The Rev. Noah Van Niel
February 3rd, 2019
The Chapel of the Cross
Epiphany 4: Jeremiah 1:4-10; Ps 71:1-6; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30
When my mother turned fifty, we threw her a big birthday party. During the festivities, I remember that she, eager to make this a meaningful occasion, claimed her prerogative as birthday girl to ask her family and friends to each say one really important thing they had learned in their many years of life. This being her birthday, everyone obliged. Now I was a passing a bit of a sullen streak at this point of life, so I don’t remember anything any of the attendees said, but I do remember that when it came time for my mom to drop her bit of wisdom on the crowd she said this: “The older I get, the more I learn how much I don’t know.” Being her sullen teenage son, my first reaction to this answer was, “laaaaame.” But as the years have passed, I have remembered those words, and come to appreciate their profound truth. The more we know, the more we know we don’t know.
My mother wasn’t speaking exclusively about faith when she said this, but I think it applies more there than anywhere else in our lives. When it comes to God, we don’t know everything. When it comes to a lot of things we don’t everything, but especially something as big and complex, as infinite, as God. If we’re lucky, as we age, we learn more and more about God, but in a paradoxical way, that increased knowledge actually serves to show us the limitations of our knowledge. In this way spiritual humility is actually a sign of spiritual of maturity.
In 1981, James Fowler, a Methodist Minister and a seminal figure in the field of developmental psychology, published a highly-regarded book called, Stages of Faith.[1] In this book, Fowler used his scientific research methods to demarcate stages of spiritual maturation that people pass through in their life. And what he found was, that stages of faith development are much more elongated than traditional human psychological development and not everyone passes through them equally, or even passes through them at all. But for Fowler, one of the important stages of spiritual maturation was what he called “conjunctive faith,” which is a relationship with God that recognizes the limits of logic; that believes truth can exist alongside mystery and metaphor. It is a faith that has made peace with half-answers and unknowing, and embraces paradox. “Conjunctive faith,” is a “both/and” stage of faith that allows for us to know some things and not others, and for that to be okay.
The great irony here is that in many people’s opinions, spiritual maturity is not measured in this way. It’s measured in regularity of church attendance, or how much of the Bible you have memorized, or how vociferously you cling to the dogma of your particular branch of belief. Sometimes we can make the mistake of thinking that a faith that embraces mystery and allows for questions without pretending to have all the answers is kind of weak, or loose. It certainly gets cast that way by some. The opposite of this kind of “conjunctive faith,” is a more literalistic, locked understanding of God. This can be highly motivating, and all-encompassing, but it can be dangerous as well. The story of Jesus in his hometown shows us what can happen when one has a locked understanding of the world, or of God—people can get defensive, or even downright aggressive when something or someone shows up to challenge their preconceived notions and beliefs. And such a dogmatic approach to faith actually makes it harder for new revelations to break in. It may be less clearly defined, but a faith that has room for mystery and paradox, that approaches God with intellectual humility, also means that there is room for God to do a new thing. Take Jeremiah, for instance. Even though he is, by his own admission, just a boy, he had something of this spiritual maturity, this “conjunctive faith” about him. He knew his limitations. His first reaction to God showing up on his doorstep was to say, “Who me? I couldn’t possibly be a prophet, I don’t even know what to say.” That’s the response of one who knows what he does not know, knows that he does not know, and it allows God to move in and show him that where he is lacking, God will make up the difference.
Now Fowler spent almost ten years compiling interviews and writing up his findings for this book. But I wonder if he couldn’t have cut that time down if he had been able to interview St. Paul as a research subject. Yes, Paul, that zealous preacher of the Gospel of Christ, upon whose writings the Church has formed much of the dogma and doctrine to which it clings. For buried in that famous ode to love in 1st Corinthians 13, is Paul, laying out essentially the same argument Fowler did, and that my mother learned after 50 years of life on this planet. “When I was a child,” he writes, “I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” Now, I don’t think Paul is talking about when he literally was a child. He’s using that as a metaphor for his spiritual maturation. And what is the sign of his maturation, this great revelation that marks his shift from being a child in faith, to being an adult in faith? It is that what we know, we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part…that we see things not clearly but only as in a dim and dusty mirror. That’s Paul’s version of, “the more we know, the more we know we don’t know.”
I think of it like this: we have a lot of puzzles in our house—truck puzzles, farm puzzles, dinosaur puzzles. And that also means we have a lot of missing puzzle pieces around our house—under the couch, in between the seat cushions, in the refrigerator. And what that means is that our puzzles are almost never complete. They’ve got holes, and gaps and edges missing, which can be mighty frustrating. When it comes to faith, when it comes to our understanding of God we are working with more missing pieces than found pieces. And that too, can be mighty frustrating.
But not knowing everything is not the same thing as not knowing anything. We have some important hints, some clear clues to go on. We have enough pieces to give us an idea about the shape and content of the puzzle we call God. We have the revelation of Jesus Christ, the Holy Scriptures, previous generations of the faithful who have offered their insights into the Almighty for us to benefit from, and we have our own experience. We have some edges, some clear sections that have taken shape—“Oh here’s an area of justice…Ah yes, this big section in the middle is definitely love…and this big portion over here, that looks like mercy.” And even though as we go along we still see only in part, we can sense the outline of things, and the promise of that complete picture out there, even though it hasn’t all quite come together yet. We know in part, we see only in part, but there are things we do know, and we do see.
It’s important to remember though, that sacrificing surety doesn’t mean sacrificing commitment. We shouldn’t confuse not knowing with not caring. Because there is admittedly a fine balance between recognizing our understanding is only partial, and giving up on ever seeing the whole. Again, Paul is a valuable example for us here. Because Paul’s zeal was not diminished by his maturation in faith, it was emboldened. His commitment to the truths he did know—those unshakeable truths of faith, hope and love—were enough to guide the rest of his life and inspire him to work tirelessly to spread those truths to others even though he knew that his picture was only partial. Because rather than that partial picture being bad news, in Paul’s eyes it was actually good news, because it was a promise of yet more wonderful and glorious things to come. When it comes to the limits of our understanding of God we can lament the gaps, the holes, the pieces which we cannot see, or we can look at what we can see, and say, “Can you just imagine how much more beautiful this picture will be when it’s complete?”
Even though when it comes to the great mystery of God we may have more questions than answers, we can still have a Pauline zeal for the answers that we do have, and we can give our lives to them just as fully as he did. Having a “conjunctive faith” does not excuse us from sharing in that same conviction for spreading the good news of God in Christ that propelled Paul across the ancient world, because we believe that when the complete comes, when we know fully, it won’t be a surprise, it will be a fulfillment; a completion of the puzzle, a dusting off of the mirror, a face to face greeting with God, and it will be glorious. Yes, mom, you were right: the more we know, the more we know we don’t know. But if what we don’t know about God is anything like what we do, then it is worth giving our lives to; worth the struggle of living as a paradox: simultaneously humble in our understanding and bold in our witness; and worth proclaiming with passion, that great is the mystery of our faith. Amen.
[1] Fowler, James. Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning, HarperOne, New York, NY 1981.