Daily Devotion for June 14, 2006

Confession from an Agnostic

 

“But the fact is that Christ has been raised from the dead. He has become the first of a great harvest of those who will be raised to life again.” 1 Corinthians 15:20

 

About 25% of my students in the Word Among Us Bible Studies are unchurched.  Included in that group are some who see themselves as agnostic.  Below is a letter I received from one of them – I would like to use it as today’s devotion.

 

When I was an agnostic – I was one of those many people who viewed Jesus as a great teacher, possibly the best who ever lived. Did I study his teachings closely or make a serious attempt to live by them? Not really. He was a role model, buried somewhere in my collection of semi-conscious images and ideas, but I didn’t think of him that often. I believed that if I really began picking apart the Gospels, I’d probably be deeply disappointed at what I’d find there, losing one more hero.

 

 This view of Jesus prevailed for me into my earliest days of listening to your Bible Study: Word Among Us. It takes a long, long time to uproot lifelong doubt, which is really just another form of belief. I was ignorant enough then to even doubt that Jesus ever existed at all. I think that I became an agnostic in active mode only when I started listening to WAU, and began truly entertaining the possibility that the Good News was all true. An active agnostic would surely be driven to seek the answer: was it true or not?

 

 My learning curve began. No two people experience this process in exactly the same way. First there’s the issue of God. Does the learner believe in God? If so – does he or she believe in a God that is in some significant way human-like? To really embrace the story told in the Gospels seems to rely on this concept of a human-like God. I had a terrible time with that for a long time and still feel pulled away from that at times. Then begins the Jesus curve. Did he exist? Well, I soon found out that, yes, there apparently is secular reference to his existence – “secular” meaning, to the agnostic, reliable. (Isn’t that a laugh?)

 

 The slow process that followed for me was to absorb the stories, parables, events recorded in the Gospels and also encased in the rest of the Bible, to find sense and sensibility in them, to relax inner tensions that I’d developed in other contexts and “let it be.” What came remarkably forward (and this is my version of a personal relationship with Jesus) was the clear uniqueness of this Person, the ultimate Person – the person who thought more clearly, centered more effectively, judged more fairly, felt more purely, knew with more certainty, than anyone I’d ever known, encountered or imagined. Jesus. The Jesus I’d found for myself. (With enormous help of course).

 

 At this point I’m reaching, I think, the height, the peak, of the Learning Curve. Resurrection. Its easy now for me to just submit to that idea. Why not? In this most astounding biography of a Man, why not believe the most beautiful part?

 

 I continue to be a Christian who cares little about my own future in Heaven – I don’t know why that is but it’s true for now – but I do believe now, at last, that Jesus was resurrected and that somewhere, at every moment, He lives! And that is Heaven!

 

Prayer
Dear God, I thank you for my Learning Curve, for your patience in seeking me out and presenting me with the opportunities to find my way. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.

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Tim Hetzner - President - Lutheran Church Charities
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