Sermon from October 21, 2007 BVBC's Phase III Project calls for a new sanctuary, large gathering spaces, and twice as many classrooms. It does much more than that. It signals a major commitment of this church to the future of Christianity in Northern Delaware and Southeastern PA. It also signals this congregation’s entry into unknown waters.
Sermon from October 21, 2007
BVBC's Phase III Project calls for a new sanctuary, large gathering spaces, and twice as many classrooms. It does much more than that. It signals a major commitment of this church to the future of Christianity in Northern Delaware and Southeastern PA. It also signals this congregation’s entry into unknown waters.
The unknown involves moving off site on Sunday mornings for 15-18 months; but it has more to do with spiritual challenges than with meeting in rented quarters. We are not just building a new sanctuary. We’re building a community of faith through whom reconciliation with God is offered to the people of the Brandywine Valley.
As we ply these unknown waters, we will find ourselves in places where we need to build bridges to people who are uncomfortably different from us. It’s important to remember that many people just want us to care enough to listen to them and try to understand them without condemning them or fixing them or giving up our own convictions about right and wrong.
Now, there is a striking feature about these bridges we want to build. They not only offer to be part of someone else’s life; they also give permission for someone else to be part of your life. We listen to them; we also need to tell them about ourselves. They may find that we are uncomfortably different from them. As soon as you open your mouth to talk, you begin to reveal what kind of person you are: gentle or harsh; truly interested in the other person or pursuing your own agenda; open to ideas or closed-minded; fair or bigoted; straightforward or manipulative. What will they find?
Let me set the problem for you as bluntly as I know how. Charles Colson wrote an essay in the current issue of Christianity Today (CT, “The Back Page, October 2007”). He told about a program he sponsors to teach middle-school, Christian students how to think about the world in a Christian way.
One of the 13 lessons led a particular group of students “through a series of choices to learn the difference between matters of taste and truth.” It talked about the differences between Christianity and other religions. To the teacher’s surprise, the students refused to say that Christianity was right, when it differed from other religions.
So, the teacher “urged them to talk to their parents or pastors, believing these authority figures would straighten them out. The next day, they came back with their answers. . . . One teen’s pastor said that no one can be sure of truth, that ‘it’s all perspective.’ Parents . . . agreed that their teens shouldn’t say that Christianity alone is true, because that could offend others. One girl had written a paper on ‘Why We Shouldn't Hurt Others’ Feelings by Claiming Our Way Is Right.’”
Please hear me. I believe we can know truth. I am also prepared to look for and welcome areas of agreement between Christianity and every other religion. But when they disagree, I believe Christianity is true, and the other religion is wrong. My intent is never to hurt another person by claiming that Christianity is right. And I hope the people I disagree with are just as convinced that their religion is right as I am about Christianity.
Now, seeing that I believe like this, how can I build a bridge to someone else and express what I believe without coming across as arrogant and close-minded? How can you do that? That’s the question I want to address with you.
Knowledge and Love
Let’s begin with the governing idea that will help us to build bridges without burning bridges. Two passages from the New Testament capture this governing idea. Look first at 1 Corinthians 8:1-2. Paul was writing to that young and chaotic congregation about a specific issue. The principle he laid down applied not only to their concern then but to our concern this morning. I’ll begin in the middle of verse one and go on to verse two.
Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. The apostle came back to this tension between love and knowledge later in the famous love chapter. Look at 1 Corinthians 13:12-13. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Then, he clarifies what he means. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Now, I’d like to make a sweeping statement. Like all sweeping statements, it leaves too much unsaid, but I think it is useful in understanding the civilization we have inherited. Western Civilization made a strategic blunder by rejecting the scriptural wisdom we just read. This blunder distorted the way we think about science, politics and religion. At the heart of the blunder, men gave priority to knowledge over love.
Let me give you one small illustration of the mind-set that came into its own 300 years ago. John Locke, to whom American politics owes so much, made the following, famous definition: “belief is ‘a persuasion which falls short of knowledge.’” (quoted in Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 18)
Think about that for a minute: “belief is ‘a persuasion which falls short of knowledge.’” For John Locke and a generation of Western European intellectuals, dazzled by the physics and mathematics of Isaac Newton and others, knowledge was a matter of certainty, not faith; of certainty, not probability.
If any area of human thought could not measure up to the precision and power of scientific knowledge, then that area of thought could not rise higher than personal opinion. Christian faith could not rise higher than personal opinion. The humanities could not rise higher than personal opinion. To this day in universities, tension exists between the humanities and the sciences. To this day in public life, tension exists between church and state. Both tensions trace their ancestry back to the conviction that man could have certain knowledge only through science. Western Civilization forgot that knowledge puffs up. Western Civilization forgot that we know in part.
This is why you talk about your Christian faith, and people may respond by saying, “Well, that’s true for you, but it’s not true for me,” or accuse you of intolerance or hate speech. Anyone can believe anything, but no one can present that belief as truth.
So, when we try to build bridges to other people in our polarized nation, how can we talk about what is dearest to us without coming across as harsh, bigoted and manipulative? We can do it, but it will require us to have a disciplined understanding of the world we live in and a disciplined way of speaking the truth in that world.
Love Says We Know in Part
We must always remember that we know in part. Such restraint about our knowledge, including science, requires that we move two pieces of furniture into our mental house and situate them prominently.
First is obedience. Jesus was not talking about science, when He said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” – John 8:32. He was talking about God. That’s why we believe we can know truth about God that is universal in the sense that it is true for all people under all circumstances, starting with me. We the Church will hold to that conviction in the face of relativism and political correctness.
But holding to that conviction makes a special demand on us. If what we believe about God is universal truth, it requires us to make a personal commitment to that truth in the sense that we allow it to shape the way we think and live, and we are willing to talk to other people about that truth. In James 2:18, that remarkable Church leader said, I will show you my faith by what I do. Our claim to know universal truth about God will be hollow, if it does not obviously affect the way we live.
Now, we need to move a second piece of furniture into our mental house - humility. It is the willingness to be corrected. We believe that we know truth about God that is universal in the sense that it is true for all people under all circumstances, starting with me. However, our ability to know and express that truth is partial. The apostle’s words apply here. Knowledge puffs up. We know in part.
The limitations on knowledge make a special demand on us. Because our ability to know and express the truth is partial, we must be willing to have our knowledge corrected and enlarged, even by people we disagree with. We avoid giving the impression that we are beyond correction, that we know it all. We are willing to learn from the other person, even if the other person is uncomfortably different from us.
I hope you begin to see how important this is in being able to talk about what is dearest to us without coming across as harsh, bigoted and manipulative. Go back for a moment to 1 Corinthians 13:5. Love, he says, is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered. “Rude,” “self-seeking” and “easily angered” reflect political discourse in this country, and they often reflect Christian participation in that discourse.
Christ calls us to a more excellent way. We will speak the truth as we understand it; we will do so with a willingness to be questioned and possibly corrected; and we will do it with patience and kindness.
Love Says We Learn in Community
So, we know the truth about God; that protects us from being skeptical and cynical. We obey the truth; that protects us from being hypocritical. And we always know the truth partially; that keeps us from being arrogant and close-minded.
All human knowledge results from participation in some community of people, who transmit that knowledge. Einstein may have written The Theory of General Relativity without footnotes, but he learned all the necessary math and science to do that from the scientific community. Every genius stands on the shoulders of others, and then extends the knowledge he learned from them.
In the same way, our knowledge of the truth about God and our willingness to allow it to shape the way we think and live have become our experience, because we belong to a community of people that knows and teaches the universal truth about God and also acknowledges that its knowledge is partial.
Why is that so hard for Christians to grasp? Haven’t you heard people say, “I don’t need church, I can worship God anywhere?” No you can’t! Without the Church our puny religious impulses will disappear like an ice cube on a July sidewalk. And our knowledge of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus, which is already infantile, will shrivel away into fads and superstitions.
The most neglected doctrine in Protestant Christianity is the doctrine of the Church. We have been so afraid that someone might think we were too Catholic that we have reduced the Church in people’s minds to the level of a filling station or a fast-food restaurant.
Look back a page or so to I Corinthians 12:13. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body – whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free – and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. And look down at verse 21. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”
Christian brother and sister are joined to each other in this one body. Baptist and Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist, Anglican and Nazarene are joined to each other in this one body. Within this one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, we learn the universal truth about God, and we learn a proper humility about the limitations of our knowledge.
All of this matters, because when you try to build bridges to the people in your life, and when they challenge what you believe, you can acknowledge your limitations and even learn from them, but you will also often be able to say, “This is not my private belief; I learned it from the global Church; two billion people agree with me on this.”
The Pastoral Center of Gravity
These reflections on knowledge and love lead me to infer seven habits of a beautiful life.
First, in building bridges to people of different understandings, the aim is not to win arguments but to bear faithful witness to our own understanding and to listen courteously and actively to the other person’s understanding. We should acknowledge it, when we’ve learned something from the other person’s understanding.
Second, we should seek always to grow in our understanding of the truth. We should be lifelong students of what we believe. Why are you content with what you learned in Sunday School as a child? If you never went to Sunday School or CCD classes, why are you content to be ignorant?
Third, we should test our understanding of the truth by our commitment to letting it shape our thought and life. Obedience clarifies a lot of understanding. We should also test our understanding of the truth by paying attention to the problems our understanding encounters. Doubts and difficulties about our faith are a gift from God; they are the best indicators that our knowledge is partial. Let them stimulate you to grow.
Fourth, we should cherish the community that gives us our understanding of truth and commitment to that truth. If the Church is optional to your life, Jesus is optional to your life. We can do better than that. Heaven and earth and the powers of the age to come meet in this act of worship and in our life together. Cherish and build the Church.
Fifth, we should talk about our experiences with the truth with others of our community of faith. The Spirit is at work to guide us. We can learn from each other.
Sixth, we should look for the larger Church beyond our own church, and rejoice when we find it. Every church’s understanding of the universal truth of God is partial. But among the churches their understanding of truth overlaps, and we learn that common themes knit us together in this much larger, global community that Christ is building.
Seventh, don’t let disappointment with Christians deter you from loving truth or drive you away from the community that gives us universal truth about God and the humility to handle it. The beef is good even if the butcher is sometimes bad.
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