Scripture: Matthew 5:3-10; Psalm 13:1 Series: 2021
Launching a new series, the pastor uses being adrift on an unfamiliar sailboat at Lake LBJ to frame Pascal’s Wager: because we are already ‘embarked’ in life, doing nothing about God’s existence is itself a choice. He surveys rival conceptions of God, sketches Pascal’s biography and the four outcomes of the wager (infinite delight or finite loss versus finite gain or infinite loss), and argues that one comes to faith not by deciding abruptly but by living as believers do, guided by Wesley’s General Rules (do no harm, do all the good you can, attend the ordinances of God). Read on All Saints Day, the Matthew 5 beatitudes are presented not as ideals but as a life lived for God, including the exhausting yet satisfying hunger for justice (dikaiosune). The strongest apologetic, he concludes, is not an argument but the lives of the saints who taught us to love; the congregation is invited to remember them, believe, and become kingdom-builders themselves.
Illustrations: sailboat-lake-lbj, grandmother-jetski-beebee-gun, blaise-pascal-pensees, pagan-creation-myths, gods-playing-bridge, mortgage-on-black, belief-like-an-outfit, check-yourself-wreck-yourself
November 7
The Wager (Part 1)
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 5:3-10
My grandfather bought a house on Lake LBJ before I was born. I grew up going there and having lots of fun. We had sail boats from time to time. Small ones, like a sunfish, that I would take out by myself. The family got rid of the sunfish years ago because it took up a lot of space and I think I was the only one using it. I am not a big ski boat or jetski guy. The sound of the engine is too annoying for me. My grandmother hated when Jetskis first came to our cove and she would often threaten to bring a beebee gun or a 22 up to the lake to give them some warning shots. When I am at the lake, I like to take out a kayak or canoe. Simple to put in, simple to guide. Last summer, my cousin bought a sailboat and brought it up and I thought it might be fun to take it out. I had not been on a boat like that in a long time. I thought I would try it. What’s the worst that could happen? I made it on to the water, but that was the best I could say about my effort. I had launched the boat and I had to deal with the consequences. I was pulling up the sail and I was not controlling it. I completely forgot what I was doing, but I was on the water. I couldn’t choose to do nothing. Nothing was not an option. Nothing was crashing. I did not know what to do. I did not know where I was going and I could not get out of the boat. My friends, we are starting a new series called The Wager. Not many methodist sermons are about gambling. I am not going to help you bet the money line on the Cowboys game or pick a foolproof parley. The Wager is about God, the existence of God, and our pursuit of God. The title comes from the French mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, and an argument for God that has been translated as Pascal’s Wager. One of the first and most essential points Pascal makes is that when we come to this question of the existence of God, we are not in a neutral position. It is as if we are on a ship already launched into the sea. It is as if we are on a sailboat on Lake LBJ without a sailor in sight. So there isn’t this luxury of waiting around. Doing nothing is a choice. Today, we’re going to look at the wager itself, especially with regards to the beatitudes and the saints in our life. Does God exist? This is a very important question for the world. Is there a divine being that created everything? Different cultures and different religions have different conceptions of God, different conceptions of creation. Ancient Greece imagined that the sky was Uranus and his wife, Gaya, created everything. And then a Pantheon of other gods that fill up the different aspects and movements of life. The Babylonians had a set of gods. The Japanese had an understanding of creation myth. The norse though the earth was created to protect against Frost Ogres. One of the unique aspects of the Jewish faith and then the Christian faith was the uniqueness of God and God’s creation of all existence out of nothing. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not just another God in a Pantheon of gods that all meet together and play bridge and look after their people. What we call monotheism also had different positions within Greek philosophy before Christianity. Aristotle gives a number of reasons for the existence of a single God in his Metaphysics. Neoplatonism, one of the school of rival schools of philosophy in existence during the early church, talks about God, theos, a lot. In fact, in the early church, the word theology doesn’t have anything to do with Christianity or faith. It has to do with Greek religion. Early Christians would say, “I am not a theologian.” Theologian is pagan. Theos is a pagan word for God. There is a lot of history and ideas between 33ad and the 17th century, but we’ll skip it for today and come to Blaise Pascal, who was the son of a clerk in France. When he was a young man, he published a set of scientific and mathematical papers that basically launched probability theory. He had another paper that proved there could be a vacuum. Then in his thirties, Pascal had a mystical experience and he basically stopped researching science. He wrote letters from time to time, but his goal at that point was to worship God, to pray to God, and to defend people whom he thought were offering a good description of God. Pascal died as a young man and the documents that he left were collected by his sister and published in French as the Pensées, or thoughts. They were published in English a few years later. John Wesley knew them and published his own abridged edition. One of the most famous aspects of the Pensées is le pari, or wager. Gambling was a big part of French culture. There were a lot of different dice games and card games and horse racing, things like that. The Methodist Church in particular used to be pretty anti-gambling because of the social harms it can cause. Husbands putting the mortgage on black to win, losing, and then the family becoming homeless. There’s some churches that refuse to have Bingo because it seems like gambling. Pascal doesn’t advocate gambling or wagering. Instead, he brings his early writings on gambling and probability to bear on belief in God.
The basic summary of the wager is that there are four options.
- You bet on the truth that God exists by conforming your life to the Lord and you receive an eternity of life and happiness. If it is true great. It is what you really want. Eternal life is not the status quo extended eternally, but a party that never goes old where you are truly appreciated and loved and filled with constant joy. Where there is no pain but constant delight in the God who is love. But what if it is not true?
- The second position is betting on the truth that God exists, but God doesn’t. Well, then you’ll die and be buried and that’s the end of it.
- The third position is betting on the truth that God doesn’t exist and you’re right. Well then you live a life of obsessive amour-propre or self-love, terrified of death and doing whatever you can to distract yourself from thinking about death. Whether it is with boats or cars or sports or movies or celebrities or politics. You fill your time so you don’t have to think about the end of your time.
- The fourth position is betting the truth that God doesn’t exist and you’re wrong. Then you miss out on what you really want, which is joy and happiness and life with God.
So with the first two positions, you have a chance of either infinite delight or finite loss. With the second two choices, you have the chance of finite gain (being right but dying all the same) or infinite loss. We need to make a choice and live our life accordingly. And like I said at the beginning, we are already launched into the waters, we are already launched into the lake. We are on a boat already floating. We can’t sit idly by. We need to make a choice. The point is not to make a choice one day and change your belief as if you are changing an outfit. “I think I will wear red today.” No true belief is that fickle. Pascal, instead, says that if “you’d like to arrive at faith and you don’t know the way…you ask for the remedies. Learn from those who were bound as you are and who now bet everything. These are the people who know the way you’d like to follow…Begin as they did, which was by acting as if they believed.”(LG 397)
And so what Pascal says is that we make the choice by how we live. If we don’t currently believe, we start by doing something different, by doing the things that Christians do, not in the sense of going through the motions and in your head and knowing that this is foolish and this is false, but earnestly building new habits of mind and body. And what are the things that Christians do? There’s a number of ways of thinking about this and talking about this. In the Methodist tradition, I like to talk about the General Rules of the Methodist Church . Rule not as in right or wrong, but rule as a measure of what is a good life. The first rule is do no harm. Check yourself before you wreck yourself. Am I currently harming someone in how I am living? If so, I need to stop that. The second rule is do all the good you can. Again, check yourself, not check other people, check yourself. Am I doing all the good I can? Or is there other good I could be doing? The third is in pretty archaic language, but I appreciate it. Wesley says to attend upon all the ordinances of God. That is, the things that God ordained for us to do. This is where the rubber meets the road. Pray, worship, come to the table, talk to other Christians, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those who are in prison, visit those who are widows and widowers: do these things.
. It can be tiring to do no harm. Sometimes harm is a lot easier than not harm. It’s a lot easier to go through life and not think about the consequences of your actions than it is to imagine them. It’s a lot easier in life to not try to do all the good you can, but to just do enough good so that you can feel good about yourself and then you can go about your day. It’s a lot easier in life to not continue to follow the ordinances of God, but again, to choose what you will or will not do. It is a lot easier to follow amour-propre, self-love, and do whatever your heart tells you to do, even if it harms yourself or people in your life. And yet we are embarked in this life. Is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ who raised Jesus from the dead real. Then we should follow him with our lives. We should praise him with our lives.
The beatitudes from Matthew 5 have been historically read for All Saints Day. The beatitudes are not about an ideal but a life lived for God.
When we come to the point of our spirit becoming poor, we should remember Jesus’s words in Matthew. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Happy are the poor in spirit. Macarius, happy are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
Again, if we are pursuing God, if we are putting our chips in on the side of God, it’ll make us look at the world in a different way. It’ll make us look for justice in this world. Righteousness and justice are translating the same word dikaosune. And once you start looking with the eyes of God, you start seeing a lot more injustice in this world, and it can be exhausting to hunger for justice. It can be draining to thirst for justice because you see how long it’s going to take and how far away our world is from the justice of God at this time, like in Psalm 13,
How long, Lord?
And yet in the beatitudes, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for justice, for they shall be satisfied. Satisfaction is not found in completing the task, but in seeking God and hungering for justice in this world, I can go on and on with the beatitudes. I think that they are so helpful to guide us and help reframe what life can be. That is, if God is real, if God exists. And if this God who exists, loves us so much that he gave his only son, so that whoever believes in him, whoever leans on him, whoever puts the chips in on him, will not perish in the wild sea of this world, in the wild lake of this world, but have eternal life, if this is true we should do the things of God. Which brings us to All Saints Day. Somebody taught you about Jesus. Somebody showed you about Jesus. Somebody offered you an opportunity and the possibility that Jesus is real, that God is true and that God loves you Today, we lift up the saints of the church that we have lost in the past year, but those are not the only saints that we have lost. And a year in a life that is grieving is not a long time. Many of the people who have shaped us and loved us have long since passed to life eternal. But here, when we are on this boat and on this rough sea, when we come across challenges to our faith, when we come across challenges in our life, challenges to faithful living, challenges to justice, God in God’s infinite mercy offers us hope in the people who have shaped us. The closest we come to Jesus is not in an idea in our head, but in the flesh of our neighbor. Offering love as well in the people who showed us how to love, who showed us how to not give up, who showed us how to forgive Jesus calls his friends, his mathetas, disciples, which means students. To be a follower of Jesus is to be a student of Jesus. And we learn at the feet of the people who shaped us and taught us and showed us how to live, how to build habits of faithfulness. From the very beginning of the church, the most powerful evidence for Jesus have been in the lives of his followers. The most powerful apologetics is not found in an argument, it is not found in a syllogism or a wager, but in the lives of the faithful. We’ve all witnessed such faithfulness in some ways or else we would not be here today. Even if you do not currently believe you have seen love in this world. That’s the powerful thing of All Saints Day. It is not just about remembering those who have passed, but embodying the same spirit that they had. That not only have you been shaped by those who came before, you can now be a shaper of others in your life. God offers you the power and opportunity to teach another how to love, to teach another how to show mercy. And this is for us right now the wager. Are you willing to bet on God? That God’s love for you is so great that even you can become a kingdom builder, even I can become a kingdom builder. This world is full of so many obligations. So many time commitments. So many people pulling us, needing us, craving our attention. But we are already embarked. Let us remember those who taught us how to live, and we need just step forward into a life that only through grace, we can claim this day, God exists, we can claim this day. Jesus is real. And Jesus has a message of peace for this world. That even when we are tired, we will find rest. Even when we hunger for justice. We will be satisfied, thanks to the living God. And when we are disconcerted, when we don’t know where to turn, we will share the stories of the people who shaped us. We will have patience with the people in our lives who don’t yet know. We will have patience with ourselves. We may feel like we are inadequate to the task. We may realize that we are on the waters. We may not remember how to sail yet, but God will not leave us alone to crash. Arrogance took me on lake lbj, humility brought me safe to shore. This All Saints Day, may you remember. May you believe. May you take a new step towards God, towards those you love, towards your future life in eternity. Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, May we receive your mercy this day. May we remember those we have lost with lightness this day. May the Spirit that moved in them move in us this day. May we decide to believe in you this day. May we decide to follow you this day. In the name of the father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.