Reading An Agnostic: Lesson Learned

I told Bettyann that I have a real fascination with the vocabulary words used but the content of subject matter is "muddled and muddy" in a book I finished a couple of weeks ago.  Julian Barnes in his book Nothing to Be Feightend Of, “but I miss him” begins with "I don't believe in God." Though he admits he never had any faith to lose (a "happy atheist" as an Oxford student, Barnes now considers himself an agnostic), he still finds himself dreading the gradual ebbing of Christianity.  He misses the sense of purpose that the Christian narrative affords, the sense of wonder and belief that haunts Christian art and architecture.  "I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm."  Just one example of thoughts that surface as Barnes attempts to confront his fears of death and dying in this memoir.  He believes Christianity to be a foolish lie, but insists, "It was a beautiful lie."

There is certainly room for beauty in the description the apostle Paul gave of the gospel.  Like Julian, Paul saw its foolishness clearly as well:  "For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe" (1 Corinthians 1:21).  He also noted the weakness inherent in the Christian proclamation.  At the heart of the Christian religion is one who "emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, and being found in human form" (Philippians 2:7).  On this much Paul and Julian agree: however beautiful, foolishness and weakness imbibe the Christian story.

But unlike Julian, Paul saw the foolishness of the gospel as a reason—not to disbelieve—but to believe.  "For God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are" (1 Corinthians 1:27-28).  This past week, I once again ruminated on a bit of a difficult explaination as to "why" at the heart of the Christian story there is a child, why God would answer the dark silence of 400 years with the cry of a rejected, forsaken, political failure, why God would take on the weakness of humanity in an attempt to reach humanity with power.  I think I would know better than to create, or to perpetuate, a story so foolish.  However beautiful, the story of Christ is difficult to explain; that is, unless it was not crafted with human wisdom at all.

The story of a Savior coming as an infant in Bethlehem is indeed astonishing, as astonishing as the divine putting on the flesh of a wounded humanity, as astonishing as the resurrection of this flesh.  That God chose to come into the world with a body, flesh that would suffer and die, is strange and paradoxical, beautiful and foolish.  Perhaps it is also wise beyond my comprehension.  "For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength" (1 Corinthians 1:25).

I have discovered lately that although the word “incarn” has not been used for a generation or two, it was once used medically, describing the flesh that grows over a wound.  Applied to healing, the word refers to the recovery of wounded flesh due to the presence of new flesh.  The Incarnation and the resurrection, the astonishing events Christians once remembered in Advent and at Easter, the story that has inspired music, architecture, and hope, I think, is God's way of doing exactly that! Christ comes in flesh and is raised in flesh to cover our mortal wound.  God comes near in body and in weakness to bring healing to weak and wounded bodies.  To me, this may have seemed a foolish mission, at one time, but to the blind who receive their sight, the lame who now walk, the diseased who are cleansed, the deaf who hear, the dead who are raised, and the poor who have good news brought to them, it is the most beautiful foolishness they have ever known.  This morning, I stand amazed!