TO MAKE US WISE Romans 8:1-11; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 In April 2007 in Washington there was a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society on the theme of The Public Good: Knowledge as the Foundation of a Democratic Society. [The novelist] E.L. Doctorow s keynote address was titled The White Whale. It began this way: (The Nation, 7/14/08) What does it say about the United States today that this fellowship of the arts and sciences and philosophy is called to affirm knowledge as a public good? What have we come to when the self-evident has to be argued as if 500 years into the Englightenment and 230-some years into the life of this Republic it is a proposition still to be proven? How does it happen that the modernist project that has endowed mankind with the scientific method, the concept of objective evidence, the culture of factuality responsible for the good and extended life we enjoy in the high-tech world of our freedom, but more important for the history of our species. How does it happen for reason to have been so deflected and empirical truth to have become so vulnerable to unreason? history seems to be running in reverse and knowledge is not seen as a public good but as something suspect, dubious or even ungodly, as it was, for example, in Italy in 1633, when the church put Galileo on trial for his heretical view that the earth is in orbit around the sun.
How have we gotten to this point when the opinions of know-nothings and ignoramuses have more sway in the public market place than those of scientists and other thoughtful persons? In asking this question I am not saying that people with expensive educations know best. The people who are running our government have the best educations money can buy and have still led us as stupidly as one could imagine. Education in and of itself means nothing. It is wisdom that matters, by which I mean the ability to understand the relations between things and how to judge what is better and what is worse with discernment and what is the good and worthwhile standard for such judgments. During the last seven years the running of our nation has taken its cue from bad religion by which I don t mean right-wing Christianity, which is merely an example of bad religion, though it is certainly true that right-wing Christianity has been influential with our leaders. What I am speaking of is the thinking called Manichaean. Manichaeism was the most influential religion of the ancient world, founded by Mani who was born in southern Babylonia about 216 BCE. He was known to his followers as the apostle of God. The chief characteristic of Mani s religion is an absolute dualism of good and evil which cannot be traced to the same source. The Manichaean myth begins with two primal principles, Light and Darkness. These are locked in battle with one another everywhere in the world. This myth infected all of the religions that it touched, and you can easily see its influence in the use of symbols in the New Testament. There is a remnant of this kind of thinking wherever people see the world rigidly in terms of black and white, evil and good. Perhaps you even detect a bit of Manichaeism in St. Paul when he writes to the Romans, For those who live according to
the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. Here darkness and light have been translated into the terms of flesh and Spirit, but you can see in this passage something of the division of the world into two opposing forces that is characteristic of Manichaeism. The philosophy of Manichaeism was properly declared a heresy by the Early Church that is to say it was declared false teaching. For Christians, God is supreme and the Maker of all things, without a rival. In the Christian faith, the choice is between the way of God represented in the life and teachings of Jesus or the way of selfishness according to which in effect a person makes himself god and lives to himself and for himself. This choice is not a simple matter of black and white but has many shades of gray owing to the complexity of life in the world, and we are encouraged to think that people who see the world rigidly in black and white terms are intellectually immature and accordingly do not see the world truly as in the case of the New Testament s caricature of the Pharisees. This intellectual immaturity is the problem that E.L. Doctorow is pointing to in the excerpt from the talk with which I began. We have, he says, retreated or more accurately fallen back into a primitive Manichaean, black vs. white, way of thinking that lacks understanding and compassion. The result is that we are living in a time when a case needs to be made for the virtues of reason and understanding, when we must cultivate a respect for knowledge as opposed to mere opinion and unseeing obedience to authority. The tendency Doctorow finds in our national life is also present in the church insofar as Christians do not work and, more than this, do not struggle to understand the
faith they believe. In the Parable of the Sower Jesus tells us that we must not merely hear the word of God s realm but that we must understand it. Only in this way will the word have its beneficial affects. And how do we come to understand what we hear? We think, we reason, we use our imaginations! The church is not, however, today suffering from too much thinking, too much reason, and fault for this state of affairs is to be found in both clergy and laity, but clergy most of all. The Christian faith has been dumbed down by clergy who are not thoughtful enough or who do not care enough to think through the faith and help the faithful understand what it is they believe; clergy who are not willing to engage the complex reality of life in the 21 st Century and use a bit of Christian imagination to think about our faith in light of this complexity and the culture in which we are living. There was a time when the clergy were expected to be public intellectuals, by which I do not mean smartypants academics, but rather people who from the vantage point of Christian scholarship studied and spoke to the issues of the day with discernment, helping their congregations to think Christianly about the world in which they were living. They didn t try to make everything simple, because neither the world nor our faith are simple things. They did not play to the lowest level of learning and intelligence but rather attempted to move their congregations to a higher understanding. The clergy had and has a responsibility to do this, a responsibility too often abdicated for one reason or another. At the same time lay people also have the responsibility to heighten their expectations of what it means to participate in the Christian faith and what membership in the church demands of them and what worship of God means.
We do not know what kind of education Jesus had. Probably not very much in the way of formal education. But the Jesus we come across in the New Testament is a person who is wise and who seeks to understand the faith he has received and not just to repeat it. In so doing, he challenges those he addresses to understand better than they do the lives they are living and what godliness means in light of their experience in the world. He calls his followers to be wise, not merely hearing the word of God s realm but he calls them to understand it and in their living bear fruit which reflects this understanding. In this way he is like a sower who went out to sow, broadcasting seed for the purpose of making us wise. Amen. Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, July 13, 2008 Emanuel Lutheran Church