Sermon 9-7-25

Pastor Ray Lorthioir

Trinity Lutheran Church

W. Hempstead, NY

The 13th Sunday after Pentecost. 50th Anniversary of Ordination

No Grim Christians Here

Good morning. I’m Pastor Raymond Lorthioir Jr. I have served Trinity Lutheran Church, West Hempstead as senior pastor since 1985. Since I’m going to be retaking my ordination vows in a special service this afternoon, I’m going to do something I seldom do. I’m going to make this sermon about me. You need to know a little about your pastor.

My father, Ray Sr., was a lapsed Lutheran from St. John’s in Bellmore who married a Roman Catholic lady from Hempstead. In those days as part of the marriage agreement, the Roman Catholic Church insisted that any offspring be raised Roman Catholic. Therefore, I was baptized at Our Lady of Loretto in Hempstead and began catechetical instruction in Wantagh at St. Francis.

But in his late 20’s, my father was diagnosed with an illness that sent him fleeing back to the church. It wasn’t long before he was on the church council at St. John’s in Bellmore. Therefore, on one memorable night he sat me down at the dining room table and explained to my seven year old soul the difference between Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism. He announced that from then on I would be attending Lutheran Sunday school. But, instead of enrolling me in Bellmore, he enrolled me at Christ Lutheran in Wantagh, right around the corner from where we lived. 

It was several more years before my father decided to transfer his membership to Christ Lutheran in Wantagh. He was on the church council there in the late sixties when our pastor unexpectedly died. If I remember correctly, he was the head of the council when the new pastor was called. Around 1970, he was intimately involved in refurbishing the sanctuary of that congregation into its present configuration. I was ordained in that sanctuary on Sunday, September 7th, 1975 — fifty years ago today.

I’m the oldest of four brothers raised in Wantagh. Our youngest brother died an untimely death from cancer twenty years ago. He left a wife and two daughters. My two surviving brothers and their families live in Suffolk. My mother is still alive at 98 and also lives in Suffolk.

My mother is a devout Roman Catholic and must have taken me with her to church. Apparently, I was quite impressed. For, a black and white picture exists of me at age four standing in a box in our backyard, holding a book as if I were preaching out of it. It was a harbinger of things to come.

Sociologists have discovered that if a child’s father goes to church regularly, the child will also go regularly as an adult. So it is with my brothers and I.

I always loved going to church. So, it was not a leap for me to decide that I wanted to enter ministry. That thought came in the 7th grade. Somewhere around 10th grade I made it known to my family. So, my higher education was oriented toward that goal.

In the fall of 1967 I began classes at Hofstra University as an undergraduate with a major in philosophy and a minor in history. I also met my wife. And for the next five years Carol and I were an item before being married in 1972.

Just after the founding of the United States, public education became the policy of the country. It’s purpose was to train the children of a Christian nation in the wisdom of their  Creator God and the virtues He commands in the lives of citizens.

However, by the mid 20th century, a new religion had taken over public education in the U.S. It’s known as Philosophical Naturalism or Materialism. I call Materialism a religion because it has an origins story. In fact, this year is the hundredth anniversary of the 1925 so-called “Hillsboro Monkey Trial” where a public school teacher was convicted of teaching Darwinian Evolution — then against the law in the state of Tennessee. But the real outcome of that trial was that the supposedly “scientific” theory of monkeys to man became the rage of a new modern, supposedly sophisticated culture, while the ancient narrative of our creation by a Creator God was relegated to the ravings of superstitious fools and hillbillies.

Therefore, by the mid twentieth century, Materialism, with its Darwinian origin story, had taken over public education. You may not know this, but if you were educated in American public schools, you were thoroughly indoctrinated in Philosophical Naturalism. In fact, you probably live more by the worldview of Philosophical Naturalism than you do by the Christian worldview. You just didn’t know what was being done to you in school — how you were being quietly indoctrinated.

At the university, however, the wraps came off. It was in my studies as a philosophy major that the doctrines of Philosophical Naturalism were formally revealed to me. I had to think and write about them. I was confronted with the monster face to face.

The fundamental doctrine of Materialism is that the material universe available to our five senses and any electronic probes we make is all that exists. There is nothing else. There is no supernatural realm. There is no Creator God. We have no soul. Our consciousness is the byproduct of electrical reactions between the cells of our brains. When those reactions cease at physical death, we simply cease to exist. There is no heaven. There is no hell. The only reality is existence in this life.

Therefore, in life, we are our own gods. What a cultural majority of us defines as good and evil becomes good and evil. Truth is anything we want it to be — except that it can’t be some evil truth, like what Hitler came up with. Since there is no heaven, we must make utopia on this earth — as the communists once attempted in Russia, or as we’re attempting here through technology.

Since there is no hell, we can listen to the lusty sophomoric 1954 ramblings of Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy, and be sexually liberated. In fact, being sexually liberated is the most important part of Materialism. And now with the woke ramblings of critical theory and intersectionality, we’ve learned we all must heartily celebrate the freedom to choose any sexual self-identity we desire for ourselves.

Until recently, most of the time we were not confronted with the doctrines of Philosophical Naturalism head on. There was enough residual Christianity in the culture to blunt the effect. But, if you’re raised a Christian, when you formally study Philosophical Naturalism and delve into the writings of its foremost proponents, an intellectual and spiritual crisis is created. 

I had had a preliminary version of that crisis in about 3rd or 4th grade. I noticed that the human history I was being taught in my Sunday school and the human history I was being taught in public school were quite different. Which one was correct? In my childish way I decided that the public school version must be correct because it was being taught by real teachers. My Sunday school teachers were just moms and dads. Without knowing it, I had made a religious decision in favor of the religion of Philosophical Naturalism. It was my first step away from the Christian religion.

I was confronted with another crisis. In 10th grade biology we were introduced to Darwinian evolution. It was a good thing that I was too busy with the business of being a teenager to think much about it. However, in the university I was forced to confront the stark dichotomy between Darwin and Genesis. Again, which one is correct? I was being indoctrinated that Darwinism was “Science!” And Genesis was a mere creation myth of “religion.” So, obviously science — real knowledge — had to be true. Religion was myth for superstitious simpletons.

In the spring of my freshman year at Hofstra I was confronted with a philosophical school of thought that has its roots in the 18th century British skeptic, David Hume. By the mid 20th century, this school of thought had been perfected and became known as Logical Positivism. Its foremost proponents in the late 20th century were British atheist philosophers, A. J. Ayer and Anthony Flew.

Logical Positivists believed they had come up with a foolproof standard to separate meaningful talk from meaningless talk. And by that standard any talk about God is meaningless talk. This was a new crisis. It meant I was heading for a career of meaningless chatter about complete nonsense.

Consequently, in the spring of my freshman year with the walls of Philosophical Naturalism closing in around me, I fell off an intellectual and spiritual cliff. The terror of the Philosophical Naturalist doctrine of death encompassed me. I lived in the terror that upon death my consciousness — my very being — would simply disappear. It would be as if I had never been. So, why, indeed, had I ever been born? Was my life and all our lives just the cruel joke of a mindless universe that had by pure accident brought human beings into existence through time, chance and the survival of the fittest — that is death?

Somehow, I couldn’t follow this path to its logical conclusion and give up Christianity entirely. So, I became what might be called a Grim Christian. I stubbornly and doggedly held on to the traditions of Christianity, even though all the intellectual and scientific proof seemed to be against it. In those days Materialists scoffed that Christians had to park their brains at the door of a church to enter. I gritted my teeth, parked my brain and went in. I became a Grim Christian. Liberal churches are probably infested with Grim Christians.

Seminary only made things worse. At the urging of another son of Christ Lutheran who had entered the ministry, I enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan. In 1910, Union was the first seminary in the U.S. to surrender to the wave of Philosophical Naturalism that had infected the church in Europe. Therefore, I was trained in what is called the Higher Critical Method of biblical interpretation.

The Higher Critical method stands on the Materialist doctrine that there is no supernatural. There simply can be no supernatural. Therefore, I discovered that the older Higher Critical scholars entertained themselves by speculating on how Jesus had performed what looks like miracles.

The speculation I remember most clearly was an explanation for how Jesus had hoodwinked the crowd with the loaves and fishes. Some Higher Critical scholars speculated that Jesus was connected to the ancient Jewish sect of the Essenes, and that He knew where the Essenes kept food storage caves around the country. Therefore, Jesus had led the crowd that he fed with the loaves and fishes to an area where there was one of those caves. The mouth of this particular cave was covered with a curtain of vines hanging down, hiding the food within. Therefore, Jesus kept sticking his arm into the cave through the vines and pulling out loaves and fishes. According to these scholars, that’s how it appeared that the five thousand were miraculously fed. I kid you not.

All of this did nothing to help a Grim Christian. So, I want you all to know the reason I’m retaking my vows this afternoon. I was ordained on September 7th, 1975 as a 26 year old Grim Christian. I’m not one now.

For, I’ve been privileged to live in a very blessed time. First, by a curious series of events, I found myself in an Episcopal Church in the tony city of Darien, Connecticut on a Tuesday morning in April of 1979. The place was packed with about 360 people for a mass that began at 9:30am and lasted until noon. And it was like that every Tuesday morning in those years. The strange thing was that these upper crust Episcopalians actually worshiped and talked as if Jesus is real — which He is.

Their rector (Episcopalian for pastor) was a brilliant former college professor. Father Fullam could keep you in rapt attention as he preached and taught for forty-five minutes with only a Bible in his hand. He made you turn the book’s pages with him.

That first morning, something he said greatly challenged me. He said, “Freud taught that God is our projection of the human father on a large screen in the sky. But Freud was wrong. The human father is a poor imitation of our heavenly Father.” I was stunned. He had dared to challenge the great Philosophical Naturalist demigod, Sigmund Freud! And what he said made sense. I found myself thinking, what made Freud correct? Why couldn’t human fathers be poor imitations of our heavenly Father?

Within a few weeks I had taken my first steps away from Philosophical Naturalism. Knowledge that God is real is contagious. And the rector of that church was an internationally acclaimed teacher of Scripture. As I attended week after week I developed a hunger to know more. 

And then, there’s the matter of the Holy Spirit. Trying to read Scripture without the Spirit is like trying to read a foreign language. Indeed, in his three year ministry Jesus spent large quantities of time teaching His disciples about the suffering and victorious Messiah found in the Old Testament. They just didn’t get it. Without the Holy Spirit, they couldn’t get it.

However, we read in John chapter 20 that on Easter evening, resurrected Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit into the apostles. We read in Luke chapter 24 that on that same evening Jesus opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. The effect was electric. It would take too much time this morning to fully develop the difference in the apostles before and after Easter evening. But as we read in the first chapter of Acts, it’s clear that Lord Holy Spirit inspired Peter, from Scripture, to call the apostles together to replace Judas Iscariot with St. Matthias. You can also see how the apostles were able to preach the suffering and victorious Messiah from the Old Testament on the Day of Pentecost and many times thereafter. Before they received Lord Holy Spirit, the apostles weren’t able to see Jesus in the Old Testament, even when Jesus Himself taught them. After they received Lord Holy Spirit, they found Jesus all over the Old Testament. That’s what makes the New Testament epistles such amazing interpretations of the Old Testament.

I had the same experience. Scripture just makes amazing sense when Lord Holy Spirit opens our eyes.

Now someone will object that as Lutherans we confess that we receive the Holy Spirit in baptism. I confess that. But if we allow ourselves to be seduced in life by foreign gods and their religion, the Spirit then allows us to squash Him down into a hole within us where He quietly and patiently waits. Indeed, one cannot serve Philosophical Naturalism and Yahweh at the same time. We will serve one and hate the other. 

However, Yahweh was merciful to me. He overthrew the stranglehold that Philosophical Naturalism had in my life. Therefore, the Spirit opened my eyes to see Yahweh’s truth in His Scripture. I had what is known in some Christian circles as a born-again experience and the baptism with the Holy Spirit. From the Lutheran perspective, it has a much less exciting name. It’s called confirmation of the faith. As Martin Luther wrote in his Small Catechism, “the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith. In the same way He calls, gathers, enlightens and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith.”

In 1986 a parishioner at Trinity signed me up for what was then, the Bible Science Newsletter, now known as Creation Moments. From its pages I came to understand that the supposed conflict between science and Christianity is really a scam promoted by Philosophical Naturalism. Doing science, everyone has the same physical evidence to work with. The difference is which narrative we use to interpret the evidence.

The thing we absolutely have to understand is that Philosophical Naturalism’s narrative is not science. It’s a modern religious myth made up out of whole cloth that attempts to account for the universe without a Creator. On the other hand, the Genesis narrative accounts for a Creator of the universe. And scientific discoveries, especially in cell biology, are making it more difficult all the time to defend the myth of a universe without a Creator.

I was especially blessed twenty years ago when I discovered that a Christian philosopher ten years older than me, Norman Geisler, had brilliantly demolished the intellectual foundation of Logical Positivism when he was just a sophomore in college. He proved that the supposedly foolproof standard Logical Positivism uses to separate meaningful talk from meaningless talk is by its own definition meaningless talk. As it says in both Psalms 14:1 and 53:1, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”

I wish I had known of Geisler’s work when I was in college. It would have saved me tremendous spiritual and intellectual turmoil. In 2004 Geisler published a layman’s version of his work, along with the work of co-author, Frank Turek, in a book called, “I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist.” I loved the title, so I bought a copy.

Geisler had a sharp eye for standards that fail their own test. He’s the guy who would teach you that in a discussion about Jesus, if someone says to you, “There is no truth,” you simply ask, “Is that true?” Or if someone says, “Everything is relative,” you say, “Are you absolutely sure of that?” Or if someone says, “We can’t know anything about God,” you say, “How do you know that?"

In his maturity, Norman Geisler debated the major 20th century British atheist, Anthony Flew, numerous times. Flew found himself on the losing end of these debates. An honest intellectual, Anthony Flew followed the logic and gradually gave up atheism. At the end of his life he had become a Theist. When I read about that I was stunned. That’s how powerful the defense of the Christian faith has become in recent decades. Philosophical Naturalism is doomed. So is Darwinism.

There’s another man my age named Gary Habermas. In his doctoral thesis presented in the mid 1970’s he made compelling arguments for the historical truth of Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the dead. In 1975 probably 75% of biblical scholars did not accept Jesus’ resurrection as real history. Instead, they held the position of Philosophical Naturalism that there can be no supernatural realm and that Jesus’ resurrection is merely a myth that crept into the gospel narrative centuries after Jesus walked the earth.

Well, the work Habermas pioneered has reversed that percentage. Today, even the most skeptical scholars are forced to admit it is proven historical truth that the church was preaching Jesus Christ physically resurrected from the dead as soon as two years after the event, and not centuries later. Skeptical scholars don’t believe in Jesus’ resurrection. But they can’t deny the now proven history that the Church has been preaching it from the very beginning. Habermas has just finished his life’s work by publishing four volumes of proofs of Jesus’ resurrection. Of course, you don’t hear about this in the old media. But, who controls the old media?

Then, there’s that other British atheist I told you about, A.J. Ayer. Several years ago I found out that a year before he died, Ayer had what is called a Near Death Experience. Because of the techniques that have been developed to resuscitate people in cardiac arrest, tens of thousands the world over have had Near Death Experiences.

Ayer choked on a piece of fish at dinner and was clinically dead for a short period before being resuscitated. While dead, Ayer had a Near Death Experience. He published an article about it called, “What I Saw When I Was Dead.” Remember, atheists believe that consciousness entirely ceases upon death. Supposedly, death eliminates us entirely. Well, Ayer’s consciousness didn’t cease upon death. And he could remember what had happened while he was clinically dead. This shocked him tremendously. In the article, Ayer assured his followers that he wasn’t about to give up his atheism. But this turn of events had challenged him. As far as we know, Ayer never became even a Theist. But he was warned.

The works of Anthony Flew and A.J. Ayer had tortured my soul as a young philosophy major. Therefore, it was incredible to hear what had happened to each of them at the end of their lives. As St. Paul wrote, “God cannot be mocked.”

I’ve spoken this morning about the intellectual crises that I’ve faced in life. But, there really are no intellectual crises concerning God. For, hiding behind every intellectual crisis concerning God is the real root of the problem — a moral crisis concerning God. I’m no exception. If I weren’t a Christian, I know what my sinful nature would like to be doing.

From birth, Adam’s Original Sin forces every one of us to define good and evil for ourselves as if we are God. Even worse, Adam’s Original Sin prevents us from consistently acting on what Yahweh defines as good. Temptations lure us across lines we should not cross. As the Apostle Paul complained in Romans 7:21-24, “21So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, 23 but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

Paul then goes on to tell us in Romans 8:3, “For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh [meaning the sinful nature], God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh [meaning as a mortal human] to be a sin offering.” (NIV)

This means that the sinful nature we’re born with is more powerful than Yahweh’s perfect, holy and righteous Law. That’s why the Law can’t deliver us. Only something or someone more powerful than the sinful nature can save us. That’s why Yahweh came Himself. He sent Jesus.

By suffering on the cross the full penalty for our sin in our place, the Son of God won us liberation from sin, death and the devil through the full forgiveness of our sins. That liberation is the power of the new birth in the human heart brought about by Lord Holy Spirit. The new birth brings the righteousness of Messiah Jesus into our hearts. In turn, the power of Messiah’s righteousness enables us to function in the righteousness of Yahweh’s holy Law.

Now, the work of Messiah’s righteousness in us remains incomplete as long as we walk in this flesh. But we’re promised in Philippians 1:6 that it will become complete on the Day of Messiah’s return — the Day of our bodily resurrection from the dead. Completeness in Christ is what Christians wait for with great desire. Therefore, at Trinity, it is my aim that there be no unsure, Grim Christians here. Amen.

All Bible quotes are from ESV except where noted.