Sunday, December 12, 2004

Sunday



FROM THE PULPIT: John 1:1-9

"I am succumbing to the season this week – the sermon today I trust will help us as we prepare for Christmas. You may be feeling the stress and strain already – work, school, neighbourhood, church functions to celebrate the end of another year. They can almost be the end of us!

This is the Incarnation – God coming into the world as the answer for the chaos, confusion, weariness and lost-ness that pervades mankind. Of course Christmas is just the beginning for believers, not the answer itself that so many see it as being. It is a beginning that has its ending when we yield to Christ as our Saviour and Lord.

It is at that point that we discover “the true meaning of Christmas.” So it was disappointing to watch a Christian aid agency ad that speaks glowingly of the true meaning, yet focuses solely on child support (we are child sponsors) and never gives Jesus even a token nod.

It can be an elusive virtue, but the Scriptures give us the answer:
Luke 7:16 says “God has come to help his people.” That’s the truth behind Immanuel “God is with us” [Matt 1:23]. He is with us, to help us deal with what we can’t ourselves: sin. As Matt.1:21 also tells us “You are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

He has come to help his people; to deliver them from their sin. Does that include you? Jesus said 'Ask and you will receive.' "


The people who in darkness walked
have seen a glorious light,
that light shines out on those who lived
in shadows of the night.

To greet You, Sun of Righteousness,
the gathering nations come;
rejoicing as when reapers bring
their harvest treasures home.

For now to us a child is born,
to us a Son is given;
and on His shoulder ever rests
all power in earth and heaven.

His name shall be the Prince of Peace,
eternally adored;
most wonderful of counsellors,
the great and mighty Lord.

His peace and righteous government
shall over all extend;
on judgment and on justice based,
His reign shall never end.


The sermon this morning was titled “A Light in the Darkness” and began by acknowledging that there seems to be so much darkness in the world: violence, racism and poverty seem beyond our control… maybe even beyond God’s control.

But the world and its history are still under the direction of the Lord – his arm can reach to the most distant spot in the furthest part of the Outback. God has his purposes even in our grief and sorrows. (The problem is often that God’s plan is not the same as the ones we make.)

We also need to repent of the darkness that comes from within. Inside us all there is a stubborn streak of rebellion, a self-centred tendency that would prefer to follow our way and not Christ’s.

Turning on the light will dispel the darkness. Remember God’s mercy is a gift that we can receive any day of the year – we don’t need to wait until Christmas Day.




There is a God, leading atheist concludes

NEW YORK - A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God — more or less — based on scientific evidence, and he says so on a video released Thursday, reported Associated Press

At age 81, after decades of insisting that belief is a mistake, the professor, Antony Flew, has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.

Flew said he was best labeled a deist, like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people’s lives.

Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article “Theology and Falsification,” based on a paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by the writer and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis.

Over the years, Flew proclaimed the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele and Reading universities in Britain, in visits to numerous U.S. and Canadian campuses and in books, articles, lectures and debates.

There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.

Yet biologists’ investigation of DNA “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce [life], that intelligence must have been involved,” Flew says in the new video, “Has Science Discovered God?”

The video draws from a discussion last May in New York organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese’s Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas. Participants were Flew; Varghese; Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew; and Roman Catholic philosopher John Haldane of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

The first hint of Flew’s turn was a letter in the August-September issue of Britain’s Philosophy Now magazine. “It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism,” he wrote.

The letter commended arguments in Schroeder’s “The Hidden Face of God” and “The Wonder of the World” by Varghese, an Eastern Rite Catholic layman.

This week, Flew finished writing the first formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his “God and Philosophy,” scheduled for release next year by Prometheus Books.

Prometheus specializes in skeptical thought, but if his belief upsets people, well, “that’s too bad,” Flew said. “My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.”

Last week, Richard Carrier, a writer and Columbia University graduate student, posted new material based on correspondence with Flew on the atheistic Web page Infidels.org. Carrier reassured atheists that Flew accepted only a “minimal God” and believed in no afterlife.

Flew’s “name and stature are big. Whenever you hear people talk about atheists, Flew always comes up,” Carrier said. Still, when it comes to Flew’s reversal, “apart from curiosity, I don’t think it’s like a big deal.”

Flew told The Associated Press that his current ideas had some similarity with those of U.S. “intelligent design” theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts that it can explain the ultimate origins of life.

Flew, the son of a Methodist minister, became an atheist at 15.

Early in his career, he argued that no conceivable events could constitute proof against God for believers, so skeptics were right to wonder whether the concept of God meant anything at all.

Another landmark was his 1984 article “The Presumption of Atheism,” playing off the presumption of innocence in criminal law. Flew said the debate over God must begin by presuming atheism, putting the burden of proof on those arguing that God existed.








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