Tyndale Chapel Podcast

I was doing a magic show at Bayview Glen, actually, and they said, "Hey, you're skilled in entertainment and deception, you should try out ministry. That's how I got the job."

Susanna Clarke wrote a novel entitled Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and it's set in 19th century England. Think Napoleon, Sherlock Holmes, and the scene is set with this observation that magic has long since vanished from England, they still had stories of King Arthur and Merlin and the round table, but no one had seen real magic in a really, really long time. Despite that little detail, there was a group of men who had the reputation of being some of the finest and wisest magicians in all of Yorkshire. Despite the fact that they had never performed a single piece of magic in their life. They couldn't make a leaf wiggle on a tree, they couldn't pull magic, rabbits from hats, coins from ears, they couldn't do anything. They would gather together and discuss the theoretical aspects of magic, the history of spells, they would read long papers to each other. Their magic was quite dry. Now Mr. Norrell comes to town. And he's a magician that can do real magic. And they gather at a cathedral and he makes all the statues come to life. And they start dancing and telling stories, and I got really uncomfortable at this point, when I was reading this story, I started to see some similarities between myself and the Yorkshire magicians, in more ways than one. I was quite sympathetic to them. Because their relationship to magic was an intellectual one. And I claimed to be a Christian, but in many ways, and in many days, my faith feels like an intellectual faith.

I know a lot about Jesus, I can talk to you about the Bible, and about history and all that. But a lot of times when I walk through life, day to day, how I would describe the world, as being filled with God's presence, isn't always what it feels like. Sometimes my daily life feels oddly irreligious. And I won't ask you to raise any hands, or come to the front, but you know, do what you want. But maybe this is kind of a similar feeling to you, I would describe that I'm someone who loves Jesus, I'm committed to Him. But I wouldn't say that my, my day is peppered with an awareness and presence of God in my life. So it's kind of this question of, "Why is there such a gap between what we believe and what we feel?" This isn't just a little fun puzzle, this is a real question. Why is there a gap between the head and the heart, the cognitions, and the affections, in this way? If you have a Bible, I would invite you to turn with me to Matthew 22. As we seek how to bridge the gap between the head and the heart, you got a physical Bible or an iPhone, you got the chip in your arm, go nuts. I'm going to start reading from the ESV. I'm going to be reading from verses 34 to 39.

But when the Pharisees heard that he, Jesus, had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him the question to test him, "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?" The hundreds and hundreds of commandments. And he, Jesus, said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And the second is like it. You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets". When he's getting quizzed by the scholars, what's the greatest law of the hundreds of them, Jesus quotes to them, Deuteronomy six. Loving God, and from this, also the commandment to love others. You might have heard the definition of being human as Homo sapien, that means a thinking thing. There's also a classic definition of being human, a homo Adorans, that is a loving thing. And the medievals would actually describe that this alignment of the head and the heart is the doctrine of, doctrine, the virtue of prudence, that a man is wise if all things taste to him, as they really are. And Psalm 38, 34:8 says to us, taste and see that the Lord is good. And as we seek to do this, there's a little bit of a tension. There's a challenge, obviously, because the culture that we are in, the waters that we swim in, the air that we breathe, isn't always supportive of us in this endeavor to taste and see that the Lord is good. It's actually quite the opposite. If you check the temperature of Twitter on any given day, it is doom and gloom. It is chaos. The world is ending, the economy is imploding, things are exploding, there's fringe cultural forces that are existential threats. Elon is going to let Trump back on, Trump is going to resurrect Hitler. The end is nigh. They'd be great evangelists. You even see this when there's a large tragedy like a mass shooting. People say "sending thoughts and prayers" and someone will respond to them. "Hey, why don't you actually do something?" Assuming that prayer is simply an empty, inactive gesture. And I would argue that a lot of this is simply trickle down from the Academy.

If we had time, I would read to you the myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. But I'll quote to Arthur Schopenhauer. He will do the trick. Listen to this, and just feel for the angst behind it. "There is not much to be got anywhere in the world. It is filled with misery and pain. If a man escapes those, boredom lies and wait for him at every corner. Nay more, it is evil, which generally has the upper hand, and folly that makes the most noise. Fate is cruel, and mankind pitiable." Does that feel familiar? You see lots of memes floating around, that ah the Earth would be such a better place if humans weren't on it. Misanthropy is all the rage, demonic to its core. So the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor would describe all of this, Camus, Twitter, and the like simply as this, an effect of our secular age is that we are disenchanted people. Disenchanted. The world has been drained of any divine interaction, any divine purpose, any participation with the transcendent, it's empty of all of that. And we are in a cold, empty universe that is devoid of any meaning. And so we long for these things, and we're met with silence. There is no providential being that pours out his benevolence on us. Life sucks, the cruel, powerful and rich get away with whatever they want. And we're just hoping to get by. Does that feel familiar in this way. This affects how we approach prayer. We're catechized by our secular age, because prayer is a terrifying thing. Because isolation and seclusion are a terrifying thing. In a disenchanted world, we are truly alone. And even if I do pray, I'm not really expecting that God will hear. I'm not really expecting that God will interact. I know what I'm supposed to do. But it's been a long time since God has heard me or I've heard from Him. It also affects how we interact with events in our lives. Why? Because I don't really see God in the day to day events. And so I'm going to look for God in grand big spectacles. If I want to encounter God, I have to go to a concert or a conference. Even our desire for spectacle can be indicative of a disenchanted world, and it affects how we read Scripture, we treat it like any other disenchanted object, it's a text that I throw on the table. And I'm going to try and chop it up and pull up some moral principles as I stare down from my morally superior and scientifically advanced perspective. And I'm going to evaluate it on the basis of utility and pragmatism, like any other disenchanted text. This affects all elements of our Christian life. And being a disciple of disenchantment is incompatible with being a disciple of Jesus. I can't be said to love God with all my heart, with all my mind with all my soul and all of my strength, if I think of him as impartial, irrelevant, and impotent, in these ways.

So, one of the marks of the new Christian life, of the people of Easter, is that we can be, we have been, set free from this disenchantment, and we've been freed for a life of Godly wonder. And I hate that, as soon as you hear that word, Disney has taken this term so much, you think wonder, disenchantment, magic. Can you give me something a little bit more substantial. But I want to show you that this is Godly labour, Romans 12:2 says, "Don't be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind." So one element of discipleship of the Christian walk is fighting to cultivate a godly imagination and wonder in areas of our mind that had been distant from disenchantment. There's many ways you can do this. Here's one. Let scripture do it for us. You can scarcely do better than that. Look, Listen to these verses from Psalm 8. I have these memorized in KJV from Dr. Driver, but I'll read them in a contemporary version.

O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
2 Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.
3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
4 what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?

So David sees God's greatness packed into every corner of the world. He hears the little noises that babies make, and he sees God's strength in this, and he stares up at the universe, and the cosmos, and he's amazed by the stars and he thinks about the God that is behind the stars. When he looks down, when he looks up, he sees God packed into everything. Look at the prophets. Try this, close your eyes, I want to read you two verses from Isaiah, try to imagine this, "Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hands, and marked off the heavens with a span, and closed the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains, and scales, and the hills, in the balance. Who has measured the Spirit of the Lord, and what what man shows him counsel, whom did he consult, and who made him understand, who taught him the path of justice, and taught him knowledge and showed him the way of understanding? Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales. Behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust." Look at how the Prophet can train our minds. He's looking at his hands. And he thinks, you know what, I'm looking at these these little lines between my hands. And I think God would cup all of the water of the worlds, kind of like we cup water in our hands. He looks at the mountains, and he thinks, you know, Everest, Himalayans, the Rockies, those kind of look like scales that you would put weights, that you would put on a scale. The nation's must be dust on the scale. What kind of God is this who's never been frustrated, He's never had to consult something, you know, Holy Spirit, Jesus gather around, what are we going to do right now, but God who does what he wants, and what is the title of this chapter in Isaiah, the title of the chapter is this, "Comfort for God's People". That when he considers these things, it gives him comfort because the God who created infinite space has made a space for us. We can see how scripture can train our imaginations.

We don't have time to go into prayer, how we can follow the faithful saints of old, the Desert Fathers with their breath prayers, they would breathe in and breathe out. They'd be praying scripture and meditating on it. Have mercy on me, Jesus Christ, for I am a sinner. When I'm feeling anxious and worked up and angry, I can pray that I will cast my cares on Him. Because He cares for me. We won't get into that. But when we're trying to train the imagination, sometimes it's hard. It's hard for me, I'm more of like a tick, tick, tick. I like to crank things out, you know, emotions kind of scare me. So we can look to people who are gifted in this way, aka the artist.

There's a prophetic role of the artist, there's actually a pastoral role of the artist. What does the artist do? The artist calls our attention to something. Simone Vale said, at its highest level, there's no difference between attention and prayer. And an artist makes a frame, and a frame tells you what's in and that tells you what's out. And the artist calls attention to facets of the world. So the painter, the musician, the film critic, the sommelier, they're pointing out features of the world, calling our attention to things and helping us see the detail in the majesty of what God has done. Here, if you're on Instagram, or Tiktok, young punks, and you see a puppy playing with a duck, and you go, ha ha, that right there. That is holy ground. That delight, that happiness that you feel is what God feels looking at his own creation. And we are thinking His very thoughts after him. This is holy work. This is holy ground. And the artists, and the writers of Scripture can help form and mold our perspective in all these ways, day in and day out. So where in your life do you feel this crust of disenchantment starting to form? Where do we need to invite God into these places? When we listen to a Cello Suite from Bach or a solo from Miles Davis? Where do we need to remind ourselves that we are hearing a preview of heaven? We're getting a taste of this, in this way. What would your life look like? If we lived like this? What flavour is to food, wonder is to theology. What would the church look like? What would our influence be to the world around us? I can tell you what it used to be. In the year 998 ad. It was Vladimir the Great, the Prince of Russia. He converted the Russian people to Christianity, after his envoys reported to him the beauty of Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire. Actually I've got a picture of this, particularly the Hagia Sofia. The envoys came back and they said, "Look at what we've seen". And the leader, the Prince of Russia at the time, said my nation will follow Jesus. I want to know the kind of God that inspires beauty like this. I want to know the God that shines through work like this.

So perhaps, in a culture that is skeptical of the truth truth of Christianity, and that is cynical of the goodness of Christianity. Perhaps we can meet them with the beauty of Christianity. And that's good news for us today. So let's pray.

God, we thank You for Your Word. We thank you for those that you've anointed and gifted to lead us in worship in these ways, and help us to re-see things that we know and remember things that we forgot. We confess that we believe and we need help in our unbelief. Would your spirit be gracious with us? We thank you that you are graceful when we forget these things. And would you help us to remember, and rediscover, and see how you see the world, recognize you and all these things, the God who is with us, who pours out His love with us, who weeps when we weep, who rejoices when we rejoice, who upholds the word, the world by his words, and is active and present in providing us with our next meal. We thank you for all this in Your Son's name. Amen.