“And when the days of her purification according to the Law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him (Jesus) to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord…” Luke 22:1
“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin condemned sin in the flesh…” Romans 8:3
Remember that over the last few weeks I have said that every big event in life has its own text. The event generates the text. And I used the example of the resolve of the 13 original colonies to be free from England that has as its text the Declaration of Independence. The event of falling in love generates love letters, poems, and novels; but is it is also true that the experience of nihilism generates letters, poems, and novels but of a very different sort. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 23 is spoken by a man who has lost everything that would matter in his day, in his society as well as his own judgment of self worth and yet, at least internally, he rises above his “outcaste state” when he draws the most profound conclusion and sings, even in his misery:
“Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”
Now that is love – a blessed state that I cannot imagine another poetic character, poor, poor J. Alfred Prufrock, ever experiencing. T.S. Eliot published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Poetry magazine in 1915 and it sings the sorry song of a world where judgments are no longer worth the time because nothing matters anyway. The poem begins:
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky,
Like a patient etherized upon a table…”
And things go downhill from there. He speaks of an “overwhelming question,” but the only questions he ever brings forth are as empty and pointless as Prufrock’s own pathetic life:
“I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?”
Shakespeare’s world understood the importance of making judgments because things still mattered. Eliot lived in a world in which the views of men like Thomas Jefferson and Fredrick Nietzsche had triumphed, thus eliminating the supernatural from the world and stripping it of meaning. Jefferson wanted a world purged of the supernatural and the elimination of the presence of whatever unmoved mover started it moving in the first place; but he also wanted a world that continued in the morality of Christ. Nietzsche would have none of that, so he force-fed honesty to refined European folk by drawing the accurate conclusion that the elimination of the supernatural meant the death of God and the death of the so-called morality of Christ.
What happened between the time of Shakespeare and Eliot was the arrival of the Enlightenment and the eventual triumph of what we call “science.” And by the “triumph of science” I do not mean that the method of science is the mischief-maker – science doesn’t kill people, its bad people with science who kill people. People turned the method into the religion of science; a way of life that assumes that the material, physical world is all there is to life. All that there is in life may be reduced to physics and that which is not reducible to physics does not matter because it is not real. Beauty, goodness, morality, love, your sense of self-consciousness are fictions generated by the vestige of a defective, un-evolved faculty of man. This is the religion of scientism. Most atheists in this country today are of the Jefferson type – they have not quite evolved enough to man-up to the whole true. Most of them still say it is important to be fair to other people, to be just, to care for the sick and the broken, “to acknowledge the value of Judeo-Christian values.” But not Nietzsche. Now there is a truthful man and courageous – the ideas of fairness, or justice, or altruism are slavish fictions that keep the weak in a state of weakness. What is my point? This is my point: the big events in life generate their own text. One of the biggest events in the world was the Enlightenment and the great but narrow success of the scientific method. However the eventual transformation of the scientific method into the religion of scientism, which has atheism and materialism as its central articles has flourished ever since as every new advance in the physical sciences seems to prove the religion’s infallibility.
This is the world we live in today – a world in which materialism, physicalism and atheism are simply assumed to be true by the educated and ruling classes. This is why I said last week, that we needed to talk about our use of narratives as the means of telling the truth because today the words “story” or “narrative” are frequently taken to be light-weights in the world of truth and meaning because of the assumption that scientific knowledge is real knowledge and narratives are just stories. For the scientist the ideal language of truth is physics and the language of physics is mathematics and anything short of that is soft at best or just journalism, propaganda, or wishful thinking.
Furthermore, stories and narratives are typically taken to be entirely personal and subjective, merely one point-of-view among other equally valid points-of-view. That of course is not the truth concerning the words “story” or “narrative” but that is the assumption. Just go into a courtroom or a departmental hearing in a hospital or a university when charges have been brought against someone and listen to the examination and cross-examination of witnesses and look at the consequences of giving a false witness. False testimony can end a career and even put a person behind bars and the only reason that is just is the fact that we know that we can know and understand as well as communicate truth as a narrative. Even in hearing a complaint in the context of people dedicated to a branch of hard science no one would suggest the absurdity that they discover how to eliminate the narrative of a witness and replace it with the certainty of mathematics. The fact is that some points-of-view have exercised attentiveness, intelligence, reason, and responsibility while other points-of-view are bent, crooked through being inattentive, prejudicial, unreasonable and irresponsible.
One should know that the New Testament narratives most certainly claim to record historic facts, the truth about real events in history. The narratives of the Gospels, of the Acts of the Apostles, as well as events asserted in the various epistles are neither deceptions nor lies, nor are they literary fictions, but rather they are responsibly recorded narratives in many cases written down either by eye-witnesses or from the direct testimony of eye-witnesses. John put it this way:
“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life… That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.” I John 1:1,3,4
The root problem that St. Paul identifies in Romans 1 is that humanity has turned from the God who is God and embraced the illusion of atheism and that has lead humanity away from the truth and reality. Furthermore the illusion of atheism has brought about patterns of recurrence, begetting illusions of greater and greater complexity, but illusions that inevitably lead to decline, disintegration and finally death because those illusions do not correspond to reality. So when man turned from the God who is God he turned to the creature and worshipped idols in the creature’s image: man, birds, mammals and reptiles. What is true is that we are created to love and worship the God who is God and even if we turn from God, we will never escape the vocation to love and worship. What was true for the city of Rome was true for the nations yesterday and today and it is also true of families and for us individually. My point is that yes this is the condition today, exactly as Paul describes it in Romans – atheism, the rejection of the God who is God and really the only significant change is that today’s atheism has a different delivery system. In Rome in Paul’s day it was the cult of Caesar and Roma and today it is the cult of Scientism and materialism. But then or today, atheism functions as an opiate. Atheism offers a refuge from the fear of a God who is unmanageable and all-powerful. Atheism is a safe haven of willfulness and selfishness. Atheism is a religion of consolation that provides therapy for private fears, for desire masquerading as needs, for secret disappointments and selfish ambition.
I have placed before you two texts this morning from the New Testament, both of which I tell you are records of the work of the living God who is God.
“And when the days of her purification according to the Law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him (Jesus) to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord…” Luke 2:22
“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin condemned sin in the flesh…” Romans 8:3
If the Second Person of the eternal Trinity was not capable of assuming human flesh, not capable of coming to us “in the likeness of sinful flesh,” then the New Testament is not true and it is not worth the bother. But the Church claims that New Testament texts are records, memoirs, in some cases autobiographies, life stories, and accounts concerning, as I said last week, an insignificant Jew from the back of beyond named Jesus. Today the Church remembers another narrative of his early life that involved not only his mother Mary’s obedience, but the faithfulness of his adopted father Joseph as well. And the Church recalls the story of two faithful Jews, a man named Simeon and a prophetess named Anna whose life stories, like our own stories, have gotten caught up in God’s story. We know of Simeon and Anna because Mary told this story to the Apostles after the resurrection of Christ from the dead. And this brings us back the main point I made a few weeks ago and I wish to make now: the big event that gave birth to the texts of the New Testament is the resurrection from the dead of that insignificant Jew. The resurrection of Jesus Christ was God’s work of finality, the great reversal, the climatic moment in human history. The text of the New Testament hangs entirely upon the event of the resurrection and the identification of the resurrected One as Mary’s child, and that is why Paul’s epistle to the Romans matters so much. Furthermore it is the historical resurrection of Jesus Christ that drove his early followers to undercover his identity through the narratives of other insignificant Jews like Simeon: