theory of evolution to be the most sensible way of accounting for the facts. If you should every hear me use the word Intelligent Design in describing the universe, be assured I do not mean Creationism.
When young children ask where the world came from, Ward suggests there are only three answers. 1. It arrived by chance and continues to develop by chance. 2. It is the only world we could have, the laws of physics make it necessary to have this world. 3. God gave it to us and continues to maintain it in being. I won’t insult Ward by trying to summarize a whole book in a few sentences. In the end, he says, the hypothesis of God, while it won’t prove anything, especially to a predisposed skeptic, at least offers the best explanation for things as they are. At a telling point he says, we use our own God-given reason to reason that God isn’t necessary.
Now, isn’t that just the story of the Prodigal Son? Please Father, give me what is mine, which by the way comes from you, so that I can go off and live as though I don’t need you, though it is precisely the inheritance that makes my venture possible?
The founder of Medtronic, the world’s largest medical device manufacturer, built a meditation room in the main gathering area of the new headquarters, many years back. He was not pushing any particular religion. He was just suggesting that our very scientific enterprise in the company had deeper roots in mysteries of life that we would not solve, but must respect and take time to remember.
He knew that we must admit that we are working off our inheritance. And, when we do come to our senses do we not realize that the Heavenly Father has been waiting patiently for us to return, and that He comes running to meet us in order to rejoice at our homecoming?
In our brief reading from Corinthians this morning we are told that in Christ we shall become a new creation. It is a theme that Paul works on in other letters. In Galatians he put it this way. Neither circumcision nor un-circumcision is anything, only a new creation.
Our first reading today, from Joshua, is a split reading. The end of chapter 4 tells how the people of Israel followed the Tent of the Presence across the Jordan River. The carriers of the tent stopped in the middle until the people had crossed, the Tent of God’s Presence holding back the waters, much like in the Red Sea crossing. Later in chapter five we were told how they celebrated their first Passover in the Promised Land, no longer needing the manna that had sustained them in the wilderness. The part left out of our reading was that all the males had to be circumcised before they could continue in the Promised land, that not having been done during their sojourn in the wilderness. It gives you some idea of the importance of this ritual in their story of redemption.
So then, what a bombshell that Paul would say that neither circumcision nor un-circumcision counts for anything. It amounts to saying that religion as a system of rites and practices, however helpful to many, is not our reason for being. The 20th century theologian, Paul Tillich, a self-initiated exile from Nazi Germany published a book of sermons called The New Being. In the title sermon Tillich asks us what St. Paul’s bombshell means for our time. He notes that we have rituals and practices also. And he notes that other religions have their rites and rituals, and even secular movements have their calendars and celebrations and rites of passage and holy spots of significant origin. We were in Washington DC last weekend, which is full of political temples honoring our national saints, and documents that are our national scripture. The ceiling of the capital rotunda is entitled “The apotheosis of George Washington”, a depiction of Washington rising to heaven surrounded by 13 maidens representing the original states. At the tomb of the unknown soldier, solemn ritual marks a holy remembrance.
It seems like we are there just to go through the tourist experience of awe and wonder at what others have done, much as we do our rites and rituals to recall what Jesus and the early disciples and saints of the church have done. Tillich reminds us that none of this is our message. We are not here to say, exchange your rites and ceremonies for our rites and ceremonies and you will be fine. No, we are to tell the world that when a person or a culture or a church or any institution rediscovers its roots in the Divine purpose it will be like homecoming and it will become a New Being, reconciled to God and each other, thus becoming part of a new world.
I grew up in Pipestone, MN where about the only difference between the Methodists and the Episcopalians was that the former couldn’t drink in public. Our worship rituals were almost identical. Last Sunday I went to church at St. Paul’s K street in Washington where they do some very elaborate ritual. I doubt that I will ever feel as comfortable in more ritual as I do in less ritual, but I have learned that each can hold great meaning for its adherents. St. Paul and Paul Tillich would also have us understand that neither is of ultimate significance. More ritual – less ritual, circumcision – un-circumcision, what does it matter?. What does count is that we come home to God and are reconciled one to another and to Him.
For a brief moment. Let us return to that story in Joshua. It is the culmination of all the content of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. This long narrative assumes that the world came to be in order that God might lead them to this moment of destiny. You may recall that early in our national history we felt a manifest destiny to conquer the west. Just as the people of Israel did their best to wipe out the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Jebusites, believing always that they did so under God’s command, so did we to the natives of this land, also believing we were just in forcing them to give up their religion and often to die.
I would never argue that God has no destiny for us. I would argue that we have a hard time understanding what it is. And we do so because we have been given our inheritance and have misused it in to pursue our own kinds of riotous living, often in the name of religion.
In Luke’s Gospel, before the stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin and the lost prodigal we are told that the Pharisees were grumbling because Jesus was eating with sinners and outcasts. All these stories have in that context a simple message, God is eager for the lost to be found. When he sees the lost return, he runs to meet them. The theology of the early church re: Jesus as God’s sacrifice for us, was driven by the sense of the early disciples that while they were pursuing Jesus for their own spiritual quests, he was patiently pursuing them to show them the Kingdom of God already in their midst if they would just turn from their blind ways.
When he meets us, he rejoices that we have returned, that we are reconciled to him and to others and to our selves. As persons, as congregations, as communities and nations, our Easter will be full of joy and festivity, to the extent that we seek a destiny with divine love in it rather than just our own pursuit of pleasure, that we see that our rituals are merely signs of something greater, not ends in themselves, and that we find purpose and meaning in our living rather than simply drifting through our lives as if the world was here only by chance or by some gradually evolved laws that have no moral end beyond themselves.