BEST TO BELIEVE. A good atheist is hard to find. Please hold that thought.

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1 BEST TO BELIEVE Jer. 31:31-34; John 12:20-33 A good atheist is hard to find. Please hold that thought. John tells a story about Jesus I just read it to you in which Jesus says, Father, glorify your name. evangelical Christians love this Father glorify language. God only knows what it means. Anyway, the story continues, Then a voice came from heaven. I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again. More murkiness insofar as we still have no idea what it means for God to glorify God s name. But let s press on. The crowd standing there heard it [the voice from heaven] and said it was thunder. Others said, An angel spoke to him. And so on and so forth. I find it interesting that in this story Jesus hears one thing and the crowd gathered hears another. Jesus hears a voice from heaven. The crowd hears thunder. Some others say that it is voice but that it is the voice of an angel, as if anyone can tell the difference between the voice of an angel and the voice of God it is probably worth pointing out that scholars generally believe that angels serve as stand-ins for God, God s messengers, emissaries, but either way we re talking voices from heaven. The curious thing here is that Jesus thinks he hears God, the crowd thinks it is thunder, and some in the crowd think they hear an angel. Why the discrepancy? I don t think we can make much sense of this if we treat this story as something that happened one day in the walking-around world that we inhabit. Taken as bits of history, stories such as this give atheists a field day, because at face value the story makes 1

2 no sense. But I don t want to give atheists a field day. So let s look beneath the surface and see if this story might be saying something more to us. Try this. It seems to me that this story illustrates how two or more people can experience the same thing and come to different conclusions about what their experience means Jesus hears the voice of God, the crowd hears thunder, and some in the crowd hear angels. It is useful to remember this as we approach Holy Week, because the people who encountered Jesus drew different conclusions about who he was. Some thought he was the Christ of God. Others viewed him as a country prophet. Some saw him as a healer and miracle worker. Some believed him to be a provocateur and a threat to social stability. Some saw him as an itinerant rabbi. Some thought he was a cute guy with great eyes. Others hardly noticed him at all. There were those who saw his death as a tragedy. There were those who saw in it the mechanism of God s salvation. To others it was good riddance to a nuisance: different people with different perspectives which may be equally honest in their appraisals of Jesus, knowing Jesus as they are able to know him, as best their lights will allow. There is an analogy here to the question of whether or not people believe in God. Athiests say that there is no reason to believe. Religious people let s say Christians say there is reason to believe. The atheists say there is no evidence for the existence of God. The Christian says (if s/he knows her/his business) that the whole universe is evidence, that the evidence is everywhere. The atheist looks at the universe and sees just the physical universe, a lot of stuff. The Christian looks at the universe and sees a Creator at work, and this because nothing comes from nothing and science hasn t a clue as to why there is this huge something that is everything and which we call the universe. 2

3 What s the atheist s answer to this? That they don t want to think about the question, or at least that they don t want to think about it very deeply. But before we Christian believers become too smug, it has to be admitted that there has been and is so much stupidity and ignorance put forward in the name of God that atheism can seem like positive enlightenment by comparison. Think of Islamist suicide bombers or those who kill their daughters for the sake of family honor. Or think about 60-plus percent of the people of Alabama and Mississippi Christians I would imagine who can t bring themselves to believe in evolution and persist in the belief that President Obama is a Muslim and on and on. Of Jews who believe that they are entitled to occupy the land of Israel because the Bible tells them so. And then there s Voodoo and Santaria and the Pope s infallibility and prohibitions against birth control and the Quran as the literal word of God direct from Allah s lips to Muhammed s ears via an angel. Need I go on? I best not or you will be joining the atheist camp. Still, all this having been said, atheism cannot account for why there is something rather than nothing, let alone why the universe works the way it does, and that is a rather glaring omission on its part. The new atheists are nevertheless evangelistic. They want to make converts. They think that they have logic and science, reason and common sense on their side. In fact they don t. What they have done is to set up straw men to knock down or taken the straw men which unthinking religion sets up and knocked them down. But even if religion gets it wrong and horribly wrong, that is no evidence against God we should not forget that a-theism means against or without God and not merely against or without religion. The fact is that the new atheism is fundamentalist religion by a different 3

4 name. From an ethical perspective, we should note that the great moral crimes of the 20 th century were committed not in the name of God but in the name of godlessness. The new atheists are dogmatic and astonishingly uncurious, and it might be added often quite useful to right-wing religious bigots like Billy s son, Franklin Graham, in his diatribes against Islam. The novelist David Foster Wallace has described atheism as an antireligious religion, and if that is a false characterization, its falsehood has yet to be shown by those who suppose themselves more rational than thou. As I said at the beginning, a good atheist is hard to find, by which I mean one who can make a rational case for no- God. There s a new book out from a not-so-angry atheist titled Religion for Atheists that admits that religion offers many benefits to humanity, such as inspiring art and offering moral guidance and raising deep questions about what it means to be human. This book proposes to recreate the functions of religion but without God, to mimic the rituals and habits and institutions of religion but to do so in secular terms. It is a silly book and ends up making the atheist look pretty shallow. But more than this, it reveals by contrast the depth of experience and inspiration that is enshrined in the name of God by people who believe they are making a response to God in their religions. When I said that a good atheist is hard to find, I did not mean to suggest that there are not good people and even extraordinarily good people who find they cannot bring themselves to believe in God. God doesn t mind if they don t believe. God does not need to be believed in to be the Creator sustaining the universe or the Holy Spirit inspiring us to love one another and seek justice in the world. Nor does one need to be a believer to be so inspired. In Jeremiah, God says of the new covenant God will make 4

5 with Israel that it will be within them and written on their hearts. Christianity thinks it knows something about this new covenant and extends it to all people and not simply to the house of Israel. And if this is the case, then to atheists as well! The point, in any event, is not that religious believers are better people than atheists who are any of us to decide that? but that believing in God makes better sense than not believing when the matter is thoughtfully considered. In closing, may I add with all due modesty that Emanuel is a church where this matter is thoughtfully considered because we want to know what it is best to believe. Amen. Fifth Sunday in Lent, March 25, 2012 Emanuel Lutheran Church 5