Totality: A Way to Connect

G'day, mate.

Have you ever been immersed in another culture on a trip and then heard the sound of an Aussie accent and gone, oh, anyone?

Sort of somehow warms your heart.

So many people in COVID were deprived of human contact.

You might have been one of them.

I know my mum, she sort of had a couple of years as she was in a retirement complex that she barely saw any human contact.

And it really affected her, because we need human contact, don't we?

Humans, it's the title of our new series.

Human, we are all human, and we need one another.

We are very aware of what is sometimes referred to as the human condition.

Human, filled with the most extraordinary potential for good, aren't we?

And yet, plagued with this capacity for evil done to others and even our planet, that is beyond comprehension.

Human, we are human, and we are looking over the next, Lord willing, over the next five weeks at a bunch of thoughts that come from a book by Dr.

Daniel Strange called The Five Magnetic Points.

And we're not just sticking to the book, but really jumping out of that foundation of these five magnetic points that talk about five longings that are in every human and every human culture.

We'll look at where they came from.

But I want to suggest, as the book does, that the longings that we find in humans, in the cultures that they create, are all fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

Amen?

They are fulfilled ultimately in Jesus himself.

I wonder, did you ever play hide and seek?

Anybody?

Probably we've stopped playing hide and seek, but youth groups sometimes get to play in churches, which is, I guess, pretty cool.

But most of us learned about hide and seek in our family homes, where someone would maybe count till 20 or even 100, and everyone else would go and hide.

And if you can remember, often there was, as a little kid, there was a squishy, hard-to-get-into spot in some cupboard somewhere.

Anyone know that spot?

And if you could get in there, it was hard to get in there, it was a challenge, but if you could get in there, you were pretty confident you might win.

Now, it's often assumed that God is playing a cosmic game of hide-and-seek with humans.

We hear people talk about, I'm on a search, a journey, I'm seeking God, as though God is hiding and making it hard for humans to find him.

Famously, in 1961, the Russian astronaut or maybe cosmonaut, you might call him Yuri Gagarin, went up into space and on his return, allegedly told his bosses, I've looked and looked but couldn't see God anywhere.

God, is he hiding?

Is it a game of hide and seek?

Why do humans find it so hard to discover true truth that completely fulfills our longing to make sense of the mysterious complexity of human life?

Well, the Bible tells us actually, clearly, that God is not playing hide and seek.

I don't know if you knew that, but the Bible comes straight out and says, he's not playing hide and seek.

And it's not in the passage that we heard read, but we'll get to that later.

It's in Romans chapter 1.

So if you have a Bible there, you might like to turn to it.

Romans chapter 1 verse 18, the text will be on the screen, where Paul is writing to the church at Rome, and he says, The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness.

Since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them, for since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God, nor gave thanks to him.

But their thinking became futile, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being, and birds, and animals, and reptiles.

God is not hiding.

In fact, from the very beginning, he has been revealing himself, and when I say the very beginning, the beginning of creation from a biblical worldview, we are told that God created the universe.

Certainly, this planet, the earth, and everything in it, by his powerful word.

His fingerprints, the Bible says, are over everything that's been made.

His DNA, as it were, is all over his creation, and especially on his image bearers, that is you and I, humans.

We've been, humans have been created uniquely to be God's representatives and to rule under his authority.

So, what is it in Romans 1 that God has revealed about himself?

Well, we're told in verse 20, two invisible qualities of God have been impressed upon us.

They are God's eternal power and divine nature.

These two qualities uniquely highlight the difference between the creator and the created.

God's eternal power and divine nature.

He has eternal power because he's always been there.

He has always existed.

He's not part of the created order.

That's what sets him apart.

He is independent of any other power, but we are not.

We are dependent on our gracious God to give us life and breath as he does to all of creation.

We have seen in creation his eternal power, Paul says.

And also his divine nature.

Now that's a little bit hard to sort of understand.

What exactly does he mean?

I think he's saying that this is a personable being who is divine, who is God, who is eternal, but he can be known.

Eternal power, divine nature.

The Bible says God is not hiding.

Humanity is dependent on him and accountable.

He has all power, eternal power.

We're dependent on that power, and we're accountable to a personable being, a relatable being who has a divine nature.

He's not an it.

He is a person.

In our cosmic game of hide and seek, God is not hiding.

But guess what?

The Bible says we are.

We are the ones hiding.

And it goes back to Genesis 3, what Rob read out for us a few minutes ago.

The man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

But the Lord God called to the man, where are you?

He answered, I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.

Now, if we look into the story, they are hiding because they've already disobeyed God.

They're only given one rule to obey.

Don't eat from the tree in the middle of the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or you will die.

Don't do that.

But there is a being, a supernatural being who is personified by the snake, and the snake gave a different scheme of the way things were.

The snake lied.

The snake gave humanity a different idea to frame up their reality.

And he said, no, God is holding back from you.

It's fine to eat.

And so, they believed the lie which unleashed sin and death on the world.

They are dependent, these humans.

We are dependent, and we are accountable to one who has eternal power and who has divine nature.

So, they felt guilt and shame, and they hid.

And so, then God called them out, and he wasn't seeking their geographic location.

After all, he is God.

He was calling them out of their hiding.

He was calling out the whole human race to stop believing a lie.

Stop believing this idea that's been given you, which is fake, about how things truly are.

So, coming back to Romans 1, it is a commentary on Genesis 3.

And we find the Bible telling us that humans do two things with the revelation of God's truth.

We suppress it and we substitute it.

The wrath of God, Paul writes in verse 18, is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their own wickedness.

Humans suppress the truth of who God is.

And in verse 22, they claim to be wise and they exchange, they substitute the glory of the immortal God for all sorts of other far less glorious things.

Mortal humans, birds, animals, reptiles.

Suppress and substitute is what humans do.

When you think of suppress, think of holding someone's head underwater.

Suppress them.

Suppress the truth is what we're told humans do.

Another way to see it is we take a big fat marker pen, and with the ideas given us by the snake, we write our truth over God's truth.

Does that make sense?

We graffiti his truth that's being presented to us about a loving God who created us in his image, and we graffiti a different idea about reality.

We suppress the truth, and we substitute it with idolatry, is what we're told.

Humans making up stories that explain life without God requires a new God, idolatry.

God speaks through creation, and then humans speak over him.

Can you agree that this is what we see?

Suppress and substitute.

And you know, this isn't a one-off event.

This is a dynamic that happens over every generation.

Wouldn't you agree?

Suppress, substitute.

God speaks, his eternal power is revealed in creation, and even in closer, more clear explanation from, say, the word of God or someone who can explain what Jesus has done.

But we hear it, eternal power, divine nature, and another generation will suppress it, push it down, graffiti over it, and substitute it for a lie, a new way of understanding reality.

So this brings us to the five magnetic points.

JH.

Bavink was a Dutch missionary in the beginning of last century in Indonesia, and through his studies in cultural anthropology, which is basically observing how people live, he came up with this thesis, and I'll just read it out to you, a couple of sentences.

He wrote, There seems to be a kind of framework within which human religions need to operate.

There appear to be definite points of contact around which all kinds of ideas, things crystallize.

So we suppress the truth and we substitute it with ideas.

There seems to be quite vague feelings.

One might better call them direction signals that have been actively brooding everywhere.

So he's suggesting that he's seen this in Indonesia, but in other cultures as well.

Magnetic points that time and again irresistibly compel human religious thought.

Look, human beings cannot escape their power, but must provide an answer to those basic questions posed to them.

They can answer them with foolish myths, with fairy tales, with totally unique thought forms, but they cannot ignore them.

I wonder if you would agree with Beving.

They impose themselves on people, and in one way or another, people must come clean about them.

These five magnetic points from JH.

Beving all point to the longings in human cultures and in humanity.

And these are the five.

Totality, a way to connect.

Norm, a way to live.

Deliverance, a way out.

Destiny, a way we control.

And higher power, a way beyond.

Now, stay with me.

I've read this book a couple of times over, and I just found it quite hard to even sort of synthesize these five into a cohesive idea.

But it does make sense to me now, and I think it's really worthwhile insight that's worth extrapolating.

So today, we're going to start with magnetic point number one, totality, totality.

And before we get to just thinking about it, I want to just quote a scripture from Hebrews, which is, I think, beautiful in the sense that it reminds us that everything that we're looking for regarding truth, like a Good Sunday School lesson, is found in Jesus.

It's found in Jesus.

In the past, we read in Hebrews 1, in the past, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets, and at many times, and in various ways, of course, through creation.

But in these last days, He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, and through whom also He made the universe.

The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being, sustaining all things by His powerful word.

Honestly, my prayer is, no matter if you're completely new to the ideas of Christianity, or they're very familiar, that that text would speak of what's going to happen for you and I over the next five weeks.

That we'll be drawn to Jesus, and we'll see God's glory in the face of Jesus Christ.

Totality.

Let me try to explain the magnetic point of totality.

It was 1979.

Anyone spend time on that place, the hill of the SCG?

Anyone?

Andrew Dawkins, I'm looking for your hand.

So 1979, I was nine years old when I had my first experience of an international cricket game on the hill.

That's a throng of humanity, isn't it?

And add to that inebriated people from, it goes from about two o'clock till 10.30, something like that, by a couple of hours in, they are pretty, you know, loaded up with alcohol.

And yet, we were there with friends, and I remember being there thinking, I'm nine years old, should I be here?

This seems wild.

But I just, I can remember, instead of Ozzy, Ozzy, Ozzy, Oi, Oi, Oi, Andrew, what were we singing?

Come on, Ozzy, come on, come on.

Come on, Ozzy, come on.

That was what we were doing.

And so I had this sense of totality as a nine year old.

We were fighting the West Indies, and it was a tough gig to try to beat the West Indies in, no matter what the format was.

But when you got a wicket against the West Indies and that crowd went, this is euphoric.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

There's something in humanity that longs to belong, to be part of the bigger thing.

We all know we're humans together, and every now and then the team that you're part of gets together and celebrates.

Anyone at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in 2000, the dress rehearsal or the main one, we were at the dress rehearsal, and we were basically up here.

We were on the southern end, but we were looking down.

And I remember so distinctly at one point, they played John Lennon's Imagine.

There's 100,000 people there.

It's September 2000.

If you don't remember, the sky was blue for three weeks.

It was just this epic time in Sydney.

And we're all there celebrating humanity coming together, and they play Imagine.

Imagine there's no heaven and no religion too.

And it's John Lennon is, and I'm up there, I'm a Christian, and I'm going, this is awesome.

Oh, I didn't know it was totality that I was celebrating, but the humans, yeah.

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

I'm not celebrating that.

That's not true, right?

That's a graffiti pen being written over the reality that there is a heaven and there's an earth and a judge of all the heavens and all the earth, amen.

And he created it all for its glory.

Imagine there's nothing above us, yeah, yeah.

And we could just sway together.

That sounds really sarcastic.

I'm not meaning to be judgmental, but that's totality.

We have a longing for it.

We have an innate sense of totality.

We're connected and part of something bigger, and we enjoy it when we experience it every now and then.

We're small cogs in a much bigger machine, tiny cells that are part of a bigger organism that's cosmically connected and interconnected.

We have a sense that we don't stand alone in life, and yet at the same time, we want to be apart, A-P-A-R-T, no gap.

We want to be apart from the universe.

We don't want to lose our individuality, this totality stuff, or our identity.

We don't want to lose our meanness.

We don't want to be swallowed up by the whole.

So there's this tension, isn't there?

A longing for totality, but also to be an individual in the midst of it.

If you look at most religions, they have some sense of totality.

The idea of satori, enlightenment in Japanese Zen Buddhism, Hinduism.

I'm generalizing a lot here, but the ego in Brahman for Muslims, the umar, the worldwide community of Islam.

When this is really interesting, when Facebook celebrated its one billionth user, Facebook brings people together, one billionth user.

This is the ad campaign.

Let me just read the text from it.

The things that connect us.

The script said this, chairs, chairs are made so that people can sit down and take a break.

Anyone can sit on a chair, and if the chair is large enough, they can sit down together and tell jokes, or make up stories, or just listen.

Chairs are for people, and that's why chairs are like Facebook.

Doorbells, airplanes, bridges, these are things people use to get together, so they can open up and connect about ideas.

Remember, it's all about ideas, isn't it?

And music and other things that people share.

Dance floors, basketball, a great nation.

A great nation is something people build so they can have a place where they belong.

The universe, it's vast and dark.

And it makes us wonder if we are alone.

So maybe the reason we make all of these things is to remind us that we are not.

That's not about totality.

We're together.

Facebook is bringing us together.

And these are smart people writing an ad campaign that's tapping into the human longing of totality.

And yet, independent as well.

When, last one, when the 850 year old Notre Dame Cathedral was severely damaged by fire in 2019, there were newspaper headlines that said, Notre Dame is us.

It is Paris.

It is the world too.

Isn't that an interesting headline?

Notre Dame is the world.

1 billion euros were quickly raised for its restoration.

President Macron says in his speech in the aftermath of the fire, he described Notre Dame as our history.

Think about this.

The most secular nation on earth.

He says, this is the epicentre of our lives, Notre Dame.

He said, I am solemnly telling you tonight, this cathedral will be rebuilt by all of us together.

Fascinating.

The symbol of a cathedral which represents totality.

So this first magnetic point, is there a way to connect?

What is my relationship with the rest of reality?

What does that relationship mean for identity, individuality and my significance?

How is it that I am both part and a part?

Spec and special, nothing and noble.

Humans want that question answered.

When we embrace the Christian teaching on being human, we find that we don't have to constantly flip-flop between our sense of insignificance and significance, which is the wonderful truth about Christian theology, about Christian doctrine, what we find taught in the Bible.

The Bible's answer to the question around totality is beautiful and satisfying, and it's both end.

You'll see some of these texts come up on the screen.

We are created by God, Genesis 1.

The text says, 1.26, Then God said, let us make humankind in our image.

What the Bible says at the very start is human, us, humans, are created by that one with the divine nature, the one who has eternal power.

He created us, and that gives us immense worth.

Amen.

He is of immense worth, and he created us.

And so we are not seeking an identity.

We don't have to seek an identity outside of who created us, where our origin came from.

Not only were we created by one who is of eternal worth, we are created in his image.

We are not the same as God.

Same text, let us make humankind in our image.

But we are in some ways royalty.

It's what the Psalms talk about, that humanity is the pinnacle of God's creation.

Very good.

So we're created by one of immense worth, and because we're made in his image, we are given immense worth, Genesis 1, 26.

And then Genesis 2, 7 tells us we are created from the earth.

This is fascinating, I think.

Genesis 2, 7.

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

The Bible teaches that we are of the earth.

Does anyone find that interesting?

We are meant to have an affinity with creation.

We are meant to look after this planet.

We're from it.

Created in the image of God, by God, but from the earth.

The Bible so clearly says, yeah, ontologically, at the most core aspect of our being as a human, I belong on this planet.

I am one with this planet.

Not in a new age sense.

I'm different, but I'm connected.

And it gives me worth, and it gives me a sense of totality as well.

We're created for relationships, not only with creation in general, but with human beings.

Genesis 2, 18, the Lord God said, it's not good for the man to be alone.

I will make a helper suitable for him.

We started out mentioning that humans need other humans.

This is what the Bible teaches.

What we know to be true in our hearts, is right there at the beginning of the Bible in Genesis.

We're designed for relationships, and we're created with a purpose to make a home for ourselves together, using God's blueprint.

Genesis 1, 26, God said, let us make humankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground.

As image bearers, we are speakers and makers.

Isn't that a cool idea?

God is a speaker and a maker, and so are we.

We're speakers and makers of culture, of ideas, of shaping this earth we are given to steward.

Speakers and makers.

The biblical story says humans were created to be dependent, dignified, responsible, and also accountable.

And yet we've already talked about the fact that this went horribly wrong with sin.

Although we crave connection, we're made with immense worth for connecting, but sin, that fake and false idea that we were fed as our first humans to disobey God, brought about a disconnection inside of us with ourselves as humans.

I think it's part of the human condition.

Just not being right in here and here.

And then we're not right horizontally with other human beings.

We're not right with the planet.

And worst of all, we're not right relationally with God Himself.

We're made and designed for so much.

But in the same way that Adam and Eve turned their backs on their Creator, and they ran and they hid, and in hiding, they substituted His truth for false stories.

We've done the same thing.

In not wanting to face our Maker and His truth, we put our hopes, dreams and fears in other things that don't deserve our worship and can't give us the identity, meaning and communion we so long for.

And this leads us without enough time to explain in enough detail what Jesus did for us.

Jesus is human and He's God.

And the Bible is very clear in the New Testament that He came and lived a perfect life.

He lived as a character in history.

That can be proven.

It's based in evidence.

And He lived a life that was significant and He taught and He did enormously powerful actions all over the place.

And then He went to a cross and He died.

And He said, I'm dying for the sin of the world.

I'm dying because sin matters so much that it needs to be punished.

And He was punished in our place.

And He fixed the problem of sin through the shedding of His perfect blood.

It's what the Bible teaches.

And death could not hold Him down, but He rose again from the grave.

So Jesus, in such inadequately short time, Jesus did enough to fix our problem of the breakdown of relationship with ourselves, each other, the created order, and God Himself.

He fixed that, and we can be part of His forgiveness by confessing our sin, repenting, turning from it, and clinging to Him in faith.

And then we have this wonderful picture, biblical picture of the very thing we long for as humans, totality.

Jesus says, I am the vine, you are the branches.

This is totality, right?

If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit, and apart from me, you can do nothing.

If you don't remain in me, something bigger than you, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers.

Such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.

Being connected to the vine, being in it and staying attached to it, and the vine being Jesus, is how a human flourishes in a biblical world view.

Jesus says we remain in him by recognizing our dependence on him, trusting his promises and throwing ourselves on his love.

A love in which he lays down his life for his friends.

Remaining in Christ means the end of our search for totality.

We are in the vine by faith.

It means rest for our restlessness.

And I think this is the thesis point of this whole sermon.

We can be part of something bigger because we become part of someone bigger.

Amen.

That's the Christian message.

It's not lost in a sea of imagine, there's no heaven.

It's caught up in the triune God.

It's caught up into relationship, into Jesus himself, which is what Hebrews chapter one said at the start of this sermon.

We can be part of something bigger because we become by faith part of someone bigger.

Jesus said, As the father has loved me, so I have loved you.

Now remain in my love.

Remain in me.

It's bigger than you.

If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love.

Just as I've kept my father's commands and remain in his love.

I've told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

My command is this.

Love each other as I have loved you.

Join together in me by faith and then treat people the way they should be treated.

Love is what the totality in Christianity actually is.

This longing to belong, that's the love of Christ.

This longing to belong horizontally, that's love through us to others.

Amen.

It's all brought together in the Christian ideal of love.

We are, as humans, created dependent, dignified, responsible, and accountable.

This is how we find totality.

By faith, connected to Jesus, by His Spirit, we do not suppress the truth, we do not substitute the truth for some other scheme.

We believe, and then we become, and we behave, and we belong.

And there is this beautiful sense of worth as an individual, both end, and yet joined up in this sense of totality, belonging in something so much bigger.

In Jesus, we find that we are of inestimable value as individuals.

He died to save us.

He forgives us, and he establishes us in the Father's image, and we are called to join together as His people, belonging in the vast throng of humanity also made in the Father's image.

It is in Christ that we truly find our individuality and our sense of totality.

Amen.

Thank you, Lord Jesus.

For fulfilling that longing that's in us.

To truly know that we are of value, and to truly know that we belong to something bigger.

Lord, for those who are searching for you, I pray that they might see today that you are not hiding from them.

That you might reveal who you are very clearly in all the glorious, loving, holy truth of who you are.

In Jesus' name I pray.

Amen.

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