God and Atheists, Part 2: Human Experience

Sermon manuscript for Green Lake Church of Seventh-day Adventists

For Sabbath, August 9, 2014

Wednesday evening I peddled my bicycle the few block from here [Green Lake Church] to Teddy's Bigger Burgers. I locked up my bike, ordered my usual vegeburger and fries, then headed back outside to my usual table on the sidewalk. It was a glorious evening, warm and sunny. The sidewalk was busy with people pushing strollers, walking dogs, or headed to one of the restaurants in the neighborhood.

At some point I looked up and noticed way down the block at the corner a couple embracing, then kissing.

A few minutes later I noticed them leisurely walking up the block toward me. They were both fit. Maybe they had run around the lake together. She was tall, red hair, a rich smile on her face. He was muscular, just a bit shorter than she was. Obviously happy. They stopped at the bike rack opposite me and he began turning the dials on the cable lock on his bike, explaining to this beautiful woman why he preferred combination locks to keyed locks. He was in no hurry and as he continued talking and messing with his bike, I turned my attention back to my burger and fries, smiling at the magic of romance.

Only romance would fool a guy into thinking a beautiful woman was interested in a lecture on the relative merits of combination versus keyed bike locks. Only romance or motherhood, would prompt a smart woman to acted interested in said lecture. But that's what romance does. That's what love does.

One of my physician friends likes to talk about romance in terms of hormones and brain chemistry. The brain can sustain the fiery intensity of romance only so long, he says. It's his way of explaining away “the truth” of love as seen through the eyes of young lovers.

A few months ago I listened to a psychologist seated next to me at a dinner table explain that fMRIs show that the brains of people in love are “disordered.” That was her word. She went on to speak dismissively of the starry-eyed dreams of lovers. I think the older people at the table were supposed to nod their heads and wisely agree that romance is an exercise in insanity. But I wasn't persuaded. I'm a hopeless, shameless romantic. Obviously, what we see through the lenses of romance is not objective. But that does not make it false or undesirable. Human life purged of the magic and charm of romance would not be an improvement. And the language of hormones and brain chemistry, and electrical activity in the brain function is utterly inadequate for conversation about the human experience of love.

Given the neighborhood where I was eating my vegeburger and witnessed the charming scene I just described, it's possible the red head was neurologist and the muscular guy was a psychiatrist. If that's who they were, let's imagine listening to either of them describe their afternoon to their respective friends.

They would have at their disposal all the language of science to describe their afternoon, but I doubt we would words about hormones and pheromones. We wouldn't hear about mate selection in pursuit of the propagation of genes. Instead we would hear the language of love and romance and friendship—the only language remotely adequate for this wonderous human experience.

It is the same with spirituality.

You can study human spirituality using various scientific tools—neurology, biochemistry, psychology, sociology. These scientific disciplines can give us useful insights. They can identify various predictable correlates with spiritual experience, but when you sit down to talk with someone who has had a direct experience with God, the language of science quickly becomes utterly inadequate. The concrete language of science can at best describe only pieces of the experience. And all of the pieces together do not equal the experience any more than an analysis of hormones or a map of electrical activity in the brain is adequate for talking about love.

Which is a long way round to get to today's scripture, Acts 9

Meanwhile, Saul was uttering threats with every breath and was eager to kill the Lord's followers. So he went to the high priest. He requested letters addressed to the synagogues in Damascus, asking for their cooperation in the arrest of any followers of the Way he found there. He wanted to bring them--both men and women--back to Jerusalem in chains.

As he was approaching Damascus on this mission, a light from heaven suddenly shone down around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul! Saul! Why are you persecuting me?"

"Who are you, lord?" Saul asked.

The voice replied, "I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting! Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do."

The men with Saul stood speechless, for they heard the sound of someone's voice but saw no one! Saul picked himself up off the ground, but when he opened his eyes he was blind. So his companions led him by the hand to Damascus. He remained there blind for three days and did not eat or drink. [Act 9:1-9 New Living Translation, accessed through Blue Letter Bible.com]

This story of Paul's encounter on the Damascus Road sets the stage for us to understand the most influential missionary in the history of Christianity. Paul had been a devout, brilliant, implacable enemy of the Jesus People. Then traveling from Jerusalem to Damascus to continue his crusade against these corrupters of religion, he had his own, personal encounter with the Risen Jesus. He changes course 180 degrees and becomes a Christian preacher.

The early Christian church was founded by people who had dramatic spiritual experiences. The church grew because of the attractive force of dramatic personal stories. People experienced miraculous healings. They experienced ecstasy and had visions. The early Christian Church was not a club of Bible scholars and philosophers. It was filled with people who had direct encounters with the divine that was persuasive and attractive.

You can try to account for all these stories using various psychological and sociological descriptions and explanations, but in the end they fail to tell the story. It's like describing a rainbow in terms of wave lengths of light and diameters of rain drops. You haven't said anything about the why we rush to grab our cameras.

We are sitting here today because of experiences people had 2000 years ago, and because the experiences did not stop happening 2000 years ago.

I sat down yesterday in Starbucks to finish my sermon. I noticed a book on the table next to me, “Living with a Wild God” by Barbara Ehrenreich. It grabbed my attention. I thought Barbara Ehrenriech was an atheist. I asked the woman at the table if she had read the book. She had. She found it difficult to read, but fascinating. “You can have a look, if you like,” she said motioning to the book. I picked it up and read the blurbs on the dust jacket and the description on the inside front cover.

Then I got on line and read several reviews. I was right, Barbara Ehrenreich was famous as a curmudgeonly atheist. And yes, this book was about her teenage encounters with God. They did not fit any of the categories of experience people she knew talked about. A couple of times she had tried to talk about them, but people thought she was crazy. So, for decades she had ignored those encounters. Finally, she went back and looked again at the journals she had kept in those days, trying to make sense of experiences that did not fit any of her secular categories.

Here is Barbara's description of one of those encounters:

The world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with the ‘All,’ as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it. Whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze.

The book is not a conversion story. Barbara still does not have confident, helpful language for talking about what happened. But honestly confronting her own experience has led to a late-in-life admission that rationalism and scientism are not adequate for describing her own life. The fullness of her humanity cannot be accounted for without resorting to language of God and spirituality.

Late in the book, Barbara writes: “It took an inexcusably long time for me to figure out that what happened to me when I was 17 represents a widespread, if not exactly respectable, category of human experience.”

To which one reviewer responded: “It took Ehrenreich so long to learn that her visions were a part of human experience not because the visions were so foreign, but because human experience was altogether foreign to her, too.”

(NY Times Book Review: “Vision Quest,” a review of ‘Living With a Wild God,’ by Barbara Ehrenreich. By Parul Sehgal. April 25, 2014)

Just as love and romance are essential to the richest, sweetest experience of humanity, so religion and spirituality are essential to living fully human lives. And the language of God and spirituality are necessary for rich, meaningful conversations about these kinds of experiences.

When we use the word atheism to describe insistence by young people that we be honest about unanswered questions, it has powerful appeal. Our religious answers don't always work. Just as some people have rich experiences of the presence and favor of God, others have devastating experiences of the absence or inaction of God

Just last week I met a woman after church who needed some financial assistance. She told me her story. For 40 years she had worked, bought groceries, paid her rent, went on vacation. Then three years ago the business she was working for closed. No problem. She figured she would get another job. But it didn't happen. Now she's on the streets. Where is God, she asked. “I prayed,” she said. “And prayed and prayed. But either God won't help me or he can't.”

I winced when she said that. I felt the sting. Her experience seems to contradict the promises of God we celebrate here at church. When atheism is a label for our willingness to hear this kind of story and not discount it, then atheism is a label worthy of respect.

But atheism falls apart when it imagines we can account for the entire range of human experience without invoking the language of God and spirituality. There is far too much human experience that can only be explored and celebrated through the language of God and spirituality.

In fact, the very commitment of atheists to the pursuit of truth and justice makes most sense against a background of the reality of that fiery presence Barbara Ehrenreich experienced decades ago.

So to my atheist friends I offer this:

If you have not had a direct experience with the divine, we will not ask you to pretend. We share your commitment to honesty. We will not pretend that your lack of experience of God is evidence of bad character or bad judgment.

On the other hand we will encourage you to respect the stories of others who have had such experiences. Don't pretend that psychology, sociology and neurology can provide adequate language for the entire human experience. Don't narrow your world to things that can be counted, weighed and measured with a tape measure or micrometer. Don't imagine that a world without romance is an improvement.

In church we celebrate the reality of God. We honor the stories people tell. We prize the stories of God's involvement in the world. We love the stories of the fiery presence.

We also respect the stories of God's absence. For those who feel the weight of God's absence, we join you in your longing.

Remember the couple I saw on Green Lake Way? The beautiful woman and muscular guy. The guy was unlocking his bicycle and talking about why he preferred combination locks to keyed locks. The next time I glanced their direction, he had his lock stowed, his bike away from the bike stand and was preparing to get on and ride away. That much was entirely unremarkable. It was the woman who caught my eye. She was standing there looking at him getting on his bicycle and I instantly saw she was wanting one more kiss. Her body language was as eloquent and unmistakable as a movie scene. He was utterly oblivious. They had had a wonderful time running or playing ball or frisbee across the street at the park. The date was over. He had kissed her good down the street. Now he had places to go, things to do. He was preparing to ride away, but she wanted another kiss. To me sitting ten feet away, it was plain as day and sweet as jam. I'm thinking, how can he not see it? He throws his leg over his bicycle and calls over his shoulder, “Love you.” And was stopped in his tracks. She said something. I didn't hear her words. I saw the effect. He planted both feet and opened his arms.

I was not watching chemistry or neurology. I was watching love.

And when we come to church or climb a mountain or sit on a park bench and open our hearts, we are not chasing an illusion. We are not merely activating a fossil neural pathway, we are opening our hearts toward a reality called in English, God. We are longing for the kiss of the divine.

May you not be forever kept waiting.