Rev. Dr. Eric Elnes
September 22, 2019
Listen! Hearing That Still, Small Voice and Finding Your Own Part 3: Finding A Large Enough Story to Live In
Listen! Hearing That Still, Small Voice and Finding Your Own
Part 3: Finding A Large Enough Story to Live In
by Rev. Dr. Eric Elnes
September 22, 2019
Scripture: Exodus 3:1-14; Acts 10:1-17; 1 Corinthians 13:11-12
- The Gift of Uncertainty
According to one of the world’s foremost living poets, David Whyte, if we want to live life fully, we must cultivate a healthy relationship with The Unknown. Otherwise, we will continually edit reality to conform to the little stories we keep telling ourselves about who we are, who God is, and how life is supposed to work. Life is too large to conform to these little story-boxes we construct. When confronted with a new view reality that doesn’t fit neatly within these boxes, the “cognitive dissonance” or uncertainty we experience presents us with an invitation to find new stories that are large enough to contain the new reality.
One of the reasons that our world is in such tumult is because, in the last century or so, we have been bombarded with so many new realities through scientific advancement, economic shifts, political upheaval, and so on, that human civilization itself is struggling to find stories that are large enough to make sense of them all. Some don’t even want to try. They dig their heals in, claiming the old stories are sufficient even as these stories become less and less convincing with each passing year.
Are you living a life that feels too small to freely inhabit? If so, then, Uncertainty is your friend.
Religion does us a disservice when it seeks to remove Uncertainty from life. Have you ever noticed how the more certainty a religion claims to deliver, the more frenzied and hysterical are its adherents? I’m always amused by those who claim that the Bible contains clear and simple answers to all of life’s questions. The only question the Bible gives a clear and simple answer to is the question, “Are there any certainties in life besides death and taxes?” To this question, the Bible clearly and simply answers, “Are you kidding?”
As followers of the crucified and resurrected Christ, we can’t even be certain about death!
I’m not sure that anyone who claims that Bible as a source of certainty has ever read the Bible. From the first book to the last, all of the Bible’s great heroes lived in the midst of high uncertainty. Whether you look at Moses, Abraham, or King David in the Old Testament scriptures, or Peter, Paul, or even Jesus in the New Testament, there is no evidence to suggest that faith exempted them from uncertainty and struggle. In fact, uncertainty and struggle made them who they were.
Consider Moses. According to Exodus 3, God first appeared to Moses in the form of a bush that burned but was not consumed by the fire.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Until Moses’s encounter with God in the burning bush, two things he could have been absolutely certain about is that bushes can’t burn without being consumed and that bushes can’t talk. Then, God gives Moses the clear command to confront the mighty Pharaoh of Egypt, demanding that he let God’s people go. Moses isn’t so sure his people will go along with this audacious proposition unless they know exactly which God is behind it. Yet, when he asks God to at least tell him God’s name, God’s only response is, “I am who I am.” Technically, you can also translate the Hebrew as “I will be who I will be,” but this hardly clears matters up!
Do you really think that a God who speaks out of a burning bush and responds to the name “I am who I am” gives a hoot about certainty? Quite the opposite. This God seems to value the Unknown over the Known, the Uncertain over the Certain.
If you read the Bible from cover to cover, you’ll find that only the villains of the Bible consider certainty to be a high value. From the serpent in the Garden of Eden enticing the original couple with the absolute knowledge of good and evil, to Pontius Pilate who crucified Jesus in exchange for assurance of remaining in power a little longer, the Jewish and Christian scriptures continually portray certainty as highly overrated.
Why? Because David Whyte is right. If we are to live life fully, we must cultivate a healthy relationship with Uncertainty. When we are faced with a circumstance that fundamentally contradicts the stories we keep telling ourselves to explain who we are, who God is, and how things work, we are invited to expand the boundaries of our old stories until they become large enough to contain the new reality. Our lives, like our stories, expand to contain a little more of God’s story.
This dynamic works in many areas of life, not just religion and philosophy. When Copernicus’s astronomical observations showed that the sun did not revolve around the earth, but vice-versa, he was forced to find a new story to explain how the cosmos worked. His new story changed the world.
Even then, Copernicus’s story wasn’t large enough to be satisfactory for long. In the subsequent centuries, scientific discoveries have continually revised and expanded the story until it now reaches the far corners of the Universe … and when we got there we started asking, “Is there one universe or many?”
Looking back on all these centuries of scientific discovery, we find that the people for whom certainty is of high value are the very people who stand on the wrong side of history – just as they do in the Bible.
Dealing with Uncertainty is difficult, though, isn’t it?
Some of you know the story of when I was a young pastor in my first church in Scottsdale, Arizona. I paid a visit on an elderly couple who had drifted from the church. They told me that there was so much new going on that they found it hard to keep track of it all so they were feeling increasingly marginalized. I suggested that they attend one of our Bible studies as a way of reconnecting. Much to my surprise, the husband said, “I would never attend one of your Bible studies.”
Taken by surprise, I asked him to tell me more about that. He answered that he wouldn’t attend because he might learn something new. When I asked what was the problem with that, he responded, “At age 80, I don’t want to learn that something I have believed my whole life was wrong – even it’s true.”
I don’t know about you, but when I’m being honest with myself, I must admit that I’m not so different from that eighty-year-old. I don’t go around intentionally toppling the apple cart of my own constructions of Reality. I would be quite anxious to be presented with incontrovertible evidence that the fundamentalist version of Christianity is the correct version; that Creation took place in just six days; that the earth is just 6,000 years old; that the Bible really is God’s literal, inerrant word. Wouldn’t you? Or, how welcoming would any of us be of evidence that proved that our participation in the Tri-Faith Initiative is against God’s will?
Don’t worry. I have no evidence of that. In fact, I think it is far more likely that we will be continually confronted with the reality that God is using the Tri-Faith Initiative and many other deep, interfaith relationships all over the world to expand everyone’s stories, starting with our own … and expanding our lives along with them.
- A Larger Story
When you scratch below the surface of most people’s lives, you find a deep – if unconscious – fear of having any significant encounter or relationship with God. Partly, this is because we all intuit that if we eventually stand before God’s throne of judgment, we will discover a lot about ourselves that God disapproves of. Many of the things that we think we have done right will probably prove, in the end, to have been wrong. So why start that shame-filled experience now?
Actually, I think the hardest thing we’ll see about ourselves is not the bad stuff we’ve done, but how many times God invited us onto a path that filled our hearts with joy but that society taught us was the wrong path – so we either didn’t take the path, or continually felt ashamed of taking it.
Think of all the people who have ever fallen in love with “the wrong kind of person” who never acted on their love out of shame for feeling this love in the first place. Or what about all the people who have ever held beliefs that society deemed heretical when, in fact, it was society’s dominant belief that was heretical. Many go to their graves believing themselves to be the problem, not their faith community or society.
When we stand before God’s throne, I think it will be this view of ourselves that will be hardest to look at. It’s a view that will show us that we could have made far better use of what is good and right about us and been less concerned with what is wrong about us (and others!); that we could have been more confident, less ashamed; that the inner stories that confined us were mostly self-imposed, if only because we accepted a constricting story of ourselves.
To me, this is one of the main reasons why I don’t want to put off until tomorrow the relationship with God that I can have today. It is why prayer is so vitally important, and life-bearing. It is also why being a part of a community of faith that is dedicated to living God’s story rather than society’s story is so life-bearing. Without prayer, and outside a strong, spiritual community, I would not often have the faith or confidence necessary to tear down the stories I have been taught in order to live into the story that is lodged deep in the wellsprings of my soul. And the tiny stories I construct for myself and try to live within would not be challenged nearly often enough. It is therefore incomprehensible to me to live without prayer or active involvement in a faith community.
Many people believe that people who are strongly committed to their faith, and their faith community, have constrained their story and live without true freedom. This may be true for those whose faith community insists that the stories constructed thousands of years ago adequately describe all of Reality for all time. But vigorous and vital faith communities don’t do this. They see the faith tradition as a living tradition, not a dead or static one. Therefore, they don’t throw out the old stories. They just see them as the beginning of an ever-expanding story, not the end of one.
If you are skeptical, consider the preeminent story of what biblical faithfulness looks like in the New Testament, outside of Jesus’s own story. It’s the story of how Peter – imperfect as he was – managed to turn a small, unorthodox Jewish sect into a world religion.
In Acts 10, we have the story of Peter out on his porch in Joppa praying. After some time, Peter’s mind starts drifting toward thoughts of lunch. Yet rather than responding to his hunger pangs like most of us would, ending our prayer and grabbing a bite, Peter asks for lunch to be prepared for him and continues on.
Then comes the vision: Something like a blanket drifts down from the sky suspended by ropes. On the blanket is spread before Peter all the non-kosher animals of Earth. Then a voice says, “Peter, go to it. Kill and eat. Anything you want.”
“Now wait a minute,” Peter says, “This isn’t … uh … kosher!”
Remember, Peter is a Jew. All the Christians of his day were of Jewish descent, not Gentile, and they continued to consider themselves Jews. They were simply Jews who accepted Jesus as the true Messiah. Jews eat kosher. Thus, so did the early Christians. They ate kosher not out of gastronomic preference but out of respect for God’s Law, given to Israel during the Exodus, inscribed in the covenant made at Mt. Sinai. Eating kosher had been part of the tradition for well over a thousand years by Peter’s time.
If Peter had not developed a strong relationship with the Holy Spirit, he might have resisted the vision’s encouragement to kill and eat the animals stating, “God wrote it. I believe it. That settles it!” He could have cited Leviticus 11 in defense, where God instructs Israel about which animals are “clean” and authorized for eating, and which are “unclean” and therefore forbidden. He could have insisted that the Bible “plainly and clearly” states that camels, for instance, are “unclean” and must not be eaten while cows are “clean” and therefore permitted. Camels are considered unclean because they chew the cud and don’t have a divided hoof, but cows are “clean” because they chew the cud and do have a divided hoof.
Peter could have stood on a stack of Bibles and insisted how the inspired Word of God states in black-and-white that fish with scales are fine to eat, but that scallops, oysters, and crabs are “unclean” because they live in the sea and don’t have fins or scales. Peter had been taught these things – from Scripture – since he was a child. The Scriptures made it clear that eating non-kosher foods was an abomination to God. Before he had his vision, if someone had told him that God was doing a “new thing,” and that eating kosher wasn’t required anymore, he probably would have accused them of arrogance, or apostasy, or both.
You may think that a spat over kosher food would have seemed silly from the start. “There’s nothing wrong or evil about eating crabs or scallops.” But roll back the benefit of 2,000 years of hindsight and the picture gets a lot murkier. If you were in Peter’s sandals, do you really think you would have thought that a change of dietary law was “no big deal”? Or if you were one of those whom Peter would later try to persuade, would you have accepted his vision, or would you have thought that he’s being soft on sin? What may appear to be a little ripple to us was experienced by our Christian ancestors as a tsunami.
Remember: even Peter resisted the vision at first. But he kept praying. The vision came a second time and it was still so startling that Peter couldn’t accept it. He probably thought that Satan had sent the vision, not God. But he kept praying, and the vision came a third time. God asked him, “Will you pronounce unclean the things that I call clean?” (Notice how patient God was with Peter!)
Then there was a knock at the door. Three Gentiles stood outside. They asked Peter to accompany them to Caesarea where a Roman centurion wanted to ask him a few questions about Jesus. Suddenly, Peter realized that his vision was not simply about food. His vision was about people.
Doubtless, Scripture was running through Peter’s head again. Memories from the book of Nehemiah of how the Jews were commanded to divorce their foreign wives so that they could become pure in God’s sight; memories of Jews being commanded not to associate with the Gentiles. The early Jesus-following Jewish community didn’t have any notion that Gentiles who did not follow Mosaic Law should be allowed into the community of the faithful. They held the exact same prejudices against pagans that their non-Jesus-following sisters and brothers did.
Yet Peter realized that these Gentiles standing at his door were effectively bearing another message from God: “The people I have declared ‘clean,’ are you to call ‘unclean’?” So, Peter said, “Of course I’ll go with you!”
Peter accompanied the Gentiles to Caesarea (about 32 miles away). There, he met with Cornelius, a captain in the Roman guard – someone the Jewish people considered especially detestable. They start talking about Jesus and the Holy Spirit comes upon them. All the Gentile pagans in Cornelius’s household want to be baptized as Christian – something that until this moment would have been impossible without conversion to Judaism and following the Mosaic law, including circumcision of every male.
Later, Peter was called to account for his “brazen” action by church leaders in Jerusalem. No one was happy with him. Peter was breaking open the story they had lived with since childhood. He was breaking with a thousand years of religious and scriptural tradition. Yet, the Book of Acts tells us that Peter held his ground. I can imagine Peter telling the church Council exactly what he told Cornelius and his household. Acts 10 tells us:
Peter fairly exploded with his good news: “It’s God’s own truth, nothing could be plainer: God plays no favorites! It makes no difference who you are or where you’re from – if you want God and are ready to do as he says, the door is open. The Message God sent to the children of Israel – that through Jesus Christ everything is being put together again – well, God’s doing it everywhere, among everyone. (Acts 10:34-35 The Message)
The church Council was persuaded. They were persuaded because they, like Peter, had developed a strong and abiding relationship with the Holy Spirit. They affirmed what Peter did and sent him out into the world not only with their blessing, but with their assistance. Their story became greater that day and, with it, so did their lives. They found a story that embraced more of God’s own story. As a result, it wasn’t just their lives that were affected, but literally billions of human lives.
To bring this story full circle, we need only consider what we are doing today, on the Tri-Faith Commons. We are living in an age where God is, once again, radically expanding the world’s story. What the Holy Spirit is doing right here among us in Omaha is at least as important as what the Spirit was doing with Peter and the high church Council 2,000 years ago.
If the world manages to survive the next 2,000 years, with God’s help, I am convinced that our descendants will look back on our story – and the stories of all those who are presently engaged with interfaith work – and see more clearly than we do that God blessed us with the gift of Uncertainty about the stories of division that formed us so that we could accept God’s larger story that re-formed us. We were breaking down the barriers that have divided the Abrahamic faiths for centuries and replacing them with bridges of respect and appreciation that enabled humanity not only to survive, but to thrive.
Future generations may even conclude that our age witnessed the long-predicted Second Coming of Christ – only this time Christ became incarnate not in a single person, but in millions.