Scriptures: |
Acts 5:27-32 |
Technology keeps moving us on. By now probably many of you have a Global Positioning System – a GPS – in your car to help you find where you want to go (Mapquest and Google Maps are so yesterday). (As a matter of fact, just this morning I read an article in The Sun about Clark County getting over a hundred new GPSs for their official cars.) Get a rental car at an airport and you’re almost automatically offered a GPS, anymore. Some people I know can’t imagine how they ever functioned without one. Of course, you have to put up with a frequently annoying voice and an “I know I’m right” attitude much of the time. There are always trade-offs. And whether our lives are enriched by always knowing where we are going is at least a debatable theological question.
Barbara Brown Taylor, writing in The Christian Century, tells a story about two friends of hers which she calls “a modern parable”. Jesus, as you know, used parable as a basic teaching technique, and at last week’s Annual Gathering we heard artist Charles McCullough interpret through his sculptures parables in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. Well, here’s a story rich in insight to help us understand the meaning of faith in the 21st century, which is what a parable is supposed to do.
It seems that these two friends had to go from Philadelphia to a conference at the Kirkridge Retreat Center in Bangor, Pennsylvania. Since Kirkridge is not the easiest place in the world to find, they decided to rent a car with a GPS. The guys put the screen up on the dashboard and turned it on. Up came a “Never Lost” computer screen (sounds familiar, huh? that GPS computer screen just knows everything!). After typing in their destination they were given four options in terms of the route: most expressways, shortest distance, shortest time, or most scenic. They clicked on “most expressways” and a pleasant female voice announced, “Calculating route”. They were soon on their way.
What a terrific ride! For the next three hours all they had to do was follow whatever the pleasant female voice told them to do. At one point they made a wrong turn into a shopping parking lot. “Return to designated route,” the voice said, and while they were looking for a place to turn around the computer kept going “boing, boing, boing” to remind them that they had made a wrong turn. They were embarrassed to have goofed, but they were also relieved to discover that they truly could not get lost.
As they approached their destination in Bangor, the voice alerted them, “Approaching left turn in nine miles”. She kept repeating the warning every mile. But then as they came up on the actual exit with the voice saying, “Approaching left turn .2 of a mile,” the men in the car saw that the exit was clearly visible on the right side of the road. What should they do? What should they believe? – their own eyes or this authoritative voice which hadn’t been wrong so far…and was also so very pleasant to listen to. The eye in the sky couldn’t be wrong, could it?
Caught in an existential crisis, the driver wasn’t sure what to do…until a solid concrete wall on his left finally convinced him to take the risk of following what his eyes told him must be true. Swerving across two lanes of traffic, he zoomed onto the exit ramp. Both of them cringed waiting for the accusing “boing, boing, boing” that would tell them they had made an error – but it never came. As they continued around the exit ramp, it turned into a complete cloverleaf, and they realized that they were indeed turning in the direction that the voice had told them to go. The satellite had simply overlooked the exit ramp (now, newer GPS versions probably have corrected for this, but that would ruin the point of the parable). By acting on their own convictions, they wound up doing what the “Never Lost” computer system had intended for them to do all along.
What a potent parable for us to use to contemplate our 21st century faith! Modern life so often confounds us. We are programmed to act in certain ways by contemporary technologies. We think of ourselves as a “mediated” society, with media from print to the Internet and iPhones and iPods influencing our lives in obvious and subtle ways. We feel like we really aren’t in control, don’t we?
And yet we have these maps that ground us and give us direction. Three such maps for Christians are scripture, tradition, and a code of ethics. We spread them out in front of us each Sunday – during worship and at the Adult Bible Study Class and perhaps at other times as well – and discover what we already knew: these maps give us basic, fundamental direction for getting where we want to go.
The problem is that often these maps don’t truly reflect what’s happening in the modern world. They’re a bit like the old Mercator map projection of the world, with which we are all familiar from our school days and yet which gives an inaccurate picture of the real relationship of continents to one another. The more modern Peters Projection Map depicts Africa and other Global South land masses in a truer perspective, although this map looks somewhat askew to eyes used to seeing the Mercator.
And so we get hot for the newest thing – a new gimmick-y “eye-in-the-sky” system (and we are certainly familiar with “eyes-in-the-sky” in Las Vegas) that will assure us we will never get lost – new approaches to old truths like, say, situation ethics (which was a fad back in the 60s) or a theology of hope or womanist theology or New Age wisdom. And for a time, for some of us, they work. They can provide a map that corrects us and turns us around when we make that wrong turn into the parking lot.
But then the “Never Lost” system comes up against the reality of our own experience. Here’s where the modern crisis of faith comes in. We’ve all had one of those experiences that test our faith, whether personal: a death in the family, a relationship gone sour, a child whose rebellion goes beyond the pale – or on the world scene: a scientific breakthrough that would seem to challenge our religious worldview, an archeological discovery that would seem to contradict a piece of Biblical history, books by noted atheists (like those which came out last year) well-reasoned in their effort to proclaim that there is no God. And so doubt becomes the touchstone of our existence.
Thomas, of course, one of the disciples, a close friend of Jesus, firmly knit into the community, is the most famous doubter. Thomas is one of those Biblical characters that just about every one of us can identify with. “Oh no, uh uh, only if I actually see the mark of the nails and put my hand in his side – only then will I believe.” Gotta see it for myself. Gotta feel it for myself. Gotta experience it myself. Thomas is the quintessential 21st century human being: the one for whom empiricism, reason, and scientific truth must all bear witness to the divine if faith is to be real.
And what our parable of the modern map is telling us is: that’s OK! We do have to trust our own eyes, our own feelings, our own experience, as well as follow that which we have been told is authoritative. Not to do so is to fall into the trap of so trusting the seemingly infallible authoritative voice that we lose all judgment about what is really significant. Do you remember the 1961 movie “Judgment at Nuremberg”, with Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, and Maximillian Schell (it was turned into a Broadway play about eight years ago, as well)? That movie well depicted what happens when humans take that 20th century mantra of “I was only following orders” to the extreme. We need to resist such a dynamic here in the 21st century.
It is all too easy simply to put our trust in the map, the system, the technology, the authority that says, “This is the only way to do it – the only way to live your life.” That’s why for many years at the end of the last century and into this first decade of the 21st conservative churches were growing (although that growth seems to have slaked off in most recent years). People found comfort in being told what was true and how to find your way. You could check your brain at the front door. (One of the things that the UCC’s Stillspeaking campaign has found is that people really like a church like the UCC where you are not expected to check your brain at the front door.) In these conservative churches the old maps seemed to work best; or, at least, the interpreters of the maps said that that was how things worked best. But now in 2009 people of faith are re-discovering the double truth: both that God gives us signposts and markers and aid for the journey and that God intends for us to use what we know to plot our own way. What’s more, this kind of an understanding of faith means that there is more than one option open to us. Everyone likes to quote Yogi Berra, and, of course, not everything attributed to him he really said, but one of my favorite Yogi-isms is very appropriate to what we’re talking about here: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” That is to say, each or all of the paths available to us may have something of value for our spiritual journeys. Modern maps of the spiritual journey need to offer us those kinds of options.
These three people who have joined with us in our journeys now bring their own journeys, their maps, their questions, their doubts, but also their hopes, their examples, their faith to walk down these multi-fold paths. Vanessa and Jeffrey and Karen have shown their willingness to share their gifts here in this sacred space, and that means that even more paths and maps and discoveries will be added to those that are already in this place. As I said a couple of weeks ago during the season of Pentecost, we share and communicate our gifts with one another out of our very diversity, and that diversity is enhanced when new paths are here proffered.
In the passage from the book of Acts that we read today Peter and the others affirm that they are witnessing to a new thing – yet it is based on a line of faith that stretches back over many generations. “The God of our ancestors,” says Peter, acknowledging the map of tradition from which they have come, “raised up Jesus…. God exalted him…as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things…..” A new map (resurrection), newly understood (through the Apostles’ experience), yet based on the maps of tradition and ancestors, gives Peter – gives us – a map of faith for our time.
What twenty centuries of Christianity have brought us to is the realization that there are many maps to help guide us. To depend on one or two, no matter how seemingly authoritative, is to run the risk of missing out on God’s wider plan for our lives. If everything in our experience is telling us that the exit is going to go off to the right, then perhaps it’s time to trust that experience. And often, as with a global positioning system, we will discover that what had appeared to be in conflict with or to contradict what we are seeing ends up affirming it. Jesus does not flinch from Thomas’ desire to see and to feel. He says, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.”
True faith welcomes doubt, welcomes the opportunity to affirm what we have seen and what we have experienced. When we then proclaim along with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”, it is not merely a kowtowing to authority but an acknowledgement that the reality of the Easter Jesus is consonant with our own experience of life and of faith. We take that exit ramp secure in the belief that we have weathered the crisis of faith, and that all of our maps are pointing us to the right center.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
June 14, 2009