What is the Only Reality that Is Certain in an Uncertain World?

A few weeks ago my dad had a stroke, and then a week later he had another one.   Thankfully, he is doing ok.   But I feel shaky about the whole thing.  He seems fine now, but what news might the next call from home bring?   Someone once said that when it comes to life, we are all on a limited lease and subject to immediate eviction.  

And forget the uncertainty of life, so much in life is uncertain.   The economy seems to be better, but who really knows.   And no can tell you when and where the next terrorist might pop up and do something awful.    No one knows who will win the election, and what that will mean for our future.   Heck, is Hurricane Matthew going to hit us?  Who knows?  And that’s just the big uncertainties.  Every day brings all sorts of other uncertainties with our families, our friends, our work, our health.  The list goes on.   So many things feel uncertain around us, even the future of this church.   It can be crazy making.

How do you have confidence and calm in a time where so much seems so uncertain?   How do you find a place to stand when everything around you seems so shaky, so temporary even?   In these words from Hebrews, God shows the way.  So let’s hear what God has to say.

Hebrews 11:1-13  

So much of life is uncertain.   And uncertainty has always been around.    Hundreds of years ago, Ben Franklin wrote this in a letter…. ...but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. How true that is!    So how do you live with confidence, even peace, in a world where so much can’t be counted on?    Here God tells you.   You gain that confidence the more you realize the truth in what you cannot see; the uncertainty of what you can see, and in the face of that, trust in the one certainty that cannot be broken ever.

Too often people get confused about what faith means.  They think faith means certainty.  But in reality certainty shuts you off to faith.  How is that?    Faith means you open yourselves to new possibilities, to a world deeper and more mysterious than what you can see.   And to do that, you have to let go of certainties.  

When the writer of Hebrews describes faith as the conviction of things not seen, that word conviction actually means a conclusion that you gain by looking at evidence.   In fact, in the old King James translation, they translated it as the evidence of things not seen.  What God is telling you here is that the more you ponder that evidence, the more you seek to understand it (as verse 3 puts it), the more you will see that truth, that reality goes far deeper than anything you can see.   What am I talking about?   

The great 20^th century philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre put it this way.  He said.  Let’s say that I have a radio.   How do I know that I have a good radio?    To know that, I have to know what a radio is built for, right?    If I said I had a terrible radio because it didn’t open my garage door that would be ridiculous.   Radios weren’t built to do that.   To know it’s a good radio, I gotta judge it based on what it was built for.  Does it receive radio waves, and turn them into a sound I can listen to?   That’s how I know it’s a good radio, how well it does that.   But if I don’t know that, if I don’t what it was built for, then no way can I judge if it’s doing it well or not.

So now, let’s take it a bit further.  How do you know a human being is good or bad, that what they’re doing is good or bad?    Well, you can’t know that unless you know what a human being was built for, what the purpose of being human is.   But if the world you see around you is all that there is, that everything only has a natural cause.   Then there is no creator or anything beyond the natural world.   You are simply here by accident, which means you don’t have any underlying purpose at all.  And that means, you cannot evaluate if any human being is good or bad.   So, for example, you might feel that violence and oppression is wrong.  So what?  That’s just your opinion.  You don’t have anything to base it on. 

Yet, when your heart breaks at children ravaged by bombs in Syria, it’s not just a feeling.   You know. Something deep within you tells you.  This is not the way the world is supposed to be.   But if this world is all there is, then what basis do you have for that knowledge?  You’ve got nothing, nothing at all.

And if this world is all there is, then not only does it undermine any sense of right or wrong.  It undermines pleasure.    When your child smiles at you or heck any child smiles at you, you feel your heart leap.   It brings a smile to your face.   Now, if when that happened, you just thought, well, this is just an ingrained evolutionary response so that human genes keep reproducing, how does that rock your world?  Yet, at the level of what you see, that is exactly what is going on.   But does that give you pleasure?  No.    You know deeper than that explanation, something more is going on, something that touches you with joy.  

And the same goes for any pleasure, the delight in a good meal; the sense of transcendence you feel at a beautiful piece of music.   If that just gets reduced to some chemical response in your brain, it so minimizes what is happening.  Yet at the level of what you see, all of that is true.  But you just know that beyond that, something deeper is going on, something you cannot see  

And the more you see that, you more you realize that faith doesn’t give you certainty.  Instead, it will actually undermine whatever certainties you feel.     That’s what all these examples here in Hebrews have in common.   The faith they had did not make their life more certain, it made it less.   Look at Abraham here.  Abraham had a good thing going.  He lived with his father’s family on land they had owned for generations.  He knew his neighbors.  Everything was familiar, the language, the culture, the landscape.   Yet here comes God saying.  Hey, Abraham leave that all behind, and follow me.  And where is God going to take Abraham? God doesn’t say.  God says leave, and I’ll tell you as you go.

Why does God do that?  Why does God again and again in Abraham’s life, in the life of all these people here, throw their lives into radical uncertainty?    God is trying to free them from false certainty, from certainties that are not really certain at all.  

As a parent, you hear lots of advice on how to raise your child, and all of it seems so, well, authoritative, so sure.    But how sure is it, really?    Millions swore by a parenting expert named Dr. Spock, but now, what Dr. Spock said is questioned, and some even disproved.    And more likely than not, a lot of what experts are telling parents today, experts  a generation from now will be saying.  That was not right at all.  

In fact, so much of what seems certain knowledge now will, in a generation, be seen as inaccurate, maybe even completely wrong.  That’s why God is in the business of delivering uncertainty.  God wants human beings to realize that pretty much everything has the certainty of sand.   You can’t rely on it. Not only is it not permanent, but it can be swept out from under you like that.  God knows.  The more you realize that uncertainty, the more it will open your mind to the only actual reality that is certain.  And what is that?

Let’s go back to Abraham.    As Abraham journeyed into the unknown with God, he began to have some serious doubts.  God had promised descendants like the sand on the shore, and Abraham, now very old, still didn’t even have a son.    Abraham brought his questions to God.   And that night, as Abraham slept, God came to him in a dream. 

In this dream, Abraham was in the desert at night, and in front of him, he saw all sorts of animals cut in half and laid out on the desert floor.   Now this probably seems weird to you.  But Abraham knew exactly what it was.    These cut up animals were part of a standard method of ratifying an agreement, of sealing a deal in his day.   Basically, it worked like this.   Each party to the deal would walk through the animals.  And in doing that, they were saying.   May it be with me as it is with these animals if I don’t keep my end of the bargain.    And in this dream, God does two shocking things.  First, God comes in the form of a flaming torch and walks through the animals.  But then beyond that, he doesn’t ask Abraham to do the same.   Do you see what God was telling Abraham?

God was saying if I fail to keep my word to you, let me be torn apart.   But not only that, even if you fail to keep your word to me, I will pay the penalty.   God was telling Abraham.  Not only will I not fail you, but when you fail me, I won’t walk away.  No matter how badly you mess up, I will never give up on you.   I will never stop loving you ever, even if it costs me my life.   That is the one certainty you can count on, no matter what.   And that promise, Abraham did not see completed.  He only greeted it, as it says in verse 13, from a distance.  But what Abraham only greeted, you have seen. 

In Jesus, you and I see the God who paid the penalty, who was torn to pieces on our behalf.   We see God the source of all certainty experiencing excruciating uncertainty for us.   Do you think Jesus knew resurrection lay on the other side of that cross?   He believed it, yes.  But he didn’t know it.  In his humiliation, his suffering, his death, he was facing the ultimate uncertainty, that all of this pain could be for nothing.  When he cried out, My God, My God why have you forsaken me, it’s because in that moment, he felt that God had, that he was utterly alone.  God fell into the infinite cosmic abandonment and agony of that cross, so you might know you will never be abandoned, that you can know you will always be loved now and forever.   In Jesus, God left behind all security, all certainty to make you secure in his love no matter what you face.    And all that God asks is that you trust in that love, that you rest in it; that you make that love your firm foundation.  And the more you do that, the more confidence and peace you will have, no matter how uncertain your life or this world seems. Why? You know you don’t stand upon shifting sand, but on a solid rock.   For you will know that nothing in the universe is more certain than this, God’s love for you.