Sunday, February 8, 2009

5 Epiphany B - 8 February 2009

5 Epiphany B - 8 February 2009
Isaiah 40:21-31; 1 Corinthians 9:16-23; Mark 1:29-39
James V. Stockton

Most of our Adult Education Classes on Sundays, and our Wednesday noontime scripture study, begin with a prayer; and the prayer always includes thanks to God for the gift of curiosity. In one of my favorite movies, Inherit the Wind, based on the play of the same name by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, two attorneys are squaring off against one another. Ostensibly a trial around a school teacher who violated a law against teaching human evolution, the drama is deeper than that. One attorney, Matthew Harrison Brady is cross-examined by his counterpart, Henry Drummond. “We must not abandon faith!” declares Brady. “Faith,” he says, “is the most important thing!” “Then why did God plague us with the capacity to think?” asks Henry Drummond. “Why do you deny the one thing,” he goes on, that sets human being above the other animals?”

It’s an interesting point. Over the years, many of you have heard me claim that the most theological question that a person can ask is, ‘Why?’ In the play, it is not merely the ability to think that raises the anxiety of the protagonists. It is the ability to follow one’s thought even to the point of questioning, to the point of wondering ‘how is it so,’ ‘why is it so,’ ‘why must it be so?’ I believe ‘Why’ lies at the heart of God’s blessing to us, of the gift of curiosity. Do you want to know why?


First, know this: every first Sunday in February is recognized by the Episcopal Church as Theological Education Sunday. A resolution was put forward at General Convention in 1997 and Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, declared that the first Sunday on February would be so recognized in the Episcopal Church. Yes, this is the second Sunday of February, not the first, but I want us to be aware of theological education as something that is meant to be engaged always, not only on one Sunday of the year. And, I want us to raise our awareness of it this week because next Sunday we will have a guest preacher in the person of the Rev. John Newton. The Rev. Newton is both a relatively newly ordained priest and the Chaplain of the Episcopal Student Center at the University of Texas here in Austin.

I want everyone who knows a young person who is approaching graduation from high school to invite those persons to come to church with you next week. They need not being heading off to college, they need not be heading off to U.T., to experience the benefit of witnessing someone who is hardly older than they are affirming for them the fact that both God and the Episcopal Church are in favor of their using their gift of curiosity. People of every age, but especially minds that are young enough to retain their full-blown ideals and highest hopes need to be asking these questions with an especially youthful fervor.

Every answer that emerges from study, from experience, from trial and error, from perseverance, leads to yet another question, to another reason to ask, ‘why?’ And one really has to wonder, I think, if this is not exactly as God intends it to be. Here at ECR, we support our local seminary, the Seminary of the Southwest, by serving as a site for seminarians from around the country who come here and do their Field Education. Judith Lund, Doug Wasinger, Shari Adams, Brent Russell, John Fritts, Bob Fitch, Jody Harrison, Sue Wilmot, Sam Giancarlo, and now Marie Buttebaugh have all come to know the blessing and challenges of ministry through their time and ministries here at ECR. ECR also works closely with the continuing education program of the seminary, having had in the recent past one of our own serving on the Board of Directors of the Austin Lay School of Theology. Lay persons and persons seeking ordination are all seeking to respond to that hunger for “Godly understanding, knowledge, and wisdom.”

In today’s Gospel we see both this hunger and God’s response to it in Jesus. You may recall from last week that Jesus has been teaching and healing in the synagogue. He now leaves there and goes directly to Peter’s home where he ministers to Peter’s family. From there Jesus turns to all the needs of all the people of the city. Hour after hour, encounter after encounter with person after person and question after question: “How, Jesus, do I make sure that I’m a good enough person; and what is that I am trying to be good enough for?” “Why, Jesus, did this sickness happen to my child?” “How is it, Jesus, that me and many others continue to suffer because of the sins of someone else?” And even questions not so weighty, but really just as important: “Jesus, why is the sky blue?” “Jesus, why are some people very nice, and other people not very nice at all?” “Jesus, why shouldn’t I tell a lie?”

From my bias, I rather think that Jesus hears each as a theological question. It is a full day, long, exhilarating and exhausting all at the same time. Then, when it would perhaps be easiest for Jesus to stay right here in this place right where he is very popular and completely safe, Jesus turns instead to respond, I think, to that aspect of human curiosity that only intentional solitude with God can fill. Jesus moves on from there, to serve people whom he has not met, who will receive him or not, he does not know. But he is curious to find out, and he is hungry for further godly knowledge of who he is, for further understanding of whom he is here to help, and he is eager to feed them whose hunger for the wisdom of God in heaven is a gnawing as his own.

Back at the trial in the play, Henry Drummond is examining his opponent Matthew Harrison Brady on the stand. “Why did God plague us with the capacity to think?” he asks. “What other merit have we? The elephant is larger,” he goes on; “the horse stronger and swifter, the butterfly more beautiful, the mosquito more prolific, even the sponge is more durable.” “Or does a sponge think?” Drummond asks. “If the Lord wishes a sponge to think, it thinks!” replies Brady. “Does a man have the same privilege as a sponge?” asks Drummond. “Of course!” Brady answers. “Well this man,” says Drummond motioning toward the school teacher on trial, “wishes to have the same privilege as a sponge, he wishes to think!”

Like any good play or movie this one seeks to answer some questions, but it also raises new ones. The courtroom drama is a battle between the human capacity for critical thinking on the one hand and the human capacity for blind faith on the other. The gift of curiosity is a gift so great that it compels both the person of faith and the person of reason to ask, ‘Why?’ ‘Why must we accept the premise that my faith in God contradicts my God-given right to think?’ ‘Why must we accept the premise that my disbelief in the god of my childhood, or in the god with which I have been attacked or insulted, somehow keeps me from the knowledge of the true God?’

Listen, look, and notice that every big question being asked today has been asked in every age. And in every age, whether people knew it or not, the questions have been theological. “How does humanity know what it the right thing to do?” “How can humanity end the plague of wars and threats of wars?” “What compels us to want to right what is wrong and what prevent us from doing so?” Look, listen, and notice, Christ today is raising up a driving hunger to know that humanity and divinity are related; that goodness beyond the relative good, that holiness beyond self-righteous comparisons, that that which is of God and is God is not beyond our reach, and that our world is not beyond the reach of God.

The character of Drummond calls the ability to think a plague, but that character is a cynic. I call curiosity a gift, and I believe ‘why’ lies at the heart of it. And I believe this because I believe God is curious, too. Education that is theological helps to answer our curiosity about God and God’s Love. It also brings us nearer to God and so helps answer God’s own curiosity about what God’s Love is doing in our lives and is doing through us in the world around us. It helps bring us nearer, to those better and better questions that only God, you, and me, all of us together, can ask.

Aren’t we curious about what those might be? I know we are, and so I say thanks be to God.

Now may Almighty God, the fountain of all Truth, so enlighten by the Holy Spirit our learning and our teaching, that by us, all may come to know and rejoice in the wisdom of God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with the Father and the same Spirit, lives and reigns, One God, now and for ever. Amen.

© 2009, James V. Stockton

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