January 30, 2011 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Certain Uncertainties

J. Barrie Shepherd
Minister Emeritus, First Presbyterian Church, New York City

Psalm 15
Job 38:1–7; 42:1–6
John 10:14–16; 16:12–15

“Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”

Job 42:3 (NRSV)

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. . . . One in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party one meets—most likely one’s parents’. One gets rest, commodity, and reputation but shuts the door of truth. One in whom the love of truth predominates will keep aloof from all moorings and afloat.

One will abstain from dogmatism and recognize all the opposite negations between which . . . one’s being is swung. One submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion,
but is a candidate for truth . . . and respects the highest law of one’s being.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

First a word of thanks to my old friends, John, your Pastor; Calum, your whisky-tongued Executive Associate Pastor; and to your Session for the privilege of this pulpit this morning. And just to respond to Calum, there is a difference between Edinburgh folk and Glasgow folk. You see with Edinburgh folk you can understand what they are saying. With Glasgow folk, even if you could understand them, you’d be better not to.

Fifty years ago, as a young seminary intern from Yale, serving a storefront church, a converted saloon, down in Pilsen, I would sneak away on Sunday evenings and sit far in the back there to listen to the sublime eloquence and fiery passion of that inspired Welshman, Elam Davies. Ever since, this church has been a “thin place” for me, a space within which I have drawn close to the presence of the divine. And for that, and for this morning, I am deeply grateful.

· · ·

Christian Century magazine (a publication hardly unknown in this neighborhood) has recently revived a series it used to run back in the dark ages of my youth, “How My Mind Has Changed.” Back then, when the series first began, I probably accepted the stereotype that the elderly no longer change their minds, that they become rigid, set in their ways, fixed firm in their own long familiar ideas. Having now joined those elderly, however, I am discovering that it’s not that way at all! Another fond illusion of youth was that someday I would have it all figured out, or at least find myself a teacher, a guru, who had it all figured out. But that too doesn’t seem to be the way it works. This has been—these retirement years have proved to be, for me at least—“The Age of Uncertainty.” Yes, the age of uncertainty.

There’s a marvelous moment in Handel’s Messiah when the bass soloist (quoting St. Paul) proclaims, “Behold, I show you a mystery!” And the longer I search, the more I suspect that’s what we are involved in. My old friend Peter Gomes, Chaplain at Harvard, described his preaching this way: “The first ten years I explained. The second ten I apologized. Now I celebrate the holy mysteries of the faith.”

Something I read not long ago appealed to me. It was in a book about the Last Judgment, a book that examined the way our Western religions—specifically Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all insist on dividing humanity into the sheep and the goats, and then consigning those goats, who somehow always seem to include the vast majority of us, to the perpetual agony of hell, whereas Eastern religions, notably Hinduism and Buddhism, make no such divisions. The writer went on to say, “If one may offer a generalization about the traditional Indian attitude, it is that reality is far too complex to admit any unequivocal statements.”

Perhaps I’m becoming a Hindu in my old age! Similarly, an eminent philosopher at Princeton described uncertainty as “the sense that, not only you don’t know the truth, but that many complex issues are irresolvably ambiguous” (New York Times).

I speak of an age of uncertainty then, and surely that’s where many, if not most, of us live. Ever since Darwin, those comforting systems of belief that assured us that “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world” have been shattered beyond repair. The fundamentalists, of course, within all religions have tried—are still trying—to deny this, to turn back the clock to those good old days of blissful ignorance. But it’s not going to work—or at least judging by what we have seen of their plans, for those of us who fail to agree with them, we certainly hope it’s not going to work.

So we are stuck with uncertainty. That superb poet John Keats wrote somewhere of the necessary ability to live with questions, doubt, the absence of clear and definite answers, “without any irritable reaching after certainty” as Keats put it. It’s fascinating really that Einstein, the most brilliant mind of the last century, got stuck here as well. When fellow physicist Max Planck set out his seemingly illogical quantum theory and Heisenberg followed it up with his Uncertainty Principle, Einstein could not accept it. “God does not play dice with the universe,” he bellowed and spent the rest of his life searching, fruitlessly it turned out, for a theory that would make it all make sense. But what if it doesn’t—at least doesn’t make our kind of sense? That’s where Job ended up, after all. Thirty-seven long chapters of trying to figure it out, trying to reason and argue with God, until Job was finally dumbstruck—gobsmacked, as we say in the UK—by the utter magnificence of God’s universe, and all he could say was “Oh, my God!”

This uncertainty, of course, if we can accept it—not just accept it, but embrace it as the God-given reality in which we are called to exercise our faith—this uncertainty has clear ramifications for that faith. It means, for example, that we need to reexamine our former certainties, for one thing, about the superiority of our faith over all others. Yes, I realize that Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, the life, no one comes to the Father but by me.”

But did that really mean that you have to be a Christian even to approach God? Or did Jesus mean that the only way to God was through the compassionate, self-sacrificing, eternally undefeated love that he embodied, lived out fully, as his identity here on earth? Joe Hough, retired President of Union Seminary, states that it is no longer enough merely to tolerate other religions, to see them, as Karl Barth once said, as “lesser lights.” Today we have to go beyond such patronizing, beyond all exclusive claims to God’s revelation.

What is essential for Christian faith is that we know we have seen the face of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Hough affirms that it is not essential to believe that no one else has seen God and experienced redemption in another place and time. Wherever there is peace and movement toward peace, where there is justice and movement toward justice, God is present and working.

Another age-old certainty that has to be opened up is that whole complex of convictions I referred to earlier as the Last Judgment, a complex by which we Christians have, for centuries, consigned the vast majority of our fellow human beings to eternal torment. Listen as Jonathan Edwards some 300 years ago described that torment: “To be damned is to be perfectly deprived of all good and to suffer perfect misery for all eternity as the fruit of the wrath of God for sin. . . . There shall be no end to this misery. After thousands and thousands of thousands of years, it will be but just beginning, no nearer to an end.”

Imagine hearing that Sunday after Sunday. Spiritual terrorism is what I call it. It was Morris West who wrote, “God wants us running toward him like lovers, not stampeded like a herd of terrified cattle.”

Surely, if we can embrace the uncertainty—yes, the mystery of our times—then we are delivered from that kind of judgmental religion based on fear. Perhaps we might even rediscover the teachings of Origen of Alexandria, one of our own early church fathers, one of the ancient world’s most brilliant minds, who developed the doctrine of apokatastasis panton, the ultimate restoration of all things to God. He taught that in the end, as in the beginning, this whole creation and everything in it will be reunited and brought back into harmony with God. Origen was declared a heretic, of course. But even the Church of Rome is taking another look at its heretics these days.

Yet another focus of our faith that needs to be opened up is that vortex of ideas centered around the cross. As traditionally understood in Western Christianity, the cross represents a transaction whereby God substituted his innocent son to pay the penalty for sin and so open up a new way back into God’s grace and eternal life. And we, in order to get in on the deal, had to go through some kind of conversion, accept Christ as savior and Lord, and then share that experience with others. The result of all this has been an ongoing obsession with sin and guilt, the confessional mode as the default mode, and a great void where the peace, joy, and serenity of salvation ought to be. Despite all our singing about amazing grace, it’s appalling guilt that so often sets the tone. As Friedrich Nietzsche—a Protestant pastor’s son, by the way—once said, “You Christians should look more redeemed.”

But there are other ways of understanding the cross, at least a dozen theories of the atonement that seek to comprehend what went on at Calvary. The theory I lean toward sees the cross as less a transaction than a demonstration—a living demonstration—as was the whole incarnation that was Emmanuel, God with us. The cross was God’s way of showing us how far his love would go, of showing that even though we reject God’s love, nail it up on a cross to die, divine love will not, cannot, be defeated, but will come back—that’s where the resurrection comes in—will keep on coming back through all eternity until we yield at last to God’s invitation and find union with him. For me, the cross was a supreme act not of paying, but of wooing. But our private enterprise society and religion prefers to see it all in terms of debts, credits, and IOUs.

An age of uncertainty, then. An age of uncertainty. In the midst of this uncertainty, what might be there left to hang on to? Because make no mistake, uncertainty is no easy thing to live with. No wonder people yearn for that old-time religion when you knew just what you had to believe to get into heaven, and that was that: “The Bible. God wrote it. I believe it. That settles it!” as I read on a popular bumper sticker.

Yet grace still is amazing. God’s grace still surprises us in all manner of secret ways. Music does it for me, or can do. “A mystery, really, how / Sounds and sweet airs, / [can] give delight, and hurt not,” as Caliban puts it in The Tempest. Making music or simply hearing glorious music as you are privileged to do here at Fourth Church, in moments like these I can be transported to another realm and experience—I am convinced a foretaste of what heaven must be like. What was it Karl Barth said? “In heaven I plan to spend the first millennium speaking to Bach and the second to Mozart.”

Laughter can do it, too. Do you know how many Scots it takes to change a light bulb? “Och, it’s no that dark!” We had Aissa, our thirteen-year-old granddaughter, visiting recently, and each morning as I ploughed through the daily tragedies in the Times, Aissa sat there beside me LOL—yes, laughing out loud—at the cartoons in the Philadelphia Inquirer. And it dawned on me, I gave up reading the cartoons years ago: not serious enough, not Presbyterian enough. It was JFK who said, “There are three things that are real: God, human folly, and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension, so we must do what we can with the third.”

Compassion, too, will always be there, for no matter what system of belief you subscribe to, compassion must be close to the heart. We lose ourselves and find ourselves renewed again in music and in laughter to be sure. But in the living out of love, in the giving of oneself for the sake of another person, one comes closest to the meaning of all we truly call divine. As we read in 1 Peter, “Most of all love each other as if your life depended on it. Love makes up for practically anything.”

Finally, of course, there is Jesus himself, Ecce homo, “Behold the man!” Strip away all the dogmatics, the elaborations, complications, and encrustations of twenty centuries of debate, dispute, and at times bloody conflict, and we find again “the man for others,” a sublime teacher, beloved healer, a wondrously winsome, magnetic personality so convinced of, so committed to the forgiving love of God, that he offered up his life to show it to us, bring it to us—a life, one life with such power, such wisdom, such an amazing, overwhelming grace that it has drawn the attention, the loyalty, the affection, yes devotion of millions upon millions over centuries upon centuries.

Why are you sitting here this morning? Why am I standing up here? I’ll wager it’s because somewhere, somehow—a mother’s knee, a Sunday School or college classroom, a quiet corner in a church, a pub, a woodland meadow, beside a hospital bed, or a cemetery lot—somewhere someone spoke his name, told of his words and deeds, prayed with you, for you, led you to Christ.

Albert Schweitzer, perhaps, put it best; in the concluding paragraph of his monumental work The Quest for the Historical Jesus, Schweitzer writes,

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in his fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who he is.

He comes to us as One unknown.

A certain uncertainty then, a blessed rejection of spiritual arrogance, of all that false certitude about who’s in and who’s out of the kingdom. A radical new openness to others, to all who seek to explore this vast mystery we share called life. And above all else, compassion; a deep-rooted, passionate concern for the welfare, the well-being of our fellow human beings, fellow children of God. This, after all, is what he taught us, what he lived for, what he died for. And this, I believe, is what he calls us to today.

Now let us pray: Grant us, O Lord, to live with a certain grace, a certain grace even in the midst of uncertainty. Teach us not to grasp after empty assurances, but rather to place our days—both laughter and tears—into your loving hands. And to be thankful—thankful simply for being here. Let us say together, Amen.