The First Word
FROM FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF BONITA SPRINGS
SERMON BY REV. DOUG PRATT  NOVEMBER 10, 2013
PART 5 OF 6
Learning the Common Core
Today’s message is Part 5 of a six-part series, working our way
together through the brilliant insights and concepts presented in the
classic book by C.S. Lewis called Mere Christianity. We are calling it
Pure Christianity because these truths represent the essence or the
core of what we believe.
In a big and diverse society like ours, there has been a great national discussion of what the basic ideas and skills are that we
need—especially in the area of education. If we are going to continue as the world leader in business, technology, and military power,
we need each subsequent generation of Americans to be smart and
competent. And so some experts in school curriculum have proposed a series of lessons and tests that have been given the label
“Common Core.” The effort has been somewhat controversial, including here in Florida. Not everyone is in agreement with the
Common Core plan, or how it should be implemented and administered. I will not take a side in that debate. But there is, I believe, a
strong consensus that students need to all know and be able to apply certain universal “core” truths—whether they live in Florida,
Arkansas or Alaska.
That is what C.S. Lewis sought to provide in the area of Christian beliefs and Christian living in his book. No matter what our
faith tradition (Episcopalian, like Lewis, or Presbyterian, Catholic,
Baptist, Lutheran, non-denominational, etc.), these are the things
that an educated and successful Christian needs to know and apply.
In the final section of Mere Christianity that we will consider today and
next week, we learn what those “core” or “pure” understandings and
convictions are.
But first, let’s let in the sunlight of a portion of God’s Word (because
everything Lewis wrote was based on scripture, and everything we
teach and practice here at this church is likewise Bible-centered). Our
text will be from Ephesians chapter 3, a letter written by the Apostle
Paul to Christians in the first century. Having outlined in the previous
couple chapters the common core of Christian beliefs, Paul senses that
the minds of his readers may be a bit overwhelmed. So he expresses the
following prayer for his readers (and us) that we will be able to absorb
and appropriate everything he is teaching us.
W
hen I think of all of this, I fall to my knees and
pray to the Father, the Creator of everything in
heaven and on earth. I pray that from His glorious, unlimited resources He will empower you with inner
strength through His Spirit. Then Christ will make His
home in your hearts as you trust in Him. Your roots
will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong.
And may you have the power to understand, as all
God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high
and how deep His love is. May you experience the love
of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully.
Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of
life and power that comes from God.
Ephesians 3:14-19 (NLT)
The Paradox of Knowledge
We are living in a time of phenomenal change in the fields of technology, knowledge and application. These changes are exploding all
around us. It is as if we were at the town park at nightfall on the
Fourth of July and happened to wander into the area where the fireworks were set up, just as they began to shoot off. Explosions are happening all around us, and it’s dizzying and hard to keep up.
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There are two counter-trends or opposite currents occurring simultaneously in technology in these exciting decades of the 21 st century.
I’ll call them the “Paradox of Knowledge.” They are the twin poles (or
extremes) of Complexity and Simplicity. In the devices we use and the
machines our lives depend upon, we are seeing both an increasing
complexity in design and an opposite movement towards simplicity in
usage.
Think about the telephone. It was once a comparatively simple device: electrical impulses from a sending machine traveled over wires to
a receiver and were re-translated back into human speech. No discredit to Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor, but old land-line phones
were relatively easy to understand, and even to repair. Think of the
complexity of an Apple iPhone 5s. It can handle thousands of complex
apps (as much knowledge as a Carnegie Public Library of a century
ago), record and photograph, access the internet, and basically manage
your life. The tiny inner workings are incredibly complex.
Think about the automobile engine. It was once something that an
average mechanic, working in his or her garage, could understand, repair and service on their own. Now engines are phenomenally complicated and sophisticated, with advanced circuitry and controls. Nobody can diagnose or repair the engine of the latest Mercedes or Honda without high-tech equipment.
And yet, with complexity, has come greater simplicity of use for
the consumer. Many of us remember the early days of the internet,
with dial-up modems and primitive search engines. Today the use and
application of technology by the leading companies is becoming more
and more “user-friendly” and simple.
In fact, in our highly-competitive global business world, if a product is not being constantly improved and made more simple and accessible, easier to use and more enjoyable an experience, it will be left in
the dust by others. Look at Blackberry and Nokia—once industry leaders, but now in big trouble.
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The business books getting the most attention in executive suites
and boardrooms today are focusing precisely on this paradox of complexity and simplicity. Best sellers include Simple: Conquering the Crisis
of Complexity by Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn, and The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. Just as technology grows ever more intricate, the
opposite pressure is to make it ever simpler. The primitive computer
that Bill Gates assembled in his Harvard dorm room in 1975 following
a step-by-step guide in a Popular Mechanics article and with various
crude parts—the Advair 8800—is like a Model T compared to the latest
computer products. And yet Gates’ computer was hard to use, with
monochrome screen and code language. Now our smart phones and
tablets are easy to see and use: bright colors, responding to simple
touch or vocal commands. More complex yet more simple is the paradox of modern life.
Which is precisely why the federal government has caused such
frustration and brought such derision and disrespect upon itself. The
IRS tax code is a hopelessly complex mess. But because the government
is a monopoly and doesn’t have to compete in a free market, it has no
incentive to try to make its more than 14,000 pages of sometimescontradictory rules and procedures more “user-friendly.” That’s the
danger of a monopoly: bureaucrats are free to engage in ever-greater
complexity of design with no correspondent pressure towards simplicity
of use, as the competitive marketplace demands.
The debacle of the launch of Affordable Health Care is the latest
example. Only one percent of the 3.7 million who tried to register for
coverage in the first week were successful. The best tech experts are
now saying that the core mistake the government made was in deciding to use “closed” versus “open” source software. Most of the best
software today is designed and continuously improved and perfected
by using open source. But out of an obsessiveness with control and
secrecy, the HHS department decided to keep its health care website
completely out of the public eye. This was perhaps a predictable reaction in an era of “Wikileaks” and [NSA leaker] Edward Snowden, but
the result has been disastrous—and will be stunningly difficult to fix.
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This is another paradox of modern technology: though security and
secrecy concerns become greater because of potential theft of information, yet internet software needs to be an “open secret” to function
best.
The Spiritual Paradox
While these examples may be rather technical, I believe they are
relevant to what we find in Mere Christianity. Even though Lewis lived
and died long before the smart phone and other current technology
was developed, I’m confident that he grasped this basic concept.
Here’s how the paradox of complexity and simplicity plays out in the
realm of the spiritual world that is our focus:
God is vastly more complex and greater than we can ever imagine, ever envision or ever understand Him;
Yet “accessing” God, by enjoying an intimate daily relationship
with Him, is far simpler than humans would ever expect.
Though the mystery and wonder of the universe is a secret we
will never be able to fully crack;
Yet our Creator has made the basic truths so easily known that
all of us can grasp the important truths—His revelation is like
an “open source” code of software, available to all mankind.
Let’s look at each of these components in closer detail.
The Complexity of God
When we dig into the inner workings of Christian theology
(comparable to removing the back of a smart phone to see the circuitry,
or lifting the hood of our car to study the engine), we come upon an irreducible and beyond-logic complexity. God the Creator, the Life-Force,
the Sovereign Ruler and the Ultimate Purpose behind the incomprehensible universe, is somehow a Trinity: He is Three-and-yet-One.
Our smartest minds have been trying for centuries to make sense of
this. How can something be both Three and One? And yet God is—
and the Bible doesn’t allow us to minimize it. In the brief passage we
read in Ephesians 3 we find all the Persons of the Trinity. The Father
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or Creator reigns supreme, the Spirit works within each of us, the Son
has accomplished the vital work of redemption and now lives in each
believer’s heart. Their interaction is beyond what we can ever grasp—
more mysterious and interconnected than all the circuits in an iPhone.
You can’t remove any of them without the whole biblical understanding of God collapsing. All we can do is just accept that God is infinitely more complex than the human mind can ever grasp.
That should actually be a comfort and reassurance to us—and a
confirmation that the Christian description of reality is true and not
“dumbed-down” or cheapened to be easy. For thousands of years
humans have wanted to create an easy God. They have carved statues
out of marble and stone and wood. They have worshiped and bowed
down to created things: the holy rock in Mecca, the Hindu statues of
their multiple but limited gods. They have wanted to put God in a
nice, neat little box.
But reality is too vast and complicated to fit into our finite minds.
Indeed, any God you or I could understand would be too small and
unworthy of our worship and adoration.
The Simplicity of the Christian message
Although God is unimaginably beyond us and greater than us, He
has chosen to come down to our level and actually care about us human
beings as individuals. He wants to know you and me and be part of our
lives. He desires to forgive our sins, answer our prayers, guide us and
comfort us, protect us from evil and temptation, and shepherd us all the
way to an eternal existence in communion with Him. And through
Christ’s death and resurrection and the Holy Spirit’s constant presence,
He has made it unbelievably simple to access.
We humans have always wanted to make it more complicated than
God has. We have laid out complex sets of rules and regulations. The
Pharisees of Jesus’ time were the First Century equivalent of the IRS bureaucrats: piling laws on top of laws, so complicated that no one could
follow them all. The followers of Mohammed have made it complicated
to please Allah: you have to pray five times a day, pilgrimage to Mecca,
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fast during Ramadan, avoid certain foods and drinks, and participate in
jihad—and that’s just to get a chance at eternal life. Even people who
have grown up in a Christian tradition have been skeptical and suspicious that God’s grace could be received by faith alone. Surely we have
to do something to qualify or be worthy. It can’t be that easy.
Yet Paul and C.S. Lewis and other insightful Christian thinkers in
each generation, have continued to show us that, in fact, God’s offer is
incredibly simple. Believe in Christ. Turn from trusting in yourself to
trusting in Him. Just open the door, and keep it open all the time. You
don’t earn or deserve it. It’s grace.
Paul’s prayer is that we will learn how to trust in the Lord, and
keep trusting Him. He says, “May you experience the love of Christ,
though it is too great to understand fully.” In other words, you don’t
have to be an automotive engineer and understand every system under the hood of your car in order to drive it. Just get behind the wheel.
You don’t have to master the complicated technology of the smart
phone. The way you learn to use it is by using it. The way you download apps is by pressing the screen and letting the technology do the
work. Long before the modern business world discovered the paradox
of complexity yet simplicity, God had already perfected it.
The “Open Source” of God’s Revelation
What an incredible book the Bible is. Scripture is not just an ancient writing of ancient thinkers. Uniquely, it is God Himself who has
revealed what we need to know and guided the thoughts and the
hands of those who put it down in writing. We don’t have to go
through some secret or esoteric initiation to have access to God’s
Word. We don’t need to go to graduate school. Nothing has been hidden, locked behind firewalls of security. It’s available to the whole human race. This is what we need.
Lewis ends this portion of Mere Christianity by moving from the
nature of God (the Trinity, His vastness and infinite dimensions, His
incomprehensible power and mind-boggling genius) to the complexity
and unpredictability of human life and experience. We are never able
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to see all that is happening at any given moment, nor can we see with
20/20 foresight what tomorrow will bring. This is frustrating to us, because we like to be able to control our little worlds. But we never can
completely.
So how does a Christian make sense of the ups and downs and unexpected swings and turns of life? Why was one person’s life long and
another’s cut short? Why am I sick or injured? Why is that person not
being properly punished by God’s justice? How could that individual
be allowed to do that to me? Why is somebody more successful than
I am? Why isn’t life fair? Why did God stick me with my body and
my dysfunctional family and all my problems?
Those are questions we will only get, at best, partial answers to—
and in many cases only after much time passes. Those are questions
that, though they feel at times so urgent and pressing, are ones we can
only put in the almighty hands of God. If we don’t, they will imprison
us. If we don’t let them go, they will keep their hands around our
throats.
The only question we should focus our limited minds upon is this:
What, God, do you want me to do now? In other words, how should a
faithful Christian respond in my current circumstances? God can’t answer our demand to know and understand everything, because we’re
simply not able to. But He always will answer—through His Word,
through His Spirit, and through the example, encouragement and wisdom of other believers—our questions of What should I do next? 
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