June 2, 2013 | 8:00 a.m.

All in the Light

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 96
1 Kings 18:20–39
Galatians 1:6–12

“For I did not receive [the gospel] from a human source, nor was I taught it,
but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”

Galatians 1:12

Hello, sun in my face . . .
best preacher that ever was.

Mary Oliver
“Why I Wake Early”

In a recently published book entitled When God Talks Back, psychological anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann studies the American evangelical relationship with God. In particular, she studies the feature that she thinks most distinctively characterizes American evangelical Christianity: the search for an intensely personal experience of God. By intensely personal, she means an experience of God as one who cares about the specific details of someone’s life, a God who answers specific prayers, a God whose clasp is felt on hands and shoulders (p. xv), who is as close to them as their best friend. This search for a direct, personal experience of God is not new on the American religious landscape. Throughout our history, with a series of “great awakenings” there have been other times when Americans have fervently sought to experience God directly and personally. What is new is how mainstream it has become, so mainstream that it is imperative for people who do not identify themselves as evangelical Christians to understand before judging.

In writing this book, Tanya Luhrmann tries to help those who may be skeptical observers to understand how God becomes real for American evangelical Christians. Dr. Luhrmann begins by debunking the notion that evangelical Christians are themselves not skeptical. Self-identifying evangelical Christians also are realists, and they too experience doubt and uncertainty. She writes, “Faith is hard because it is a decision to live as if a set of claims are real, even when one doubts” (xiv).

For Christians of all backgrounds, evangelical and otherwise, this is true. As it has been for all Christians throughout the ages, faith is experienced as a struggle. For example, when we are surrounded by evidence to the contrary, it is hard to live as if the world is fundamentally good. In the absence of any supporting evidence, it is hard to live as if there is eternal life after death. When we may not know ourselves as loved or loveable, it is hard to live as if we are children of God, made in God’s image. When life has been full of hardship, loss, and sadness, it is hard to live as if the promise of joy were at least a possibility.

The experience of doubt, uncertainty, and cognitive dissonance is not unfamiliar to people of faith. God’s people have always sought to know God, to feel God’s presence, to receive answers from God, and more than once they have been disappointed. Their expectations have not been met. What they thought they knew about God turned out to be wrong, or they didn’t get the response from God that they had prayed for.

What is remarkable about the story we read from 1 Kings today is that in this story God not only responds, but God also responds as the prophet Elijah expects. This story stands in stark contrast to the many other stories in the Hebrew Bible, in which the people wait and wait upon the Lord or even cry out to God, “Why have you forsaken me?” or are bewildered, contradicted, or rebuked by God. In this story, God takes part in a contest set up between his prophet Elijah and the 450 prophets of Baal. The point of the contest is to reveal which is the real God. The real God will be the God who answers. It is a dramatic story with a dramatic ending in which the prophet Elijah prays to God, “Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back,” and God actually answers the prayer by casting fire upon the altar so that the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and even the ashes and the water around the altar are consumed.

Dramatic stories like this in the Bible are meant to stand out as exceptional. This is an extraordinary story not only because God’s answer is unmistakable and immediate, clear and direct, but also because it is revelatory of God’s absolute sovereignty. The problem all Christians face, sooner or later, is how do we relate to a sovereign God without the occurrence of such extraordinary revelatory events in everyday life?

In his book The Meaning of Revelation, theological ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr offers a definition of revelation that I find very helpful. Revelation, Niebuhr explains, is an event that illuminates everything else. Something is revelatory not because it is supernatural, but because it sheds light on things that were left in the dark before and makes sense of things that didn’t make sense before. I find this definition helpful because it gives us a criterion by which we can test whether an experience is revelatory or not. According to this criterion, not every instance when I feel God intensely present in my life is necessarily revelatory. Not every time I think God has answered a specific prayer is revelatory. Not every time I feel God to be as close as a best friend is revelatory. Instead, whenever my heart and mind have been so transformed that I see things differently and can make sense of things newly, I suspect that God is revealing something to me.

In his letter to the church in Corinth, the Apostle Paul differentiated between the direct and full revelation that will come at the end of life, when we will be face to face with God, from the revelation that we experience in this lifetime. He writes,

For now we know only in part . . . ; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:9–12)

In this lifetime, when we are capable of knowing things only partially and dimly, we need God’s light to help us to make sense of things. Without revelatory events, we cannot mature in our faith.

Each of us can identify experiences in our lives when our minds and hearts were opened, enabling us to see things in a new way, to consider things we hadn’t considered before. These, Niebuhr would say, are revelatory events.

In her book Encountering God, Harvard University professor Diana Eck recounts a scene in a novel by Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights. She writes,

A young rabbi from Brooklyn . . . travels for the first time in Japan. One afternoon he stands with a Jewish friend before what is perhaps a Shinto shrine with a clear mirror in the sanctum or perhaps a Buddhist shrine with an image of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. We are not told which, and it really does not matter. The altar is lit by the soft light of a tall lamp. Sunlight streams in the door. The two young men observe with fascination a man standing before the altar, his hands pressed together before him, his eyes closed. He is rocking slightly. He is clearly engaged in what we would call prayer. The rabbi turns to his companion and says,

“Do you think your God is listening to him, John?”

“I don’t know, chappy. I never thought of it.”

“Neither did I until now. If He’s not listening, why not? If He is listening, then—well, what are we all about, John?” (Diana Eck, Encountering God, p. 166)

Diana Eck tells this story to illustrate a moment of revelation. It seems that revelation may occur when we find ourselves in unfamiliar territory and asking questions that we had never asked before.

This is often what happens to me when I take part in interfaith gatherings. A few weeks ago, I was invited to offer a prayer at an anniversary celebration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. In preparation for my role, I started with a prayer that I had previously written for a Sunday worship service here. I wondered if I would need to adapt it significantly for this interfaith gathering, and the question occurred to me, Should all of my prayers be subjected to this test? Shouldn’t my prayers always address a God who is sufficiently sovereign to listen to persons of all faiths?

In his book Love Wins, evangelical Christian Rob Bell tackles the topics that have troubled many Christians over the ages: topics of “heaven, hell, and the fate of every person who ever lived.” He makes room for people to ask questions that they may have feared asking before. In a sense, he encourages them to bring to light questions that they may have buried before. At the end of the book, he shares a story about the night when he, as a young boy, prayed to God and experienced for the first time the desire to invite Jesus into his heart. He shares that story, because for him it was the first among many revelatory experiences he would have in his lifetime. As he tells about this experience, he writes,

There is a temptation at times to become hostile to our earlier understandings, feeling embarrassed that we were so “simple” or “naive,” or “brainwashed” or whatever terms arise when we haven’t come to terms with our own story. These past understandings aren’t to be denied or dismissed; they’re to be embraced. Those experiences belong. . . . Those moments were necessary for us to arrive here, at this place at this time, as we are. (Rob Bell, Love Wins, pp. 194–195)

I agree with this. Maturing in our faith requires us to embrace all of our faith history. It’s only through revelatory experiences that shed light on the whole of our lives that we grow in faith. But that’s not all that is required. Growing in our faith requires us to see beyond our own personal experiences and personal narratives and challenges us to seek unfamiliar territory and ask questions we have never considered before. Only then can we come to know a God who is truly sovereign, Lord of all.