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Coming from Alabama, I had many friends in within the evangelical camp of Christianity; I still do. I often hear, or even see online, conversations or proofs our evangelical brethren offer for conclusive and definitive proof of God’s existence.
I also studied at the Great Books Program at St. John’s. Not only can I tell you all these proofs, I can walk you through some of the original ones, if not certainly the greatest ones. Obviously the existence of God makes sense to me, otherwise I wouldn’t be standing here.
Yet there can be uncertainty in this world. For all the proofs there are for God’s existence, there are many that have been put forth for His non-existence. We all have our low-points. We all have our doubts. I am no stranger to that.
What gets me through these times of doubt, though, aren’t these arguments, these definitive proofs that God exists. What gets me through are my memories of my time experiencing our Lord.
When I have doubts, I think back to feeling the Spirit’s presence descend on me during my Confirmation. I recall my experience of feeling God there as a teacher for me as I took the daunting task as a middle schooler to read the whole Bible. I remember God’s presence as I worshipped in Taizé, France on a youth trip in high school. I look back on my first experiences with God in Centering Prayer. I remember my time in Montana felling God in nature and sharing my own experience of our Lord Jesus Christ to the youth I served there. I think back on my time at Holy Comforter in Atlanta as a seminarian and witnessing our Lord with the people there. I recall feeling God’s presence in the early acts of my ministry. I remember feeling God’s pleasure in the celebration of my marriage.
Proofs and arguments are great. They give us a sense of rightness and assurance. But they are also just that: arguments. You can argue against them all you want. When I want deep and abiding reassurance that God is, in fact, there, it helps to recall the times when I witnessed Him there in my life.
All of this is what Paul speaks to today. Last week, Paul told the Corinthians, and us, that the world looks on God’s wisdom as foolishness. This week he begins by telling the Corinthians he specifically “did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom.” He points out that the wisdom the church has to offer isn’t the same wisdom of the age, Paul’s or ours. That which is of God cannot be revealed except by God alone. We cannot simply reason our way to God. God must first allow us to experience Him.
To know God, to believe in God, requires an openness to let God in and to realize that God was, in fact, there with us the whole time. Knowing God has little to do with knowledge and more to do with Trust, trust that God is there. In the end, as Paul says in his 2nd Epistle to the Corinthians, “we walk by Faith, not by sight.”
What ultimately will get us through the dark times aren’t proofs, but a deep and abiding relationship with God. We build up that relationship with our lifetime of experiences with our Lord, and it is on that, the very thing the world mocks us for, that we can come to believe.
In our belief, we are called, as we see throughout the rest of our readings today, to come closer with those around us. The words of Isaiah this week reflect the words of Micah last week, that God does not require fasting from us, but “to let the oppressed go free.” Our Psalm calls on us to stand firm in whose we are and what we do, as we have been hearing from our Scripture these past 3 weeks. Jesus Himself tells us that He has not “come to abolish the law or the prophets,” but instead He has come “to fulfill” them.
Our relationship with God impacts how we act in this world. As Jesus says, we are meant to be a “city on a hill”, a light for all the world to see. We do not act good merely to be good. We do not even seek to “love our neighbor” simply for our neighbor’s sake. Our actions are meant to draw all closer so that everyone might see God. Everything we are and everything we do is about deepening our relationship, as well as those of others, with God.
Our relationship with God, and the memory of that connection, is what gets us through. Yet God’s desire isn’t just to have that relationship with us. God’s desire is to be known by all. That work starts with our sharing of who God is. We are called to shine our light out so that everyone, not just us, can have the same life-restoring gift that is the Grace of God in our Lord Jesus Christ. Don’t hide your light or your story. Share it with all you may meet.