Hilton Head Island, SC – September 23, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 19:14-29; John 20:24-29
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.” – John 20:25b (RSV)
A century ago William James delivered the annual Gifford Lecture at Yale University. William James was a famous psychologist, and the Gifford Lectures were a lecture series at Yale devoted to presentations on some aspect of the academic study of religion. The lecture that year was called The Varieties of Religious Experience. It later was published as a book under that title which became a classic even to this day. On the bulletin cover there is a quote from the book. The book is still widely read and discussed.
William James postulated that different people respond differently to the possibility and even the plausibility of faith. For some faith comes easily, he said, and he gave examples. For others it comes with great difficulty, and he also gave specific historical examples of that. One of the people he wrote about was Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth century New England Puritan preacher. Edwards appealed to both the mind and heart in his preaching, said James, but as with every preacher, his particular approach worked better for some people than for others.
The best-known of Edwards’ sermons, indeed perhaps the best-known American sermon ever preached, was Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. When Jonathan Edwards first preached this colorful and potentially terrifying sermon to his congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts, it hardly raised an eyebrow, because the congregation was used to his colorful and potentially terrifying homilies. But when he preached it at another church some distance away, his words practically sent those people into an apoplectic swoon. The effect was astonishing, as William James noted.
Why would the good Calvinists of Northampton be virtually unmoved by Jonathan Edwards’ homily, whereas those of Enfield, Connecticut went emotionally ballistic? The answer, James implied, is explained by the varieties of religious experience within the human race. Some people are readily moved by the power of the preached word, and others aren’t. There is obviously more to it than that, said Dr. James, but that’s a good part of it.
In my experience as a long-of-tooth parson, most people I have known do not seem to be very subject to mystical religious experiences. Maybe that’s because for well over half of my ministry, I was a Presbyterian pastor. Presbyterians tend more to be “head people” as compared to “heart people,” or at least so it appears to me. That is, they respond more readily to intellectual appeals for faith than to emotional appeals. Or maybe it seemed that way to me because I am essentially an intellectual as opposed to an emotional-type preacher, and that’s what those poor souls got, whether they liked it or not.
What do I mean by the word “mystical?” (Just so you understand the agenda here, that is an intellectual question, not an emotional one. And that suggests that I consider that most of you are more intellectual types than emotional types. If you were primarily emotional, you would have discovered within two paragraphs of the first sermon you ever heard me utter than I am not your basic emotional type of preacher.) Anyway, what are some examples of mystical religion?
The sixth chapter of Isaiah is a good example. When Isaiah tells us that he was in the temple, and he saw “the Lord high and lifted up,” he was talking about a mystical vision he had in the temple. There have always been mystics who see such visions, but they are in a fairly small minority of all believers, I am convinced. The Bible contains narratives of many mystical experiences, but people should not suppose they are failures in faith if they never have such visions. The apostle Paul in I Cor. 12 tells about a mystical vision he had in which he was carried to the third heaven. I will confess I never knew there was a third heaven until Paul mentioned it, and even then, I’m not convinced that heaven has several levels. The writer of the Revelation tells in Chapter 21 of seeing a new heaven and a new earth, and the new Jerusalem. Those words convey a mystical experience, but again, I think most of us don’t ever have such experiences.
Please understand: I do not mean to minimize mystical religion, and certainly not to negate its reality. I have no doubt that mystics perceive realities the rest of us shall never see. But I am certain that mystics are subject to the mystical, not because they are more faithful, but because their minds, or more precisely, their brains, are physiologically constructed in such a way that they perceive the mystical more readily than the rest of us.
In a similar manner, I am convinced that faith comes much more easily to some people than to others, and it is primarily because of cerebral wiring or brain chemistry or who knows what. The thesis of this sermon is not based on any empirical scientific study or evidence. Rather it based on having known a few thousand individual people as a minister, several hundred of them quite closely. And I mean to suggest as clearly as I can that, for instance, just as various human bodies vary greatly in athletic prowess, and for essentially genetic reasons, so too do various human minds vary in their ability to affirm matters of faith.
Here are a couple of illustrations from literature. Emily Dickinson was no pushover for faith. Her poetry is peppered with allusions to God and the transcendent, but it seems obvious to me that Emily had a hard time maintaining her faith. That’s one of the reasons I so admire her. She kept at it even when the going was very tough. In Dostoevsky’s great novel The Brothers Karamazov, faith seemed almost impossible for the middle brother Ivan, but the youngest brother Alyosha would have found it almost impossible to be an atheist, like Ivan. Alexei Karamazov was literarily and literally a natural-born believer.
I doubt that Karl Marx ever would have been a believer, no matter how winsomely biblical truths might have been presented to him. Neither would Bertrand Russell or Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. Nor would the atheists I have known personally likely ever “give in” to faith, if “giving in” is even the proper terminology. I have never known a frivolous atheist, though I have known many frivolous Christians. Only deep thinkers have the courage and intellectual fortitude to declare there is no God, but droves of shallow thinkers sign on with God because they think it is simply a good long-term insurance policy. They may not possess courageous convictions, but they do have prudential faith of a lower-level variety.
The disciple known as Thomas is my kind of guy, which by implication will probably tell you more about me than about Thomas. It is the episode from the Fourth Gospel that was earlier read which is most familiar to most people about Thomas, and it gives him his perpetual moniker, “Doubting Thomas.” Thomas wasn’t there when Jesus first appeared to the other disciples after his resurrection. The narrative doesn’t say where he was. Maybe he was at his computer, looking up the word “faith” on Google for the umpteenth time. Anyway, when the others told Thomas that they had seen the risen Christ, he said that unless he saw the wounds of Jesus in his hands and side, and touched the wounds, he would not believe what they said. Thomas was simply that kind of person. And we have all known people like that.
By nature I tend to be like that. I am a believer; I want boldly to state that. But I tend to be a resident of Missouri in the Department of Faith. You don’t exactly have to “Show Me,” because I realize faith cannot be empirically demonstrated, but just telling me something doesn’t mean I am likely to believe it. For instance, two Sundays ago our governor ordered an evacuation of all coastal counties in South Carolina, because he believed Hurricane Florence might come ashore somewhere in the Palmetto State. By Monday morning it was evident that would not happen, but it took him until Tuesday noon to rescind his order for Beaufort and Jasper Counties, costing local taxpayers and business literally in the low millions of dollars because of his decision. A true believer in such extremely cautious convictions I am not.
Incidentally, some researchers at UCLA postulated that certain people are more likely to be either conservative or liberal in their political beliefs on the basis of their particular brain chemistry. I am not making this up! They performed MRIs on several willing subjects of varying political persuasions, and certain parts of their brains lit up in certain ways if they were Republicans, and other parts lit up in other ways if they were Democrats. I guess that implies
there’s nothing we can about being either elephants or donkeys.
In like manner, I genuinely believe that faith in God is much more likely to occur for some people than for others. I can’t prove that, and I suspect it may never be provable, but I believe it all the same.
All three synoptic Gospels have the story of the father with the epileptic son, but Mark has the most detailed account. It is Mark alone who has the boy’s father say to Jesus, “I believe; help my unbelief!” To me, that is a painfully honest statement from a terribly conflicted man. He was prepared to believe in the power of Jesus to heal his son, but he also knew himself well enough to realize that it would be intellectually hard for him to accept a miracle, much as he wanted one right at that pivotal moment.
And that’s another thing. Some people are much more likely to believe in and to perceive miracles than are other people. That’s just the way it is. It is because of cerebral wiring, says I, for lack of a more accurate description. Fidelity, and even gullibility, are hard-wired into some folks, and skepticism or even cynicism are hard-wired into others. And there’s not a whole lot they can do to overcome their wiring, however it manifests itself.
I want you to understand where this is leading, or else you might become easily misled. I am suggesting that with respect to having faith or credence or credulity, nature, not nurture, may be primarily, if not exclusively, the determinative factor.
Having said that, however, I would also say that most people who are committed Christians, or committed believers of any religion, are that way because they were raised to believe it. If my parents had not been such faithful believers and church members, almost certainly I would never have become a believer, let alone a minister. However, it may be that faith is passed down from one generation to the next in certain families because genetically the brains of the people in each succeeding generation are programmed readily to affirm faith. But in other families the cerebral hardware manifests itself as atheism or agnosticism, which is why not many members of those families ever make leaps of faith. If the brain prevents the leap, the leap won’t be leaped. Again, that is only a theory, but it seems plausible to me.
I know of a family where there were six people in a nuclear family: a mother, a father, and four children. Five out of the six were always actively and positively involved in the community of faith, and one dropped out of organized religion as soon as he could. I don’t think that’s because he is a non-believer, but because he is an anti-institutional indolent voluntary semi-ignoramus in matters religious.
Lots of other people are like that man. It isn’t that they can’t believe because of what is or is not between their ears; it is because they won’t act on what otherwise is there. They think it is not sufficiently important for them to incorporate faith into their daily existence. In other words, these are not atheists or agnostics by nature; these are effective unbelievers by choice. But they are not the subject of this sermon. Other sermons, yes, but not this one.
It is important for you to know there is nothing explicit in the Bible about the theme or substance of this sermon. Everything I am saying here comes by biblical implication, not biblical explication. No biblical writer ever said one word about any scientific or even non-scientific theories of how the human brain operates. Maybe it’s just as well that nobody else, other than yours truly, has given that a whole lot of thought either.
So then, why would I even preach a sermon like this at all --- if indeed this is a sermon? Here’s why: if this whatever-it-is helps you understand something about yourself you never pondered before, then I will feel fulfilled in having voiced these thoughts. If it helps you better understand your spouse or your siblings or your cousin Arthur the Atheist or your niece Alice the Agnostic, or if it gives you a deeper or at least a different appreciation for Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin or any hard-core skeptics with whom you are familiar, then this sermon will have served a useful purpose.
One other thing. In my old age I have concluded it is possible that because of the composition of their particular brains, certain people are almost bound to become fanatics or fundamentalists or evangelicals or moderates or liberals or radicals in religion. I am much less certain of that, however. Well, if the truth is told, I’m not absolutely certain of any of the rest of this either, but on the basis of five-plus decades of pastoral experience, I’m fairly sure of it.
The vital thing to remember about all this is this: God works in and through all of us, whether we believe in Him or not. He created us, for heaven’s sake, so He can use us, for heaven’s sake. I suspect He wishes everyone would believe in Him, and that all of us would act affirmatively on that belief. But I also suspect He knows that isn’t going to happen. Besides creating us, He created us free, which means we are free to affirm or reject Him. But even our affirmation or rejection may be determined more by genetics than by actual free will.
So, adherents in The Chapel Without Walls, don’t beat up people who don’t readily believe, and especially, don’t give up on them. God never gives up on them, and you shouldn’t either. And anyway, God’s affirmation of everyone has nothing to do with our affirmation of God, but rather with God’s affirmation of us. Besides, non-believers may be no more “guilty” for not believing than they are for having red hair or blue eyes or big feet. If what is inside their skulls won’t allow them to affirm religious belief, then who are we to fault them for it? Their skepticism may be genetically inevitable.
The human race is an admirable, irascible, marvelous, malevolent, thoughtful, devious, noble, small-minded, expansive, obdurate, faithful, hopeful, and loving conglomerate of protoplasm. It has ever been thus, and ever shall it be. And for all of it, to God be the glory.