Life as Miracle. (Preaching Helps).

Under the title Life Is a Miracle (Counterpoint, 2000) Wendell Berry has published what he calls "an essay against modern superstition." The superstition that is the target of his pen is the popular scientific orthodoxy that "science is entirely good, that it leads to unlimited progress, and that it has (or will have) all the answers" (p. 24).

Berry heaps scorn on the notion that science has or soon will have all the answers. His basic objection is the modem scientific habit of thinking that "every mystery is a problem, and every problem can be solved." In the face of genuine mysteries, popular scientific orthodoxy rejects the stance of deference or respect, to say nothing of reverence. No, like Sherlock Holmes the scientist is the great detective pursuing "the answer." Many problems are indeed solvable, but "when a scientist denies or belittles a mystery that cannot be solved, then he or she is no longer within the bounds of science" (p. 27).

In this book, as in all of his work, Berry is concerned about our use of language. He bemoans the way so many of us, when talking about our world, use language that fails "to convey any respect or care or affection or devotion" toward it. Modem science has steadily and relentlessly engaged in a process of "reclassification of the world from creature to machine" (p. 8).

Once we begin to conceive of the world as machine rather than creature, our attitude toward creation undergoes a not-so-subtle shift from one of reverence to one of understanding. Our relationship to our natural environment changes from that of steward to that of absolute owner, manager, and engineer (p. 8).

Berry bristles at the notion that the world is a machine. He quotes some lines of Edward 0. Wilson's book Consilience. Wilson writes, "People, after all, are just extremely complicated machines," and says that we are all of us "organic machines" and "an organism is a machine." While admitting that "this machine business" may once have had some usefulness as a metaphor, Berry fears that Wilson speaks for too many of us in equating world and machine. "If we are to assume that our language means anything at all, then the world is not a machine, and neither is an organism. A machine, to state only the greatest and most obvious difference, is a human artifact, and a world or an organism is not" (p. 46).

Against Wilson and those who think like him, Berry hurls the accusation that their thinking is deterministic, materialistic, mechanistic, and reductionist.

Berry takes the title of his book from words of Edgar spoken to his father the Earl of Gloucester in Shakespeare's King Lear. Edgar says to his despairing father, "Thy life's a miracle. Speak yet again." That line, says Berry, "calls Gloucester back--out of hubris, and the damage and despair that invariably follow--into the properly subordinated human life of grief and joy, where change and redemption are possible" (p. 5). For Berry, life is a miracle and a mystery, not a puzzle to be solved but a gift to be received in a "properly subordinated human life of grief and joy."

Berry ponders the meaning of knowledge and raises the question whether there is not such a thing as "unexplainable knowledge." He cites the lament of Lear holding his faithful daughter Cordelia dead in his arms, the lament of David upon hearing that his son Absalom is dead, and the lament of Robert B. Lee at the end of the battle of Gettysburg. Their cries from the depths (and Berry quotes them) "certainly express knowledge ... but the knowledge they convey cannot be proved, demonstrated, or explained." These terrible utterances are not "information."

He continues by saying that statements of religious faith are similar to these lamentations. He quotes Job's famous cry of confession, "I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth" (19:25-26). Job can offer neither evidence nor proof to support his passionate conviction. But even in the absence of anything even vaguely resembling scientific proof, Job dares to call his conviction "knowledge." Berry concludes, "A great many people who have read these verses have agreed; they too have known that this is so" (p. 97).

Berry is expansive where he finds much modern science to be reductionistic. "The walls of the rational, empirical world are famously porous. What come through are dreams, imaginings, inspirations, visions, revelations.... Beyond any earthly reason we experience beauty in excess of use, justice in excess of anger, mercy in excess of justice, love in excess of deserving or fulfillment.... We have known evil beyond imagining and seemingly beyond intention. We have known compassion and forgiveness beyond measure" (p. 100).

This book of Wendell Berry's set me to thinking about the vocation of the preacher in the Easter Season--and at every season. Why would any preacher want to travel the way of the Jesus Seminar? The members of the Jesus Seminar seem intent on carrying on a mission of "scientific" debunking, as they rewrite the story, insisting that there was no burial by friends but instead an unceremonious dumping into a mass grave for common criminals and so no tomb to be discovered empty, no women coming to a tomb to anoint his body, no angelic messengers at a tomb, no falling at his feet outside a tomb. And at the other end of the spectrum are the fundamentalistic apologists, who love nothing more than to heap up arguments designed to "prove" that he really rose from the dead. Is either of these paths really helpful in encouraging people to live a "properly subordinated life of grief and joy"?

I think Berry points us in a better direction than do the Jesus Seminar and all the argumentative fundamentalists. Berry thinks hard about what it means to be a human being, and in doing so he offers what is very close to a description of the preacher's task and calling in the Easter Season: bring hearers into the presence of the Great Mystery that surrounds us, so that our sense of an "excessive" beauty and mercy and compassion may be renewed and we may be healed. Nothing less than that is what happens when the preacher tells the story not woodenly or literalistically, neither suspiciously nor argumentatively, but with reverence and awe, dwelling in loving fashion on all the details, speaking from head and heart as one struggling and believing human being to others.

Helping us in the task of reading the texts and letting the texts read us is Bruce Modahl, Senior Pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest, Illinois. Bruce is a 1977 graduate of Christ Seminary--Seminex. He earned a Master of Theology degree in homiletics from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Doctor of Ministry degree from Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. His sermons and sermon studies have been published in numerous periodicals, most recently in Sundays and Seasons and in The Christian Century.

Thanks to Bruce for sharing his heart and mind with us in these pages, and a Blessed Easter to all who preach good news week in and week out.

Yours,

Robert H. Smith, Editor of Preaching Helps

Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary 

2770 Marin Avenue, Berkeley CA 94708

[e-mail]

P.S. Our apologies for somehow getting all the dates wrong for the Lenten Season. We trust you preached good news week after week in spite of our chronological shortcomings! RHS