Sermon Tone Analysis

Title : Sight 101

 

We are visual people.

When we talking about our understanding of the world, we even use the phrase “how we /see/ the world.”

Our sight is fundamental to how we live.

If we were dogs, it would be our sense of smell – they literally see the world primarily not through their eyes but through their noses.

Bats are aural creatures – it’s through their ears that they understand the world.

But, as Christians, while we may be blessed with five physical senses, we are called to understand the world not with our eyes, but with our hearts.

As Michael Card poetically likes to say, God wants us to see “not with but through the eye.”

Seeing past the eye means faith, and it you want to understand faith, you have to know the text that we just read, Hebrews 11:1.

Hebrews 11:1 is one of those verses in which you really see English struggle to translate the Greek.

Hebrews 11:1 is one of those famous verses you’ll hear quoted often – but its okay if you hear slightly different words, because the fundamental nature of  what is being conveyed is both very exact and yet not precisely in categories that we understand.

Depending on your version, any of the following are totally valid translations:

-         The classic is “Faith is the evidence of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

-         More modern translations will say, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

-         I did some word study here, it’s totally fair to even say, “Faith is the foundation of things hoped for, it is the rebuke of things not seen.”

– That last word is the same one that Paul uses when he says that all Scripture is profitable for reproof.

Regardless of how we translate it, the author of Hebrews is trying to make some very basic points about how we see.

We can get so caught up in looking for evidence for faith, that we forget that faith does not require evidence – faith is the evidence, it is the very essence of our hope.

What I’d like to do this morning is take a few minutes to think about how we see the world, because how we see the world dictates how we will live in it.

We can “see” in different categories, and they are all here in Hebrews 11:1 – 3. Verse 1 tells us that if you see only with your eye, you’ll miss out on hope.

Verse 3 tells us that if you see with your ear, you might begin to hear the story behind what you see.

But the rest of the chapter, as we’ll see in coming weeks, tells us that we must see with our hearts – looking beyond the forces we perceive, to the person who gives meaning to it all.

But first, as I said, I want to look at what seeing with our eyes really means.

*Seeing with the eye*

Several of you know that a week ago[1], I was driving on Route 50 near the weight station before Gilberts Corner.

It was cold, the sun was right in my eyes, and my windshield was dirty.

Now, I did something really stupid here.

Even though I literally could not see, I kept going in a false hope that nothing was there.

Now, one of the basic mistakes people make in life is thinking that just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean its not there.

If my “faith” was the assurance that I hoped the road was clear, the bumper of that Ford Explorer coming through my engine was the rebuke of things not seen!

When the officer took my statement, he asked me how fast I was going.

I answered, “Well, since I couldn’t see I was going slow – only about 30 MPH, but I guess that was about 29 MPH faster than I should have!”

One of the developmental stages that a baby goes through is something that psychologists call “object permanence.”

When a very tiny baby plays peek-a-boo, for instance, as they cover their eyes, they literally think you aren’t there.

As they get older, however, they realize that out of sight doesn’t necessarily have to mean out of mind.

The fact that an object has permanence even beyond their perception is called “object permanence.”

Now, when Hebrews talks about the conviction things not seen, I see that there is a call for a form of spiritual object permanence.

I don’t fully know why God chooses not to reveal himself through our eyes, but I do know that he calls us to grow up spiritually and learn to trust that he is still up there, and still in charge, even if we can’t see him with our eyes.

In vs.3, Hebrews even uses an example of where this kind of sight is necessary.

Back when this was written, just about nobody would have questioned that God had made the universe.

There simply wasn’t a viable alternative.

But today, we do have one.

Now, let me state up front, I am a creationist.

Let me also say, that God is never going to ask you your opinion[2] on the subject, ‘cause frankly there are other questions he’s more interested in, like “Did you love my son?”

But this one is contentious, so just thought I’d warn you.

You see, ultimately, Scientists have taught us a different creation story, one that presumes because you cannot see God, he isn’t there.

Instead, we are called to believe in a mechanical universe, governed only by rules and laws that are inviolable.

It a universe without mercy, exploding stars, pulverizing rocks, amino acid soups, and miraculously life.

We human beings play only the most minuscule of parts, and are at the whim of this grand thing called “the universe.”

Now, you might be surprised to hear me say, that scientists call us to believe.

You are taught in school that scientists only rely on observation.

The scientific method, after all, is observation and experiment.

But, if you read the science as I do, you’ll see that scientists call us to believe a great number of things we can’t even hope to see.

Scientists, for example, know that visible matter doesn’t even account for 10% of the matter necessary to create the Big Bang.

So, they ask us to believe in something called “Dark Matter” – stuff that you cannot see.

The big, new hot theory of forces is called String Theory.

Oddly enough, I actually think it makes a lot sense – but in order for it to work, you need to accept that there are 11 dimensions.

Being 3 dimensional creatures, that means there are dimensions that we can’t even comprehend[3], in the same way that a person living in a two dimensional piece of paper could possibly comprehend a circle, but never a sphere.

In Biology, we are taught to believe that species can evolve to form new ones.

And yet, as honest scientist will tell you, there is such a thing as irreducible complexity.

There are certain structures, like the eye, that are simply too complex to have developed gradually, one piece at a time.

Even using punctuated equilibrium, there is just no way to jump from a single celled organism to a complex organ – unless if you have faith in the machine they call the universe.

There is a well known atheist named Anthony Flew who demanded that you need to go “wherever the evidence takes you.”

After 80 years of denying that there was a creator, he finally had to concede recently that there was.

He admitted that the evidence just doesn’t get you out of certain biological predicaments.

Sadly, he hasn’t come all the way to believe that this creator loves him, but he had to admit there was one.

Ultimately, I figured out that both evolutionism and creationism force you to have faith in something.

One calls you to faith in a machine, the other in a person.

I know which one can forgive my sins.

*Seeing With the Ear*

In re-reading this passage, I realized that while Hebrews 11:1 gets all the press, Hebrews 11:3 really underscores the point.

It is through faith that we understand that the worlds were /framed/ by – get this – the WORD OF GOD.

Machines relate to the universe through natural laws, forces, reactions and effects, but we know people relate to people using words.

The words we use tell stories that help us to understand the world.

After I went to that class up in CT a few weeks ago, Susan & I went to New York, and while we were there we went to the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History right on Central Park West.

If you have never gone there, it’s really worth the trip.

The planetarium is this big glass window box with a four or five-story sphere in the center of it.

The main point of that sphere is to give you some idea of scales.

If you look at the sphere as the entire universe, for instance, they have a little disk that is our galaxy – the milky way.

If that sphere is sun, then they have some billiard-ball sized planets that represent Mars, Venus, and the Earth.

It’s all about scale, and its truly a humbling experience.

The stories that they tell there are fascinating.

You will learn a lot about how our universe operates by listening to the stories they tell – but here’s the one thing I have to warn you about.

Every story has an agenda, so you need to go armed with the knowledge that not all stories are created equal.

Now, I was particularly taken with their exhibit about the Big Bang.

There’s a little movie at the beginning narrated by Maya Angelou, and the Center was kind enough to send me the text of that movie, and I want to read you the story that they read.

Listen carefully, because while its beautifully written, there is a fundamental difference between a story of faith and a story of science.

Here’s how it goes:

<BIG BANG[4]>

 

What happened /before /the birth of our universe?

Our laws of physics don’t tell us.

But many scientists imagine there was a void, existing by itself or within an older universe.

*In that formless void*, *bubbles of space*, far smaller than atoms, *were coming into being* and vanishing again.

Thirteen* billion years ago, one of those tiny bubbles grew and suddenly ballooned out in a gigantic explosion called the Big Bang.

*[NOTE: record also with twelve, fourteen, and fifteen]

 

/Space itself/ exploded in cosmic fire, giving birth to /all/ the energy and matter in our universe.

The expansion of space carried with it clouds of matter.

[NOTE: read “with it” as one phrase, followed by a slight pause before “clouds”]

 

The universe /cooled/ as it expanded.

Gravity pulled together enormous clumps of matter…