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I’m sure you folks have heard of Agnosticism. It is not the same thing as Atheism which denies the existence of God. Rather, agnosticism simply claims to have no evidence one way or the other as to the existence of God. The Agnostic is unknowing. There has been nothing in the world of experience that either proves or disproves the existence of God.
I mention this because Paul begins our reading from 1 Corinthians expressing the desire that he did not want them to be unknowing (agnostic) about God’s actions towards the Hebrew people when they were wandering in the wilderness between slavery in Egypt and arriving at the Promised Land. Some people translate that word unknowing as ignorant, which is inappropriate. The word is actually the word from which we get agnostic. Paul does not want them left without evidence either way of God and his steadfast love and faithfulness especially while they themselves were going through the wilderness of disunity in their fellowship. He wants them to know that the God whom they have come to have faith in was the God of a very real people for whom he did very real things. He also didn’t want the Corinthians to make the same mistakes the ancient Israelites made, which they appeared to be doing. He didn’t want them to believe without or apart from the evidence of God’s real acts in history for his people. That would make them what I would call functional agnostics.
Functional Agnosticism is believing in God but having no proof either for or against God’s existence. Paul didn’t want the Corinthian Christians trying to serve a God they didn’t know. The God they were worshipping is the God of the Jewish people who became the man Jesus of Nazareth who died for our sins and was raised and is also God whose presence they have encountered powerfully as the Holy Spirit in their midst. Unfortunately, the people of God tend to drift away from a living relationship with this God – the loving communion of God the Father Son and Holy Spirit - into functional agnosticism and once there create a religion centered on their own faithfulness rather than their God’s faithfulness to them. Paul would have said that serving a God they had ceased to know for themselves is why the Jewish people in his day didn’t recognize Jesus as their God among them.
I would hold that functional agnosticism is at the heart of the decline of Christianity in Western Culture the past 60 years. We were taught just to believe there is a God and to believe certain things about this God. We served this God dutifully usually through serving the Church because we believed serving the church is what good people are supposed to do. But, with respect to having personally experienced God’s presence and God’s acting on our behalf according to his steadfast love and faithfulness, well, we are agnostic. We have no personal proof as to whether or not God is present with us and steadfastly loving and faithful to us. So, we wind up being Christians who place our faith in our beliefs and dutifully serve those beliefs which we institutionalize as the Church. To bitter the stew even more, some of us will regard as religious fanatics those who say that they have experienced God’s presence, steadfast love, and faithfulness.
Our agnosticism becomes functional when we forget or are just plain unknowing that the Trinity is acting in and through us and in turn just do what we believe churches are supposed to do. We do worship. We have Sunday School. We do fundraising. We help charities, visit one another, and have potlucks. Yet, somewhere in the mix of doing these things we lose sight of what God is actually doing in and through us.
What God is really doing in our midst is building community. God the Trinity works to build community in the Trinity’s own image by pouring his Holy Spirit into us that we may love each other and the world outside as Jesus has loved each of us. The sure sign of functional agnosticism in a church is that it winds up doing things for the sake of doing things rather than taking the risk to do things to build deeper relationships among themselves and with the surrounding community.
Paul writes the Corinthians hoping to prevent them from falling into this functional agnosticism. Their churches were being torn apart by factions who were competing for control of the churches in Corinth and the resulting disunity was causing them to lose sight of their Christ-mindedness, their love. In actuality, they were slipping back into being just like all the other cult-like charismatic religions in Corinth. So, Paul reminds them of how the Trinity provided for the Israelites in the wilderness. Together, they followed the whirlwind cloud and passed through the sea. Together, they followed Moses, their leader. When, together, they hungered, the Trinity fed them with manna and quail. When, together, they thirsted, the Trinity gave them water from the rock. They had provision everywhere they went because Christ, the Rock, was with them.
Yet, regardless of the mighty acts of the Trinity’s steadfast love and faithfulness and even though the Trinity was personally present to and with them, many of the Israelites fell into a most tragic form of functional agnosticism by declaring that none of these mighty acts were for sure the acts of God of their ancestors. So, they made an idol of an Egyptian god, a golden calf, and claimed it to be the God who delivered them from Pharoah. Then, they rose up to worship it with a feast that culminated in an orgy. They also put God to the test, routinely complaining of hunger and thirst and wishing to be back in Egypt where the food was better. Most strikingly, because of fear they refused to enter the Promised Land the first time they came to it. So, along the way God struck many of them down and prolonged their time in the wilderness. Like the Israelites, the Corinthians were in the wilderness, a wilderness of disunity and infighting, a wilderness in which they were having to learn faith.
God brings us into wilderness places to teach us to learn that he is with us and to rely on his steadfast love and faithfulness. God brings us to where we hunger and thirst for knowing Jesus so that he may provide what we really need and prove his love and faithfulness. Wilderness places keep us from becoming functionally agnostic. In the wilderness we can find ourselves tempted to carry on like the ancient Israelites. We can and do create false gods out of our perceived needs and serve them hoping that in so doing we will satisfy our hunger and thirst for “in God we trust”. We will test the Trinity telling him to prove himself in a particular way making the bargain that if the Trinity does what we want, we will do better at what it is we believe serving God is supposed to be. We complain at the Trinity because life in the wilderness isn’t as fulfilling as doing our own thing was. We complain about what the Trinity provides for because it doesn’t really meet what we believe our needs to be. Unfortunately, for some our functional agnosticism in the midst of the wilderness will turn to atheism.
Yet, the Trinity provides us with exactly what we need. Learning faith is learning that the Trinity can and does satisfy our thirst to have a relationship with Jesus in the Spirit. The Trinity leads us into the wilderness of trials that are common to life, very painful trials where the test is to trust the Trinity and let him show us his living and healing way out. As Isaiah said, “God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and our ways are not God’s ways.” When we find ourselves wandering in the wilderness thirsty to know Jesus, asking God are you there or are you real, we just have to trust the Trinity is doing something for our good.
Truly, when God speaks his word, it accomplishes its purpose. Everything that happens in our lives good and bad is the Trinity working to establish our faith and to make us more Christ-like. When we come to the end of our time in the wilderness, and it does end, we truly do find that the Trinity has brought forth a new peace and joy in us that satisfies our thirsting. Somehow, he speaks and things happen that teach us his love and faithfulness and we can’t help but draw closer to him in faith.
So, my friends, when in the wilderness seek the Lord because it is there in the wilderness that he certainly can be found. Pray, read scripture, spend time with Christian friends, share your trials and most importantly avoid doing anything that you know is just an effort to meet what you perceive to be your needs. God is working way deeper in you than you can understand and in time he will provide. Friends, seek the Lord. Amen.
