John
16:12-15
May 26, 2013
I still have many things to say to
you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will
guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak
whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He
will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All
that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is
mine and declare it to you.
Do you know what you need to know to be saved? How do you
know that your belief system or theology is the right one, the one that God
requires you to have in order to be saved? How do you know that you believe in
the right truth? I look around this sanctuary, and I’m pretty sure that we
don’t all agree in our theologies, so how do we know who’s right and who’s
wrong? I’m pretty sure I’m right ;-), so how can I be sure you all are in the
right fold?
The idea of making sure we have the right theology
goes back a long way. In fact, one of John Calvin’s main roles, as pastor of 4
churches in Geneva, Switzerland in the 1500s, was to visit members once a month
to ensure that their faith and beliefs were in the right place. If he
considered you to be doctrinally right, then he would leave a token with you,
which would allow you to share in communion in worship. If not, you were barred
until you got your head in the right place. Several of our oldest members
actually remember when they were children, and the pastors visited their
parents, leaving tokens afterwards.
So,… is your head in the right place? Do you know
what you need to know to be saved?
Despite Calvin’s certainty, the truth is that neither you
nor I can be completely sure we’re right, nor that we have the right theology. Why
do I say this? I say it because having a theology that’s right enough, that’s
true enough, is impossible. The reality is that you can never know enough
because there is too much to know, and too little ability on our part to know
it. Everyone seems to have a certain belief that they are confident is
eternally right, but how to do you tell objectively what is truth and what
isn’t? We are limited in our ability to know objective, verifiable truth, and
if our salvation is based just on whether or not we believed in the right
things, then we’d be lost. But that doesn’t keep people from believing that you
need to know the right things to be saved.
I remember a number of years ago we had a pastor come
into our presbytery to serve one of our churches. When asked, during his
entrance examination, before the members of the presbytery, what his favorite
thing to do in ministry was, he said, “I
love to teach people what they need to know to be saved.” No one challenged
him (including me—the church he was going to had struggled, and I hoped he
would be a pastor to help it), but he distilled all of Christianity and
salvation to a set of beliefs that we needed to know and have in order to be
saved. The question I’ve always had, though, is how we find out what we need to
know to be saved? And once we find out, how do we know it’s the absolute truth?
Two conversations I’ve had over the years have
crystallized this dilemma. The first was back when I was working on my Ph.D.
The program I was in was wonderful in terms of exposing us to people of
different traditions and beliefs. About half the students were Protestants
(Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Pentecostal, Quaker, Disciples
of Christ, etc…) and the other half were Roman Catholic. Among the Catholics
were laity and priests, as well as sisters and brothers from religious orders
from the U.S., Ireland, Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Poland, Ghana,
Kenya, and more. We had great conversations during breaks and over lunch.
During one of our lunch breaks, three of us Protestant
pastors had a conversation with a young Roman Catholic priest from Michigan. He
proceeded to tell us that Protestant faith is nice, but it’s not a saving
faith. He told us that only the Catholic Church had the truth, as well as the
means, for salvation. He reassuringly told us that God still loved all of us,
but that our salvation was in question. At the time I was about to be married
to Diane. He tried to assure me that even though my salvation was in question,
I should be happy in knowing that I could take communion during the wedding
service, despite non-Catholics being barred for not having the right belief
about communion, because during the wedding the groom is bestowed the honor of
being named a the priest at his own marriage. So for that short period of time
(ten minutes?), I would be a Catholic priest at my own wedding. So could take
communion. I told him that we weren’t going to have communion at our wedding
because if you only can have communion for half the guests, it’s really not
communion—it’s bi-munion (whatever that means). He kept insisting, thought,
that I should have communion and be happy that I could take it, even if my
family and friends couldn’t. He had salvation all figured out.
Three years ago I had another conversation with a taxicab
driver on the way from the hotel to the airport. The cab driver talked to me
about his moving to San Antonio from Chicago, and about life in San Antonio. He
then asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a Presbyterian pastor.
From that point on, and for the next twenty minutes, he proceeded to tell me
the Christian truth. He told me who was saved and who wasn’t (Roman Catholics
definitely weren’t saved). In rapid fire he told me all about the second
coming, who would be lifted in the Rapture and who wouldn’t, and how he had
become saved. He punctuated his conversation with assurances that I must know
all this because I’m a pastor. I tried very hard to change the subject,
including a periodic, “So,… how about
those San Antonio Spurs? You know, your
center is a Pittsburgher—Dejaun Blair,” but I couldn’t shake him. I was
very glad to finally get to the airport.
Both the priest and the cab driver were convinced that
they had to truth, and that others not like them didn’t. Who do you believe has
the truth, and how do you know how to tell whom to believe? I struggled with
this question for a long time. In fact, one reason I went to seminary, to
Duquesne, and have read so much from so many different theologians has been my
attempt to ascertain the truth. I struggled constantly with the question, “If
this person/church/group is certain that they are right, and that other person/church/group
is certain that they are right, how do I tell?” Many times I have asked God to
give me a sign or an assurance that one side or the other is right. But I’ve
never gotten that conviction. Instead, I’ve been consistently led to a
different conviction.
What eventually helped me resolve the dilemma were
passages in two books. The first was from David Steindl-Rast, a Roman Catholic,
Dominican brother and priest, who wrote a tremendous book called Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer, which
we read as part of our men’s group. He says, “To have faith does not primarily mean believing something, but rather
believing in someone. Faith is trust. It
takes courage to trust. The opposite of faith is not disbelief, but distrust,
fear. Fear makes us cling to anything within reach. Fear clings even to
beliefs. Thus, beliefs can even get in the way of faith. In genuine faith we
hold our beliefs firmly, but lightly. We trust in God, not in our particular
understanding of God.”
What he is saying, which is so important, is that doctrines
and dogmas aren’t what matters. It’s not even cognitive belief that matters.
It’s a trusting relationship that matters. What matters is our trust in God. We
can have all the wrong beliefs, but if we deeply trust God, surrender to God,
and seek a deep relationship with God, it doesn’t matter whether or not our
beliefs are in the right place. The main command is to love God with all we
have, and then to love others as ourselves. Steindl-Rast tells us that there is
a place for beliefs, because they can help us to move into that loving,
trusting relationship, but that we need to hold them “firmly, but lightly.” Beliefs are like an egg. They can nourish us,
but if we hold an egg too tightly it will break into a sloppy mess. If we hold
it too lightly it will fall and break into a sloppy mess. Beliefs about God
only help if they are geared to deepening our relationship with God. The moment
we turn them into God, or let them go completely, the more our lives become a
mess.
Beliefs are only valuable to the extent to they help us
trust in God. The reason we make beliefs the most important has to do with
fear. We fear we won’t be saved, so we create rock-solid beliefs, theologies,
and truths that make us feel more secure. They don’t make us more secure
because, ultimately, our fate is in God’s hands, but they make us feel more
secure. So many of our strongest beliefs are intended to placate ourselves. I
think that this is what both the cab driver and the priest were doing.
A second book, and quote, that helped me was C. S. Lewis’
book, The Great Divorce, which is all
about getting to heaven. In the book, a woman meets a spirit who keeps trying
to convince her to come into heaven and enjoy God’s grace. The woman complains
that she can’t be sure that the people in there have the right beliefs. She
doesn’t want to be with people who are wrong in their beliefs.
The spirit replies to her, “That’s what we all find when we reach [Heaven]. We’ve all been wrong! That’s the great joke. There’s no need to go
on pretending one was right! After that
we begin living.”
Lewis is really recognizing that in the face of all that
God is, how can we even imagine that our poor little beliefs capture all that
God is. We think our beliefs about salvation are correct, when we barely even
understand salvation. We are captivated by our own brilliance, without ever
suspecting that it masks our ignorance.
Both Steindl-Rast and Lewis understood a great secret of Christianity,
which is that we are not saved by the purity of our belief or our truth. We are
saved by the gift of God’s grace, coming from the Holy Spirit, that opens us to
truth. In essence, truth follows a
relationship with God. It doesn’t lead to a relationship with God. I
believe that this is the essence of our passage. The gift of the Holy Spirit is
that God enters them (and us), and the truth the Spirit reveals is a relational
truth about love, and how we connect with God and each other through love. God’s
truth is relational. The Spirit’s revelations to them are about how to glorify
God and live in a deep relationship with God.
What saves us is what Paul said in Romans. See if you can
finish this sentence: “We are justified
by God’s ??? as a gift.”
If you said that we are justified (another term for
“saved”) by “grace,” you would be correct. Grace is God’s love, God’s
compassion, and God’s blessing all rolled into one. This was the basic problem
of the pastor who said that he loves to teach people what they need to know to
be saved. We don’t need knowledge for salvation. We don’t need belief. We need
grace. And if we have faith, and trust in that grace, we accept that grace, and
it leads us to a truth steeped in love.
Religious people have had a basic problem since Jewish
times: certainty. We all want to be
secure in our righteousness. The problem in the time of Jesus was that the Jews
were trying to work their way to heaven by following the law to the letter. The
were engaging in “works righteousness,” which was the attempt to “work” our way
into heaven by doing something that will convince God of our righteousness. They
were convinced that if they did the
right things, they would be saved. The problem was that they were getting so
focused on following the law that they turned it into a false god that must be
served, while forgetting all about loving God and loving others.
The problem at the time of the Protestant Reformation was
that the Catholic Church had slipped back into this works righteousness. They
were telling people that by giving to the Church they could buy their way into
heaven, or at least reduce their time in purgatory.
We Protestants have our own version of this. We engage
too often in “beliefs righteousness,” which is the idea that if we just have
pure enough belief, the right theology, the right understanding of God, our
purity of truth will elevate us to heaven after we die. Same problem as before.
Salvation isn’t based on belief. It’s based on God’s love.
It seems that every denomination has it’s own form of
“righteousness,” it’s own form of what we need to do, beliefs, demonstrate, or
procure to get into heaven. The irony is that God’s grace is already there,
inviting us.
Our particular Presbyterian problem is a belief in
beliefs—our confidence that it’s our ability to get the truth that saves us. Presbyterians
are among the smartest Christians out there, but I’ve learned something in my
own pursuit of truth, which I pursued for many years. I spent nine years of
graduate education, plus a significant amount of reading of theologians and
writers from all denominations. All of that learning has taught me that the
pursuit of truth as a pathway to God is a trap because it seduces us to be
convinced of our rightness, while blinding us to God’s presence despite our
wrongness.
The great Reformed theologian, Paul Tillich helped me see
this. In his book, The Eternal Now, he
said, “there cannot be wisdom without an
encounter with the holy, with that which creates awe, and shakes the ordinary
way of life and thought. Without the experience of awe in the face of the
mystery of life, there is no wisdom. Most removed from wisdom are not those who
are driven for desire or power, but those brilliant minds who have never
encountered the holy, who are without awe and know nothing sacred, but who are
able to conceal their ultimate emptiness by the brilliant performances of their
intellect…”
Tillich gets to the heart of our problem, which is that
we can become so knowledgeable as Christians about everything, that we no
longer have awe. We no longer have the ability to recognize God’s greatness and
our smallness. Tillich’s point is not that
pursuit of truth is bad. It’s that the only truth that matters is what
leads to love of God and of others.
The message of our passage is that if you really want to
know truth, it only comes through openness to the Holy Spirit. But the truth you’ll learn isn’t about
who is saved and who isn’t, who is in the right church and who isn’t, who has
the right knowledge and who doesn’t, or who is right and who is wrong. What you’ll learn is the truth that
God wants us ultimately to have, which is knowledge that leads us to love, to
service, to compassion, and to God
Amen.
