Atheists, Doubt, And The Trinity

Atheists, Doubt, and The Trinity

June 3, 2007
John 16:12-15

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit
of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but
will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He
will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the
Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to
you."

The last year has been an interesting one for religion, though some of it has been a
predictable as rain in spring. There is, of course, the requisite sex scandal, ala Ted
Haggard, or the inevitable contemplation on the state of the religious right with the
recent death of a leader from that movement, ala Jerry Falwell.    But I think what has
made this year so interesting is not so much the religious stories or scandals, but the
rise of what are some are calling the New Atheists, people like Richard Dawkins and
Sam Harris, who have made a second career, beyond being academics, as
spokespersons for a new, more outspoken, form of atheism. And I can understand why
they and others have become more outspoken against religion in this day and age:
religious fanaticism, whether it be the Christian right in our country who want to this
country to be run as a theocracy—ruled by God—rather than a democracy, or the
religious fanaticism of some Muslims as they plowed themselves and hundreds of
others into buildings on 9/11 or even the religious fanaticism that has fueled the deadly
violence between Hindus and Muslims on the Indian subcontinent in recent decades—
all those kinds of religious fervor gives all of belief a bad name. It seems that
everyone, of whatever religious stripe, are quite sure of themselves nowadays, quite
certain they have the truth, and any deviance from that norm needs to be something
worthy of punishment. As I said a couple of weeks ago, I think we live in anxious times,
and our way of dealing with uncertainty is to demand certainty from our government,
from our family structures, from our way of understanding the world, but especially, we
demand certainty from our religion.

So, I get why people like Dawkins and Harris are raising their voices against what they
see as the voices of unreason, and I also get why some people are listening to them,
despite the vast majority of people in this country that believe in some sort of higher
power—we can no longer seem to have conversations with each other, across so many
divides, without demonizing each other. And as someone who has struggled with faith
all my life, who has been surprised that I find myself a Christian minister, especially
coming from a non-religious family, a family with a father who was an agnostic but a
better man than most Christians I’ve known, and a mother, who still doesn’t practice any
particular kind of religion. I’ve always struggled with faith, with belief, and I’ve always
loved to have conversations with honest doubters, and honest atheists and agnostics,
mostly because I appreciate any kind of honest struggle, but also because it reminds
me of what a long, strange trip my own faith journey has been. I know I have doubts all
the time, at least once a day, sometimes twice a day, if it’s a good day. And I really do
mean that it’s a good day when I experience doubts about my faith, because its in those
moments that I know I am being as honest as my atheist friends, that I am admitting that
I don’t have all the answers, and sometimes I have doubt about the One I believe to be
the Answer Giver, that real life is not neat and nice, and neither is my faith in this God.
Its in those moments that I am reminded of why I believe, and its not because I’ve come
to a rational belief that God does indeed exist. I am reminded to go back to a
relationship I’ve tended to for over some 25 years now, my relationship with God, and
what I’ve experienced in that relationship, all the good times and the bad times, the
moments of ecstasy, and the moments of deep disappointment.

Why do I believe God is a present reality, even though there are times when I honestly
struggle with that belief? Because it has been my overall experience in this world, it
has been part of my story, and I’ve come to trust that experience, both the difficult part
of it, as well as the wonderful part of it. When people come to me and tell me that they’
ve come to believe in God’s existence because logic and reason has brought them to
that position, I must admit that I probably stare at them dumb struck, because I can’t
imagine coming to believe in God’s existence because someone had a better argument
for God’s existence than God’s non-existence. And to be frank, I think Dawkins and
Harris, the atheist du jour of the moment, have some pretty reasonable arguments,
some well-thought-out arguments, and the position of atheism, in my opinion, is
reasonable and logical and rational enough, though it’s not my position and not my
experience as a person. And it’s that latter point that I want to make on this Trinity
Sunday, and on a day we celebrate our graduates, as they go forward to a new life,
and new experiences.

My experience with God, my own deep wrestling with God, is the reason I have come to
have faith, that I have come to trust in the One whom I have wrestled with over these
many years. And I expect that most of us in this place would probably ultimately rest
our faith on this foundation, our experience with God, though we might have to go
through the litany of other things we were told to trust, to have faith in, things like the
church, or the Bible, or what mamma told us to believe, before we go to that core
foundation. As adults, we ultimately come to believe something if we have experienced
that belief as true for us in our lives, we have come to experience that truth in our
bones, and in the deep and mysterious corners of our hearts. I don’t believe in God’s
existence and presence in this world because religious people have a better argument
about God—I believe in God’s presence in this world because I have experienced that
Divine presence for myself. Now, let me be frank with you: my father, again, one of the
most amazing men I’ve ever met, was an agnostic, which means that by definition he
believed that God’s existence or non-existence was not knowable—his experience in
this world did not provide him with what it provided me, and I respect that. Part of being
on the great journey of life, one that our graduates are just beginning, is that you
quickly find that people have very different experiences in this life, and, that if we don’t
want to end up being the very intolerant people we often decry, the folks who demand
that their experience of life and God has to be our experience of God, then we really do
need to respect everyone’s experience, though it does not need to be our own. We
simply experience life and love and hope and goodness and God in so many different
ways, even amongst us people of faith, and that needs to be noted, and honored, and
dealt with. Trusting our own experience and not demanding that it be everyone’s
experience—that is a true sign of adulthood, and it’s a sign of a maturing and
deepening faith.

And, dare I say it, it’s also what the church was trying to do thousands of years ago
when it came up with this crazy, illogical, maybe even irrational doctrine we now called
the Trinity. People all over Christendom in the first three centuries of its existence were
having experiences of God, and they were having different experiences of this same
God, and they were trying to figure out how to name what it was that was going on in
their lives. Some people felt God within their bones, as if God was in the very air they
breathed, and so the words we heard this morning really resonated with them, Jesus’
words about the Spirit within them, touched a deep chord in them. And then others
began to speak of this Jesus as being as one who walked beside them, a friend, a co-
traveler, one who has experienced what they had experienced—love, life, death, and
more life. And then there were those who spoke of God in great awe, as a loving
Parent, as Father, as one who created, as the great Other of the Universe, but still
deeply caring, like a good Parent ought to be. Their were so many ways of
experiencing God, and people began to argue about their respective experiences, and
finally the church came to the idea of the Trinity, this idea that affirmed that each of
these particular experiences of God was true, was different, but still true—and the
doctrine of the Trinity was thus born, born out of the experience of the early church
struggling with all of its different ways of meeting God and God revealing God’s self to
us. I often share with the confirmation classes I’ve taught over the years my own very
rudimentary explanation of the Trinity, which is this idea of God above us, as parent, as
one to be in awe of, and then the God beside us, the Christ, who walks with us, as
friend, as living revelation, and then, then, the God within me, the Spirit of God who
dwells deep within us, the God who is so intimately in touch with us that the church uses
the ruah, the Hebrew word for “breath,” to describe this indwelling presence of God.

Now, all of this Trinity talk is really talk about relationship, about our experience of
relationship with God. The church has been so enamored with the idea of relationship
that it sometimes even talks about the relationship of each part of the Trinity with one
another, but to be honest, that is the moment when I usually start yawning, mostly
because I can’t imagine what in the world that would look like, this relationship within the
Trinity. All I know is whom I have experience of and the importance of experience when
it comes to matters of faith. At some point, you’ve got to go back to that experience, to
trust that experience, and I think that was what Jesus was telling us in today’s passage,
this small snippet from a larger farewell address he is giving in John 14-17, right before
he would meet his death on Calvary. “I have so much to tell you, but not enough time,
so I am going to send you the Spirit of truth, and you’re going to have to trust that Spirit
to tell you the truth, the truth that comes from God,” Jesus seems to be saying.   Its
interesting that instead of making everything clear and plain, Christ simply tells us to
trust what God will soon place within us, the Spirit, for the rest of the truth we’ll need to
know. I mean, to be frank, I would have laid it out before I left the room, so to speak, so
that the arguments we Christians have tended to have about God would be easily
resolved by going back to the Source, but, no, he simply tells us to trust the Spirit, the
deep intimate presence of God within us. But I think he knew something maybe we didn’
t and that was that clarity wasn’t always what its cracked up to be—a little mystery in life
and love and faith humbles us, and hopefully makes us a little less prone to dismiss the
experience of others.

So, I would say to our young graduates, on this day of new beginnings, and to those in
this room, who also experience new beginnings, daily, weekly, yearly, that maybe you
and I ought to trust that still small voice within us, to trust our experiences of God more
than anything else, though I know the supposed “danger” of that…it may take you to a
place that is different than mine, as it did for my father. But truth comes through the
experience we find in real relationship, in the hard-won truth that flows out of how we’ve
met God in this world, and how God has met us. It’s the truth of the Trinity as lived out
in our lives—so many different ways of finding and being found by God, and each one
of them different, and beautiful and to be respected and never dismissed. Beware of
anyone that says your experience of God is not valid, or not true, but also know that it
requires that you and I allow others to have their experiences of God, ones that may be
radically different than ours. Allow that to happen, don’t be threatened by it and bless
the diversity of our human experiences of God, as the church did when it came up with
the weird idea of the Trinity as a way of explaining that diversity thousands of years ago.

But I want to say something else as well, beyond the blessing of our individual
experiences of God, and that is this: I hope that you will always choose to be with
others that are in the midst of experiencing God, in all their wonderful diversity. It’s a
good thing to bless the diversity of our experiences of God, but it’s only within
community, and for us here, in Christian community, can we really recognize that
diversity for ourselves. If we think we can be by ourselves, having our own experience
of God without others, without community, we might make the same mistake of those in
our own Christian tradition that demand that we all agree on who God is and how God
is supposed to be experienced in this world.   We will come to mistakenly believe that
our experience of God is the only experience of God, the right kind of experience of
God, if we don’t share those experiences with others who are also on an intentionally
spiritual journey with God. Christianity is not a do-it-alone sort of faith—it is a faith of
community, of walking with fellow-travelers on the wide road that leads to God. Narrow
may be the gate, as Christ reminds us, but the road up to the gate is wide, and the gate
is all about how we live out that experience of God we’ve been given in this life—
whether or not our reaction to the experience of God we’ve been given will be life-giving
or death-dealing for us, or to the people around us. So, I say this, to you, enjoy the
journey, pay attention to your stories about God, and then pay attention to the stories
of your brothers and sisters, these who you’ve chosen to travel with on this side of
eternity, and bless them all, and let God sort out the beautiful differences, and then,
then I think we’ll have gotten it, I think, we’ll have gotten what the Christ was trying to do
thousands of years ago when he came to tell us the truth about love and life and hope
and God. Amen.