CELEBRATING:
SERMONS
"Sermon by Sharon Betcher"
Feb 2nd
Grace and Peace be among
us from the one we greet as Wisdom & Friend, Jesus
our Christ. Amen.
I. Know-It-Alls: They're so hard to live with!
Today's epistle lesson can read like an ancient argument
with seemingly little relevance: In cities like Corinth,
"the butcher was a priest in service to some Greek
or Roman deity.... Early Christians consequently had
different ethical views on what to purchase at the meat
market, some assuming it to be an insult to God to consume
meat which had been roasted to tickle the nostrils of
Zeus. Others[, the apparent know-it-alls,] said that
since Christians didn't believe in Zeus, the meat was
not sacrificial, just nutritional. . . . The conceited
Corinthians, presuming validation of their erudite perspective,
consulted Paul, who refers them to one of the great
commandments: love your neighbor as yourself."
Turning to those who were as sassy about what they knew
about God as any adolescent ever presumes him/herself
to be about life, Paul insisted that where knowledge
"puffs up, love builds up." So as it turns
out, it's an ancient argument with contemporary resonance:
Know-it-alls were--then as now--hard to live with.
For most of the rest of the planet, we in the West are
the know-it-alls....and just as hard to live with. We-purveyors
of high tech and Hollywood and other necessities of
gracious living--insist that we know what it is to be
cultured. We shop the markets undeterred by ethical
misgivings. Yet, writing even before 9.11's Fall of
the Trade Temples, the political scientist Benjamin
Barber observed that it was precisely the "spiritual
poverty" of western culture," "the spiritual
poverty of our education and of our markets," which
"bear a portion of the blame for [Jihad's] war
against modernity."
If that suggests one aspect of the difficulty of living
with "know-it-alls" in our present global
context, then equally knowledge has come to haunt us,
its purveyors: we, but blurs on the information highway,
bombarded by news infomatics 24-7, are on information
overload with few means of discernment. Daily our lives
maneuver webs of expert, if all too human, knowledge
into which we must entrust ourselves-if not yet star
wars missile defense systems, still daily we trust ourselves
to everything from nuclear-generated power grids and
preservatives to vaccinations and vehicles which hurls
us at hundreds of miles an hour through the air. In
a world in which "God apparently does not have
a monopoly of power" (Cobb), desperation haunts
our pursuit of knowledge-the human genome project, but
the epitome of our hope to redeem life via knowledge.
Yet that traps us in further quandries as knowledge
is laid before us for which we are unprepared: Should
one, for example, opt to cure sickle cell anemia when
such hope is pinned to the same cell that makes one
immune to malaria? Should we know if we carry cancer
genes? What a frightening equation: so much knowledge
at the flip of a switch or the twist and tweak of a
genetic ribbon, so little time to think. And when we
do, we scare ourselves half to death. Know-it-alls,
we can't even live with ourselves.
Wondering the information highway, we find ourselves
standing under the Tree of Knowledge once again: Did
we presume the pursuit of knowledge to be without ethical
implication? To be sure, the path of knowledge, of education,
at least in the public eye, has and still bears the
quality of a pretty harmless, innocent pursuit. Who
would think to send our children off to school with
a worry over what knowledge would do to them? Who would
think to presume that the practice of knowledge might
itself need special "know how?" Then again,
might there be something like an ethically responsible
use of knowledge?
Knowledge has been, at least in the ages of the Christian
tradition, a spiritual aspiration, such that educational
systems grew out of our intense desire to know the world,
the very mind and body of God. Universities were, in
another day, but the place of vision quests-places for
finding one's self within the universe. No question,
however, that this curiosity, this aspiration to know,
can be and has become distorted. E.g., science, funded
by for-profit research, can far over-stride that which
occasions the premature deaths of the majority of human
lives-dysentery, malaria, malnutrition, lack of sanitation,
environmental ramifications. We know so much from quarks
to quantums to chaos; we know so little about how to
overcome poverty, inequality, greed, cynicism, despair,
...about how to effect justice and peace. We fail to
connect our pursuits of knowledge with the Way of Wisdom;
we fail to live our intellectual inquiry as a spiritual
practice. Like adolescents with attitude, well, we know,
we know (But we know not what to do with what we know).
Knowledge can be its own temptation to ultimacy, to
control, to conceit. Or, knowledge can be practiced
as a form of neighbor-love, as Paul seemed to suggest,
recognizing that no freedom of conscience was possible
without concern for the community, the kin-dom, the
commons of life.
II. As buddhism lays out the path of mindfulness,
training the mind to empty out its pre-conceptions so
as to hospitably welcome the w/holly other, so too Christianity
has a path of mindful intelligence. As Christians
have aspired to it, knowledge unquestionably begins
as a "falling in wonder with the world," which
goes far to explain why physicists may often be counted
among our contemporary mystics. Yet Christians have
also over the centuries been concerned that selfishness
can pass itself off as reason, that systems of acquisitiveness
can masquerade as but true to human nature. Jewish prophets
and the later desert Ammas and Abbas (mothers and fathers)
of Christian faith worried that the way in which the
rich viewed the world could literally become the law
of the land, that the reason of the propertied would
be weighted with judicial power, while the majority
suffered. Reformation theologian Martin Luther spoke
out against the "prudence of the flesh," which
led a person to believe that s/he was the final and
ultimate object of life. Conversely, "'prudence
of the spirit' is," Luther insisted, "the
choice of the common good... It regards as good [and
reasonable] only those things which are ...for the benefit
of all. Gerard Winstanley, a failed tradesperson who
initiated "the Diggers," a 17th century English
movement which settled the displaced, urban poor by
turning the town commons into an agrarian communitarian
experiment, echoed Luther's sentiment: "Those that
are resolved to work and eat together, making the earth
a common treasury, join hands with Christ to lift up
the creation from bondage." Common sense would
make of the earth a shared commons, Winstanley observed.
The selfish imagination, on the other hand, put the
earth-the land, the commoners, the creatures-in bondage
to mastery.
What our ancestors called covetousness, the selfish
imagination... What we call desire and make the most
of... These energies, which cloak themselves as reason
and the reasonable, today threaten world interdependence:
since the turn into the contemporary scientific age,
knowledge has been, by definition, that which gave us
"power over" the elements, that which gave
us dominion over the earth. Schooled in such a path
of knowledge we have objectified and reduced the world
around us to resources for our needs and ever growing
catalog of wants. We have pursued the human venture
of creativity without balancing our interests with those
of nature and neighbor. Today, via globalization, this
kind of knowledge as "power over" pulls resources
into the orbit of the West. And yet its fallacy, its
myopia, by now is well known: we cannot secure ourselves
without securing the well-being of others. We deceive
ourselves with our pretense to knowledge without love
of neighbor.
III. But dare we, Do we know how to change our minds,
to practice knowledge as neighbor love? The Christian
path of mindfulness actually also has a practice-named,
Sabbath. Sabbath, the day of rest, restores an alternative
consciousness-a way of knowing that proceeds from being
known, from resting back into holy presence. To see
the world as a place of grace, of God-haunted presence
(which does not overlook the scaring, searing hot spots)
leads us to practice knowledge as communion with God
within the daily world. The practice of Christian mindfulness
starts like this: play before you work! Fall back in
wonder with the world. Unseat the controlling, dominating
way of relating to our earth-kin. Sabbath, an ancient
pattern of refraining from intervening in the environment
through labor, stills the acquisitiveness that sets
in with busyness--as we take time, waste time, coming
to know God in the deep repose and wonder of creation.
Theologian Jurgen Moltmann explains it this way: "Sanctifying
the sabbath means being entirely free from the striving
for happiness and from the will for performance and
achievement. It means being wholly present in the presence
of God" (Moltmann GiC). This shared quiescence
with Holy Wisdom herself restores us to the energies
of elemental communion-the sharing of the common elements
of life as common sense.
IV. Yet if Sabbath experience re-orients our thinking
to recognize earth as a common, if graced place, in
a world in which "God does not have a monopoly
on power" (Cobb), critical thinking becomes the
responsibility of mindful Christians: If the university
was at one time a place for a vision quest, a place
to learn to be a democratic citizen, education has become
an escalator up in and assurance of economic status.
In a society which has organized itself for increased
wealth, educational systems--as theologian John Cobb
reminds us--have been subtly given over to producing
those who will be successful in the market. Whereas
science once simply aspired to knowing the mysteries
of microbe and Milky Way, "it now serves industry.
Whereas medicine once aimed at human health, it too
has been transformed into the medical industry"
(Cobb, "Can Church Help God Save World?").
It is in this sense that Paul's letter to the Corinthians
can again assume applicability: Knowledge can be a practice
of neighbor love. Know-it-alls-those without such neighbor-love--are
extremely hard to live with.
Yet, if universities must be held accountable for the
practice of knowledge (and we for the knowledge there
acquired), Christian spiritualities have often in response
wielded a dismissive anti-intellectualism. Spiritualities
have as often renounced the path of the intellect as
universities have rejected that practice of ethical
reflection which we might call the turn from knowledge
into wisdom. If spiritualists know that-as per Paul-"knowledge
puffs up," I would, however, contend that Paul
recommended not an avoidance of the pursuit of knowledge,
but a loving way of knowing. We need as Christians to
recall the practice of serious, communal ethical deliberation,
particularly about how that which we invoke as God critiques
the coursing powers of the world--one of which we today
call "globalization." At the global marketplace,
so titillated with choices beyond number, can we discern
the "freedom to buy" from the right to choose
the common good, "the social character of our shared
world...." (Barber 117)? To engage critical thinking,
as spiritual practitioners like the prophets, Winstanley
and Luther have shown, means thinking about thought
itself-about how we can make knowledge bend to our view
of the world, about where we hide our envy, ambitions,
hopes, cravings, and desperation in what we claim to
know. Belief in God may not be amenable to every way
of doing things. The practice of a holy communion of
the elements of life may not be compatible with sampling
everything available at the global marketplace.
Commenting both on the controlling instrumentality of
our applied knowledge and the decline in public educational
funding, political scientist Benjamin Barber later in
his text Jihad vs. McWorld laments that today "smart
bombs are given preference over smart people."
To be sure, knowledge-or rather, a glut of information-does
not alone make us smart. In the words of Abba Anthony,
one of the desert fathers of the early centuries of
Christianity, here echoing Paul's epistlery sentiment:
"Our life and death is with our neighbor... If
we scandalize our sister/brother we have lost God"
(Bondi 96). We seek Holy Wisdom not as a path of self-fulfillment
that will make us independent from the need for others;
rather, we seek Holy Wisdom in order to love the others
with whom we are interdependent. An interdependent world
needs not so much another crop of know-it-alls as those
who can think seriously about how to effect love of
neighbor, about how to work and eat together, to make
the earth a commons.
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Shaughnessy Heights United Church
congregation is a Christian faith community respecting
each other in our diversity and reaching out to all
who seek God’s love.
1550
West 33rd Avenue,
Vancouver, BC V6M 1A7
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Tel:
604-261-6377
Email: admin@shuc.ca
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