Showing items filed under “The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin”

S is for Suspense

 

    Our God likes a good story.
    Exhibit A: The sixth day of creation. The land animals are made and God calls them good, as he has called good everything that he had so far called into being. But then the human beings are created, and God says nothing about them being good. The whole shebang, everything he has made, it’s “very good”; but there is no word about whether humans are good.
    It’s as if God has set it up so that he has to wait and see how this will turn out.
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    Exhibit B: After the flood, Noah offers animals in sacrifice to the Lord. Noah is a just and blameless man—we might think him even “good”—and that seems to be why he was spared the devastation of the flood. But the sacrifice he offers? God did not ask for it. God “smells” it and recognizes something pleasing about it, yet at the same time it reveals something that’s wrong inside the human heart. All human beings, it seems, are complex creatures. God decides that he will never again try to start over by wiping out creation; rather, he will see how this will work out with human beings who are mixed up. The rainbow is the sign: God suspends his judgment. He holds himself in suspense, to see how this will turn out.
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    Exhibit C: God gets into the story by talking. He speaks to Abraham, and that speech gets the story of the whole people of Israel started. He speaks to Moses, and that gets the people out of Egypt and on the way to their own land that he has promised them. But will the people love God and walk, in freedom, in his ways? That’s the question that’s left hanging.
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    Exhibit D: It turns out that the people run away from God more than they follow him. They don’t really want to be his people. They are like an unfaithful spouse; they take other lovers; they want to be like other people; they even burn their children in sacrifice to evil beings that they take as their god.
    So God comes into the story, not just as someone who talks with people, but as a person himself, a human being. The Word becomes flesh. It is suspenseful: how will the world receive this baby?
    In the event, some loved him, some followed him, others ran away from him, and some realized the deep threat he posed. Finally came the decisive arrest, the quick farce of a trial, and the execution of the prisoner.
    Even in death, however, there remained suspense! For he rose from the dead and was alive in a new way, alive so that he would never die again.
    Nonetheless, the story hasn’t ended yet.
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    God works hard to get a good story and keep it going. We know it will turn out well—there’s no worry about the ultimate triumph of good over evil. But how will we get from here to there? How is the story going to unfold in our life, in our town, in our church, in our country? There remains much suspense between now and the end of the show.
    In the divine alphabet, S is for Suspense.
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    Out & About & on the Web. I have a short essay on Good Friday and the Annunciation for on the website of the Human Life Review: https://humanlifereview.com/good-friday-and-jesus-conception/

    My sermon “The Final Sign: The Sign of Faith,” which is on so-called doubting Thomas and was preached at All Souls’ Church in Oklahoma City, is here:https://soundcloud.com/allsoulsokc/april-11-2021-the-second-sunday-of-easter-fr-victor-lee-austin?in=allsoulsokc/sets/sermons
    Mary Foster Hutchinson has recently published How the Faith Came to Texas (ISBN 9798702514970), about which I have this to say: "A charmer. Hutchinson present this history engagingly, addressing a young person without condescension, as one would share the contents of a treasured chest full of gifts now to be passed on."
    On what we used to call Rogation Sunday, May 9, I will be preaching at St. Matthew's Cathedral in Dallas, at the services at 8 and 10:30 a.m. The early service is indoors, the later one on the lawn; both are open to all comers.

 

 

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

R is for Reason


    If it weren’t such a common thing, it would amaze us every day: the regularity of the world. Let go of a book and it falls to the ground. Do it a hundred times in a row, and it won’t fall just most of the time, it falls every single time. The business of science is to explain such regularities, to put them into numbers and terms and laws. Some of these laws are elegantly simple (as in Einstein’s “e equals m times c squared”), even if it takes a specialist to unpack them meaningfully.
    So science exposes the regularities, the laws whereby the world goes round. But if we ask why the world has laws in the first place, why its regularities exist, science has nothing to say. That is a question that science cannot answer, and what it points to is a profound mystery, namely, the mystery that the world can be understood.
    It might not have to be such. We might imagine a rather nightmarish world in which the laws just keep changing. Maybe in such a world, when you let it go, a book sometimes rises up to hit the ceiling, sometimes floats in front of you, and sometimes smacks you up the side of your head. Thankfully, we do not live in such a world.
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    In the divine alphabet, R is for Reason because, in the deepest sense, God himself just is reason. “In the beginning was the Word,” opens Saint John’s Gospel, and “the Word” is “Logos,” reason taken properly in broad sense. Everything that has come to be came to be through the Logos, and without the Logos, nothing came to be. In telling us this, John gives a reading of the opening of Genesis, where the text declares that all creation came into being through the speech of God.
    And since God’s speech is Logos, the creation has and has always had a character to it. The world has an underlying intelligibility; and it is this feature of the world that rewards with insight those who study it.
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    There is a popular but false story that faith opposes reason and reason opposes faith. This story is superficial. In truth, faith and reason are mutually supportive human undertakings. It is one of the ironies of our age that reason is faltering and faith has to rise to its defense. This is the point of John Paul II’s encyclical “Fides et ratio,” although it has hardly been an exclusively Catholic concern.
    I believe that one particular calling of Christians at this time is to defend reason against those who deny it. There is such a thing, for instance, as human dignity, something that pertains to every human being without regard to race or sex or intellectual capacity or opinions voiced. For other instance: we can affirm that the difference between true and false is found in the world itself, and not in the power/privilege/sex/gender of the speaker.
    Christians should be known as people who say: Although human rational thinking cannot justify itself, we may trust it, because God, who has created everything, is himself Reason.
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    Out & About, virtually speaking. “The Sacramentalists” is a podcast hosted by three young and enthusiastic priests. They recently talked with me about various “life” questions and friendship. I enjoyed my time with them, and beyond this episode you might appreciate their other conversations too. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/interview-with-fr-victor-lee-austin/id1457082281?i=1000516849636

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

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The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: 

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