The
Quest For God
Sermon
by David Kilgour
Westminster
Presbyterian Church
Ottawa
November
17, 2002
As
we heard in the Old Testament
reading, God made his presence
known to Elijah not through the
wind, an earthquake or fire, but
in a “still small voice”.
In
the New Testament reading, Paul
criticizes the residents of Athens
for building an altar “to the
unknown God”, whom they worship
in ignorance.
Paul refers to the “God
that made the World and all things
therein, seeing that he is Lord
of heaven and earth, (and) dwelleth
not in temples made with hands,”
and so on.
Where
and how do you and I meet God
in our daily lives?
We
encounter Him in many ways, but
only if, like Elijah, Paul and
millions of other believers since,
we are open to Him.
It’s
interesting how the Internet deals
with God.
Yesterday, I typed in “proof
of God” on the Google search engine;
the result was 1,210,000 entries.
“Search For God” produced
three million; “God”, about 35,600,000.
There
is now, by the way, a daily Presbyterian
message and prayer available on
the Internet, which you can receive
daily at no cost. To subscribe, simply contact presbycan.ca/email.
Only
recently, Laura and I received
an email from a friend, containing
26 one-liners about God.
Two samples only:
- Most people
want to serve God, but only
in an advisory position, and
- We don’t
choose God’s message—His message
chooses us.
And
consider this ad on the web for
a book, A Sceptics Search for
God, by Ralph Muncaster.
The ad stresses that the
author was stunned to find that
fact after fact—biology, history,
archaeology, physics—lined up
with the Bible’s account.
But what really caught
my eye was one line in the ad:
“1456 hours of Sunday school
and church turned (the author)
into a hard-core atheist.”
I wonder where he attended.
C.S.
Lewis
Like
many Christians, I’m much attracted
by C.S. Lewis, who for many years
attempted to ignore God.
One of his biographers,
Walter Hooper, notes that Lewis’
atheism began to crumble only
when his father became ill.
Finally, wrote Lewis:
“…I gave in and admitted
that God was God, and knelt and
prayed:
perhaps, that night, I
was the most dejected and reluctant
convert in all England.”
Only
two years later (1931) did Lewis
come to accept that Jesus was
the Son of God. It was Lewis who later made his famous point
about Jesus:
“I’m trying here to prevent
you from saying the really silly
thing that people often say about
(Jesus):
‘I’m ready to accept Jesus
as a great moral teacher, but
I don’t accept his claim to be
God.’ That’s the one thing you
mustn’t say.
A man who was merely a
man and said the sort of things
Jesus said wouldn’t be a great
moral teacher.
He’d either be a lunatic—on
a level with the man who says
he’s a poached egg—or the Devil
of Hell.”
“…you
must make your choice.
Either this man was, and
is, the Son of God:
or else a madman or something
worse.”
Paul Johnson
Another British academic,
who has also written a lot about
God, is Paul Johnson.
One of his many books, The Quest For God, is about
his own religious walk over the
years.
The
book begins with the point that
the existence or non-existence
of God is the most important question
humans are called to answer.
One of the most extraordinary
things about the 20th
century for Johnson is that most
of humanity continued to believe
in God despite the best efforts
of numerous writers, including
Marx, Hegel, Huxley, Nietzsche,
Shaw and Sartre.
He
notes that human evil and brutality
cost the lives of more than 150
million persons in the century
we just left.
Both the Third Riech and
the Soviet Union were for Johnson
and many other “Godless constructs:
modern paganism in the
first case and openly proclaimed
atheist materialism in the second.”
Next Christianity
Finally,
on a snowy morning when God will
forgive us for wondering why we
don’t all live closer to the equator,
I recently came across a most
interesting article, “The Next
Christianity” by Phillip Jenkins.
It might be summarized
briefly thus:
-
Christianity
around the world today is
“growing and mutating in ways
that observers in the West
tend not to see.”
This century will in
all likelihood be one in which
religions of various kinds
replace ideology as the key
force across the planet.
-
A
new Christian Counter-revolution
is already underway beyond
affluent suburbs in North
America and elsewhere in the
industrialized democracies.
Jenkins describes it as “super-naturalism
and neo-orthodoxy… a vision
of Jesus as the embodiment
of divine power, who overcomes
the evil forces that inflict
calamity and sickness upon
the human race.”
-
In
the global South, he notes,
huge and growing Christian
populations—360 million in
Africa, 480 million in Latin
America and 313 million in
Asia, compared with only 260
million in North America,
are already dominant in the
Christian faith.
In fact, the centres
of the Christian world have
already moved “to Africa,
to Latin America, and to Asia…(the)
balance will never shift back.”
-
In
the case of Africa, for example,
the article notes that in
1900 there were only ten million
Christians in a continental
population of 107 million—about
nine percent. Today there
are about 360 million African
Christians out of 784 million
residents (46 percent) on
the continent.
-
Within
25 years, the world’s Christians
are expected to grow to about
2.6 billion.
By 2025, half of the
Christian population will
live in Africa and Latin America
and another 17 percent in
Asia. By then, Jenkins notes, “the proportion
of non-Latino whites among
the world’s Christians will
have fallen to perhaps one
in five.”
-
Pentecostal
Christians, who began as a
movement only at the beginning
of the 20th century,
are already 400 million strong—and
heavily concentrated in the
global South—but by 2040 there
could be as many as a billion.
My
own work in Africa, the Americas,
the Caribbean and now in Asia
has allowed me to observe this
Christian phenomenon.
Only recently, for example,
in Seoul, South Korea, I attended
a 3-hour service on a Thursday
night.
The 3000 or so people who
attended were mostly between 15-25!
I
see in the November issue of the Presbyterian Record that
Johnson’s article was in all likelihood
adapted from his book, The
Next Christendom:The Coming of Global Christianity.
The reviewer Peter Bush,
quotes from the book:
“Christianity
is flourishing wonderfully among
the poor and the persecuted, while
it atrophies among the rich and
secure.”
Bush
notes that if there is a shortage
of clergy in Canada the situation
in Latin America is four times
worse.
He quotes author Jenkins:
“Western investment in
missions has been cut back dramatically
at just the point it is most desperately
needed at the peak of the current
surge in Christian numbers.”
I’m
not suggesting that we all move
to El Salvador. There is plenty to do right here in Canada—both
with our own personal quests for
God and in persuading others to
search for God as well.
May
the words of my mouth and the
mediation of our hearts be acceptable
in your sight.
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