Sermon from July 29, 2007 Francis Collins is leader of the Human Genome Project. He is a devout Christian and released a book last year in which he stated clearly his commitment to Jesus Christ. The book is called The Language of God. It has earned him many an interview.
Sermon from July 29, 2007
Francis Collins is leader of the Human Genome Project. He is a devout Christian and released a book last year in which he stated clearly his commitment to Jesus Christ. The book is called The Language of God. It has earned him many an interview.
John Horgan interviewed him for National Geographic magazine earlier this year (http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0702/voices.html accessed, July 11, 2007) in an article entitled, "The Scientist As Believer." Right on cue, Mr. Horgan trotted out the favorite objection of people who don't want to take faith seriously. He said, "Many people have a hard time believing in God because of the problem of evil. If God loves us, why is life filled with so much suffering?”
I would take Mr. Horgan and others, who ask that question more seriously, if they told us what they would like God to do about human suffering. I would take them more seriously if they told us what they do about human suffering without God. Have you noticed? They never tell us. They demand that we answer the question, but seem to think they have a free pass, when it comes to explaining the perfectly awful sufferings of mankind. Their silence trivializes human suffering and trivializes the justice of God.
We Christian may stammer, but we are not silent. We seek to honor God and those who suffer by offering partial answers. We suffer too. We too seek answers. We know we have only partial answers. We suggest that God in justice uses suffering to purge people of their evil. We call that sanctification. We suggest that God in justice uses suffering to punish people for their evil. We call that judgment. We suggest that God in justice uses sufferings for purposes we can’t begin to fathom. We call that the dark night of the soul. The Bible illustrates all three possibilities.
Last Sunday, we began reading the Old Testament prophet, Habakkuk. The oracle he received from God declared that the Babylonians were coming to Jerusalem to express God’s displeasure with the injustice and violence of His covenant people, Israel. It also declared that God would show His displeasure with the Babylonians as well.
Habakkuk and all the biblical prophets present divine judgment as an unexpected depth in the moral structure of the universe. If we believe them, then it is appropriate to ask if judgment is a viable possibility for the present world.
Preliminary Considerations
Without pretending to be prophets, can we make room in our understanding for divine judgment? If God acted in judgment in our time, what would He do? How would we know it was God and not just bad luck? Such knowledge has two requirements.
First, it requires an act of faith. Plenty of people will seek only economic, political or climatological explanations for bad times in national life. We don’t deny those explanations, but we also remain open to a theological explanation for bad times in national life. For example, I believe with Isaiah (Isaiah 40:23) that
God brings princes to naught
and reduces the rulers of the world to nothing.
I stand with Habakkuk (Habakkuk 1:6), when he puts into the mouth of God these words:
I am raising up the Babylonians,
that ruthless and impetuous people,
and then (Habakkuk 1:12) replies:
O Lord, you have appointed them to execute judgment;
O Rock, you have ordained them to punish.
Second, knowledge of God’s judgment requires discernment. Not every prediction of disaster is an act of discernment, because not every disaster is an act of God. We should refrain from glib pronouncements of judgment. For example, I have heard more than one Christian say publicly, “If God doesn’t judge America, He will owe an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah.” It’s clever, catchy, but after reading the prophets of Israel, it seems more like a sound bite than serious reflection on the ways of God.
The Church in America may lack that kind of faith and discernment, because we have dismissed the office of prophet as marginal to the Church’s life. When was the last time you heard someone introduced as prophet so and so? Prophets will make a comeback, when the Church honors them again.
The Church will honor them again, when those whom Christ appoints as prophets band together. They will never forget there are false prophets. They will exchange ideas. They will correct, rebuke, test and confirm what each person claims to discern. They will speak to the Church and allow their message to be judged against the realities of life.
Prophets and judgment are legitimate categories of human discourse. Judgment has to do with the inner significance of history, and prophets discern that significance.
Through Prophetic Eyes
I believe there are prophets in the Church of North America. Perhaps their hour is coming. I do not consider myself to one of them, although I do believe that God has given me prophetic insight from time to time. It is with reluctance that I offer the following thoughts for your consideration. The attempt is not glib, but it would be more credible, if it were done in company with others. With that caution in mind I’d like to tell you what I see on my watch.
National events in the past 35 years warrant a cautious consideration that we may be feeling heavy but not fatal blows to national life as the fingers of the divine Potter press harder into our national “clay” to shape us to his purpose.
Long before desperate Vietnamese tried to board helicopters on the American Embassy in Saigon, most of us knew we had lost the war. In the last lingering years of that war we also waited in long lines, thanks to an OPEC embargo that made us aware of our dependence on foreign oil. The Supreme Court rendered its Roe v. Wade decision. Vice-President Agnew was removed from office, and President Nixon resigned.
The Ayatollahs of Iran humiliated the nation before the world for more than a year. In A few years later, AIDS emerged in urban America as a frightening epidemic. In 1988 terrorists blew Pan Am 103 out of the sky. In 1993 terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. In 1998 terrorists tried to blow up the USS Cole. Then came September 11 and its economic, military and political aftermath. Illegal immigration raises serious issues of national security and the rule of law.
Whatever distortions of American history academic textbooks present, the United States remains a profoundly Christian, even a profoundly Protestant nation. But these heavy but not fatal blows to national life are not God’s call to the Church and to the nation to recapture some golden age of our nation’s past; they are God’s call to repent and lead lives that are worthy of Christ in an American culture that invites and encourages all of us to do anything we can get away with. But this reading of God’s justice is still too narrow. He strives not only with the West but with the world.
Habakkuk 2:14 encourages this larger vision: For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea. Why should He not make His presence felt among all nations, if His purpose is to fill the earth with the knowledge of His glory? Consider this:
The AIDS virus that reached critical mass in the bath houses of San Francisco has now spread to the rest of the world with horrifying results in Africa. Other plagues such as the SARS virus threaten to become just as global and more lethal. Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran threaten the world not only with rocket-delivered bombs but with Saturday-night, nuclear specials that can be detonated by a single bomber in a great city.
We are witnessing the greatest religious crisis of our age. Islam is on trial for its very soul. What kind of religion will it be by the middle of the 21st century? Lovely Muslim voices have spoken out against the violence of al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. Too few have spoken too seldom. Muslim suicide bombers (there is no other kind) are setting our world on fire, and they nearly suffocate voices of moderation in the Muslim world.
China, officially Communist and atheist, stands on the threshold of becoming a de facto capitalist nation, and “it is possible that Christians will constitute 20 to 30 percent of China’s population within three decades” (David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing, 285).
We are also witnessing the greatest and most peaceful religious expansion in the history of the world. Christianity has grown exponentially over the past 50 years in Asia, Africa and Latin America. More Christians now live on those continents than live in Europe, Australia and the United States combined.
These global developments are not God’s call to the Church and to the nations to recapture some golden age of mankind; they are God’s call to humanity to repent and prepare for the coming kingdom of God, which is just around the corner.
The Righteous Shall Live by Faith
Habakkuk, awaiting the fury of the Babylonians, gave the proper response of Israel in their hour of crisis and of the Church in the global crisis of our own age. Habakkuk 2:4: the righteous will live by . . . faith.
Whenever someone tells us to live by faith, we should always ask ourselves, “What am I supposed to believe?” Faith responds to truth. The answer that is common to Israel in Habakkuk’s day and to the Church of our day comes in Habakkuk 2:14. For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea. That idea may sound like fantasy, but the previous verse reveals the real fantasy.
“Has not the LORD Almighty determined
that the people’s labor is only fuel for the fire,
that the nations exhaust themselves for nothing?”
Nations that try to live in separation from the God of Israel and the Church may as well try to escape the law of gravity. He will make his way to their door. He will call them to account. He will display His power in them so that His name may be proclaimed in all the earth. (see Romans 9:17) Did that seem easy to Habakkuk? Does it seem easy to us? No, but the righteous will live by . . . faith.
Chapter three bears witness to Habakkuk’s hard-won peace. In this prayer praise for God’s deeds of old fills the first fifteen verses. God, who acted before to deliver His people, would act again. Verses 16-18 bear witness to Habakkuk’s emotional and political realism and unwavering faith in the face of inescapable national disaster.
I heard and my heart pounded,
my lips quivered at the sound;
decay crept into my bones,
and my legs trembled.
Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity
to come on the nation invading us.
Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
Where does faith like that come from? Verse 19:
The Sovereign LORD is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to go on the heights.
The Pastoral Center of Gravity
I wonder who made up the audience that Habakkuk wanted to reach. I wonder if they were surprised, as I was surprised, to learn that nowhere in this prophecy did Habakkuk call for repentance. The absence of that call leaves the impression that it was too late for repentance – a fearful thought. What was his audience supposed to do?
On the other hand, you are the audience I want to reach. Our situation is different from that of Jerusalem six hundred years before Christ; and yet, Habakkuk introduces into our situation divine judgment as a valid category of human discourse.
A sensitive and sensible Roman Catholic scholar of the last century made a powerful statement about God and history. Henri de Lubac said: “God inserts himself in history and so bestows on it a ‘religious consecration.’” (de Lubac, Catholicism, 165) That is why the accumulating crises of our time deserve theological consideration. I am proposing that they are evidence of divine judgment. What are we supposed to do?
I’d like to suggest two expectations we should have that will give us perspective on what is about to happen in our world; and I’d like to suggest two actions we can take that pertain to the possible global moves God is making in our time.
First, expect evil to increase and try to demoralize the Church. In Matthew 24:12-13 Jesus said of the end of the age: “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.”
Second, expect the gospel to penetrate the entire family of nations. In the next verse, Matthew 24:14 Jesus said: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”
Third, watch for God’s hand in human events. In Mark 13:35 Jesus said: “Keep watch because you don’t know when the owner of the house will come back.”
Fourth, build the Church well. Hebrews 10:24-25 says: Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another.
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