Scripture Readings:  Proverbs 24: 13-14; Acts 9: 1-9

This month, we are reflecting on how we understand and evaluate faith-claims  … for example, how we decide what we believe to be true about God … about Jesus … about what it means to live “faithfully.”  We are drawing on a model suggested by Methodist pastor John Wesley, who suggested that four factors affect our faith understandings:  tradition, which we considered two weeks ago; Scripture, which we considered last week; along with reason, to which we will turn today, before concluding next week with the role our experience plays in our faith understandings.

            Today’s source – reason – may be especially challenging for many of us.  In fact, it is the factor that, perhaps more than any other, seems to distance many people from faith. 

            I’d be willing to bet that every one of us knows at least one – or many more – people who say things like, “I just can’t believe all that God-stuff … it just doesn’t make any sense.”  They may well be familiar with the Bible – may have even gone to Sunday School – and when they ran into stories like the parting of the Red Sea, as the Israelites were fleeing captivity in Egypt; or the immaculate conception of Jesus; or some of Jesus’ miracles, their brains put the intellectual brakes on, and they concluded, “there is no way in the world as I understand it (which includes an intelligent, rational assessment of how things work) that this kind of stuff could have really happened.”  And since those particular events don’t make logical sense, they decide to discard the entire system of faith understandings.

            And that is certainly one possible response (and one that appears to be increasingly frequent in our culture) to the metaphor, and the mystery, and the other aspects of the Bible and of faith, that reason alone does not explain or account for.  Many people – and I’d bet it includes many of us sitting here this morning – struggle with what sometimes seems like a vast divide between the world of the senses and reason and logic and that world we call “spirituality” or “faith,” and if the divide seems too vast, we lean toward rejecting the faith.  My hope is that today’s sermon will help all of us reflect on those struggles, and perhaps find at least part of a satisfactory resolution to this apparent conundrum.

            Now, I have shared stories with you before of my own struggles, even as a little tyke, to come to terms with apparent differences between the stories my Sunday School teachers were telling me (call that “faith”) and what I was reading about and learning in school (call that “reason”).  I’ve admitted to you that I was nearly booted out of several Sunday School classes for asking questions like, “So, how could Jonah survive inside a whale for three days?  He wouldn’t have had any food, or water, and how could he breathe?  And besides, wouldn’t the whale have probably chewed on him some before swallowing him, so wouldn’t he be hurt or bleeding and need a doctor?”  Or “So, when Jesus raised that guy (Lazarus) from the dead, how do we know he really was dead?  Couldn’t he have been in a coma or something?”  (I was an avid fan of the TV series “Dr. Kildare” in those days.)  “And maybe Jesus just brought him out of his coma somehow.”

            I was a fairly bright kid, and I just didn’t understand how some of the Bible stories could possibly be true.  And I wasn’t really placated by an annoyed teacher snarling, “It’s in the Bible.  Of course it’s true.”  (Brief review:  that teacher was relying solely on Scripture as her source of authority.)  Or by the one who said with considerable asperity, “Every believing Christian knows that’s true.”  (She was relying on tradition.)

            Now, I could have simply given up on the whole business of trying to understand this faith stuff, but I took a different path instead.  I chose a second kind of response that I suspect many of you have also explored.  And that is, I used my power of reason to see whether there might be other ways to explain some of the faith “stuff” that didn’t seem to make logical sense.

            For example, I grew up in the South, where back in the 1950s and ‘60s there were still heated public arguments over whether or not the theory of evolution should be taught in the public schools – since, according to many Christian folks in those days, it “contradicted what the Bible said about the creation of the world.”  And even though I was still a kid, it seemed pretty clear that a lot (though not all) of people’s logical struggles with some of what’s in the Bible came from the kind of interpretive systems they brought to bear on the problem – something I now know theologians call our “hermeneutics” for understanding.

            Of course, as a kid, I didn’t have any kind of language for this.  But I did understand that a lot of what seemed to be a problem for people about differences between the Bible and the “real (and rational) world” really wasn’t, if you just changed the way you looked at the problem.  Like, with the Creation story, it seemed to me that if you just changed the way you defined a “day” there was no problem at all.  That is, if you reasoned that perhaps a “day” in God’s time is not the same as a 24-hour day in our time; then you don’t have a huge problem.  And overall, it seemed like the creation story in the Bible talked about the very same kind of orderly developmental process that I was learning about in my science classes in school.

            And that second response I chose as a kid – let’s try to figure this apparently illogical thing out in some other logical way – is also a response that you see a lot today, especially among intelligent people who also want to be people of faith.  For example, a recent Stillspeaking Daily Devotional from the UCC included a discussion of some recent scientific articles that have addressed what scientists think may have happened in the Biblical story about Saul (later re-named Paul) that we heard a few minutes ago.

            The Biblical version is that Saul/Paul’s experience of the bright light, and his fall to the ground, and his hearing a voice speaking to him, claiming to be Jesus, and his then being blind for several days, occurred because Paul had encountered the resurrected Christ on that road to Damascus, and it was God’s way of getting Paul’s attention, and changing his life by 180 degrees.  Some scientists, on the other hand, have suggested that Paul’s experiences were not theological in origin, but neurological.  For example, in 1987, D. Landsborough published an article in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, in which he stated that Paul's conversion experience, “with the bright light, loss of normal bodily posture, a message of strong religious content, and his subsequent blindness, suggested "an attack of [temporal lobe epilepsy], perhaps ending in a convulsion ... The blindness which followed may have been post-ictal" (that is, a normal result that often follows certain kinds of seizures)[1].

            And lots of other folks have done exactly the same thing with other apparently odd Biblical events … like the Ten Plagues that struck the Egyptians and persuaded Pharoah to let the Israelites go (one explanation:  there was a proliferation of red algae contaminated the wells, “turning the water to blood,” which then led to each of the other plagues.  Or the parting of the Red Sea as Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt (one explanation is a rare volcanic eruption that sent shock-waves through the Red (Reed) Sea, producing huge waves; another explanation is a meteorological phenomenon called the “wind set-down effect,” in which a windstorm could have caused a drop in sea-level so that an underwater ridge was exposed, on which the Israelites crossed as if it were dry land[2].  Or Jesus’ apparent ability to walk on water on the Sea of Galilee (one FSU Professor of Oceanography suggested a rare combination of optimal water and atmospheric conditions leading to the development of a unique, localized freezing phenomenon called "springs ice" which could have formed on the cold freshwater surface of the Sea of Galilee, allowing Jesus to walk across a frozen patch rather than on unfrozen water[3]).

            And yet, as UCC pastor and theologian Quinn Caldwell points out, so what?  What difference does it make whether or not we can offer a scientific explanation for something that does not appear to – and that may not in fact make – rational sense?  Caldwell’s view is this:  “some people have too much time on their hands.  Like those people who spend all their time trying to explain (Biblical events) in terms of (scientific causes).  I mean, who cares if the event was scientifically explainable, or something ‘supernatural’?  Would it really be a surprise to learn that God can turn even earthquakes and epilepsy (if that’s what Paul had) to good ends?  As if something with a scientific explanation can’t be an act of grace![4]”

            Which suggests a third possible response when our reason seems to conflict with some concept or teaching from faith.  And that is figuring out how to make space for both possibilities – instead of choosing black-or-white thinking, deciding that something has to be either this way or that way, we can choose – or try – to hold in mind and heart and spirit the possibility that there may be more than one way of understanding these apparently contradictory things.

            And we are aided in that attempt by part of the tradition in this case, the writings of theologians and scholars who have wrestled with questions like this for at least 800 years.  Those of you may remember names from your schooling like Tertullian (who suggested that God so transcends reason that any attempt to approach God intellectual was useless, even blasphemous; only the mystic could know God.)  Or St. Bernard of Clairvaux (the one who founded monasticism, not the breeder of big dogs), who believed that intellectual reflection was irrelevant to faith, and perhaps even dangerous to salvation.  Or John Locke, who believed that revelation (faith truths) that “accorded with reason” should be accepted, but revelation that clashed with the clear evidence of reason should be rejected.  Or Descartes, whose focus was on the authority of reason, and believed that reason contains within itself the elemental truths of religion as well as of science.  You may even have read their works.  And if you have, you know that these passionate, intelligent, and curious human beings have come down in very different places on the relationship between reason (science) and faith.

            As have the authors of tens of thousands of other books, and those of the 61,000,000-plus “hits” you get on the Internet if you put in “science and faith,” or “reason or faith.”  Some have suggested that faith should have first priority, and that if reason contradicts it, then reason threatens our very salvation.  Some have suggested that reason should have first priority, and that if faith contradicts it, then we are fools to believe the things of faith.  And some have suggested that faith and reason are not mutually exclusive; that they can complement one another, and offer two not-necessarily-incompatible ways of understanding, and living in, the world.

            A second aid in our attempt to resolve these struggles is that second source of authority in theological reflection – Scripture.  And when we turn to Scripture for what it can tell us about this issue, we find that reason and thoughtfulness and learning have always been a deeply-valued part of our Judeo-Christian heritage.  Over and over in the Scriptures, we find passages like the one we heard this morning from the book of Proverbs:  ^“My child, eat honey, for it is good, and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste. Know that wisdom is such to your soul; if you find it, you will find a future, and your hope will not be cut off. “  That is a poetic and beautiful statement about the value of wisdom and learning; something so important that when a Jewish child sat down for the first time to learn the alphabet, the beginning of reading, and formal knowledge, the teacher would smear honey on each of the letters, so that licking it off, and learning the letter, the child would learn how sweet and wonderful a thing learning is.

            And beyond what Scripture says, we are also aided in our struggles by remembering what we learned about the nature and form of Scripture last week – that much of what is written in the Bible was not scientific, factual, carefully-recorded data.  Rather, it was symbolic and metaphorical.    For example, calling God our “rock” does not mean God is literally a hunk of limestone, and Jesus’ story about the woman with the lost coin was not in fact about an obsessive-compulsive housekeeper.

            Remembering that, it may not matter precisely what caused the Ten Plagues (or whether Jesus walked on water) – or whether there even were Ten Plagues.  Because the point of the story may not be literal, but metaphorical.  The story can make a profoundly important – and mythically or symbolically true statement about faith – without being factually true.

            Finally, next week we’re going to turn to that fourth source of authority for faith understand – our lived experience – and how it may help us with our struggles, if we have them, to reconcile reason and faith.  We’re going to consider how for thinkers like C.S. Lewis, people who were intellectually brilliant, it was experience, combined with reason, which led them to new places of deep faith (in Lewis’ case, from a place of fervent atheism).

            In Quinn Caldwell’s UCC Daily Devotional piece, he says that spending all our time and energy trying to figure out rational, logical, scientific explanations for everything in the Bible – or else we reject it altogether – may “really just (be) an attempt to avoid having our lives and our thinking rearranged by the enormity of God’s grace.”  It’s a way to make excuses for why we need not take the Bible – or the other teachings of our faith – seriously.  It’s a way of rationalizing why, in fact, we really don’t need to live lives of faith at all.  If it doesn’t make sense, we argue – if we can’t be certain about it, we argue – then we can just ignore it.

            When I was a kid, I knew – at the deepest level of my being – that I loved God enough – and I loved science just as deeply – that simply chucking out the baby with the bath-water was not a satisfactory response for me.  I was willing to work on what to do with those problem stories, problem ideas, problem possibilities that kept showing up in my Bible reading, and in my teen and young adult Sunday School lessons.  And the more work I’ve done on this, and the more I’ve learned, the more I’ve become aware that black-and-white thinking isn’t necessary … nor very helpful.

            That in fact, there may be things we simply do not – and will not ever – be able to explain rationally and logically.  Things like electricity.  Or quarks.  Or cold fusion.  Or altruism.  Or the placebo effect.  Or the flight of the bumblebee.  Or how God “works” in the world.

            And I’m okay with that.  But each of you has to engage in your own wrestling with these challenging things.  The best news, I believe, is that we can trust that God truly is with us, one way or another, in our wrestling.  Amen.