In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Silence.
Our world is so full of stimuli that we are often uncomfortable with silence.
There are a lot of reasons why we are silent. Sometimes we are speechless and
there just aren’t words that fit the situation. Sometimes we are silent because
we are hoping to hear the still small voice of God in prayer. Other times we
are silent because we’re afraid of saying the wrong thing. Those of you who
are teachers, or students, know that silence in class often means that someone
didn’t do the assigned reading. Sometimes silence is a form of protest or
anger, as in giving someone the “silent treatment.” Sometimes we are silent
when we are guilty and have chosen to “plead the Fifth.” Sometimes we are silent
because we just don’t know what to say. Sometime we are silent when we have a
question, but are afraid of what the answer might be. Silence comes up twice in
the gospel text from Mark this morning, and looking into the meaning behind
these silences shows us something about what it is like to follow Jesus.
You’ll
recall that last Sunday we heard the passage where Jesus asks the question “Who
do you say that I am?” and Peter responds by saying “You are the Messiah.” I
mentioned that Peter’s confession of faith and Jesus’ prediction of his
upcoming Passion is the turning point in Mark. Up to that point, we heard about
Jesus’ ministry of healing and going forward we will learn more about what it
means to be a disciple who follows Jesus in taking up the cross.
The
first silence in today’s reading comes up after Jesus, for the second time in
Mark, has said “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they
will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” The
response of the of the disciples is recorded as “But they did not understand
what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.” The word used for “they did not
understand” is the Greek word agnoeo,
which you’ll immediately recognize is where we get the word “agnostic.” To be
agnostic is to be uncertain, which may well be, at least, a partial understanding
of faith.
One
theologian has defined faith as the finite being turned to the infinite.
Anytime the finite tries to understand the infinite, there will be things that
are uncertain. And so courage becomes a part of faith, as there is always a
risk involved in faith. In faith, we believe in a God that is not able to be
measured or observed in scientific ways. We put our stock in promises what we
will never fully know in this lifetime. We think things that are
counterintuitive, like the last being first and the first being last. Faith
calls us to ideas and truths that are larger than we can comprehend, and so
doubt will always be a valid and healthy part of a mature faith.
One
of our modern day heresies is that which says that certainty is a part of
faith. And so we have people out there who refuse to believe that the earth is
older than 5,000 year because their faith would crumble without that certainty.
For others, faith must be quantified and objectified in statements of faith.
This isn’t what belief is about though. Belief, for much of history, has meant
things like trust and allegiance, not certainty. Belief is linguistically
related to the word “belove,” and that is what a proper understanding of
Christian belief should be about. Belief is an orientation of the heart, not
intellectual assent to a hypothesis. The shift happened during the Scientific
Revolution of the 1600s. Belief came to mean “those things that are unproven.”
Belief became about evidence more than it was about trust. One person has said
“Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century
invention.” And so in this shift in our way of thinking, doubt, or agnosticism,
went from a healthy part of a faith to a sign of weakness.
The
result is that faith today has become obsessed with thinking the right things
instead of trusting in God. This is one of the things that I love most about
The Episcopal Church and our Anglican heritage and theology. It has been said
that if you want to know what The Episcopal Church stands for that you have to
read the entire Book of Common Prayer.
Belief can’t be summed up in a statement, confession, or creed. That isn’t to
say that those things are bad, but they are incomplete. A priest I know often
calls The Episcopal Church a church of “blessed ambiguity.” For many of us,
belief is about the journey as much as it is the destination.
Life
is hard and religion is big. I recently read a series of interviews of people
who left their faith traditions behind, and almost all of them said that they felt
that they weren’t allowed to ask any questions and that their doubts excluded
them from the faith community. It is absolutely okay to have questions. It is
wonderful to have doubts, because that means you are doing belief in the sense
that belief is intended to be. If you believe every single word of the Nicene
Creed, that is great. And if you find more truth in the beauty of a sunset or
in Bach’s Mass in B Minor, that’s
great too. Faith isn’t about what you think, it’s about what you trust in.
Belief isn’t about being able to say the Creed without crossing your fingers,
belief is about being attuned to God’s grace, love, and mercy.
And
in that sense of belief, I think the disciples were strong believers. Their
silence was likely a testament to the fact that they had their doubts about the
Messiah suffering, being killed, and rising from the dead, but that doesn’t
mean they didn’t trust Jesus. Being agnostic isn’t a bad thing, it’s simply a
human thing. There is no way, on their side of the Resurrection, that they
could fathom what that meant. And in the same way, there is no way that on this
side of the Last Day, whatever that means and whatever that looks like, that we
can understand the fullness of the prayer “thy Kingdom come on earth as it is
in heaven.” So explore your doubts; ask your questions; get comfortable with
the blessed ambiguity of life. And know there are no bad questions, there are
no dumb questions, and you won’t be judged for asking them. I’d love to talk
more with you about your questions over coffee, just let me know.
It
is also quite possible that the disciples were silent because they didn’t want
to know any more about what Jesus said. Perhaps they wanted to be willfully
ignorant of what Jesus had just said about his upcoming Passion. CS Lewis once
wrote about his journey of faith and doubt. He said that the danger, for him,
wasn’t ceasing to believe in God. He writes that he didn’t dread coming to the
conclusion that “there is no God after all” as much as he did coming to think
“So, this is what God is really like.” As you may know, Lewis was agnostic,
even atheistic, but then came to faith later in life. He said that his journey
to faith wasn’t about him searching for God, as that would be like saying that
the mouse was searching for the cat.
Part
of the reason why faith can be a challenge is that, through faith, we’ll find
things that we don’t want to find. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have
questions that only faith can fully answer. St. Augustine once said “Our hearts
are restless, O God, until they rest in thee.” There are a lot of people in our
society that have questions, hopes, dreams, longings, doubts, and burdens. And
belief, meaning a sense of belonging and trusting in God, is the answer that
they’ve been looking for. But belief, meaning a series of thoughts, commands,
guilts, isn’t helpful at all. The Church has gotten wrapped up in that second
kind of belief, and so it’s no surprise that people are turning to other places
to take their questions. We need to embrace the hard questions and create a
space for those doubts to come up. We need to celebrate mystery as a gift,
instead of seeing it as a problem to solve or a truth to conquer. Truth isn’t
to be fought over, but rather embraced as a gift that we will never fully
grasp.
This
is where the second silence in today’s reading comes in. Jesus asked them, “What
were you arguing about on the way?” And their response was silence, “for on the
way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.” And so their
silence is a guilty silence. Just last Sunday, we heard Jesus say “For those
who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my
sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Clearly, following Jesus
isn’t about career advancement, and yet, here are the disciples thinking in
terms of rankings.
So Jesus takes a child
and says “if you want to welcome me, you need to welcome someone like this
child.” Children were viewed differently in Jesus’ culture than in ours. We
have a more sentimental and romantic view of children. Parents, of course,
still loved their children; but no one said “children are the future” or
celebrated the innocence, cuteness, or inquisitiveness of children. Instead,
children were seen as powerless, dependent, and unproductive. By using a child
as the illustration, Jesus makes it clear that discipleship isn’t about empire
building, but rather welcoming others, not for their productive value, but for
their value as children of God.
Not
only should the Church be a place where questions and doubts are valued, but it
should also be a place where a diversity of answers is appreciated. By
welcoming people like the children, we welcome those who might teach us more
than they will contribute. Often when we talk about church growth, we think in
terms of new committee members, and new pledging income, or new people to make
the pews look fuller. But Jesus says “Nope, it’s not about how useful people
are to your purpose, or how great you are. It’s about how welcoming you are.”
One of the things that we gain by welcoming those who are different than us is
that our image of God is enhanced.
I
watched an interview this week with the political satirist and new Late Show host, Stephen Colbert, who is
a devout Roman Catholic. He talked about how powerful and moving it was when he
attended an Episcopal church and watched a woman celebrate the Eucharist. He
was exposed to a new glimpse of God, and that spoke to his soul. When we
welcome people, not based on their usefulness for our purposes, but on their
potential to give us new glimpses of God, then we welcome Jesus. The simple
truth is that none of us has all the answers, but together we come closer to
the breadth and depth of God’s love as we learn from each other’s experiences.
It’s not about measuring ourselves against each other to find out who is the
greatest, or welcoming only those who are useful for our agendas, but rather
about seeing the fullness of God through each other.
Pay
attention to the silence in your life. In the face of God Almighty, may our
silence be that of humility and leaving space for questions to be asked. In the
face of the other, may our silence be that of listening for new expressions of
God in our midst. Amen.
