Magical Thinking

The scriptures referred to are Genesis 15:1-6 and Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16.

The first musical I remember was “Peter Pan.” This wasn't the Disney cartoon but a filmed version of the original musical play starring Mary Martin as Peter. It premiered on Broadway the same year I was born. The TV version I saw must have been the 1960 color production which was also rebroadcast later. You may have seen the 2000 version with Cathy Rigby as Peter or the 2014 version in which Christopher Walken played Captain Hook. In any case, a key scene is the one in which the fairy Tinkerbell drinks the poison meant for Peter and is dying. As her light flickers feebly, Peter looks at the audience and tells us that if every boy and girl who believes in fairies claps their hands it will restore Tinkerbell to life. I remember my brother and I clapping our hands like mad and being overjoyed when Tinkerbell begins to shine brightly again.

The odd thing is I don't remember actually believing in fairies. I grew up with TV and I knew the difference between the make-believe stuff you see on TV and in movies and the way things work in real life. It may have been because my dad knew a guy who owned a store that sold magic tricks. I was into them for a while but my brother has made a life-long hobby of performing magic, which he still does at children's hospitals. But even if I can't figure out how some of the tricks are done, I know that magic is merely an illusion. It's fun to suspend your disbelief while watching a magician do the seemingly impossible. But you don't want to end up like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who thought his one-time friend Houdini really did have magical powers or that two British girls actually took photographs of fairies, which to us look like exactly what they were: paper cutouts. It is a testament to Doyle's integrity as an author that despite this, he never converted his character Sherlock Holmes to a belief in the supernatural. In The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, Holmes says, “This agency stands flat-footed on the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”

So what are we 21^st century Christians to make of all the talk of faith in today's readings from the Bible? After all, in Hebrews we are told, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” So is our faith as fanciful as beliefs in fairies or vampires or Santa Claus? A lot of skeptics think so. Sigmund Freud saw religion as wish-fulfillment. Nobody wants to think the world is random so we dream up a God who is in charge. We dream up a devil to explain evil. We dream up heaven to assuage our fear of death and of permanent separation from our dead loved ones. How do we know that our rituals in church aren't the equivalent of clapping for fairies?

For one thing, not all beliefs are of equal validity. For instance, we all recognize some things are superstitions, at least when we see them in others. Like the baseball player who always wears his lucky socks because he once had a hot streak when he first wore them. Or the person who knocks on wood when they express any hopeful sentiment so that it won't be jinxed. Or the grandmother from the old country who spits or makes a gesture to ward off the evil eye. We laugh at such things, though we may have our own superstitions. I cannot shake a couple I picked up when I was a nurse, like deaths come in threes or that patients act up and things get hectic at the hospital or nursing home during the full moon. If I did a scientific study I would probably find that I only notice such things at certain times and don't notice the times when they fail to be true.

And of necessity we believe a lot of things that we haven't personally seen or verified. We believe in black holes and distant galaxies and what we are told about conditions on other planets like Mercury or Venus, though no humans have ever been there. We believe that we have internal organs that we have never laid eyes on. We believe in bacteria and viruses no human can see with the naked eye. Why? Well, in these cases, because reputable scientists have studied these things and told us about them. And that is an important feature of believing something to be true: you often learn it from someone you trust. A lot of what we believe comes from others. As children there is only so much we can learn from personal experience. And there are certain things nobody wants to learn from personal experience, like that drinking something you find under the sink will kill you. When Mom and Dad tell us not to do certain things because they are dangerous, we tend to believe them. You do not want to be like the girl I knew as a child who discovered why you should not play with matches. She lived but was scarred for life.

The key here is trust. You have to trust some people. If not, you can't function. For instance, when you take your car in to be fixed, you trust that they will in fact fix the problem. And they trust you to pay them. Of course, at first the trust is blind. Say, you are new to a town and find a place to take your car. If they do a bad job, you go somewhere else next time. If they do a good job, you now trust them for a different reason: you are building up a history with them. It's the same with people. It's called a blind date because you know very little about the person you are meeting for the first time. If it goes well, you meet again. Hopefully, you observe them in different situations, like how they react when either you or they are having a bad day and how they interact with friends and relatives, both yours and theirs. After a while, you feel that you know what kind of person they are. You learn over time who is trustworthy and who is not.

It's the same way with God. The Hebrew word translated “believe” in our reading from Genesis means “trust,” as does the Greek word translated “faith” in our passage from Hebrews. In the Bible belief in God is not merely thinking God exists; it means trusting God. Abram thought he was too old to have a natural heir. But God told him he would. Because of his history with God, because he had learned that God was trustworthy, Abram “trusted in Yahweh and he counted it to him as righteousness.” I like the way the NET Bible puts it: “and the Lord considered his response of faith a proof of genuine loyalty.” In other words, because Abram trusted God to be good to his promise, God trusted Abram to do the right thing, which in this case was to loyally wait for God to fulfill his promise at what would be the right time.

It is in this sense that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.” They are not unseen in the sense of not really existing, as with fairies, but of not yet having happened. In fact you could call “hope” the future tense of “faith.” We trust in God to be with us now and we put our hope in him to make things right in the end. I hope that my grandkids have long happy lives. I will probably not live to see that. But I trust that their parents and my wife and I have set them on the right path. We have taught them right from wrong and encouraged them to trust in God. I pray for them every night and trust God to take care of them.

Even scientists have faith. They trust that the scientists on whose work they are building did their studies and experiments correctly, made accurate observations and did not fudge the data to get grants or get published in prestigious journals. But because scientists are human, we are finding that not all of them are trustworthy. We now know that the British doctor who linked autism with vaccines faked the results of his 1998 study in return for more than half a million dollars from lawyers who were suing the vaccines' manufacturers and wanted some “scientific” evidence.

For that matter, even atheists have faith. They trust that the philosophers and scientists they follow are right. Yet Anthony Flue, one of the most influential of modern atheists, decided that God existed when he realized that the math did not support the idea that this fine-tuned universe could come about simply through an unimaginable series of happy accidents. Recently another mathematician worked out that the idea that life could spontaneously arise from inorganic matter was so mathematically improbable that it should be considered practically impossible. Basically it would be like putting all the individual parts of your smartphone in a box, shaking it for billions of years and expecting it to come out not only properly put together but already programmed. We are born programmed to do and learn specific things like language. And if DNA is the code which tells us how every part of us is made and how everything in us functions, who wrote that code? Accidents in transmitting the code over time may explain variations, like why some people's earlobes are connected to their heads and why some hang free, but who wrote the original code that gave us the complicated inner structure of ears in the first place? Who made sure we have an incredibly redundant immune system that keeps us from dying the minute we encounter the millions of microbes we are exposed to every day? As someone said, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.

But the real question is this: is God good? Is he trustworthy? Here we are in the same boat as scientists. First we act on information from those we trust. In our case, it is the gospel, the good news that is centered in Jesus. We read the reports of what he did and said. And he didn't merely come as a moral teacher. Jesus said he was the Son of God. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, then Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic or the Lord just as he said. We also read about how he was executed and buried. We read how he rose again and this turned his followers from cowards into people who proclaimed his resurrection even though they knew it could get them killed—and in almost every case, it did.

Today we see how fast folks are to abandon the lies they tell when it gets them in trouble. We know about these lies because of whistleblowers, insiders who come out and tell the truth. Ten of the twelve people who co-authored the study that linked autism to vaccines retracted the idea that there was a causal link. In contrast, Jesus' disciples were either stupid to keep lying at the risk of death or else they really did see, touch and eat with the risen Jesus. Does it make sense that there were about 500 people who saw the risen Christ, as Paul tells us, and yet, if it were a hoax, none of them ever told the authorities, who would have loved to stamp out Christianity? (1 Corinthians 15:6)

But, like scientists, we also must test the God hypothesis. And scientists have studied believers. Since they can't quantify how religious someone is, they go by how often people go to religious services. And they have found that people who regularly attend services have a lower risk of death from all causes, including suicide and drug overdose, have better survival rates of heart disease and cancer, lower rates of depression, lower levels of anxiety, better overall mental health, lower rates of divorce, greater life satisfaction, and find life more meaningful.

But, you may say, these are studies of people who attend services of any number of religions and so do not differentiate what kind of God these folks believe in. We don't even know how many actually do believe in God and how many just go for cultural or social reasons. It may be that the social support they receive and the encouragement of healthier habits, like not drinking and smoking, might play a part.

True. So what's the next step we can take? First, consider this: French tightrope walker Charles Blondin crossed the gorge at Niagara Falls in 1859. He did it several times, sometimes blindfolded, or in a sack, or on stilts. If you had asked onlookers, a lot of them might have said they believed Blondin could cross the Niagara Gorge carrying them on his back. But I wonder if they would have taken him up on the offer. One man actually did. It was his manager, Harry Colcord. He trusted Blondin enough to climb up on his back and let himself be carried the whole 1,100 feet while 160 feet above the water. You can see a picture of them doing it on Wikipedia.

In the final analysis, the only way to see if God is trustworthy is to trust him. Put yourself in his hands. Follow his way. Put your hope in his promises. Which does not mean to imagine that your every desire will be fulfilled, but to trust him for your daily needs. He's your heavenly Father, not a genie. Nor does it mean you will never be given more than you can handle. It does mean that he will help you handle whatever comes. As a teacher of mine said, following Jesus doesn't get you off the hook.

Indeed, unlike cult leaders and con men, Jesus does not promise that his way is easy. He says, “If anyone wants to become my follower, he must disown himself, take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23) The easy life is an illusion. The idea that things like wealth, good looks, popularity, a high IQ or the latest high-tech gadget are the keys to a good life is an illusion. A recent study shows that highly educated and otherwise successful people like lawyers, engineers, scientists and surgeons actually have an unexpectedly high mortality rate. But people still put their trust in these things and applaud those who have them as proof that they have achieved the good life.

Putting your trust in the things of this life is magical thinking. And a lot of people have a hard time believing that old-fashioned things like faith and hope and love and building character and being part of a church and helping others and trusting God are what really counts, even when doing so is hard. Ironically it is a magical person, Dumbledore in the Harry Potter books, who says it best: “We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.”

It is easy to do what appears to work in this life: looking out for number one and doing whatever it takes to get what you want. Yet every day in the news we see those who have reached the pinnacle of human success and are still unhappy and unfulfilled. Jesus asked, “For what good does it do a person if he gains the whole world but loses his soul? Or what can a person give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in his Father's glory and then he will repay each person according to their deeds.” (Matthew 16:26-27) He also said, “This is the deed that God requires—to believe in the one whom he has sent.” (John 6:29)

So the question is: do you believe in the illusions of your fellow creatures or do you trust in our Creator, who knows how things really work, what we really need and who loves us enough to give his life for us and give his eternal life to us? 

Under the Sun

The scriptures referred to are Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14, 2:18-23, Colossians 3:1-11, and Luke 12:13-21.

The most famous line from Shakespeare is the beginning of Hamlet's soliloquy: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” What most people don't realize is that Hamlet is contemplating suicide. Basically he is asking whether it is better to live or to die. “Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die—to sleep, no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.” In other words, by dying you end all the pain and suffering of life, just like a good deep sleep does. But then he realizes something. “To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub: for in that sleep of death what dreams may come...” Hamlet realizes that “the dread of something after death, the undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of...” In other words, most of us would rather deal with the problems and pains of life than risk having to deal with whatever we might experience after death.

Long before Shakespeare penned his plays, the writer of Ecclesiastes wrestled with the problems of life. But he was not dealing with the problems most of us have—trying to make a living, dealing with difficult people who have power over us—the stuff 99% of the world's population throughout history have suffered. No, our passage says, “I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem,” which would indicate that he was Solomon. So he had it better than most people. And what does he conclude? All is vanity. The Hebrew word here literally means “air, breath, vapor.” It expresses something that has no substance. So the Jewish Publication Society's version of the Tanakh translates it “utter futility.” The International Standard Version renders it “absolutely pointless.” The Good News Translation gives it as “useless.” The NIV uses the word “meaningless.” The Contemporary English Version translates the first verse of our passage this way: “Nothing makes sense! Everything is nonsense. I have seen it all—nothing makes sense.” It's a pretty bleak assessment of life and a surprising one to find in the Bible.

But the Teacher's perspective is limited. He says “I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun.” Under the sun” is repeated 29 times in this short book. So he is looking at what happens between birth and death. He concludes that everything is temporary and therefore meaningless. Pleasures are meaningless, work is meaningless, advancement is meaningless, riches are meaningless. In other words, if this life is the only one we get, then nothing we do means anything in the long run. Add to that the problems that Hamlet later lists—the wrongs of oppressors, arrogant people in high office, “the law's delay,” seeing the unworthy succeed—and there is no justice in life.

My wife and I love to watch British mysteries or as my son calls it, “murder porn.” We don't like them too dark, however. We like clever puzzles. But of course, when the bad guy is revealed and caught, it is hard to see how the murder victim gets justice. Even Sherlock Holmes realized this. At the end of one of his more tragic cases, he says, “What is the meaning of it, Watson?...What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance,which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”

I said it was surprising to find the idea that life is meaningless expressed in the Bible but you know who would agree? Atheists. Indeed there is a Youtuber who used to be a Mormon and is now an atheist who paints an even bleaker picture of life without God. Brittney Hartley says that along with the death of God comes the death of not only ultimate justice but objective morality, objective truth, tradition and culture, assurance of an afterlife, and progression towards an ultimate ideal. What Hartley doesn't list is the death of hope. There is no reason to believe that anything will ever get better.

If this is the only life there is, then everything is futile. And just as we see with the Teacher, even being rich and powerful can't make your life meaningful. It's not hard to think of rich and powerful people who had sad lives. They are not immune to broken relationships, losing loved ones, suffering disease, undergoing disasters, being murdered or committing suicide. They know better than anyone that he who dies with the most toys wins nothing of lasting value. If there is no afterlife and no loving and just God to make things right, then there is no justice or meaning to this life.

Nevertheless the writer of Ecclesiastes concludes his book by seeing some value in obtaining wisdom and obeying God's commandments. It can make this bleak life better. The real problem, though, is that he is only looking at life under the sun. And humans find this perspective intolerable. As we noted last week, religion goes back to the beginning of our species. And as evidence in belief in an afterlife, anthropologists point to intentional human burials with grave goods, like one found in central Israel that dates back 100,000 years. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar asked why did our ancestors give things useful to living people, like pots and tools and weapons and food and drink, to a dead person if they were not intended to be used in the next life?

We have an advantage that the Teacher did not. We have the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Within 3 days his discouraged followers went from mourners cowering in a locked room from the authorities to people who were not afraid of death because they saw and touched and ate with the risen Jesus. They defied the same authorities that had Jesus killed because they knew that death, like the other things in this life, was also temporary. The only thing that isn't temporary is people.

Which means that what you do in this life is not meaningless. As C.S. Lewis pointed out that if you are just going to live for 70 or 80 years and then cease to exist, it doesn't matter what kind of person you are. But if you are going to live forever, it does.

When I was in a college ministry where we went to a nursing home, I noticed that some elderly people were very bitter at the end of their lives. They couldn't forget and move past old slights and injustices and feuds and disappointments and regrets but just kept going on about them. But some elderly people were happy, despite the circumstances that put them into the nursing home. One lady was a brittle diabetic who had lost her sight to the disease and eventually both legs. But she was always joyful. She sang the loudest at our church services and loved to talk with us students. Our time at the nursing home each Sunday often ended with all of us in her room, fortified by her strong faith. And if I was going to live forever I would choose to become like her rather than like the narrow bitter souls in the same place though they might be physically better off than her. She was like a ray of sunshine. And I could see some of those people becoming like spiritual black holes, sucking in everything around them, including light, and giving nothing back.

That's why what we are becoming in this short life is so important. It sets our trajectory into the next life. And that's why Paul says, “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly.” And by that he doesn't mean things like family and friends and the things essential to a physical life. No, he lists stuff like sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, greed (which is idolatry), anger, rage, malice, slander, and abusive language. As we read last week, if we are in Christ, Jesus has nailed such things to the cross. (Colossians 2:14) Sins are like cancer: they grow and grow in us until they kill us spiritually. We know that one way to prevent lung cancer is to quit smoking. In the same way, we must stop feeding the things that harm our relationship with God, our relationships with each other and our relationship with ourselves.

And you may have noticed that a lot of the things Jesus tells us to do make no sense if this is the only life we get. Things like not resisting an evil person, turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, and not worrying about things like food and drink and clothing, do not make sense if you only live once. Those are the very things that got Jesus killed. As Paul says, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing but to those who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18) From God's perspective it is the world's wisdom that is foolish. Paul continues “But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:24)

There is a famous psychological experiment that was done with marshmallows. Kids were shown a marshmallow on a plate. The adult told them that they could eat the marshmallow while he was gone but if they waited until he came back, they could have 2 marshmallows. They watched what the kids did and then followed up on them throughout their lives. They found that those kids who resisted eating the first marshmallow, who were able to hold off on getting an immediate reward in order to gain a greater reward later on, did better in school and in life. God is saying that that same principle applies to this life and the next. You can, like the man in Jesus' parable, just think about building up wealth so you can live this life eating, drinking and being merry, or you can look at life from God's perspective: eternity. And eternal life beats this temporary life in every way.

Jesus said, “And whoever has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.” (Matthew 19:29) Jesus is not talking about abandoning these things unnecessarily but being forced to by persecution, as the parallel passage in Mark makes clear. (Mark 10:30) Jesus is saying we should take the long view; see life through the lens of eternity.

Ultimately the Teacher saw that you can't find meaning through things. He does see value in having other people in your life. He says that one person working alone is meaningless but “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work. If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who has no one to help him up! Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12) As God says in the beginning “It is not good for the man to be alone.” (Genesis 2:18) For us it is even better. Jesus said, “For where two or three are assembled in my name, I am there among them.” (Matthew 18:20) Whenever we gather in Jesus' name, however few in number, we are the body of Christ and his Spirit is with us, in us and among us. (1 Corinthians 12:13-14)

But what if we are wrong and there is no God and no afterlife? The mathematician Blaise Pascal looked at this question logically. If we Christians are wrong, and death is the end, we will never know that we were wrong. However, if we are right, we will receive a great reward. On the other hand, if an atheist is right that there is no God and no afterlife, he will never know that he was right. If he is wrong, however, he will be in the same situation as the man in the parable and that is not good. Betting on God's promise of eternal life for those who put their trust in him has a great return and no downside; betting against God has no return and a huge downside.

The Bible shows both perspectives on life. Looked at from a purely material point of view, life is meaningless. Looked at from a spiritual perspective, life is full of meaning. Everything we do can move us along one of two trajectories: closer to God or farther from him. Because every person you meet has the immense potential to grow into a wonderful, giving, larger-than-life person who will bedazzle you when they enter glory or they can shrink into an infinitely tiny ball of rage and regret and empty and unfulfilled desires. As someone said, a person wrapped up in themselves makes for a very small package.

Or look at it this way: everyone you meet is either a brother or sister in Christ or a potential brother or sister in Christ. So you can help them discover and develop this by what you say and do. And by giving of yourself to help them, you will also become more Christlike. So, with apologies to Shakespeare, to be a follower of Jesus or not to be—that is the question.