Well, here I am again!! No excuse except just so busy! I first wrote this for The Lynnville UMC and gave it on March 27, 2005, then used it again, after a very minor rewrite January 27, 2008 at the Hartford East Maple Street Chapel… I always thought it was a very powerful message, and thought it appropriate to put on here… even though not everybody ‘gets’ the bit about the Electric Monk… Douglas Adams Is an ‘aquired taste’… 🙂

    From chapter two of ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’…

High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse. From under its rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down into another valley, with which it was having a problem.

The day was hot, the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat down upon the gray rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, not even the Monk. The horse’s tail moved a little, swishing slightly to try and move a little air, but that was all. Otherwise, nothing moved.

The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City…

The problem with the valley was this. The Monk currently believed that the valley and everything in the valley and around it, including the Monk itself and the Monk’s horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink. This made for a certain difficulty in distinguishing any one thing from any other thing, and therefore made doing anything or going anywhere impossible, or at least difficult and dangerous. Hence the immobility of the Monk and the boredom of the horse, which had had to put up with a lot of silly things in its time but was secretly of the opinion that this was one of the silliest.

How long did the Monk believe these things?

Well, as far as the Monk was concerned, forever. The faith which moves mountains, or at least believes them against all the available evidence to be pink, was a solid and abiding faith, a great rock against which the world could hurl whatever it would, yet it would not be shaken. In practice, the horse knew, twenty-four hours was usually about its lot.

…

This Monk had first gone wrong when it was simply given too much to believe in one day. It was, by mistake, cross-connected to a video recorder that was watching eleven TV channels simultaneously, and this caused it to blow a bank of illogic circuits. The video recorder only had to watch them, of course. It didn’t have to believe them all as well. This is why instruction manuals are so important.

So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good was bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a lot of money sent to a certain box number, the Monk started to believe that 35 percent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and then broke down. The man from the Monk shop said that it needed a whole new motherboard, but then pointed out that the new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to sixteen entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors, were twice as fast and at least three times as glib, and you could have a whole new one for less than the cost of replacing the motherboard of the old model.

    For those who might not know, this little piece of nonsensical foolishness is typical of all that came from the pen of Douglas Adams, author of this series of books as well as the five-volume trilogy, ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy!’ And I use it this morning only to illustrate a point and ask a question… and that is… What do you believe… and why?

    These verses from Matthew contain the very essence of what we as Christians profess to believe… “The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’”

    The man Jesus was nailed to a cross and crucified… He was dead, wrapped in burial cloths, laid in a tomb, and sealed-in by a giant stone rolled in front of it… that much, even the Hebrews acknowledge! But these verses, and others like them, tell us that He arose from that tomb… resurrected from the grip of death… and was seen and heard by numerous individuals and groups before ascending into heaven!

What do you believe?

    A man I once knew through my work was telling about stopping and visiting a Jewish synagogue while on vacation some years ago. The rabbi invited him in and offered to show him around and answer any questions that he might have. During the course of that visit, he got around to asking the rabbi what he thought about Jesus. The rabbi answered that they believed that he might have been a prophet, but certainly no more than that! “Well, how do you explain His resurrection?” the man asked. “We believe that His followers stole Him from the tomb and hid the body, then spread that story,” was the reply.

What do you believe?

    Much hoopla had been made a few years ago about a fictional book entitled ‘The DaVinci Code’. In fact, the only factual things contained in it are some of the locations and names of organizations. However, many people seemed to embrace it as a new source of enlightenment, gleaning from its fictional pages new insights and ‘truths’… in effect, believing its untruths and fantasy because they are closer to what many people want to believe!

    Yet, in the book ‘The Da Vinci Deception,’ author and pastor Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer debunks every single concept contained in the ‘Code’. For example, in the chapter titled ‘The Quest for the Historical Jesus’ he writes…

“The attempt to debunk the Jesus of the New Testament has a long history. For centuries liberal scholars have tried to separate the historical Jesus (Jesus the mere man) from what they call “the Christ of faith”; that is, the Christ of legend and myth. They have tried to peel away all of the miraculous sayings and works in the Gospels to find this man, Jesus. In the process, they have ended up with as many different “historical Jesuses” as there are scholars. Rather than writing a biography of Christ, each scholar has, in effect, written a biography of himself!

This search for the historical Jesus is a kind of Rorschach ink-blot test. Since the New Testament was deemed unbelievable and one’s own conception of Jesus was all that mattered, many different portraits of Christ have emerged. Some writers pictured him as a countercultural hippie; others saw him as a Jewish reactionary, a charismatic rabbi, or even a homosexual magician. The famed humanitarian Albert Schweitzer wrote his own biography of Christ and concluded that it was Jesus’ insanity that drove him to claim divinity.

The life of Christ is a mirror in which each scholar sees a reflection of his own doubts, aspirations, and agenda.

In the end, the authors reveal more about themselves than about Jesus. Their dizzy contradictions and subjective opinions have forced many scholars to throw up their hands in exasperation and admit that the quest for the historical Jesus has ended in failure. The scholars discovered that the portrait of Christ in the New Testament is a whole piece of cloth; they were not able to find the seam in the garment that would separate “Jesus the mere man” from “Jesus the divine miracle worker.” No razor blade was sharp enough to carve up the New Testament with any rational objectivity. Realizing that the search for the historical Jesus was futile, some even concluded that the best course of action is to simply say that we know nothing whatsoever about him.

Perhaps you’ve heard the story about Edward Burne-Jones’s celebrated painting, Love among the Ruins. The painting was destroyed by an art firm that had been hired to restore it. Though they had been warned that it was a watercolor and therefore needed special attention, they used the wrong liquid and dissolved the paint.

Throughout the ages men have tried to reduce the bright New Testament portrait of Christ to gray tints—to sponge out the miracles, to humanize his claims. So far, however, no one has found the solvent needed to neutralize the original and reduce it to a cold, dull canvas. No matter who tries to blend its hues with those of ordinary men, the portrait remains stubborn, immune to those who seek to distinguish between the original and a supposed updated revision.

Try as they might, these unbelievers cannot find a purely human Jesus anywhere on the pages of the New Testament. Their subjectivism left them with random bits and pieces of information, but no coherent view of Jesus. They are faced with a clear choice: Either accept him as he is portrayed in the New Testament or confess ignorance about him. In effect, they are faced with the stark realization that the Gospel portrait is either all true or all false. Determined not to accept a miraculous Christ, some scholars have opted to say that there might not have been a historical Jesus at all!

The point is that no matter how far we try to go back to find the real Jesus, we always meet a supernatural Jesus. It is unbelief and not scholarship that forces people to say that the New Testament was built on “fabrication” and that faith “is that which we can imagine to be true.”

Augustus lived before scholars chewed up the Scriptures according to their personal whims. Nevertheless, even in his day some people believed what they wanted and discarded the rest. He wrote, “If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don’t like, it’s not the gospel you believe, but yourself.”

    What do you believe?

    Some years ago I wrote an article about the little town of Merritt, some miles to the west of where I lived outside of Jacksonville. Merritt was never very big, but at sometime during the last one hundred years it did have a railroad. One morning in the early spring, as the sun began its morning climb ever earlier, the light was just right as I drove through to highlight the old roadbed. The only thing actually left is a field road that runs diagonally to the road, and the remains of an old elevator, but on this morning the sun hit both just enough to remind one of what once was. Now, to the best of my memory, I have never seen any picture of Merritt, let alone a picture of the railroad, or of a locomotive in Merritt. But I had no trouble at all picturing in my mind a small, puffing steam engine working its way through town pulling a short freight, or maybe even a mixed train. After all, I know what a train looks like, and on this morning I could envision what the rail looked like. Only a small amount of imagination was required to ‘combine’ the two images in my head.

    It usually isn’t hard to think about or picture in your mind things that have happened or been built, or people that have been a part of the last 1-2 hundred years or so. We have historical records, paintings, pictures, and accounts of many things. Sometimes we even have the actual physical evidence. An old barn and foundation may remain, or entire villages, such as New Salem, might be reconstructed. Complete battles and battlefields, such as Gettysburg, may be preserved and mapped out, while cities like Chicago and St. Louis have museums to show how they have grown and evolved. We can see pictures of the people, walk the streets and touch and study the buildings and tools of the people who built this country. It is not difficult to ‘see’ and believe how it was then! I don’t have to have seen a train in the town of Merritt to believe that there once was one!

    However, if we go back, say, two thousand years, things become more difficult. Yes, some traces of historical buildings and cities might remain, some artifacts can be studied and learned from, but for the most part we rely on written records from that time to tell us what is was like. But these can be few and far between, and may not always be complete. What we sometimes wind up with is only a very small window into the facts and history of that time.

    That’s why we sometimes read and reread the Gospels and other books in our Bible and wonder why the people living in that day couldn’t recognize what was going on around them. What we forget is that these books were, and are, intended to focus on God and Jesus and seek to give us all of the theological answers into the mysteries of eternal life and salvation. But actual life was still going on all around the world… just as it was 200 years ago… and as it is today. These people were real people… living… working… providing for their families and their old age… doing all of the everyday things that we do today. Only the ‘how’ is different!

    We might, well, imagine them thinking… “Who has time to pay attention to a wild man baptizing people in the wilderness? And what was all that about the Messiah being here? Well, the priests will sort it all out and let us know what we need to know!” And, except for those who really listened… and understood… life went on as always.

    We have the advantage, and disadvantage, of two thousand years. Yes, it’s true, we have only written records of that time and place, but oh… what records they are! The beauty and wisdom contained in all of the Bible… but especially poignant in the New Testament… is alone worth the study. But more than that, it tells us the story of God… of the love that He has for His people, and how those same people failed Him time after time… It tells of how Jesus became flesh-and-blood and lived on this earth as the Son-of-Man in order to become the ultimate sacrificial lamb… how He was crucified on the cross of Calvary for each of us sitting here today… and how He rose from death as proof of the power of God, His Father! His wisdom and His love flows from every page… He is real!

    But what do you believe?

    Yes, the fact that I have actually seen a steam engine helps me to picture one in Merritt. But I do not have to have been in Jerusalem two thousand years ago to ‘see’ how it was. And I do not have to have met ‘Jesus-the-man’ to believe that He was real. He is real to me today. And though I try to imagine what God is, or might look like, and am incapable of it, I still know that He is very much real. I can see and feel His handiwork around me everyday.

    Faith? Some might call it that. But I KNOW that steam engines once huffed through Merritt. And I KNOW that Jesus once walked the streets of Jerusalem. I KNOW that God loves me and works in my life every day. And I know that Christ died for my sins and was buried, and arose on the third day. How about you?

What do you believe?