JESUS AMONG US PROVES GOD EXISTS
CHRISTMAS DAY –
YEAR C
December 25, 2015
Saint Cecilia
Catholic Community
Palm Springs,
California
Rev. David Justin
Lynch
Isaiah 52:7-10
Psalm 98:1-6 Hebrews 1:1-6 John 1:1-18
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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, AMEN.
When
I was growing up, I found the space program fascinating. As a nine-year old in
1961, which incidentally was the year I was confirmed, I thought that the
cosmonauts would find God when they rocketed into space. After all, as a kid I
was told “God is up in heaven.” So when the first person in space, Russian
Yuri Gargarin, said at a post-flight press conference that he had been into
space and said there was no God up there, I was more than a little bit
disappointed. As a young boy, I loved going to Church, serving at the altar,
singing in the choir and all that fun stuff. What a shame it would be that all
that fun stuff was all perhaps a waste of time!
God’s creation, all
that surrounds us, is the best way I know to prove God’s existence. After all,
how did it all get there? Saint Thomas
Aquinas said we know God exists, because God is the only thing that’s
immovable. God set everything in motion, everything moves, therefore, God
exists. So perhaps Yuri Gararin didn’t look hard enough---surely he saw the stars
and the planets---but how did they come into existence?
The United States
is nominally, and I emphasize nominally,
a Christian country. Today’s Gospel
reading tells us, “No one has ever seen God. It is God’s only Son, who is ever
close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” Jesus made God known to humankind, but you
wouldn’t guess it reading most newspapers or watching the four major television
networks. The United States as a society separates Church and State. Our foreign
affairs, the Courts, the economy, the public educational system, and even our
recreation, proceed as if God didn’t exist, even if in fact Jesus makes God
known to Christians who are the supposed majority religion. Not only is God not
mentioned, but we experience a value system that pays little heed to God’s
Kingdom as we know it. In public life, might
makes right. Money talks and everything else walks. As active Christians, we assume the existence
of God when in church and in our prayer lives, but do we remember God exists
when we’re in the mall, on the freeway, or at work? More likely than not, we
tone down, or even hide, our faith, to get along with the atheists and
agnostics that so heavily populate our world.
The existence of God
is a basic question for everyone, not just Christians. It is the first hurdle
we jump in carrying out the Great Commission. If we are to preach the Gospel
and baptize people as Jesus commanded us, God’s existence is the first question
we have to be prepared to answer when we try to convince our skeptical
neighbors that yes, indeed, the person of Jesus has something to offer to
improve their lives and perhaps they should come to Church to receive Him and
learn about Him.
A Jewish person
living in Jesus’ time who had doubts about the existence of God might consult a
Rabbi. That’s what I did. In his book, Between God and Man, Rabbi Abraham
Herschel tells us that there are three pathways to God: sensing God’s presence
in the world, sensing God’s presence through scripture, and sensing God’s
presence in what God does. In Isaiah,
God says, “To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal? Lift up your
eyes on high and see who created these, says the Holy One. He who brings out
their host and numbers them, calling them by name.”[1]
In Exodus, beginning the Commandments, God
says, “I am the Lord thy God.”[2]
In Exodus, Moses read from the book of the covenant, “All that the Lord has
spoken we will do.”[3]
Of course, all of these statements assume the hearer accepts that what
scripture says is true. These statements point to the existence of God, but do
not prove God exists.
A twenty-first
century Florida Rabbi, Terry Bookman, in his book, God 101, says that the existence of God is ultimately a question of
faith whether you believe in God or not. For Bookman, a statement that God
exists is a statement of faith. But Bookman also points out that a statement
that God does not exist is also a statement of faith. His point is, there is no
proof of God. He appears to be right.
In my former years
I made my living as a private investigator, and one of my talents was finding
people, particularly, those who didn’t want to be found. But one can’t go do an
investigation of God’s existence or whereabouts as if you were looking for a
person. So we are forced to determine whether God exists in only two ways: what God does and what God says. As Yuri Gargarin proved to us, you can’t get on top
of a rocket and be transported to heaven and find God. God, without the
incarnation of Jesus, is not a flesh and blood person like you and I that we
can go and visit and hug.
So who, or what, is
God? What God is drives the question of how we know God exists. This
morning’s psalm tells us plenty about God’s nature. It talks about God as
creator, as one who numbers the stars, makes the weather, and takes care of
animals. Hence, on a primary level, we can say that we know God because God
created everything, perhaps starting in the way outlined in Genesis[4]
and continuing in an ever changing path we continue to discover and have yet to
discover. This accounts for some of the arguments commonly made for God’s
existence: the “argument from change,” that the world is ever changing and that
nothing changes itself; the “argument from efficient causality, that there is
no uncaused reality and that ultimately there is something that is one thing
that is uncaused and that thing is God; the so-called “design argument,” that
because the universe displays a staggering amount of intelligibility, there is
indeed, a designer; and the so-called “argument from contingency,” meaning that
if something exists, there must exist what it takes for that thing to exist.
On another level,
we experience God as spirit. Perhaps God is in the wind. Ancient Israel was, climatogically, somewhat like Southern California . It bordered on Sea to the West and
had a desert to the East. When the wind blew from the East, it was a mist of
fine sand which scorched the vegetation and parched the land. Kind of like our
Santa Ana winds, when we get when a high
pressure system parks itself over the Southwest. To quote Isaiah, “the grass withers and the
flowers fall, when the breath of the Lord blows on them.”[5]
I know, I’ve seen that happen because I live in the Desert. The Western winds,
in our case the winds that blow across the Los Angeles Basis from the Pacific Ocean , however, were totally different. In
winter, west and southwest winds blow moisture on to our dry land (think of our
Pacific Storms), and in the summer, the winds off the Pacific do not bring
rain, but relief from the heat---that’s the cooling trends we occasionally get
in our summers.
Another way we
experience God as Spirit is through our very breath. When God made Adam, God
breathed into him the breath of life and he became alive. After all, the basic
difference between a live person and a dead one is the former breathes and the
latter doesn’t.
And finally, the
Spirit of God can be found in the human ability to think. Pharaoh recognized
that the Spirit of God was in Joseph, son of Jacob, when exclaimed, “Can we
find anyone else like Joseph, one in whom is the Spirit of God? Pharaoh then
proceeded to place Joseph in charge of his house and people.[6]
As evil as Pharaoh was, he was at least
perceptive enough to see some connection between wisdom and God’s spirit, perhaps
recognizing that God exists without actually saying so. Pharaoh later got a pretty good dose of God’s
existence when the waters of the Red Sea drowned his chariots and chariot
drivers as Moses led God’s people out of the slavery of Egypt
To accept the evangelist
John’s position, that Jesus is living proof of God’s existence, of course requires
us to believe that Jesus is God’s Son. The divinity of Jesus is the belief that
most distinguishes Christians from other religious people. Certainly, St. John
did not have an easy time convincing his contemporaries that Jesus was
God. The world in which he lived
featured the polytheism of the Graeco-Roman world somewhat immersed in emperor
worship into which was inserted the Jewish community that considered any claim
that Jesus was God’s son to be blasphemy. For a modern atheist or agnostic, the
idea of Jesus as God’s son is an even bigger leap since such people typically
limit their perception of reality to their five senses. Neither they, nor the ordinary non-Jewish people
in Palestine
First, if the
Gospels lie, who invented the lie and why? What did they get out of it? After
all, in the first three centuries of the Christian Church, being a Christian
was a very dangerous thing to be. The chances are you’d be tortured or killed.
Who would lie to subject themselves to something like that? Most people act out
of self-interest, to benefit themselves, not self-sacrifice. Second, if the
divine nature of Jesus was all a myth, why didn’t the people who knew him say
so? Unlike Buddha or Mohammed, whose followers considered them divine several
generations later, Jesus was recognized as divine by the people who immediately
knew him. So when Jesus told those
around him he was God’s son, he was not lying. He had the wrong psychological
profile. He was unselfish, caring, and passionate about teaching truth and
helping others find truth. Liars, however, lie for selfish reasons, like money,
fame, pleasure, or power. Jesus, however, had few, if any, worldly goods, and
gave up his own life. Some may think
Jesus is a lunatic, but consider: lunatics don’t have the personal qualities of
Jesus, like practical wisdom, all-cards-on-the-table honesty, and unpredictable
creativity. The idea is that Jesus is trustworthy because he wasn’t a liar and
he wasn’t a lunatic; he is therefore believable.
Second, in
addressing the question of the divinity of Jesus, we must also pay attention to
the verb tense: do we say that Jesus was
divine or is divine? If we say he was divine, then the notions of His
Resurrection and Parousia (a fancy word for “second coming”) don’t wash…if he was, then He died without expecting to
rise again, ascend to heaven, and come again. If he is divine, then he is in fact the risen Lord among us.
It is the presence
of Jesus still among us that proves he is
God incarnate. Not only is Jesus
sacramentally present among us in the form of bread and wine, Jesus continues
to be part not only of our lives, but many lives. Jesus’ agenda is God’s
agenda, and when we carry out that agenda, we show the world that God is
present. That agenda is one that doesn’t go along with the program of the world
around us, but is one that upsets the established order, where God’s notions of
peace and justice win out over what we see around us. The prophet Isaiah talks
about the predators of the animal kingdom lie down with those who are usually
their prey[7]
and where in the Gospel John the Baptist tells the established religious
authorities their days in charge are numbered and a kingdom favoring the
unprivileged will soon take over.[8]
The extent to which we carry out that
agenda is a tangible manifestation of God’s presence.
The proof of God
that exists is God that God is alive among us in the form of God’s Church. The Church is a sacrament itself, an outward
and visible sign of God’s grace at work within it. By “Church” I don’t mean the institutional
church. By “Church” I mean the people of God, who exist as God’s children
independently of any ecclesial body. God Incarnate today is a Church that
actualizes in its existence the values of God’s kingdom and carries out God’s
agenda as an agent of change and not as an affirmation of the status quo. The
Church is not a building. It is a community that meets in a building. That
community is us, our fleshly bodies, which in our everyday lives are making peace
among enemies, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless,
and in the way we live, making life choices that place a higher priority to our
spiritual existence than to material goods and transitory pleasures. And in
doing this, to keep the Spirit of God alive, we must be relentless. Our task as
Christians is to relentlessly continue our mission to bring God’s kingdom to
earth as it is in heaven. Yes, in St. John’s
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