The beginning of a new program year in the church—which here at The Village Church commences today—always seems to me to be a great time to take a fresh and new look at the traditional and ancient faith that you and I share. Sometimes it is good to take everything in life back to a very basic level, to clear away all that we think we already know, and to rebuild from the bare ground on up. And so today we begin a series of Sundays in which we will look at the very most important affirmations and experiences and convictions of this thing we call the Christian faith. My prayer is that for those of us who are perhaps very new to faith this will be a clear introduction to Christian faith. And for those of us who entertain some doubts and questions this may shed some further light on difficult issues. And for those who have walked long and deep with Jesus, my prayer is that these fall Sundays will be a time of renewal in your soul.

And so we start today with some big questions. Is there a God? If there is a God, what are God’s intentions toward us? Is God good, or not so good? Is God involved with us, or is God detached and distant from us? The answers to these questions determine everything else that follows in our most basic beliefs and in our most basic approach to living out the days of our lives here on this planet Earth.

Is there a God? I don’t propose to cover in exhaustive detail all the arguments for and against the existence of God today. Broadly speaking we can say that there are two main sources of belief. One is because of what you and I sense and see in the world around us and in the world of our individual souls. The other is because of particular experiences we have with God, times when God breaks in to our otherwise “normal” and “routine” lives. Let’s look at the second source first.

One of my hopes this year for our church as a whole is that we will all spend more time and energy paying attention to scripture. To help us with that, we are going to be reading in worship not just one passage, but two: one from the Old and one from the New Testaments. That will take us a bit more time but I cannot imagine time better spent. And so we’ve read from the famous story that has come to be called “Jacob’s Ladder” and also from another famous story about the Revelation of Jesus to John. In Jacob’s case, we have a younger brother who has stolen his older brother’s birthright—his inheritance—and the older brother, Esau, is not happy. Jacob is on the run, as con artists like him often find themselves. In the middle of the wilderness in the middle of the night, Jacob has an appointment with God. Jacob sees a ladder extending down from heaven to the earth, and God’s angelic messengers are going back and forth between the two places. God has a message for Jacob. I am with you, God says. I am watching out for your best interests, God says. In spite of what you’ve done, Jacob, I am still going to use you for my very own purposes, God says. When God wants to find you, and deal with you, and include you in what he is doing in the world, you cannot run away from God. God will find you, even in the wilderness in the middle of the night.

In John’s case we have an aged leader of the Christian movement who has been taken by the Roman government to a small island in the Aegean Sea and banished there so that he will not cause any more trouble with his talk about a new Lord. Probably on a Sunday, and most certainly while he is worshipping God, the old disciple has a vision of a very impressive figure from heaven. The figure is the Risen Christ. And he has a message for John and a job for John to do. Don’t be afraid, Jesus says. I was dead but I am alive again and alive forever, Jesus says. I hold the keys of heaven, Jesus says, and of hell. I have a message for seven key churches, and it is your job to write it down, Jesus says to John. When Jesus wants to find you, and deal with you, and include you in what he is doing in the world, you cannot run away from Jesus. Jesus will find you, even in a cave on a tiny little rock of an island.

Both of these stories are stunning examples of what happens when God comes calling. But things like this don’t happen very often. What does happen quite frequently is that in some subtle but unmistakable way God communicates directly with us. Many of you over the years have told me of your own dreams and visions and experiences with God. I have a couple of my own. Skeptics want to dismiss all of these things as figments of our imaginations or pure fabrications made up for political purposes. But they can no more prove our experiences invalid than we can prove them with scientifically verifiable methods. God is simply way beyond science. And what the three major monotheistic faiths consistently proclaim is that God exists and God is active in our world, so we had better learn how to deal with that fact!

We are not left, though, with only our occasional and dramatic experiences of God as the only evidence for God’s existence and for God’s activity in the world. You and I do not necessarily require a dramatic encounter in order to believe. There is other evidence for God that speaks not in special circumstances, but in the very fabric of who we are and of what our world is like. The English theologian N. T. Wright says that there are four broad areas of the human experience that tell us that there is something to this business about God and his work in the world.i First, Wright says that the universal human longing for justice is a sign that there is a just God who made us and who is working to redeem us from the injustice of the world. We know deep inside that it is not right that people should lie, steal, cheat, murder, and otherwise treat each other badly. We yearn for the time when all the human misery of injustice will go away. The yearning itself is a sign that we were made for something more. The second broad area involves the universal human hunger for spirituality. Even people who dismiss all religion usually end up making their anti-religion into a secular spirituality. This thirst for the spiritual is what has sometimes been called a “God-shaped void” in each one of us. How could we yearn for something if that something didn’t exist somewhere? The third broad area has to do with our relationships. Human beings want so badly to be connected at some deep, interpersonal level, with other people. It is not enough for us just to band together to find food and fight off the wolves. We crave companionship, touch, caring, a deep knowing that reaches into the very depths of the other person. That relentless drive to find relationship is born of the fact that God himself is a relationship of three-in-one who then made us for relationship with him. And finally, the fourth aspect of human experience that leads us toward a sense of God has to do with what Wright calls beauty. Beauty is all around us. It sometimes overwhelms us and sometimes pops up right in the middle of a lot of ugliness. We go to great lengths to preserve it where we find it and to create it on our own. Beauty is completely non-functional; it does not put bread on the table. But it is there, and it is a sign to us that there is some reality beyond the pedestrian reality of mechanical life on this planet. Our sense of justice, our quest for spirituality, our thirst for relationship, and our need for beauty are all markers of a reality that can only be answered by the existence and the activity of what we simply call “God.”

And so, for two simple reasons we Christians affirm that there indeed is a God and that this God is very much present in the world. For both sudden and subtle reasons—the sudden interruption that comes when God comes calling, or the subtle prompting that God has built into the very essence of our existence—we Christians live every single moment with this conviction that the most important fact of our existence is the fact of God.

All of this is well and good, but what do we do with it on a daily basis? Briefly, here are some suggestions. You and I cannot command or create an experience with God like those of Jacob and John. God comes when God wants to and God does not come when God does not want to. But we can take strength and direction from those extraordinary times in our past when God has come to us. We must remember those special moments and hold on to their special power. Even if we have not had one ourselves, we can learn from that of others. You and I can learn much more about looking at the everyday world and seeing that which is just beyond our vision. We can take our yearning for justice, our hunger for spirituality, our thirst for relationships, and our craving for beauty as signs and markers of the presence of God. None of these things require an overwhelming experience. They only require a heart that is willing to follow where God might lead.

Another way to say what I have been trying to say all along is this: that heaven and earth are not just two distinct realities forever separated from each other. In fact, heaven is right here with us all the time, if we will learn how to see it. You and I actually live in heaven here on earth, as we get to know God through his Son, Jesus, in the present reality of God that we call the Holy Spirit. In Jesus himself, the two dimensions of heaven and earth actually touched each other, and became part of each other. As we follow Jesus, we ourselves live at that touching point, and as we follow him further and further down the path of Christian discipleship, the overlap widens and deepens and strengthens, to the point where there is no difference. That point comes finally on the other side of this life, but we begin now. So later on today, or perhaps first thing in the morning, or maybe very deep in the night, look around you, and look inside you, and look behind you at your history and look forward into your future. God is there. God is here. We live in heaven on earth. And here at The Village Church, we’re going to keep on learning and living by that truth.

Amen.