Sermon Sunday 21 May, 2017
LessonsActs 17: 22 - 311 Peter 3: 13 - 22
St John 14: 15 - 21
Recently my attention was drawn to an article in The Guardian. Entitled ‘The Meaning of Life in a World without Work’, the piece was written by a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Yuval Noah Harari. The thrust of the article was that, as artificial intelligence outperforms humans in more and more tasks, it will replace more and more jobs. New professions may emerge such as virtual-world designers. Harari asked how we keep unemployed people occupied and content? Can society provide a universal basic income for unemployed and unemployable people in a world in which many don’t need to work or can’t work in the sort of high-tech design jobs available?
One answer, he said, was computer games. Computer games or virtual reality can offer excitement and emotional engagement. Harari said that humanity has always engaged in virtual reality as a means of escaping the real world. As an atheist/secular writer, Harari says that religions are virtual reality games. Is Harari’s assessment of religion credible?
Harari wrote:
Muslims and Christians go through life trying to gain
points in their favourite virtual reality game. If you
pray every day, you get points. If you forget to pray,
you lose points. If by the end of your life you gain
enough points, then after you die you go to the next
level of the game (aka heaven).
Harari said that, in the past, virtual reality was superimposed on reality through human imagination and with sacred books. Today that virtual reality is through smartphones. Harari tells of walking with his six-year-old nephew through Jerusalem. His nephew was hunting for Pokémon. His nephew saw Pokémon everywhere. I have done this myself with my son: Mayfield Salisbury was the scene of a great battle! Harari said that it is no different for Jews, Muslims and Christians. With their sacred books they see holiness everywhere. However, Harari said, ‘When you look at the objective reality of Jerusalem, all you see are stones and buildings.’
Consumerism is another virtual reality game: you gain points by acquiring new cars, buying expensive brands and taking holidays abroad each year or several times a year. The more we can do these things - the more we can achieve or consume – the more we tell ourselves that we are winning the game.
Like all others who talk in tones of authority, Harari said, ‘To the best of our scientific knowledge, human life has no meaning.’
By way of example of living without working, of existing on minimum income, Harari points to Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men. All day they study the Scriptures and perform rituals; they receive subsidy and support from the State. They live in relative poverty but in every survey of ‘life satisfaction’, in every global survey, Israel is almost always at the top and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men report the highest levels of life satisfaction. Harari said that work being essential for meaning is an ideology, which needs to be challenged. The future, he said, belongs to fantasy, to virtual reality – and that is the way life has always been for humanity.
It was an interesting piece. I have spent a little time on what Harari said because it directly challenges religion and the nature of reality. It is a worldview which appeals to many. One of the reasons that churches are struggling in Western society is because too often we offer no answer to this sort of intellectual attack. Our society, our young people, hear Harari or the physicist Brian Cox say that the universe has no meaning and, on the whole, such statements go unchallenged. Harari said, ‘To the best of our scientific knowledge, human life has no meaning.’
Often, too often, the language used by the churches does not help. What does it mean to say that ‘Jesus Christ is our Saviour and Lord’ to a man who sees only stones in Jerusalem or to Brian Cox who says he never thinks about religion? In the Roman Empire of the first century, in a time when the emperor was saviour and lord of the people, the claim that Jesus was Saviour and Lord had poignant political, moral and spiritual meaning but – today – what does it mean?
If anyone ever says to you that the universe has no meaning, ask them how they know that. How does Harari or any scientist know that the universe has no meaning? Scientists know about science; they do not know the nature of reality. Harari looked at the stones in Jerusalem and spoke of objective reality: what is objective reality?! The human mind is capable of no such thing! Everything we think is thought in the consciousness, in the mind: everything is perspective. The very fact that scientific theories evolve, that old ones are discarded, is proof that the old theories were not reality; they were a best fit in a material mind-frame. Harari spoke of praying for points. That is a misunderstanding of prayer. Praying for points is what theologians calls the compensation argument: you do something and you are rewarded. The Church dismissed that notion centuries ago. Praying for points may exist in the popular mind but true prayer is union and intimacy with God, union and intimacy for its own sake. Harari is wrong.
With confidence, we can say that human beings are far more complex than mere matter. Matter only exists in the mind. There is knowing beyond scientific knowledge; it is sometimes called our feeling intelligence. This is emotion, but more than emotion; it is also intuition. This is a different way of perceiving or straining after reality. The spiritual writer Sara Maitland said that, looking at the cosmos, at the universe, we see ‘a God of enormous intelligence and subtlety…..Whatever else the universe is (she says) simple it is not.’ Maitland writes:
The God who made the universe is, rather obviously, a
God who thinks on a large scale, a God who can, unlike
us, think not just in millions, but in complex infinities.
This God is surely a profoundly patient God, prepared
to see galaxies form and die, chemical ooze hang around
hopefully for millennia, information take millions of
light years to arrive at a place where it can be useful,
and so on. This is a God who is prepared to wait and see
what will happen next.
In our set lessons for today, from the Book of Acts, First Peter and the Gospel of St John, we have three very different writers, all of whom reflect the very same insight. In the Book of Acts we are told that ‘God gives to all humanity, to all mortals life and breath…’. Standing in front of the Areopagus, a symbol of intellectual and cultural power, St Paul spoke of God giving life and breath: this is what it is to be human. He told the Greeks that from one ancestor – one blood – God made all nations. He said that those who search for God, grope for God, discover God is not far away. In the Divine, we live and move and have our being. We are more than mere algorithms! We are made in the image of God, breathing the breath of God; we are God-bearers. This is a far wider, deeper and more authentic appreciation of who we are than materialists would have us believe.
In First Peter, the author said, ‘In your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord’. For the writer, the heart, the feeling intelligence, is the seat of the Sacred, the dwelling-place of the Divine. God is within us. In the Gospel of St John, Jesus told His disciples, ‘I am in the Father, and you in me, and I in you.’ He told them, ‘He abides with you and He will be in you.’ In these increasingly difficult times for the Church, Christians, followers of Jesus, seekers after truth, must learn to nurture one another in faith, practise the Presence, and not let a scientist or an atheist historian like Harari fool you.
On Wednesday last I was in Newport-on-Tay at the Service of Induction for our friend Amos Chewachong. One of my favourite memories of Amos was his reflection on the story of Peter walking on water. Peter stepped out of the boat on to the water so that he could meet Jesus. Amos said that Peter was doing fine out there on the water until he started to think about physics, the physics of walking on water. Then he began to sink. We must keep the eyes of our heart fixed on Jesus. Feel the Presence within. Trust the Mystery we call God.
Amen.
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