Between Knowing and Believing
Trinity Sunday
John 3:1-17
My pastor from College, Ron Durham, tells the story of a little girl who went with her family on vacation to see the Grand Canyon. After a long drive through rather dull scenery, suddenly they pulled into a parking area, piled out of the car, and stood before the breathtaking grandeur of the South Rim. "Wow!" said the little girl. "How did they do that?"[i]
After I preached last week, I pulled out my “Pentecost” sermons from the past 7 years, just to compare them. I wasn’t very impressed – frankly, I wouldn’t give any one of them any better than a B-. Pentecost is a difficult subject, especially when we’re trying to define the work and role of the Holy Spirit. Today is Trinity Sunday, and we multiply last week’s problem by 3. But strangely enough, I pulled out my sermons from this Sunday over the last 7 years, and they’re a little better. I discovered something in looking at them – in those sermons, I discovered that I lived somewhere between knowing and believing.
We live there, don’t we – somewhere between knowing and believing. We’d like to think that we understand God, in all of God’s expressions. But we know that to suggest such a thing is to be just a little less than completely intellectually honest. We don’t know much about God, when it comes down to it. And we know even less about this concept of the Trinity. In fact, the word “trinity” isn’t even used in the scriptures. And yet, we see three expressions of God - God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit – and so we speak of this “Trinitarian” concept – almost as though we understand it.
I’ll have to admit to you – from time to time it frustrates me. People look to their pastors to explain God, and the actions of God. Most of the time we try, but if we were perfectly honest with you, we’d say “I have no idea what God is up to on this one.” I think of one experience about 6 years ago when I was called to the hospital to minister to a young couple. The mother had left the father in charge of watching the children. He did what they’d done a hundred times before – he left the child to sleep for a while on the bed. But this time, in his sleep the child scooted to the end of the bed, slid between the mattress and the head rail, and suffocated. I held my arms around this couple as the doctor disconnected the respirator on their little baby, and watched with them as she breathed her last breath. They wanted answers. I had no idea. They wanted God to explain. So did I. It gets pretty frustrating sometimes.
When you look at our scriptures for today, we discover that Isaiah and Nicodemus had much of the same situation. Isaiah had a dream. In his dream, Isaiah encountered God, and responded like any of us with any sense would respond – “Woe is me! Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” If you and I truly had the vision that Isaiah experienced, we’d say the same thing – “Woe is me!!!”
Nicodemus had an encounter with God – in the flesh. He came to Jesus by night – I suspect out of fear. Fear that he would be found out to be irrelevant as a minister, and fear that his fellow ministers would shun him for having anything at all to do with Jesus. He was duly humble in his approach to Jesus, and his opening statement revealed a need to know. “I know that you are God. Now explain yourself to me!! Isn’t that what we all want to know? “Jesus, we don’t understand. Explain yourself. Explain God to us. We want to know. We have to know.” We live somewhere between knowing and believing, and it’s not always a comfortable land in which we live.
Larry Bethune had a great line in his Trinity Sunday sermon two years ago. He said, “To use Augustine’s famous dictum: "Faith seeks understanding." Faith comes first, then reason seeks to make sense of God. But reason is limited, because in truth none of the classical arguments for God from reason are conclusive. Even if they were, none of them comes close to defining the personal Christian God who is revealed to us in the Bible. The point is, what we know of God is only what God has told us and shown us, through the scripture and in our lives.”[ii]
He hit the nail on the head with that last little bit there – what we know of God, God told us. I spoke with someone not long ago who got to the root of the problem for most people who are searching for God. We start with the scriptures. We make the assumption that the scriptures are true, and that we can trust them. But to be intellectually honest with ourselves, we have to ask that question, “How do I know I can trust the scriptures? How can I know they are true?” It is the right question to ask.
And the answer is something less than satisfactory. The answer takes us back to our premise for today – that we live someplace between knowledge and belief. Somewhere between knowing and believing.
Larry Bethune had a second paragraph that I liked. He was talking about how some people view themselves as having all knowledge about God, and he said, “That’s my other discomfort with the experts on God. They keep telling us what God thinks and who God is, but they do not listen to our own experiences of the living God. We do well to teach what we know from scripture and seek to understand the God who meets us there. But God is not just an historical figure of the past. God is, and God is now. God is, and God is here. God is, and God is with us. This God-seeking community and the lives we live out there in the world are the laboratory of our encounter with God. We need to listen to our lives, to share our stories, to seek together an encounter with the living God. We need not just to talk about God, but to seek God, each of us on our own and all of us together, that we might also experience the awe of the psalmist who saw traces of the majestic glory of God in the starry sky.”[iii]
I quoted Bethune again because he said exactly what I’d been thinking all week. We trust the scriptures – even the part we don’t yet understand. We also trust our experiences. The only person I can really speak for is myself, but I can tell you that I trust my experiences. I trust the experience I had with Jesus when I was a nine year old boy. I trust the times that God has held me in God’s presence, and I trust the times that the Spirit of God has spoken to me words of comfort, discipline, and direction. I trust those experiences. There are those who would tell us that we can’t trust anything but the scriptures, but I have to say that I live somewhere between knowing and believing, and in that strange place, experience has something to do with my faith.
I have to find the balance. We must discover and then live in the balance. Too much experience, and we start to live in the land of syncretistic theology – a land where “whatever you believe” is the key to salvation. We know that we can’t live there. We know that there are common points of belief, and that God is not divided in God’s expressions of Godself. On the other hand, our different experiences produce different points of view. We’re a little like the three blindfolded guys who were given the task of describing an elephant. One was put at the head, another in the middle, and a third at the tail. One saw the elephant only from the perspective of the trunk. The second man saw the elephant only from the mass of wrinkled skin in the middle. And the third man thought the elephant was a tiny animal, judging from the tail. Our perspectives are singular in orientation, and we do well as believers in a common God to listen to one another, even as we listen to the voice of scripture.
“So, pastor?? After we’ve listened, what do we say of God? How do we explain God to those who ask?” It’s a fair question. I’m coming up with a more consistent answer with each week that I’m in the pulpit. We tell what we know and what we believe. We tell honestly what is ours – what we have that comes from that strange and wonderful land between knowing and believing. In my own life, I try to start with the scriptures, and then confirm what truth I think I know from the experiences I have had. To be sure – there are scriptural statements for which I have no personal experience. Conversely, there are personal experiences for which I have yet to discover scriptural support.
Ultimately, I must sometimes share the paradox that I am coming to understand. Belief and knowledge are sometimes in opposition to one another. There are things that I can think that I know. There are things in which I believe – in which I trust. Strangely, in my life, the two are not always the same.
I told the Wednesday night group that I’m pretty dogmatic about the way I attempt to use one particular phrase in my life. I know some things. I believe some things. But I “believe in” only one thing, and that is my Friend and Savior, Jesus Christ. Years ago, when we were trying to get Chelsea into a certain school in town, the people who were interviewing me asked if I believed in dinosaurs. I said, “NO, I believe in Jesus, but we’ve got bones.” When it comes to who I ultimately trust, I have to say that Jesus is the one I trust for my salvation. Not my good deeds – there’s not enough of them. Not my ability to live up to the morals of scripture – I fall short way too much. Not my pedigree, or my educational attainments, or my church associations – those are things that just don’t count. I’m counting on Jesus. Period.
Much of the time, I feel like Isaiah and Nicodemus. I am caught between knowing and believing. I’d like to know more, and along the way, I seem to discover some things. Sometimes, I trust those things. But I trust “in” Jesus. I heard about Him in the scriptures. Others told me His story as well. And then I met Him. August 14, 1966. Nine years old. Over the years, He’s proven to be a friend to me. I trust Him. I trust “in” Him.
And that’s all the explaining about God I can really do.
Richard W. Dunn, PhD.
posted by the sojourning pilgrim | 7:39 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home