Primary Wonder Rev. Sarah Campbell April 8, 2018 John 20:19-31 Dad, do you believe in God? The little girl was holding her father s hand on a walk one evening after supper. She thought she knew his answer. After all her father was a minister, a very tall one. But he paused and said Well depends on what you mean This pause was noteworthy to her, a little disorienting, but also intriguing, planting seeds of doubt and wonder and curiosity. Her garden of faith grew freely Some might say that Thomas, aka doubting Thomas, is the patron saint of Mayflower church. There is not a question you can t ask here. You needn t be secretive with your doubts. To be called a Doubting Thomas at Mayflower is a compliment. At Mayflower confirmands are not asked to assent to a certain set of beliefs but rather they are asked whether they choose to continue their faith and doubt journey in this Mayflower community. Do you get the difference? It s a big one. This is the freedom and the responsibility given to us by this historic non-creedal denomination, the only way many of us could be Christians. At Mayflower, if a youth says to us: I don t believe in God, we might well say in response: Tell me about this God you don t believe in because I may not believe in that God either. This response reminds them that there are many understandings of the word God and we often outgrow our childlike image of God as a person in the sky controlling everything. I love how Rabbi Harold Kushner responds to the hard faith questions thoughtful children often pose. I don t know. That s a question even grownups wonder about. Let s talk about it now and let s continue to talk about it as we both get older and wiser. There is nothing simple about this. Faith formation in the progressive church or synagogue is one of the most challenging, interesting, treacherous, rewarding adventures around. There is so much at stake how our children experience the world and yet nothing is black and white. So much of faith formation is abstract and metaphorical yet children s minds only later evolve towards capacity for abstraction. As Kushner says: The issue here is not our, adults, own honesty and consistency, but the absorptive capacity of children at various ages. Teaching the creation story to children who are learning, at the same time in school, the big bang theory and the science of evolution is challenging; that is, sharing with them that religion and science are not mutually exclusive but rather they are marvelously complimentary; two distinct ways of looking at the world that are enriched by each other; one tending to answer the question of how the world works and the other tending to answer the questions of why we are here and how we should behave. (Brown Taylor) It would probably be easier to teach a fill in the blank and true false kind of Christianity; to clearly define beliefs and provide religious
facts and simply explain stories and emphatically answer questions. That would be easier. But opening the mind and heart to faith, ever asking the I wonder question, pushing the Bible stories for more and more meanings rather than submitting to one meaning, helping to spark the alternative imagination of children, this is faith formation that opens the mind not closes the mind. This is the religious air our children breathe here in our church and in our home. We baptize them as children of wonder and forever after tenderly tend to this primary wondering. But out there is a different story. Something is going on. And it s troubling. And it is also the air our children breathe. This something goes far beyond the natural stages of faith and doubt. This is different and I think it s new, the extent of it. There is a false choice that is becoming popularized in our postmodern society, perhaps it is even the dominant narrative now, no thanks to a trinity of celebrity atheists and a largely religiously illiterate and complicit media. The choice? You can either be a fundamentalist God believer or a fundamentalist atheist. It seems that atheist intellectuals seldom engage respectfully with our kind of faith, non-creedal, metaphorical, prophetic. Most popularized atheists are disingenuous, lumping all believers into one category, choosing to propagate the lie that all people of faith believe in the literalism of their sacred texts, thereby erasing the entire history of liberal Christianity of the 19 th and 20 th centuries. It is stunning, and profoundly troubling, how the word agnostic has been dropped from our speech, from our linguistic landscape. The word atheist has elbowed its way in and consequently-- we know the power of language--is closing minds with a kind of fact fundamentalism that the word agnostic doesn t demand. Agnosticism is more open. It is the belief that the ultimate reality, or the great mysterious, or God, is ultimately unknown or unknowable by our poor reach of mind. Atheism, on the other hand, is the denial of the existence of any ultimate reality, or great mysterious, or God. Another word that has not been so much erased but has become distorted beyond recognition, a word most precious to our religion, is the word awe, awesome. Used now more as a descriptor for shoes than for the starry, starry night, will it ever be reclaimed and exorcised of its triviality? (Words are important. Linguists teach us that language not only reflects our reality but it shapes our reality. Awe, doubt, agnosticism are all words that leave reality open. Atheism closes reality.) Get this! 20% of young Catholics, median age 13, who have left the church, do not believe in God. 20%!, finds the Center for Applied Research at Georgetown. Has the research been done in progressive protestant churches? One presumes it would be much the same, so many 13 years olds identifying not as agnostic but as atheist. This fact fundamentalism, this closing of minds to the great mysterious, to that which cannot be quantified or measured, this presumption that there is nothing more than what we can see and touch, this centering of life in self with no ultimate referent, this incapacity for awe, this shriveling up of what makes us most human, this loss of soul is troubling. Fundamentalism of any kind is troubling. A searching mind will doubt God when faced with suffering and evil. But what does an atheist mind do when faced with goodness and beauty? The poet Jane Kenyon writes this most exquisite few prose sentences about faith and doubt, about how we experience the world. We cannot hear this enough
"There are things in life that we must endure which are all but unendurable, and yet I feel that there is a great goodness. Why, when there could have been nothing, is there something? This is a great mystery. How, when there could have been nothing, does it happen that there is love, kindness, beauty?" -Jane Kenyon I m having second thoughts, are you?, about whether Thomas should be the patron saint of Mayflower church, that is, of the progressive open minded church. He is not so much a doubter (or a wonderer or an agnostic) regarding ultimate reality as he is a literal minded, fact fundamentalist demanding certainty. Not doubting Thomas but literal minded Thomas. Why would he be our patron saint? And here s another second thought, given the changing nature of the air out there, the popularizing of the binary choice of either being a Fundamentalist Christian or a Fundamentalist Atheist. Let s reconsider our response when a child or youth says to us: I don t believe in God. Maybe our response could be: Do you want to talk about it? Do you have time? Tell me about the God you don t believe in because I may not believe in that God either. But not stopping with this. Rather this is just the beginning of the conversation. But still, do you wonder, I do, how is it that forgiveness is possible, forgiveness of big things; and how is it that people can go on living after their soul mate has died, and even finding joy; and how is it that something brand new can be created, a poem, a symphony, a painting?; how is it that there is creation, this luminous web, in which nothing, absolutely nothing is inconsequential? This is all a great mystery. How, when there could have been nothing, does it happen that there is all of this? Or maybe, when a child says: I don t believe in God, our response could be: Ah let s talk about this some night, down on the dock, under the starry sky. During college and graduate school, I tried to talk myself out of believing in God, a young woman writes in a piece in the New York Time entitled This Easter, I ll be back in church, The reasons, she writes, not to believe were multifarious and convincing. The reasons to believe came down to only one: I couldn t not believe. I seem to have been born with a constant ache for the sacred, a deep-rooted need to offer thanks, to ask for help, to sing out in fathomless praise to something. In time, I found my way back to God, the most familiar and fundamental something I knew, even if by then my conception of the divine had enlarged beyond any church s ability to define or contain it. (Renkle) The father is 90 now, and of much shorter stature. The daughter still holds hands with him when they go for walks by the river, the river that will one day receive his ashes, just as it received his father s ashes many years ago. And as he walks, he exclaims with awe at the wonder of the river and the trees. His awe is inexhaustible as is the intricacy of the creation around them as is his indignation at the threat to all of it as is his commitment, to his dying day, to the prophetic work against climate change. Inexhaustible. He is still a child of wonder. For the whole world is holy. He has shaped his daughter s faith not with a closed belief system but rather with this openness, of his faith and his doubt and his wondering. His pausing when she asked all those many years ago, dad, do you believe in God? made her realize that the mystery was far greater than any words could touch and she has been devout in opening her eyes and ears and mind and heart to this great mystery, what she and her father call God ever since.
Sources Barbour, Ian, Issues In Science and Religion. Harper and Row, 1966. Brown, Raymond, The Gospel According to John XIII-XXI. Doubleday, 1971. Brown Taylor, Barbara, The Luminous Web. Cowley, 2000. Kushner, Harold, When Children Ask About God. Schoken Book, 1971. Renkl, Margaret, This Easter, I ll Be Back In Church, New York Times, March 2018.