Proof of Heaven?

Ecclesiastes 3:18-22; 2 Corinthians 5:1-8

I am preaching on your suggestions this summer, and one of them was about the afterlife and the soul. The person making the suggestion was wondering how in the light of modern science and human evolution, people can believe any more in an afterlife and a soul. She asked, when did the belief in an afterlife begin? It is a valid question. Many people have their doubts about any type of continued existence after death. Scientific materialism is a powerful worldview, and many people think that it disproves all things religious and spiritual. Some of the most knowledgeable and wisest people in all history have wondered what we can know – if anything - about what happens after death. 

The author of Ecclesiastes, traditionally considered to be Solomon, asked the question. He writes in chapter three, “I said in my heart, “Concerning the condition of the sons of men, God tests them, that they may see that they themselves are like animals.” 19 For what happens to the sons of men also happens to animals; one thing befalls them: as one dies, so dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath; man has no advantage over animals, for all is vanity. 20 All go to one place: all are from the dust, and all return to dust. 21 Who knows the spirit of the sons of men, which goes upward, and the spirit of the animal, which goes down to the earth?”

Ecclesiastes sounds very modern. Many people consider human beings as nothing more than self-conscious animals. We are a little smarter than other primates because we have a larger brain but not really much different. Just mortal beings who come into existence at birth and cease to exist at death. How can we know that we are anything more than that? How do we really know that there is a soul that survives death? Isn’t that more likely just wishful thinking that we might somehow survive the dissolution of our bodies? 

There was a famous experiment done in 1907 by a physician name Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverill, MA. He postulated that the soul could be proven to exist by weighing the bodies of people immediately before and after death. He thought the soul had weight and mass, and therefore a person would weigh less immediately after death. He did six experiments involving six patients and concluded that the human soul did exist and that it weighed and average of ¾ of an ounce or about 21 grams. He repeated the experiment on 15 dogs and found that there was no weight loss, and therefore that dogs did not have souls. So I guess all dogs don’t go to heaven! Four years later he attempted to take pictures of the soul leaving the body with x-rays. Those experiments were not so successful.

We might think that such experiments are a little comical, but we have similar claims today. Dr. Eben Alexander, 54-year-old neurosurgeon, had a near death experience, which according to him proves that there is a soul and a heaven. His book is accordingly entitled “Proof of Heaven.” To me it is not much different than Dr. MacDougall, but a lot of people think otherwise. His book has been on The New York Times bestseller list for 30 weeks.

Is there a soul? Is there an afterlife? There is evidence that man from earliest times have believed in some continued existence after death. Neanderthals buried their death in such a manner with possessions to lead anthropologists to conclude that they thought there was some type of continued existence. Nearly all the religions of the world since ancient times have held to some concept of an afterlife, from ancestor worship in ancient China, to the tombs of the Pharaohs in ancient Egypt, to the idea of reincarnation in ancient India, to elaborate scenarios of heavens and hells in Tibetan Buddhism.  As long as there have been humans there has been some understanding of an afterlife. What about our Christian Scriptures? What do they teach?

I. The ancient Hebrews of the OT did not really speculate about an afterlife. There is a mostly silence in the Hebrew Scriptures when it comes to an afterlife. The OT saints were much more focused on this life, and they did not think much about the next life. But there are hints of something after death. We have references to a state called Sheol, a shadowy type of existence similar to the ancient Greek concept of Hades. We have the OT story of the ghost of Samuel brought back from the grave by the Witch of Endor at the request of King Saul. And we have hope of being with God after death in the famous 23^rd Psalm, which ends with the words, “And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” That has brought comfort to people at countless funerals. Although some modern translations have changed the wording to “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.” That changes the meaning significantly. But the truth is that there is scant evidence in the OT for an afterlife.

II. That changes completely when we come to the NT. Jesus talks a lot about heaven and also about hell for that matter – something we don’t talk much about. Who can forget Jesus’ famous parable about Lazarus and the rich man? Lazarus is pictured residing in a paradise described as Abraham’s bosom. Whereas the Rich man, named Dives in Christian tradition is pictured in Hades, which has been transformed from the shadow world of the Greeks to a place of torment and fire. In another parable Jesus spoke about a Final Judgment and separating people into two groups like a shepherd separating sheep from the goats. He concludes his story saying, “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” Jesus clearly believed in and taught an afterlife. These well known words of Jesus ar also often used at funerals: “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. 2 In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.”

Elsewhere in the NT we have ample evidence of the belief in the afterlife. The Apostle Paul says in our Epistle Reading: “For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, 3 if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. 4 For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life. 5 Now He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who also has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. 6 So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. 7 For we walk by faith, not by sight. 8 We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.”

I love that idea that when we are absent from the body we are immediately present with the Lord. That takes the sting away from death. Paul talks elsewhere about resurrection of the dead and having a spiritual body. The concept of an afterlife is clearly taught in the NT.

III. But now we return to the question: How do we know for sure that there is an afterlife? I have three ways that I believe that we can be confident that there is existence beyond death. I am not calling them proof of heaven. I don’t think you can prove the existence of an afterlife any more than you can prove the existence of God. But I think there are convincing reasons to believe that what the there is life after death.

1. The first reason is the testimony of people who have died. This is my least favorite reason and I put it first for that reason. Previously from this pulpit I have expressed my skepticism of much of the Near Death Experience phenomenon in our culture. Everybody and their cousin seem to have taken a trip to heaven and returned to write a book about it. It seems like every other month there is a new bestseller describing somebody’s adventures in the afterlife – going through a dark tunnel toward a light and then seeing loved ones and/or an angel or Jesus. These books have been coming in waves for decades, and right now we seem to be experiencing another wave of such books.

I have read many of them. I see good reason not to believe many of them. I guess I just don’t trust people who are making money off heaven. But every once in a while I come across an account that makes me doubt my doubt. One such account is that the Rev. John Price, a retired pastor and hospital chaplain, in his book “Revealing Heaven.” Like me Price scoffed at reports of near-death experiences because he thought they reduced religion to ghost stories. His attitude changed, though, after a young woman visited his Episcopal church one Sunday with her 3-year-old daughter. Price had last seen the mother three years earlier. She had brought her then-7-week-old daughter to the church for baptism. Price hadn't heard from her since. But when she reappeared, she told Price an amazing story. She had been feeding her daughter a week after the baptism when milk dribbled out of the infant's mouth and her eyes rolled back into her head. The woman rushed her daughter to the emergency room, where she was resuscitated and treated for a severe upper respiratory infection. Three years later, the mother was driving past the same hospital with her daughter when the girl said, “Look, Mom, that’s where Jesus brought me back to you.” “The mother nearly wrecked her car,” Price said. “She never told her baby about God, Jesus, her near-death experience, nothing. All that happened when the girl was 8 weeks old. How could she remember that?”

Another account is related by Raymond Moody, a physician and psychiatrist who was the first one to write a bestselling book on Near Death Experiences entitled “Life after Life” in 1975. He tells the story that got him interested in the topic. It was the testimony of George Ritchie, who also was a psychiatrist. It was December 1943, and Ritchie was in basic training with the U.S. Army at Camp Barkeley, Texas. He contracted pneumonia and was placed in the hospital infirmary, where his temperature spiked to 107. The medical staff piled blankets on top of Ritchie’s shivering body, but he was eventually pronounced dead. “I could hear the doctor give the order to prep me for the morgue, which was puzzling, because I had the sensation of still being alive,” Ritchie said. He even remembers rising from the hospital gurney to talk to the hospital staff. But the doctors and nurses walked right through him when he approached them. He then saw his lifeless body in a room and began weeping when he realized he was dead. Suddenly, the room brightened “until it seemed as though a million welding torches were going off around me.” He says he was commanded to stand because he was being ushered into the presence of the Son of God. There, he saw every minute detail of his life flash by, including his C-section birth. He then heard a voice that asked, “What have you done with your life?"

These are just two stories. There are other stories that are also impressive. I personally have heard stories during my ministry from people in my congregations who have not written books, not widely publicized their accounts, and have nothing to gain. These stories are not proof of heaven. But they seem to me to be more than just the hallucinations of a dying brain. They make me think.

2. The second reason I believe in heaven is because of faith. When it comes down to it we are not going to have proof. But we still have to make decision based on the evidence that we have.  I guess some people would say that we don’t really have to make a decision. You can be always an agnostic on the subject if you want, and just say you don’t know and can’t know and leave it at that. I can’t do that. I think one has to make a choice based on the information we have. That takes faith.

I have faith in Christ. I believe that Jesus actually said the things the Gospels say he does about the afterlife, and that they were not placed in his mouth by the gospel writers much later. I think the historical and literary evidence points in that direction. I trust that if Jesus taught about the afterlife that he knows what he is talking about. He says to Nicodemus, “11 Most assuredly, I say to you, We speak what We know and testify what We have seen, and you do not receive Our witness. 12 If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven.” Jesus says he was in heaven before his birth. I believe him.

I also believe he knows about the afterlife because he experienced it. The Gospels say that he died and rose from the dead on the third day. The evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is a whole other topic, which I have preached regularly, especially at Easter time, and I can’t redo it here and now. I think the evidence points to the fact that Jesus really did rise from the dead. And if so, then Jesus did not just have a Near Death Experience; he had a real death experience. He was dead from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning. He was dead and lying cold in a tomb, and he came back to life. And he said, “I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of Death.”

You have to trust somebody when it comes to matters beyond your own information and experience. The key is to trust trustworthy people. I think Christ is trustworthy. I trust Jesus. If I am wrong I am wrong. But I throw in my lot with him; I tie my fate to his. If I am wrong and there is no God and no afterlife, then the worst thing that could happen is that when I die I cease to exist. Then death is nothing more than a dreamless sleep, and we should not be afraid of it any more than we are afraid to go to sleep at night. We should not be afraid of dying any more than we were afraid of being born. Actually the worst thing would be if the Muslims are right. If Islam is right then we Christians are blasphemers for calling Jesus the Son of God, and we can expect to be cast into hell by Allah. But I will place my faith in what Jesus says in the Gospels over what Mohammad says in the Quran. You have to put your faith somewhere and in someone. I place my faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

3. The third reason I believe in heaven is because of personal experience. I have not had a Near Death Experience, nor taken a spiritual express from the hospital emergency room to the Pearly Gates. But I do experience eternal life. I experience eternal life every day.  Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you” or I think it is better translated, ‘The Kingdom of God is in your midst – all around you.” That is my spiritual experience. For me the presence of God is as real as the presence of the sun or the wind on my face.

Of course I could be living a fantasy and deceiving myself. That is possible for any of us. But we tend to trust our own experience. I trust my own experience. And I experience God. I experience the Spirit of the risen Christ. I experience the Kingdom of God around me. I understand heaven to be simply the continuation of what I already know of the presence of God, only more so. Paul says that “now we see through a mirror dimly, but then we shall see face to face. Now we know in part but then we shall know fully even as we are fully known.” The most convincing evidence for me of eternal life after death is eternal life before death. We don’t have to wait till our hearts stop beating to enter the kingdom of heaven or see the kingdom. Heaven is where God is. And God is here now when we have the eyes to see. That is the closest I have to proof of heaven. 

Spiritual, but not Religious Enough

                                    Matthew 9:14-17; Galatians 1:6-12

I can’t take all the credit for the title of this message this morning. The idea for the title (but not the sermon) came from a new book that just came out in January 2013 entitled, “When "Spiritual but Not Religious" Is Not Enough: Seeing God in Surprising Places, Even the Church.” It was written by Lillian Daniel, a United Church of Christ pastor in the Chicago area and an editor at large for Christian Century Magazine. She tackles the well-known phenomenon of increasing numbers of people in recent decades who describe themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.” These are folks who have some religious beliefs and spiritual practice but who do not affiliate with any religious group.  This topic also happens to be a Summer Sermon Suggestion from someone in the congregation. I want to tackle this subject by looking at four different categories of people.

1. First is Neither Spiritual nor Religious. This is the fastest growing segment of people in America today. There have been a number of surveys and studies done that show that more and more people are choosing no religion at all – and not only no organized religion, but no personal spirituality. According to analysis of newly released survey data by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Duke University, Religious affiliation in the United States is at its lowest point since it began to be tracked in the 1930s. Last year, one in five Americans claimed they had no religious preference, more than double the number reported in 1990.” (Americans and religion increasingly parting ways, new survey shows” By Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations - March 12, 2013)

Atheism is on the rise. According to a 2012 Gallup poll, religiosity is on the decline and atheism is on the rise not only in the US. The poll, called “The Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism,” was conducted by WIN-Gallup International and is based on interviews with 50,000 people from 57 countries and five continents. Participants were asked the question, “Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person, or a convinced atheist?” It found that the number of Americans who say they are “religious” dropped from 73 percent in 2005 (the last time the poll was conducted) to 60 percent. At the same time, the number of Americans who say they are atheists rose, from 1 percent to 5 percent. (Poll shows atheism on the rise in the U.S. By Kimberly Winston, Religion News Service, Published: August 13, 2012)

This is the new reality in the religious landscape of the United States. Northern New England is leading the way. New England is the most nonreligious part of the country. At the Annual Meeting of the American Baptist Churches of Vermont and New Hampshire that I attended two weeks ago, Dale Edwards, our Regional Executive Minister, repeatedly referred to Vermont and New Hampshire as the two most unchristian states in the nation. Our region is in the forefront of this movement away from both religion and spirituality.

2. The second group I want to mention is the popular Spiritual but not Religious group. This approach has been popular for a long time. This group has not given up on spiritual matters, but has given up on so-called organized religion.

The older members of this group were brought up in the church. The younger age group may or may not have been brought up in the church. If they have a church background, then somewhere along the way – usually about adolescence or maybe a bit later –high school or college – they stopped attending services. They just weren’t interested anymore. They list a number of reasons why they became disillusioned with the church and stopped attending and may have stopped identifying themselves as Christians.  They didn’t like something that some religious leader, person or group said or did. They say they have transcended that traditional understanding of God. They may still believe in God or at least some vague divine spirit or energy. They may meditate, even pray, maybe in the past even read through the whole Bible.

But church is not for them any longer. They have spiritually outgrown it. Religion is a cultural and spiritual backwater to them. They point to the Crusades of 1000 years ago or the pedophile priest scandal of today or televangelists or Islamic terrorists as typical products of religion. Basically they have come to believe that religion is bad for people and society and is responsible for much of the bad that happens in the world. They think church is all about making people feel guilty, shameful, sinful and bad about themselves. They see religion as socially and emotionally oppressive and abusive; it is all about rules and hypocrisy and money. On the other hand they see themselves as spiritual, emphasizing love and truth, tolerance, diversity, welcoming, and accepting. They are very spiritual, and definitely not religious.

3. The third group is the Religious but not Spiritual group. This is the people that the Spiritual but not Religious group love to criticize. I admit that there is some religion in the world that is harmful. Fundamentalist forms of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, as well as Hinduism and Buddhism and any religions can be harmful. Legalism is alive and well. You read the stories of the fundamentalist Mormon polygamist groups. 60 Minutes had a story on young Jews coming out of strict forms of Hasidic Judaism. The stories they tell of life in that strict religious community do not sound very healthy. There are hate groups within Christianity. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas is a well-known example. Even Buddhism, which is nonviolence by doctrine, has its share of child abuse by monks and increasing violence against other religions in Buddhist countries like Burma, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Hinduism is known for its radicalism and violence against other faiths and prejudice against the untouchables even today.  There is a lot of religion that is not what I would call spiritual.

There are religious but not spiritual people in mainline Protestant and evangelical churches. Religious people going through the motions of dogma, ritual and rules because that is what they have always done. There are people who practice religion but have no living experience of God or Christ. There are certainly churches that teach a theology of legalism, guilt and shame. In Jesus’ day, he reserved his harshest criticism for such folks, who in that day were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Sadducees where the high-church ritualistic religious folks of the day – the priesthood who ran the temple with all its ceremonies, robes and incense. The Pharisees were a lay movement who controlled the synagogues. They were into a strict moralism, but they had turned it into a religion of rules. There are still Pharisees and Sadducees around today in Christianity.

But not nearly as many as people outside the church think. I have been part of organized religion and institutional church as a leader for 39 years.  I have served mainline Protestant churches and evangelical churches. My experience with religious folks is that the vast majority of church people are sincere spiritually minded people who are seeking God or who have found a fulfilling faith in God. There will always be some religionists in churches - dogmatic people and legalistic people. Churches have their share of hypocrites, but no more than the society at large and I think actually far fewer. We have folks who put their politics above God. But I see that much more in the Democratic and Republican parties than in the Christian church. There are judgmental people in the churches, but to be honest I have heard much more judgmental attitude by people outside the churches being directed toward the churches than I have heard coming from the other direction. But there are certainly people who are religious but not spiritual.

4. Fourth is the Spiritual and Religious Group. In my opinion, this is the healthiest of the four options.  I think it is unhealthy to be religious but not spiritual, and just as unhealthy to be spiritual but not religious. What is needed is a healthy balance – that Goldilocks zone – not too hot, not too cold … just right! A balance of spirituality and religion. That is what Jesus was talking about in this illustration of the wine and the wineskins. On this occasion the disciples of John the Baptist questioned Jesus about why he did not follow the spiritual practice of fasting like the Pharisees (and also they themselves) did. Jesus responds saying, “16 No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and the tear is made worse. 17 Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

Jesus is saying that his teaching was something new. It was like new wine, and could not be put in the old wineskins – the structure – of the religion of his day. But he said it did need wineskins. Jesus didn’t say he wanted the wine without the wineskins. He didn’t say, “I believe in wine, but I don’t believe in wineskins. Just drink it without any container at all – no wineskins or wine jars or wine cups.” How silly would that be! Wine needs wineskins. Jesus said his spirituality needed new wineskins for his new wine. Spirituality is the wine. Religion is the wineskin. You can’t have wine without wineskins. On the other hand wineskins without wine are just dry empty shells. You will die of thirst. There is a need for both. We need structure. Let me give you some examples of what I mean.

One is ethics. My observation of the Spiritual but Not Religious movement is that it tends to be weak on ethics and morals. It has shunned moral commandments as legalistic and judgmental, but in so doing it is very vague on any clear sense of right and wrong. It has become very subjective and individualistic. The Ten Commandments have become the Ten Suggestions or Ten Nonbinding Recommendations. Out of fear of eliciting guilt or shame, the Spirituality movement has discarded any mention of sin. Sin has become a dirty word.  Nothing is right or wrong; it is just helpful or unhelpful. Out of fear of appearing judgmental, people have rejected the whole idea of any moral judgment or accountability. I know there is danger of religion of becoming legalistic and moralistic. But there is also the other danger of being amoral and immoral. In the Letter to the Galatians the apostle Paul tried to steer a course between rigid legalism on one hand and moral lawlessness on the other. Spirituality without the moral structure of a religious set of ethics drifts into immorality masquerading as spiritual liberty.

Another value of religion is community. The SBNR have no clearly defined spiritual community to which they are accountable. I am not saying there is no community at all. There may have friends who share values, and one might bump into some of the same people at conferences or meetings. But there is no ongoing commitment to one another like we find in a church – at least as we should find in a church. Church today has largely sold out to culture and is not the strong community it should be. But at its best church forces us to be accountable to God and to each other. It forces us to deal with people. It forces us to forgive each other. Without spiritual community if you don’t get along with someone you just avoid them. But if we are committed to spiritual community as part of a church, we can’t avoid them. We see them every week at least. That is the way God designed it. Church is designed to grind the rough edges off our lives, and that can be uncomfortable. Church is meant to be both comfortable and uncomfortable. It is comfortable because we share our lives with each other on a deep spiritual level. It can be uncomfortable because sharing our lives means that our sins are exposed. We realize that those around us are sinners and we are sinners. We need to be challenged to forsake our sin and we need to be forgiven when we sin. We don’t have that anywhere else but in healthy church or a good healthy family.

Another value of religion is Scripture and Religious Tradition. These keep us grounded. The Spiritual but not religious movement picks from the spiritual buffet table that is American religious life. At a buffet we chose this food we like and pass by that food we don’t like. When we sit down our plate is full of only the things that make us happy, leaving all that other stuff on the buffet. That is the way the Spirituality movement is in America. We choose this teaching or that practice from this religion or that religion. You ever see a kid at a buffet table? They do not choose the healthiest foods. Neither do we. Religion forces us to eat our vegetables. Having Holy Scripture forces us to deal with ideas that we would otherwise reject. It forces us to wrestle with doctrines that might otherwise reject without a thought. Just because we don’t like some Christian doctrine doesn’t mean it isn’t true! That is why Paul says, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.”  Having a canon of Holy Scripture forces us to deal with things in our life that we would like to ignore. Scripture – if we read it and meditate upon it - keep us honest and holy. Religious tradition does this also, but in a less authoritative sense. Tradition is changing; scripture is not.

A lot of the SBNR reject whole portions and teachings of Christianity because they do not fit in with personal likes and dislikes. Our personal preferences in spiritual matters become our ultimate authority. That is a recipe for spiritual disaster. Often times we don’t like what is best for us. Jesus never promised us an easy road. That is the whole reason we cannot reject scripture or treat it lightly.

In conclusion we need to be both spiritual and religious. We need the living water and holy flame of the Holy Spirit or our religion becomes dead. We need the structure and guidance of religion or our spirituality is directionless and a shallow self-indulgence. The spiritual need to be religious, and the religious need to be spiritual. Then we will be spiritual and religious enough.

Recipe For Happiness

Matthew 5:1-12; Luke 6:20-26

I visited the Dartmouth College Bookstore a few weeks ago while in Hanover, and I was thumbing through the bestsellers displayed on the table right when you walk in. I always look for the religious books to see what people are reading these days. There was a book by the Dalai Lama, as there usually is. I opened it up and the first words were these: “The purpose of our lives is to be happy.” Those words could have been written by an American prosperity gospel preacher as much as a Tibetan Buddhist monk – although they are clearly coming from different perspectives. We Americans desire to be happy. We have the “pursuit of happiness” written into our Declaration of Independence as one of our "unalienable rights" given to us by our Creator and for the protection of which our forefathers formed these United States of America. The pursuit of happiness is part of our American DNA. I was not surprised to hear that phrase extolled by Chuck Estano, the keynote speaker at the Memorial Day ceremony in Sandwich this year. 

There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times on May 29 written by T. M. Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford and the author of “When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God.” The article was entitled “Belief is the Least Part of Faith.” He was saying that it was not belief that is at the heart of evangelical Christianity. He wrote: “To be clear, I am not arguing that belief is not important to Christians. It is obviously important. But secular Americans often think that the most important thing to understand about religion is why people believe in God, because we think that belief precedes action and explains choice. That’s part of our folk model of the mind: that belief comes first. And that was not really what I saw after my years spending time in evangelical churches. I saw that people went to church to experience joy and to learn how to have more of it.”

This joy or happiness is what I am talking about today. I will be using the beatitudes as my text this morning. That is because a popular modern translation uses the word “happy” in the beatitudes. Instead of the familiar “Blessed are the poor in spirit, etc.” Today's English Version (also known as the Good News Translation or the Good News Bible) replaces the word blessed with the word happy: “Happy are you poor, happy are you who are hungry now, happy are you who weep now, Happy are you when people hate you.” These sound like very strange words to our ears. Are the translators correct in rendering it in this fashion? I think the word “blessed” is a much richer, deeper and broader term, and generally I prefer it. But happiness is part of what it means to be blessed. So it is not incorrect to use the word here. That is clear by the fact that all translations will end the beatitudes with words like: “Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven….” To rejoice, be glad, and be happy are part of what Jesus is part of what Jesus means by “blessed” in the beatitudes. In these beatitudes Jesus is giving us a recipe for happiness. It is a very different understanding of happiness than what the world offers.

1. First, Happiness is not dependent upon what you own. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Poor in spirit does not mean spiritually poor (even though some translations take that route.) Jesus is talking about material wealth, not spiritual wealth. He makes that clear in Luke’s form of the beatitudes which omits the phrase “in spirit.” There Jesus says simply “blessed are you poor” or (as the TEV translation says) of “Happy are you poor.” But the phrase “poor in spirit” is helpful for it tells us that what matters is the spirit in which we possess things. What matters is our attitude. We are to treat possessions lightly; as if it made little difference whether we had them or not. Happiness is not dependent on whether we are financially rich or poor. Rich people can be miserable. Poor people can be miserable also. Especially if they so poor they do not have the necessities of life – if they are starving to death. You have to have the necessities of life, but above that it doesn’t really matter that much. It doesn’t matter how much we possess. It matters how much things possess us. “Poor in spirit” refers to being unattached to material wealth, whether we have much or little.

In the May 27 edition of UA Today there was an article entitled, “Can wealth really buy happiness?” It presented the findings of a new study by the Brookings Institution. It found that to a certain extent wealth can buy happiness, seeming to contradict Jesus’ teaching and another well-publicized 2010 study that indicated that money did not make people happier. But it really doesn’t say that when you read it closely. The subtitle for the article read: “If money isn't buying you joy, you're probably not spending it right.” The article concludes by saying, “So can money buy happiness? The answer turns out to be complicated, because happiness is complicated. But if money isn't buying you happiness, we do know this: You're probably not spending it right.” The article confirms that money is not making people happy. People with money are happy only if they spent money on people rather than possessions. Basically it says that true wealth and happiness is measured in relationships.  Helping people, not making money, makes you happy.

2. Second, happiness is found in embracing all emotions – even the strong negative ones. Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn, For they shall be comforted.” Or as the TEV puts t “Happy are those who mourn.” That makes no sense on the surface. Those who are mourning are the least happy! Grief is one of the strongest, saddest emotions that one can have. How can one be happy when one is sad? When Jesus says happy or blessed are those who mourn, he is saying that strong emotions will come and go, but the comfort of God remains forever. “Blessed are those who mourn, For they shall be comforted.”

True joy – which is the word I generally prefer over happiness – can be the background of our lives. It can be the default setting of our hearts. Sure we will be sad sometimes. When bad things happen, we will be sad. Something would be psychologically wrong with us if we weren’t! We will sometimes be very, very sad. But it will pass. And when it passes the underlying joy will return. As psalm 30 says, “weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” It is alright to be sad. It is alright to be unhappy sometimes. I don’t trust people who always have a smile on their face. I have known preachers who wear a perpetual grin. I don’t trust them. It just doesn’t seem genuine. There are some things in life that you just can’t grin about. There are some times in life when we should cry and be angry about and be sad. We should not try to suppress feelings of loss and grief and sadness because we think it is not spiritual or not faithful. It is much healthier to experience and express these emotions fully and completely. Let whatever emotions that arise come. They won’t stay forever. Emotions have a life span; we can feel them ebb and flow. If we try to stop that natural process, we will get ourselves into psychological trouble. Feel whatever you are feeling; let emotions come and go, and when they have run their course joy will return.

3.Third, happiness is selflessness. “Blessed are the meek,” says Jesus. “Happy are those who are humble.” I would interpret this to refer to the selfless. Selfishness makes you unhappy; selflessness makes you happy. That is what that Brookings institution study found. The more you give yourself away the happier you are. Take Bill and Melinda Gates for example. Bill Gates, of course, is the founder of Microsoft. They are among the richest people in the world today. They are not religious at all. But they certainly appear to be happy. They are happy because they spending their fortune to help as many people as they can. I don’t know if you would call Bill Gates meek or humble, by the normal definitions of those words. But maybe we need to redefine those words. Scripture calls Moses meek. Numbers 12:3 says, “Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all people who were on the face of the earth.” But Moses was no doormat; he was a strong personality and a strong leader. So is Bill Gates.

I think humble and meek really mean selfless. Self gets in the way of our own happiness. Selfishness is the problem, and selflessness is the solution. It is not the external circumstances of our lives that make us happy or unhappy. It is how we approach life. And the strange truth is the less we think about and are preoccupied with ourselves and our happiness, the happier we are. It is a paradox..  The less we are the center of our lives, the more happy we are. The more we empty ourselves the more we can be filled with the joy of God. “Have this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus,“ the apostle Paul says, “who though he was in the form of God did not consider quality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.” One of the main ingredients in the recipe for happiness is selflessness.

4. Fourth, happiness comes when we hunger for what is right. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, For they shall be filled.” “Happy are those whose greatest desire is to do what God requires; God will satisfy them fully!” This is talking about morality and ethics. Too many people think of morality as a restrictive set of rules and laws that force us to do what you don’t want to do. And when we are forced to do what we don’t want to do we are unhappy. The key to happiness is to want to do what God wants. When you hunger and thirst to do what is right, there is joy! The Good News Translation of Psalm 1 says, “Happy are those who reject the advice of evil people, who do not follow the example of sinners     or join those who have no use for God. 2 Instead, they find joy in obeying the Law of the Lord, and they study it day and night.”

Some people think religion is a joyless affair. Unfortunately that is true of some religious people. I have known some very miserable people who call themselves Christians. But a truly spiritual Christian is one  who has been so transformed by the Holy Spirit that he/she loves what God loves and desires what God desires. The commandments of God are not burdensome “Thou shalt nots.” They are a joy. Because they have united with God by Christ and the Spirit, they want what God wants. It makes them happy to make God happy! 

5. Fifth, if you want to be happy, forgive. “Blessed are the merciful, For they shall obtain mercy.” “Happy are those who are merciful to others; God will be merciful to them!” My experience as a pastor is that one of the major causes of unhappiness in people’s lives is their unwillingness to forgive – unwillingness to show mercy to people who have hurt them. People hold resentments for days, weeks, months, even years. Somebody did something or said something and people will not let it go. That is unhealthy and it dampens the joy of life. I encourage you to forgive everyone who has ever done anything wrong to you, no matter what it is. To forgive someone doesn’t mean that what they did was alright or that you will let it happen again. Just the opposite; we only need to forgive someone who has done something wrong. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be legal consequences for wrongdoing. Justice is as much an attribute of God as forgiveness. Mercy and justice and not contradictory; they are complementary.

The Biblical word for forgive means simply “to let go.” The word picture is that of a clenched fist that is opened. It means you no longer hold onto the hurt and pain. What that person did to you may be a terrible thing! Then why would you want to carry that terrible thought around with you? Let it go! Forgive it and forget it and you will be happier. The same with our attitude God. Some people get angry with God. Something happened in their lives and they won’t forgive God for letting it happen. They will not step foot inside a church while alive, and these days they don’t even have to be buried from a church. I was talking to a funeral director not long ago. He told me about the three biggest trends in funerals in the last decade. They are (1) cremation (2) nonreligious funerals, and (3) no funeral or memorial service at all. People get mad at God or they get mad at a church or church people, and they never let it go. To forgive means to let it go. That is what the mercy of God means. When God forgives God lets go of our sins, as if they never happened. It doesn’t mean there is no such thing as sin. It means that sin has been dealt with through the Cross. Because of the love of God and the justice of God demonstrated in the death of Jesus, God lets go. God gives us the power to let go.

6. Sixth, happiness is purity of heart. “Blessed are the pure in heart, (Happy are the pure in heart) For they shall see God.” That verse is worth a whole sermon in itself. How do we become pure in heart? God does it by his grace; he purifies us and sanctifies us. But we need to do some things make that a living reality in our experience. This happens with spiritual disciplines like prayer, meditation, confession, repentance. I don’t think most Christians are serious enough about spiritual practices, doing the inner spiritual work of purification. Jesus said to the Pharisees “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. 28 Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” A lot of Christians look good when it comes to the externals, but not the internal. Scripture says, “man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” The insides are cleaned when we open up our hearts and minds and souls to the Holy Spirit. We do this by an inner decision and attitude and daily practice of surrendering our hearts to God.

7. Seventh, happiness is peacemaking. “Blessed are the peacemakers, For they shall be called sons of God.” “Happy are those who work for peace; God will call them his children!” We live in a warring world. Wars and rumors of wars abound. The new type of guerilla warfare called Islamic terrorism is horrible. People are killing innocent bystanders in the name of God! That is spiritually pathological! It shows the depths of depravity to which religion can go. But all warring is caused by the warring within the human heart. James says in his letter, “Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? 2 You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war.” Peterson’s translation puts it this way: “1-2 Where do you think all these appalling wars and quarrels come from? Do you think they just happen? Think again. They come about because you want your own way, and fight for it deep inside yourselves.” Conflict in the world is caused by conflict within the human heart. It will only be ended when the human heart is at peace with itself and at peace with God. That is the only way to happiness.

8. Lastly, happiness can be found even in persecution. Jesus said, “Happy are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires; the Kingdom of heaven belongs to them! 11 “Happy are you when people insult you and persecute you and tell all kinds of evil lies against you because you are my followers. 12 Be happy and glad, for a great reward is kept for you in heaven.” A couple of weeks ago I asked for prayer for Pastor Saeed Abedini, the American pastor serving an eight year prison sentence in Iran for his faith. His wife spoke at the UN Human Rights Council on Monday urging nations to fight for the release of her husband, but our government seems uninvolved. Anyway, on May 22 he wrote a letter from prison to his wife in America. He wrote: “I heard that the persecution, my arrest and imprisonment has united churches from different denominations, from different cities and countries, that would never come together because of their differences…. You don’t know how happy I was in the Lord and rejoiced knowing that in my chains the body of Christ has chained together and is brought to action and prayer.” He writes of joy in persecution, much like the apostle Paul often did in his letters.

We Americans don’t know what persecution is. We do know prejudice though. Anti-Christian prejudice is increasingly being recognized as a problem in America; some are calling it Christophobia. There is an anti-christian prejudice voiced by many people in this country. It is one of the last remaining socially acceptable forms of bigotry in our country. People will be called on the carpet for saying or writing anything racist, anti-semitic, or homophobic. But people can speak against Christians, against evangelicals, the institutional church and organized religion (which is code language for Christianity). People repeat offensive stereotypes of Christians as ignorant, hypocrites and bigots, and people just smile and agree.

I might be oversensitive to it because of my position as a church leader, but I hear it so much; it is pervasive and offensive to me. It is socially acceptable to be anti-Christian in our country. Many people are prejudiced against Christians and don’t even know it, the way many of us did not recognize our own racist attitudes back in the 1960’s. Hopefully this will change. Thankfully we are not experiencing persecution in this country; there are too many Christians with too much power. But many countries are experiencing increasing persecution of Christian communities. A report just issued by the Vatican two weeks ago to the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva reported that a staggering 100,000 Christians are killed annually because of their faith. Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world today. Several human rights groups report that anti-Christian violence is on the rise in countries like Pakistan, Nigeria and Egypt. The so-called Arab Spring has released anti-Christian violence in many lands.

What should be our response as Christians? Jesus says, “Blessed are those who are persecuted. Happy are you when people insult you and persecute you and tell all kinds of evil lies against you because you are my followers. 12 Be happy and glad, for a great reward is kept for you in heaven.” I admit to you that I am not there yet. This is something I need to learn, and I haven’t learned it yet. But the persecuted Church is teaching me this as I hear and read their testimonies of joy in the midsts of persecution. It is part of Jesus’ recipe for happiness. I hope you will join with me in heeding all eight of Jesus’ beatitudes and put into practice in our lives Christ’s recipe for happiness. 

Show Me God

John 14:1-11; 2 Corinthians 4:13-18

Throughout the month of May I asked for suggestions from the congregation and community for sermon topics. I got more than enough to see me through until Labor Day. Today on this first Sunday after Memorial Day, I will be preaching on one of these Summer Sermon Suggestions. This first one is theological in nature, but I am going to make it experiential. That is the way I understand theology. I do not see theology as a metaphysical explanation of reality; I see it as a description of our experience of reality. I see it as experiential. Theology is not meant to be just believed in our head, but known with the heart. If we just believe doctrine without experiencing it, we are simply indoctrinated and that is all. Then we have missed the point, which is to experience that to which the doctrine points. Doctrines are signs meant to point us to a spiritual reality; they are not in themselves spiritual reality. Today I am not just going to be talking about God; I will be attempting you lead you into an awareness of God.

The sermon suggestion for today involved the Trinity and Christ. In particular someone asked me what the term “Jesus Christ” meant. Another question by the same person asked about the Trinity, specifically how the Christian understanding of the trinity differs from that of UUA – the Unitarian Universalist Association. Presumably the person had in mind the local UUA congregation in Tamworth. I have chosen to answer these questions in the broader context of our experience of God.

In our Gospel Lesson for today Jesus was teaching about God, and his disciples were asking him questions. First Thomas asked him a question to which Jesus responded with the famous words: ““I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” I will get to Thomas later. Then Philip asked a follow up question. This is the one I want to focus on mainly. Actually it was more of a request than a question. Verse 8 reads “Philip said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us.” Jesus had been talking about God, and Philip cuts to the chase and asked Jesus to show him God. And Jesus does. That is what I want to do this morning – something you might consider impossible. That brings me to my first point, which is …

I. No one has ever seen God. John 1:18 tells us flat out, “No one has seen God at any time.” Jesus says to the Samaritan woman at the well, "God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth." No one can see God because God is invisible. This is what a lot of atheists these days don’t seem to get. Atheists reason that since no one has ever seen God then that proves that God does not exist. It does no such thing.

Atheism has a long and honorable intellectual history, and most atheists in recent centuries have been sophisticated philosophically and theologically. They understood what Christianity taught about God, and they disagreed. That is not the case now. A lot of atheists don’t seem to understand what Christianity teaches about God any more. There is an epidemic of theological illiteracy.   Recent atheist books I have read hold to a childish parody of God. They create a straw man which they label God and then tear it down. This is very easy to do, but it says nothing about the God worshipped by most Christians. I read an article by an atheist who seriously asked the question of where God was located. He wanted to know where in the universe God lived! That is ignorance. God is not located in space and time. God is spiritual, not physical.  God is omnipresent – meaning invisibly present in all places at all times. You can’t see God physically. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t see God. This leads to my second point, which is …

II. Everyone has seen God. No one has seen God physically, but everyone has seen God spiritually. But the apostle Paul says that people suppress this truth. In Romans 1 the apostle Paul talks about the “ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19 because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse….” Everyone sees God. Psalm 19 says: “The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork. 2 Day unto day utters speech, And night unto night reveals knowledge.” The hymn says, “This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.” Everyone has seen God. Which brings me quickly to my next point – the main point of this message:

III. Then show me. Show me God. That is what Philip asked. That is what people want today. They don’t want religion. They want to experience God firsthand and know that God is real. They want to see God – not physically of course, because God is not physical - but spiritually. How do you see God? How do you see the invisible? It is possible. Hebrews 11 says of Moses, “he endured as seeing Him who is invisible.” Our epistle Reading in 2 Corinthians says, “we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” God is real. And we can see God. How? That is the question. Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

I recently heard a true story told by a religious leader, who was visiting in the home of some friends. Their eight-year old daughter came up to him and said she wanted to see God. She asked the same question we are dealing with today: “Show me God.” The preacher said, “You go to school today and when you come home, I will show you God.” So she went to school and when she came home, she said, “Where is God? You said when I came home from school, you would show me God.” The man replied, “Tomorrow morning, before you go to school, come to me and I will show you God.” So she came to him the next morning and asked. “Show me God”. He replied. “You go to school today and when you come home, I will show you God.” She looked at him skeptically and said, “No, you said you would show me God yesterday and this morning. I will not go to school until you show me God.” (This determination was exactly what the man was hoping for.) “Okay,” the preacher said. “But you have to give God something. You can’t come to God empty-handed. (Which is very good advice, by the way.) “Do you have anything to give God?” She replied, “Mama gave me some chocolate to take to school today for desert. I will give God my chocolate.” He replied, “Good. God likes chocolate! (which says a lot about God I think.) He told her, “Give the chocolate to God.” She replied, “Where is he? He has to be here first before I can give him chocolate.” He replied, “No, you have to give it to him first.” She thought about this for a moment, and then put out her hand and offered God the chocolate. All of a sudden she started laughing and shouting for joy. Her joy became so loud that her mama came in the room to see what was happening. Her mama asked her, ‘What happened?” She replied, “I gave God chocolate and he took it!” Her mother replied, “What are you talking about? I don’t see God here!” “The little girl replied, “You don’t see God? Look. He is right here! I see him.”

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Jesus said that we have to become as little children to enter the Kingdom of God. We have to have the faith of a child. God is here, if we have eyes to see. It is because people do not believe God is present that they cannot see. People say, “I will believe it when I see it” or “seeing is believing.” That is not the way it works. It is just the opposite. Believing is seeing. We say that God is omnipresent. We say we hold this to be a true statement – that God is present everywhere. But if we truly believe that God is omnipresent, then we will see him everywhere. That is what I mean with I say that true theology is practical and not theoretical. It doesn’t matter what we tell others we believe about God, or even what we tell ourselves that we believe about God. When we truly believe that God is here now, we will see God here now. Do you see God here now? Scripture says that Moses saw God. It says he saw God on Mount Sinai and in the tent of meeting. Hebrews says Moses saw Him who is invisible. Do you see that which is invisible? Do you see God?

IV. Fourth, we see the invisible God in Jesus Christ. In our passage, Philip could not see God. That is why he asked Jesus to show him God. This is what Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me?”

We see the invisible God in Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul says in Colossians that Jesus is the “image of the invisible God.” This is where I will finally get around to answering the specific questions in the sermon suggestion. This is where the idea of the trinity originated. The Trinity is a way of describing the experience of seeing God in Jesus. The early church came to call Jesus God the Son. Christians are Trinitarian – we experience God in three persons. Tri means three. Uni mean one. The Unitarians  experience God as one, not three. Theological unitarians reject the trinity. When Unitarianism started, it was a theological movement that understood Jesus as a human preacher and teacher but not divine – not the Son of God nor God the Son. Jesus was understood as just a man like any other. The UUA has changed and broadened since those days. It still would not call itself a Christian church or denomination. It sees itself as broader and more inclusive than Christianity. But nowadays they would say that they are so inclusive that include even Trinitarian Christians in their ranks. In fact we used to have a couple in this church – Frank and Kathy Perkins – who were devout Christians and part of the UUA. The were members of the Christian Fellowship, a Trinitarian group, within the Unitarian Universalist Association.

The term Jesus Christ is another way of describing the divinity of Jesus. Jesus was his birth name. but Christ is not Jesus’ last name.  Christ is his title given to him by his followers. Peter was the first one to call him that saying, “You are the Christ ,the Son of the Living God!” Christ means anointed one. The Greek term is Christos – the Greek form of the Hebrew word that means Messiah. Kings were anointed in Israel, and the Messiah was seen as the King of Israel. Priests were anointed in Israel, and Jesus is understood as Christians’ High Priest, mediator between God and man. But most importantly for our topic this morning, Jesus was anointed with the Holy Spirit at his baptism, declaring him to be the Son of God. In his baptism Jesus experienced himself as the Son of God through the anointing of the Holy Spirit. In Jesus Christ we experience God.

In Jesus Christ I experience God. I call myself a Christian  not because I hold to certain theological ideas about Jesus as part of a creed or catechism. Being a Christian is not just believing a set of doctrines. It is experiencing Christ, knowing Him to be the Son of God, and submitting one’s life to him as Lord. When I see Jesus, I see God. I experience the risen Jesus alive today as God. How did I come to see this? By faith! Like that little girl. That is what Jesus told Philip. Listen how Jesus urges Philip to faith. “Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?”

Maybe you say, “I can’t believe that.” I can’t believe Jesus is God. My answer is: Sure you can! Let me show you how. It is so simple a child can do it. Just drop the doubt and you will see Christ for who he is. Thomas is another disciple mentioned in our gospel lesson. He is known as doubting Thomas. On Easter Thomas said he would not believe in Jesus unless he saw him with his own eyes. Thomas said, “Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.” But even when the risen Jesus called his bluff and stood right in front of him, Thomas would not believe. That was not really the issue. Seeing is not believing. Seeing did not result in believing for Thomas. So Jesus told him, “Stop doubting and believe.” When Thomas stopped doubting, then he saw God in Jesus. And he declared, “My Lord and my God.” That is what it comes down to for us also. We see when we believe. And when we see, we wonder how we ever did not see it earlier. We wonder why everyone cannot see. It is as plain as can be. God is here. Jesus is here. God is in Jesus. Jesus is in God and God is in us. That is my fifth point, which is …

V. Seeing God in others. When we say that God is omnipresent, that means that God is everywhere. He is in everything that exists.  As Paul said “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead….”  God is especially visible in people. That is what it means to say that humans are created in the image of God.  Even people who do not believe in God are made in the image of God. To be made in the image of God means that when we look at people we see God. That is the practical experiential meaning of this doctrine. Theologians theologize about what the image of God in human beings is. Is it the soul? Is it the reason? Is it creativity? Is it this or that? That approach misses the point. The point of the doctrine is to point us to seeing God in humans.

God should especially be seen in Christians, since we profess to know and serve God. As Christians we acknowledge Jesus as the Christ, as the Son of God, and we experience God as Holy Spirit dwelling within us. We experience God inside and outside and in others, especially in those who share our experience of Christ and the Holy Spirit.  We experience God the Creator in everyone created in the image of God, and we experience Christ in those who profess Christ and are part of the Body of Christ.

And when we truly see God in others, the normal Christian response is to love them as we love God. The apostle John writes: “No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him, and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.” He goes on to say in that same passage: “If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also.”

We see God in our Christian brothers and sisters. That is what it means to be church. And we see God in everyone; that is what it means to be a Christian in the world. Teresa of Calcutta said, “I see God in every human being. When I wash the leper's wounds I feel I am nursing the Lord himself. Is it not a beautiful experience?" Jesus said, “As you have done it for the least of these my brothers, you have done it for me.” God is present. Just look around and you will see God. Drop the doubt and believe. If you don’t see God, ask God why. In prayer ask Christ what Philip asked, “Show me God.” And Christ will show you God.