Sermon

2 Corinthians 4: 16-18

Secularism: The Subtle Enemy

By Dr. Gilbert W. Bowen

No wonder we do not lose heart! Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, God is creating new life within. Our troubles are slight and short-lived, and their outcome is an eternal glory provided our eyes are fixed not on the things that are seen, but on the things that are unseen; for what is seen is transient, but what is unseen is eternal.

So the Biblical faith sees the fundamental human problem as lack of vital connection with the Unseen. We are not autonomous creatures who just happen into this world, who are capable of living consistent, productive, peaceful lives on our own. We are creatures of the creative will of God, creatures who live rightly and well only so long as we stay conscious of his reality, and seriously seek to live in relationship to him.

But this way of viewing ourselves, and this way of living have been seriously eroded in our time. I do not want to suggest that we have ceased to be religious, that we don’t have vaguely felt religious longings or don’t participate in religious activities. Indeed, along with the people of India, we Americans are the most religious people in the world.

But do we not all live in an increasingly secularized culture where it is more and more difficult to maintain a lively sense of the reality of God and take him into account in the conventional decisions and activities of everyday living. Not that bad a culture, but one devoid of signals of God’s activity. We walk out of the door every day into an essentially man-made world. It was not always so. In the pre-modern world every thing that humans could not explain or control, and that was almost everything, was attributed to the action of God. Storms were the punishment of God. Luther is almost struck by lightning and took it as a call to the priesthood. Plagues were inflicted as punishment. God sent drought out of anger. Mental illness was demon possession or God inflicted. Vestiges of this premodern view still hang around. A television evangelist believes that the prayers of his viewers led God to change the path of a hurricane. Other preachers insisted that 9/11 was God’s punishment on America. No few voices assured us that Katrina was an act of God.

But now there has been a sea change in the way many of us view the world. “Acts of God” in the natural world are now reserved for insurance policies. A more secular view of such events once ascribed to the Almighty has taken hold. Meaning what? Meaning that rational and scientific understandings of the weather, psyche, political and economic forces, have pushed the sense of God’s place and role to the margins of daily experience. Many, even believers, live an essentially secular existence dealing day in, day out with the seen, the passing, the immediate, without any reference to the unseen, the eternal.

If in management of a business, or execution of a profession we ask only the pragmatic questions about technique and methodology, If in marriage and family we ask only about personal fulfillment and psychological stages of development, If in economics and international relationships we ask only the pragmatic questions of growth and national self-interest, all important questions, but if this is the only level on which we function, the level of the visible, the secular, then the reality of God as a factor in all of life, as a real player in our world, tends to fade, his place and role increasingly marginalized. He simply becomes a refuge for occasions of panic or a warm feeling in extra-curricular moments of piety.

Russell Kirk has written, “The conditions of modern industrial civilization do not strongly encourage the search after God. To the average Western man today, the good things of life appear to come almost automatically, out of factories and department stores; they seem to be man’s creation and his birthright. The old-fashioned farmer knew he was dependent upon God’s providence; twentieth century urban man looks to the government, the corporation, and the giant union for protection and plenty. The average American now tends to tolerate God, rather than fear him.” As one young co-ed remarked, “Yes, I believe in God, but I’m not nuts about him.”

But our faith says this is precisely what is required if we are to live lives of order and purpose and power, both individually and collectively. This is precisely what Jesus is saying, when he says, “The greatest commandment, the one supreme requirement for real life, corporate and personal, is love of God: heart, soul, strength, and mind.” That sounds like “nuts about God” to me.

We need to stop and ask ourselves again and again, not ‘Do I believe in God?’ but rather how do I take him in to account in my daily life? Is my relationship to him anywhere near as driving a concern or passion as the success of my business or the health of my children, or the pressures I confront tomorrow or my ambitions for next year?

Why ought we to stop and ask? Because there are still several ways in which a place for God in our lives is critical . We cannot function as human beings without a deep sense of responsibility to an ultimate authority. Paul insists to his friends in Rome that everybody knows God, in the sense that they know they are accountable. But self-destruction begins when they resist that accountability, do not honor God as God but serve the creature rather than the creator, themselves rather than a higher will.

Isn’t this an apt picture of what has happened in much of modern society? If God is no longer real on the social scene, it is in part because we refuse responsibility for our conduct and affairs. We cease to be accountable to other than ourselves. In the conduct of our lives, we no longer ask about the ultimate will. We no longer fear God. And so we fear everything and everyone else.

But this is the way to self-destruction insists the Apostle Paul to his friends in Rome. And not only Paul. Eric Fromm, the well known psychologist, wrote some time ago, these haunting words, “There are immutable laws inherent in human nature and human functioning which operate in any given culture. These laws cannot be violated without serious damage to the personality. If someone violates his moral and intellectual integrity, he weakens or even paralyzes his total personality. He is unhappy and he suffers. In spite of what he thinks, the problem of mental health cannot be separated from the basic human problem, that of achieving the aims of human integrity and the ability to love.”

So Paul just prior to the words of our text, writes of declaring the truth openly, recommending that truth to the consciences of his fellow-men.”

Further, Paul’s words are marked through and through by the presence of God as a sense of purpose in his life. “Since God in his mercy has given me this ministry, this calling, this purpose, we never lose heart.” Robert Cole, Harvard psychiatrist, “We need to understand how people make sense of this life… the reasons for the ways in which we conduct ourselves at home and at work. For many of us … these reasons are essentially religious. Perhaps it took too long for me, a doctor, to appreciate how important religious life is for many people as they cope with life’s challenges and as they go about bringing up their children. It is a means of providing them with a vision of what truly matters and of what is trivial and inconsequential. Without such a vision, such a sense of purpose, life can become confusing… even empty.”

And we cannot function as human beings without a deep sense of dependency upon an ultimate power. I am amazed, and sometimes a bit amused, at the proliferation of twelve-step programs. The twelve-step program came into being as Alcoholics Anonymous, and is without doubt the truly successful approach to the problem of alcohol addiction. Now it is being applied to other human problems, all the way from gambling to dieting. But surely one of the powerful insights of this approach is the insistence that the autonomous individual does not have the strength to straighten out his life apart from dependence upon a higher power. This is central and essential.

Religion has been described as a crutch by the cynical. But perhaps the real question is not whether religion is a crutch, but whether human beings when left to their own devices are not in some sense cripples. Or to put it another way, are we really designed to exist in splendid self-centered autonomy apart from dependency upon our Maker. The overwhelming answer of our faith and Lord is “No.” Jesus confesses, “Apart from my Father I can do nothing.” The apostle insists, “There is no question of our having sufficient power in ourselves. The power we have comes from God.”

So we must struggle to stay sensitive to the reality of God not only as law-giver and guide. We need not only moral clarity and sense of direction, we need hope and staying power to continue the struggle against chaos and disorder, reversal and trouble, suffering and despair. Simone Weil once said, “The truly happy are those who are perfectly aware of the fragility of life, who know that at any moment everything might be taken from them, and precisely because of this awareness have the keenest experience of joy and happiness in God.”

So what does it mean to take God seriously, to love him heart and mind. It means engaging the disciplines personal and communal that enable us to live by realities which are invisible in a world which is all too impressed with the visible. It means to stay morally sensitive, open to mission, spiritually dependent… in a world which it seems all to well designed to keep us from these. The busyness, the distractions, the preoccupations of pervasive modernity, the focus of modern media, this all too secular world devoid now of signs of the sacred, all of these draw us daily away from attention to what really counts. Nothing wrong with any of it, unless and until it takes such priority, absorbs attention and energy to the point where we lose touch with the invisible, with our God, His will and his strength. Unless we nurture the discipline to turn away, shut down from time to time the schedule and busyness that absorb our lives and the lives of our children, unless against the games and entertainments, long hours at school or work in and for the secular, visible world and its demands, we carve out times, avail ourselves of sacred spaces, to do what. To let the invisible have a time and place in our lives.

One of the 20th century’s great Christian leaders was Martin Niemoller. Niemoller was a churchman who survived Adolf Hitler’s Dachau prison during World War II. He died in Wiesbaden on March 16, 1984 at the age of 92. Niemoller took a stand against Hitler and as a result was arrested and thrown into solitary confinement. Every day, the stench of burning human flesh and the sighs of walking dead people haunted him. When the war was ended, Niemoller came to the United States. Once, in a radio interview in Cleveland, he was asked how he could stand Dachau and solitary confinement without losing his sanity. He replied that we do not know how much we can suffer until the test comes. He declared. “If God dwells in your life, you can stand far more than you think.”

If God dwells in your life. But how do we let that happen. Quite simply by remembering, remembering to whom we belong and for whom we truly live. This is not a matter of nostalgia, living in the past. One elderly said, “How can I be nostalgic about the past, when I am having trouble remembering it.” Not living in the past, but from it. This is what the Apostle is doing in his appeal to his friends. Remembering. ‘We have been hard pressed, but never cornered; bewildered but never at our wits end; hunted but never abandoned to our fate; struck down, but never killed.” God is present to him as the memory of the times when deliverance has mysteriously been there. This is why as people of faith we gather here. To remember. Because it is as we take the time to remember that the presence and purpose of God takes on life again for us. Remember the times of failure, but failure where forgiveness did come and new life began again. Remember the times of gift, the presence of another who cared. Remember the pain or paralysis that did recede with the presence of physician and prayer. Remember the chance meeting that took life in a different and better direction. Remember the unexpected moments when life took on meaning and lightness we had not thought was there. We live forward, but we know backward. It is in remembering, that God takes on reality again. Remember now your creator in the days of your youth. Do this, remembering me. Remember Jesus, writes the Apostle.

J. Barrie Shepherd sums it up so beautifully. “I have a hunch that much of faith is formed in looking backward, taking stock, reflecting on what has been, and what might have been. Most of the time, you see, we’re far too close to things to view them properly. The hassle hustle of the everyday can blind us to what’s really going on, obscure for us the chasms and the pinnacles that mark the landscape of our living. It’s only when, and if, we take the time to glance across the shoulder and reflect, to pause and ponder where we are and how we got here, that we can trace the constant presence of a mystery that blesses as it wounds, that turns us inside out and upside down, that leads us, by a path we did not choose, toward a hope we hardly know we had, a trust that yet endures, despite so much, a strange familiar grace that touches everything we touch with promise. I’ll even bet old stammering Moses leading his motley crew across that gap between the waves, had no time to inquire about who put it there. He just saw a chance and grabbed it with both hands. Then later, on the other bank, or deep into the wilderness, he realized, “So that’s what God was up to all the time.”

We do indeed live not by the things that are seen, but by the things remembered that are unseen. No wonder we do not lose heart.

Copyright 2006 Gilbert W. Bowen. Used by permission.