Learning to Prize Holy Ignorance

September 9, 2007

If you haven’t already started the quiz that is in your worship folder or turned it over to sneak a peek at the answers, feel free to work on it as you listen.  I’m sure that most of you are pretty good at multi-tasking!  My apologies for the typo in question #2… it should be sacred text not scared text… although there is probably some truth to my mistake!  Anyway, go ahead and don’t let my talking bother you!

            Did you know that many high school seniors think that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife?  “According to Stephen Prothero, professor of religious studies at Boston University, America has become a nation that is at once ‘deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion.’… Personal belief in God remains high and Americans assert that their convictions shape their public behaviors and positions… yet surveys show that the majority of Americans cannot even name one of the four Gospels, only one-third know it was Jesus who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and 10 percent think that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.  (Hey, at least they know that Noah was associated with an ark…)”*

            As our children and youth are back in school this week , we are beginning Sunday School as well.  I want to talk about the importance of Christian education in our lives.  For our children and youth to grow in their understanding of their Christian faith and their relationship with God, participating in educational experiences that are designed for their ages and stages of faith is important.  We do not learn what it means to be faithful in a vacuum nor how to live faithfully through osmosis.  As parents, as teachers, as members of this church family, attention to the Christian education of our children and youth is essential.  But Christian education isn’t just for children and youth.  It cannot and should not stop once we graduate from high school. 

            Barbara Brown Taylor, in her new book Leaving Church, shares an observation that she made after years of serving churches as an Episcopal priest.  Speaking about what happened after the confirmation class joined the church, she writes: “The first adult decision that some of them made was not to attend church anymore, which helped explain why so many grown-ups held adolescent views of faith.  Sixth grade was as far as they had gotten in their schooling, which meant that many of them lived the rest of their lives as spiritual twelve-year olds”**

So how are you doing with the religious literacy quiz?  Anyone able to answer all the questions without turning it over and looking at the answers?  Don’t worry, I had to spend a little time doing a little research to find the answers for you.  I have yet to memorize the four noble truths of Buddhism or even the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church.

            Timothy Renick, the chair of the department of religious studies at Georgia State University, suggests that “in a world shaped not merely by 9/11 but by the conflict in Iraq, Bosnia, Kashmir, and the West Bank – not merely by abortion but by gay marriage, intelligent design, euthanasia, and stem cells – Americans increasingly accept the idea that we need to understand religion better.  What we haven’t quite figured out is where and how this should be done.”*  I hope Renick is right.  I hope that we are increasingly accepting the idea that we need to understand religion better.  I hope that we are increasingly accepting the idea that we need to understand faith better. 

            Every year, as we begin our fall programming here at the church, I stand up and encourage us to participate in the educational offerings for adults.  For the past two years, since the organization of our C-Groups, John has called together participants and encouraged you to expand both your knowledge of faith and your relationships in faith through shared study and reflection.  Last year, through the First Sunday Symposium we increased the number of participants in our adult education dramatically.  The symposium attended by the least number of people represented more adults than on the best day of regular Sunday classes.  This is great!  We are moving in the right direction.  But we still have a long way to go before we really move beyond that sixth-grade spirituality that has become the norm for so many of us.

As I have thought about why we, as adults, place less value on our Christian education than we do on almost every other educational pursuit, I know that we have lots of reasons.  I think I’ve heard them all – it’s boring… we don’t have enough time… we’re busy… it’s not important in the big scheme of things anyway so why care… we know it all already… we like our coffee and donuts… we don’t like the teachers!  The list goes on and on!  But I think that there may be a deeper reasons why we shy away from really educating ourselves about our faith.  I think it might be because we don’t want to admit to others or, more importantly, to ourselves that we don’t have all the answers.  I think sometimes we don’t want to be challenged in our faith.  We don’t want to risk the possibility of changing beliefs.  We are very comfortable with our sixth-grade spirituality.

            Next March, author and lecturer, Diana Butler Bass will be speaking here at our church.  In preparation for her visit many of us are reading her new book Christianity for the Rest of Us so you may hear me referencing her writing over the next few months.  She reminds us of the importance of study and reflection as people of faith in today’s world.  She offers that “Bible study is a practice of thoughtful faithfulness, one that blends Christian commitment with openness.”***  Suggesting that “Church people often pit mind against the heart”***  Butler Bass encourages us to think and question and reflect and discuss theologically so that we might “catch glimpses of God.”***  It is her belief that “thinking theologically [does] not mean arriving at certain conclusions”*** instead seeking to educate ourselves in faith opens us up to God’s revealing presence.

But the fact remains that educating ourselves in faith can be scary.  Back to truth of that typo in the quiz – changing our beliefs about that which we hold sacred can be scary!  If we, in true United Methodist fashion, study the Book of Genesis by looking at how and when and why it was written… if we take the time to discover the many voices that are blended together, telling one story of faith… we might find old beliefs that we have held sacred falling away as we become aware of God speaking to us in new and exciting ways. This can be scary!  If we, with open hearts and open minds, choose to study those passages in the Bible which we have been told condemn our gay brothers and lesbians sisters, we might discover a different truth… that God is calling us to new understandings for new situations with new faith.  If we actually study the Bible… you know, more than occasionally picking up when we want to prove a point… we just might find what others before us have understood.  We might find, borrowing the words of Barbara Brown Taylor that the Bible is “…the Word of God… but always the Word as heard by generations of human beings as flawed as [we] are.  As beautifully as these witnesses write, their divine inspiration can never be separated from their ardent desires; their genuine wish to serve God cannot be divorced from their self-interest.  That God should use such blemished creatures to communicate God’s reality so well makes the Bible its own kind of miracle, but [we must] hope never to put the book ahead of the people whom the book calls [us] to love and serve.”** 

            We must, borrowing her words again, “learn to prize holy ignorance.”**  Learning to “prize holy ignorance” means letting go of our grasp on religious certainty in all its forms as we find that there is so much about God and the life of faith that we can never know completely.  Learning to prize holy ignorance means we must never stop yearning to grow in our understandings and beliefs.  I believe that as people of faith living in today’s world we must choose to study and reflect and, in the process of learning, discover that the more we study the less we know but the more we open ourselves to learn the deeper we will grow in our faith.  We must learn to prize holy ignorance.

            Okay, so with all this talk about ignorance, what about the religious literacy quiz… is it important?  Well, yes and no.  Yes, you can still be Christian if you don’t know that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the four Gospels but no, it is not enough to know the names of these first four books of the New Testament or to connect Jesus with the Garden of Gethsemane without claiming the transformative power of the Gospel story in your own life… without understanding God’s gift of grace in Jesus Christ.  Yes, it is important to know the name of a sacred text of Hinduism or the four noble truths of Buddhism or the seven sacraments of Catholicism, but no, it is not enough to recite these from memory if we are not willing to really learn what those who believe them hold most sacred so we can be better equipped to love our neighbors or at least slower to condemn them for conceiving God in a different way.  Yes it is important to know about the lives of the people who are a part of our faith story… Abraham, Moses, and Paul… but no, it is not enough to simply know about their lives without understanding how we can learn about our own faith journeys from both their doubt and their faith… from how they failed and how they followed.

            You know, I love children and I love youth.  Let me be clear that I have absolutely nothing against sixth graders but for those of us who have moved well beyond the sixth grade in all other areas of our lives, it is time to move beyond our twelve-year-old spirituality.  Knowing our Christian faith, in our heads as well as our hearts, provides us with a fundamental orientation for knowing what we think and believe as faithful individuals… for knowing who we are as a church family… for knowing how we are to act as a community of faith. Knowing our Christian faith in our heads as well as our hearts most importantly helps us know we belong to God.

*From Dumbed Down, an article by Timothy Renick in the September 4, 2007 edition of “The Christian Century

**From Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor

***From Christianity for the Rest of Us by Diana Butler Bass