homily
preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA
by the
Rev. Josh Hosler, Curate
Thursday, July 28, 2016, 10:00
a.m.
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| "Father knows best" ... not. |
In the past week I’ve been inundated with
surprising pastoral care situations. I won’t go into the details except to say
that there was a common thread: strangers seeing my collar and then expecting
me to be able to tell them exactly what God wants them to do.
I’ve been a priest for two years now, and I
still find this a little surprising. It puts me in mind of what Karl Marx said
about religion being “the opiate of the masses.” It shouldn’t be, but it can
be. Wherever Christian leaders have taught people not to think for themselves,
but to rely on others to do their thinking for them, trouble lies close at
hand. This nurturing of dependence on other human beings is not true to anything
that Jesus teaches us.
For Jesus taught us freedom—freedom that grows
from love. How did he teach us? Through words, yes, but not with an instruction
book, but with stories. Parables. Our education in the faith is actually best
done in an abstract way, because each of us must live our own life and make our
own decisions.
All of this plays into people’s various
misunderstandings of what education is supposed to be in the first place. For
instance, people who haven’t made much of an effort to read the Bible might
feel as if they are not qualified to be helpful to others in matters of faith—guilt-laden,
they’ll confess that they just don’t have the knowledge. This assumes that book
knowledge is what makes one an expert. Book knowledge is helpful, but it’s not
the only kind. By itself, it downplays the wisdom of our actual lived
experiences of God. Book knowledge is a good thing, but it doesn’t necessarily
lead to wisdom.
By the same token, our actual lived experiences
of God usually need interpretation through the lenses of others to set them
into a larger context. Book knowledge can help with this process—knowledge of
various strands of Christian theology and how they might fit in with our
individual situation. Wisdom comes through openness to all sorts of knowledge.
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| Is this how we become followers of Jesus? Didn't think so. |
But in our culture today, book knowledge is the
kind of education we usually think of first. Many people’s understanding of
education is what I jokingly call, “open head, insert facts.” This works pretty
well with math. But as a result, for instance, some parents choose not to let
their children take communion yet because they don’t think the children have
enough facts in their heads. Meanwhile, the most important knowledge of
communion is experiential: Here is the path your baptism set you on. Here is
community. Here is invitation and inclusion. Here is sustenance for your
Christian journey. Here you are touching the holy. Here is love. The youngest
children understand at least some of these things instinctively. Book knowledge
will come later, but it will be inspired and informed by first-hand knowledge
of the thing itself. We are not merely being educated, but formed.
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| From the font directly to the table to begin experiencing Holy Communion. (Source: Wikimedia) |
I think our entire faith lives are like this.
We don’t truly learn about things before we experience them. Rather, we
experience things and reflect on them theologically. The task of Christian
“educators”—and yes, I put that in quotes on purpose—is not to “open head,
insert facts,” but to help people learn to draw close to the mystery of God. In
Godly Play, that can be as simple as beginning a sentence with “I wonder …”
One of my favorite authors, Robert Farrar
Capon, put it best:
Christian
education is not the communication of correct views about what the various
works and words of Jesus might mean; rather it is the stocking of the
imagination with the icons of those works and words themselves. It is most
successfully accomplished, therefore, not by catechisms that purport to produce
understanding, but by stories that hang the icons, understood or not, on the
walls of the mind.[1]
And this is why, at St. Paul’s, we refer not to
“education,” but “formation.” My new title is Associate Priest for Adult
Formation. My job is to help form faithful adults. I’m not the potter, but I invite
people into the potter’s house for the sake of being formed under the potter’s
hands. I can’t tell people what God wants them to do or become, but I hope I
might inspire them to draw nearer to God and to discover holy freedom. Freedom
in Christ means freedom to be fully human, with all the choices and
responsibilities that entails, and with all the love that demands. How did the
Mother Abbess put it in The Sound of Music? “A dream that will need all
the love you can give/ Every day of your life, for as long as you live.” This
is the Christian life.
And because this is the Christian life, and not
just the life of a priest, this is your work, too: to nurture in other people freedom
in Christ. True freedom doesn’t just mean we get to do whatever we feel like.
True freedom comes with an awareness of our responsibilities to each other.
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| An image of God (Source: Pixabay) |
Our potter works with very willful clay. God
will keep working to form us into something beautiful, even if we must shatter
first and be thrown back into the furnace. As individuals, we are broken and
re-formed into something new. But note that Jeremiah was not writing to
individuals, but to the house of Israel. In the same way, the whole church is
continually being broken and re-formed.
I believe that we are living in a time of the
church being broken—not destroyed forever, but broken into pieces so that it
can be cast into the furnace and re-formed into something more useful to a new
situation. This doesn’t mean that everything we love about the church we grew
up with must disappear. But it does mean that new things will spring up
alongside the old. “Therefore,” says Jesus, “every scribe who has been trained
for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of
his treasure what is new and what is old.”
Jesus’ parable of the net catching fish, which
goes alongside this saying, is a parable of judgment. When God looks at what
the church has become, God goes through and sorts the good from the bad—not
necessarily good and bad people, but good and bad aspects of our souls and our
systems. The church is being invited, every single day of our Christian lives, to leave behind that which destroys
and to embrace that which leads to a deeper love. In this way, we and the
potter work to shape our clay. But if we willful clay jars sabotage the
potter’s hand, the potter can still start over with us.
None of us is ever lost. None of us is
abandoned. God does not disown God’s children. Rather, God has created us to
live in freedom—freedom to make our own decisions, our own mistakes, our own
triumphs. God’s hand is always guiding the wheel, and no destruction is
permanent. Today I pray that we will remember this throughout our lives, and
live and act from the reassurance and joy that comes with drawing ever closer
to God, the potter. Amen.
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