“1 One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and his disciples began to pick some heads of grain, rub them in their hands and eat them. 2 Some of the Pharisees asked, `Why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?'
3 Jesus answered them, `Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? 4 He entered the house of God, and taking the consecrated bread, he ate what is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.' 5 Then Jesus said to them, `The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.'”
So one Sabbath day and Jesus and his disciples were out walking somewhere. The disciples did something that sounds weird to us; they just reached down and stripped some kernels of grain off the stalks. Then they rubbed them in their hands to get the husks off, and they ate the raw grain as a snack. And some Pharisees saw it and complained. They didn’t complain that his disciples would get indigestion from the raw grain. They didn’t complain that they were stealing from a farmer. They complained that Jesus’ disciples were breaking one of the Ten Commandments. They were both harvesting grain and milling grain on the Sabbath.
But Jesus didn’t accept their rebuke. He pointed out a precedent from the Old Testament. In the Old Testament tabernacle, there were special loaves of bread that were dedicated to God and only for the priests to eat. But the great King David, who wasn’t a priest, had gone ahead and eaten them once when there was urgent human need. God can be flexible about ceremonial things when there is a human need. And he made this amazing claim for himself, calling himself “the Lord of the Sabbath.”
It must have felt pretty obnoxious the way that the Pharisees were always nit-picking at him. But he didn’t turn it into a personal battle. He didn’t indulge in name-calling and counter accusations. What did he do? He turned it into a theological discussion, a time for teaching, a time for talking religion.
And you might say, “Well, duh,” of course Jesus talked theology. That’s what he did. But it’s something we often avoid, something mainline churches of today have largely forgotten how to do, and something we very much need to learn to do: to talk theology.
Why do we talk about theology so rarely? I see two main reasons. C. S. Lewis once wrote about giving a lecture with some theology in it to fliers in the Royal Air Force. And one of the tough old officers stood up and said, “I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there is a God. I’ve felt him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat dogmas and formulas about him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!”
Have you heard those feelings before? Have you had them yourself? The implication is that theology is a waste of time, that you have to choose between knowing God personally in your own experience or reading about God second hand in an impersonal, abstract form called theology.
And C.S. Lewis’ answer to that was very wise. He said to think about the two ways of knowing God as like two ways of knowing the ocean. You can experience the ocean personally through walking along the beach, getting your feet wet. Or you can experience the ocean indirectly, through studying a map, back safe and dry in your home. Of course, there is no substitute for the wonder of walking along the seashore yourself or sailing in the open, high seas. You would be a fool to sit far inland looking at a map of the ocean and then consider yourself to know all about it without every gotten your feet wet in one yourself.
But it’s equally foolish to stand on one point of the shore of the vast ocean enjoying the soft sand and the warm sun and claim that you know all about the ocean from just that one contact. Sure you have now experienced one small stretch of the beach. But the map could tell you things about what thousands of other people have experienced about other parts of the same ocean, things that will give you new perspectives, even though the map is only made of paper. Your own eyes can only see to the horizon, but the map can give you a greater sense of just how big that ocean is. If you want to get somewhere in exploring the ocean for yourself, the map will tell you what to look for and how to get there. The map can warn you about dangerous reefs and rocks that have caused other people shipwreck. Depending upon one personal experience you have had is fine if you are content to sit in the sun and not get anywhere. But every explorer who is serious about experiencing more is hungry for any map that will tell him what others who seen who have gone before.
Are Christian doctrines against personal experience of God? No, they are the result of the personal experiences that thousands of people have had with God, distilled down and expressed in the clearest terms possible. They warn us about dangerous currents that could pull us off course or hidden rocks that have sunk other people. They stretch our minds to think thoughts about God that might never occur to us alone. They give us the vocabulary to be able to express our experiences of God to others and to hear what others have experienced of God. If you want to get any farther at all in experiencing more of God, those doctrines can be a big help in knowing what to look for and how to get there.
Edmund Burke said, “Theology is that part of religion that requires brains.” It is work. But it provides such a reward. We read right at the beginning of the Bible that God created us in his image. At the core of who we are, we are like God. So, finding who we are flows out of finding who God is. God created this world. Understanding the world flows out of understanding God. Don’t be content to splash in the shallows of a one-time experience of God. Jump in and experience him in every way you can, with both heart and mind. Talking religion, thinking about our faith, is very important, because it can help us understand God.
But then there is another reason, perhaps an even bigger obstacle to talking theology. There’s a saying we have that there are two things you can’t talk about. What are they? Politics and religion. And why do you think that saying says not to talk about those two things? It’s because so often those discussions turn into fights. And what happens to the search to understand more about God? It goes underground. We keep it to ourselves, all so hidden and personal. We are afraid that if we talk about the most important subject in our lives, it will cause fights. So we keep quiet.
In the last 50 years our United Methodist denomination has been described as a pluralistic denomination. That means that we aren’t strict that everybody has to believe exactly the same, we are pretty tolerant about a variety of views. I appreciate that because I’ve had to change my own views on things more than once and I appreciate the room to do that and I appreciate having pastor friends who see things a bit differently from me because that stimulates my thinking.
But the idea of pluralism has often come to be misunderstood to say that we don’t care about beliefs. And that’s a tragic misunderstanding.
To know God is the most important thing in life. And if we can’t talk about our faith, and talk about it in the theological terms that helps us be precise about what we mean, then how can we learn? One of my confirmands once said that if you ask a question you might look like you are ignorant for a minute or two. But if you never ask questions you are guaranteed to be ignorant for your whole life.
The way to avoid fights over theology is not to stop talking about it. The solution is to learn how to talk about theology like Christians.
There has been a bit of an e-mail discussion going on among some of our conference pastors on whether Christians should support sending troops to Afghanistan or not. In our conference we haven’t always done theology well in the past. There tends to be a conservative camp and a liberal camp and they tend to get tired of each other and act irritably. But there is one professor at our local United Methodist Seminary, Garrett-Evangelical Seminary in Evanston who has jumped into the discussion and the contributions he has made to the discussion have been so wise, so respectful of the opinions of those he disagrees with, so gentle in stating his own convictions, that it makes talking theology a joy.
Can I suggest a couple of principles that can help us learn to talk about theology together and find it a joy?
The first principle is to watch what Jesus did in our text. There was a difference of opinion on how strict to be in observing the Sabbath. And Jesus pointed those there to the Bible to find the answer. The Bible is God’s word for us. It has been helping people sort out the true and the false, the wheat and the chaff, for a very long time. And if we can agree to that ground rule of asking first, “What does the Bible say about that?” then we’ll be able to get along easier because we’re all playing by the same rules. And the more we learn what the Bible teaches the wiser we’ll be.
A second principle is to respect the person you are talking to or talking about, even if you disagree with their ideas. Back when I was in seminary, one of my theology professors made it a rule for himself that he would never talk about any theological position that he disagreed with unless he could state that position in a way that presented it at least as well as someone who held that position would do. And in every lecture he would come to a new theological issue and then lay out 3, 4, sometimes 6, 7 or 8 different answers that theologians had come up with over the centuries on that issue. And he would state every one so fairly, so positively. And then he would give his own position and his reasons for his position. And he didn’t hide anything. He gave his reasons for disagreeing with the other positions. But he always respected those who thought different. And talking theology was a beautiful thing.
When we talk about theology, lets give each other the respect of listening carefully until we understand what the other really means. That’s a precious and beautiful thing. When we talk about theology, let’s be careful not to cut off the discussion by sticking simplistic labels on one another. Let’s give our brothers and sisters that wonderful gift of being understood for who they are. When we talk theology, let’s give each other the gift of time to think about things and come to our own conclusions. We don’t need to use emotional pressure or our disapproval to push them into something they aren’t ready for. When we talk theology let’s treat each other with the respect to talk things through thoroughly, trusting in each other that we can come to some common ground, trusting in God to lead us to the truth. Let’s treat one another with the respect that trusts we can put all our questions and disagreements out on the table and work them through. Let’s talk about theology, because that’s one of the ways to learn about God. AMEN
