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?