The Faith of Learning

Go to college.  Go to class. Take some notes.  Read some textbooks.  Take online quizzes.  Answer questions.  Prepare for tests.  Go to study sessions.  Take tests.  Answer questions.  Get grade.  Work harder.  Repeat. 

            Lather, Rinse, Repeat.   Lather, Rinse, Repeat…..

            Oh HI.  My name is Cody Nielsen.  I am a 10 year veteran of the college campus.  And after ten years, lather, rinse, and repeat…it doesn’t work.

            So often in life, people are simply searching for how to pass the test, how to get the grade, how to make the mark..  And so often in college, that becomes what class is all about: the answer….4.0 Magna Cum Laude here I come….

            I kind of feel bad for people who go through life like this …it’s kind of like watching rats run through a maze in search for cheese…searching for something at the end of the day that will satisfy…and then realizes that you’re just going to be left without a whole lot of answers anyway.  Once you know what you know, the problems really start to happen because then you know too much and don’t know much of anything at all.

            What If I was to tell you that there needed to be a greater sense of wonder in this world, that we’ve lost our ability to just sit and think about things without having to quickly find answers and move on.  What if I said we needed that…  Would you say sure… or would you say But come one Cody, I don’t have time to think about everything.  I have too much homework, too many papers to write, to much going on.  I don’t have time to ask questions, to stop and look around for just a minute…maybe you would.

            For almost your entire life, you’ve been told that the answer is the solution to the question.  But there are places in our lives where questions are more important than answers, where a sense of wonder might suffice for a simple solution.

            This is the scenario we walk into in the gospel lesson today.  The writer of Mark is giving us a pretty interesting scene a while after Jesus’ companions have been following him around.  And in this exchange, after all the things that the disciples have seen Jesus do, the question is finally asked…Who do you say that I am? …And Peter will answer correctly…sort of.  Because when Jesus says there is more to the story, Peter doesn’t want to have it.  But oh well, that’s the rebuke that is needed. 

            Consider your own lives.  If you dating someone, or have ever had a serious relationship, or even if you have a burgeoning friendship, you might realize just how many things there are to know about a person.  You could get married, know them for 10, 20, 50 years and still be finding out new things about them.  And with love interests, we very often do spend time asking these questions…at least for a while…but mostly everything else is just a checkmark on life.

            Peter’s lesson to us is a reminder that we can never fully know or understand anyone around us, let alone God.  At a certain point, it becomes important for us to simply have a sense of wonder…And college is a great time for that.

            For a long time, you’ve been told what to believe, what is correct about faith and what is incorrect about other faiths.  But right now, while all the rest of of your learning is going on, you’ve got to put a little time into that faith journey.  And you know what, you might find an amazing amount of understanding starts to emerge.

            Consider the fact that there are two creation stories that have completely different images of God (now you probably didn’t believe literally in the story of Adam and Eve did you, but could you realize that the story of the 7 days of creation is not the same story).  How about the fact that the flood likely never happened (ok easier there).  But what if I told you Exodus probably didn’t happen, that the book of Isaiah was written by three separate authors, that no one who knew Jesus wrote the 4 gospels, that John’s gospel was a argument against another community who has a noncanonical book (that means a book that was not “voted” into the canon) named the Secret Gospel of Thomas, that Martin Luther hated books like Ezekiel, Daniel, the book of John, James, and refused to write a commentary on Revelation, that there may have been twice as many books that didn’t make it into the new testament as we now have, that there is a secret book now called “quell” that had the saying of Jesus in it, that the ending of Mark was added 600 years after the original gospel was written, that the story of Jesus freeing the woman who was caught in an affair with the immortal words “he who is sinless cast the first stone” never happened, and that the book of revelation is one of the examples we have in the bible of a prophecy that did not come true...would you believe it.  Would this book that we so value, both positively and negatively, is mostly the product of a 5^th century gathering of People called th Council of Nicea at which the canon was set and of which we have yet to reconsider any pieces what so ever. Maybe you should come to terms with that.

            Would you take the time to get to know something that has influenced people around you for a long time, that influences a world sometimes, especially when it is misinterpreted. Would you consider asking serious questions, being a faithful learner of faith itself, of life itself, of the world around you.  Or will you simply answer the questions on the paper and move on.

            Life is more than simply the answer to the question.  Sometimes, you have to step away from all of the world’s scientific needs, and simply live.  To experience things  Like the smell of the air, or a kiss that has been too long in coming, or the undying love of an animal.

            This is the passion of the Psalmist who gives us Psalm 19.  The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.  You don’t have to take long in reading this passage to realize that there is not really answers, but simply observations upon the beauty of the world and the perfection of God’s love for the world.  Time to reflect has given this writer a beautiful voice that should be heard.  That’s why it has been preserved instead of forgotten like many more thousands of drafts of poetry that make up the Isaelite book of worship….that’s right.  The Psalms are actually the ancient book of worship, and it’s likely that there are way more than what we’ve preserved.

           

            You can go on with your life, simply answering questions that you might find in textbooks.  you can live your life being a robot who is on a mission of simply checkmarking everything that has to be “completed” in order to get a degree.  You can do that with your faith too, simply knowing the answers to the questions and just letting is stay that way, the way that people sometimes teach you and the way you were taught in grade school.  Or you can wake up, realize what faith is, has, and always will be about and ask some serious questions.  You think there’s a question too difficult or challenging to ask me or to ask anyone here…then you’re not putting your mind to work.  You aren’t actually being engaged.  You think there is a question you shouldn’t ask, or you find that in other communities you there is a simple solution to faith…well I’m sorry, but you aren’t following any Jesus I know.  You think you shouldn’t open your mouth, even during a sermon and be serious about wonder, then you haven’t yet come to terms with what it means to live this life…because if you are blindly following and you don’t really know what you believe, well, you’re wasting your time. You won’t ever feel fully satisfied with simply answering questions in the same way as you do in your calculus class.

            So get up, invite each other and others if you like, and come along on a journey that will require of you much more than simply a few moments of your time.  Come along on a journey that begins today and will last the rest of your life.  It’s a journey where you are engaged in questions, in life, in meaning, in each other.  It’s a life you were always meant to have and an opportunity you were always meant to reach toward now that you are on your own.

            If you have ever held a sense of wonder, about faith, about life, about yourself, and about what it is all about, then ask the question.  Have faith that in the learning you will learn more, and more, and find deeper questions to ask.  But please don’t just use your faith as a way to answer a question, to punch a check-in card, to simply think you’ve got it all figured out.  Because faith, it’s more than that.  And life, it’s way more than any piece of fill in the dots kind of paper. 

            May you wake up everyday, seeing new questions right in front of you.  Because life, is truly in the questions.  And there is no better time than right now to ask them.