Sermon of October 9, 2005
Presented by Rev. Chuck Ericson
Scripture lesson: 1 Corinthians 13

“We Just Don't Know"

I mentioned last week that some thoughts for my sermons this month come from a trip that Jane and I took to Arizona a couple weeks ago, where we spent some time in the desert. I decided to talk about it but I forgot the name of the place where we went. Well it’s called the Palatki Ruins. I want to make sure I don’t say, “pilates” or “Pataki,” but it’s Palatki Ruins. It’s south of Sedona along one of the main roads, then eight miles in on a dirt road into a place where you are in what the early Mexican settlers called a rincon or a box canyon. You go in and there are three sides before you and you’re at the end of it, you can’t go any further, you’re boxed in. And along one side of this box canyon with very high ridged walls all around were these ruins. You drive in the road and park and there’s a ranger station and on one side there are some ruins of the cave dwellings and on the other side. There are also some ruins of cave dwellings and but more writings, more hieroglyphs or pictographs that were either etched or painted into the walls some hundreds or thousands of years ago, except for one that I saw that said, “Carlos, Los Angeles, 1995.” I think that was new. But they’re keeping that guarded all the time now because people have done that over the years but most of these are really very primitive pictures of animals and symbols and things from a long time ago. It’s incredible to see that they’ve lasted this long.

We got talking to the ranger while we were there, asking about how this canyon got formed and whether people believed that once there was ocean there. The ranger said, “We don’t know.” And we said, “Oh, well maybe there was ocean and it eroded away and left this rincon or box canyon.” And she said, “We don’t know.” “Well maybe there was a glacier here. Do you think there was a glacier here?” and she said, “We just don’t know.”  And at that moment I had just a very startling awareness of how close in some ways science and geology and exploration are to religion and Christianity – because the same answer applies very often to questions people ask about the Bible, about faith, about Christianity. The answer that I give probably more often than I would like is, “We just don’t know.” There is not absolute truth, perfect facts that build the foundation of our faith. There are really three different categories of responses when people ask questions about faith. So I want to take a few moments to look at those different categories of answers, and one of them is going to be, “We just don’t know,” but I’m saving that for the end.

But the first answer we can give sometimes is, “We are pretty certain that something is not true or not factual” or perhaps even close to being considered fictional, although that’s a difficult word for some people when we talk about matters of faith. But there are some things that we’re pretty certain are not true or factual, just as it is true for exploration or science, we’ve learned over the years that the sun does not revolve around the Earth. People thought that for a while. And then we learned that wasn’t true. We learned that the Earth is not flat, it’s round, so that was dispelled after many hundreds of years of believing, and we learned that Columbus didn’t discover America. I know it’s great to have this extra long weekend but there were people here before Columbus , living here quite well in nice communities and living in these caves and other places, putting the pictures on the walls. So we know that some things have been proven or shown over the years to be, that were once thought to be factual, are not really considered that way anymore.

And the same is true in religion. In the Bible, if you had an old King James Version, the first five books of the Bible were often called the first five books of Moses. The belief that people had for many years was that Moses wrote those first five books of the Bible, because Moses is associated with the Ten Commandments and the laws which are at the center of these five books. But if you get right to the end of Deuteronomy, it says, in Deuteronomy 34, so “Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab according to the word of the Lord and he was buried in the valley in the land of Moab opposite  Bethpeor, but no [one] knows the place of his burial to this day” (Deuteronomy 34:5-6).  Moses couldn’t write about his death and his burial, could he? No. So Moses didn’t write all of the first five books of the Bible. In fact it says here he was 120 years old when he died and there were more than 120 years between creation and this point where Moses dies at the end of Deuteronomy when Joshua takes over. So some people felt at one point that it was all Moses’ handiwork and we know now that it wasn’t. Some of it was, to be sure, the work of somebody like Moses or somebody with the name Moses, but it wasn’t all.  So that has been dispelled over the years.

Another one is that David wrote all the Psalms. There are 150 Psalms and David is believed to have been a creative writer and had written some of them, but not all of them. I like to think David wrote the 23^rd Psalm. There’s nothing that I know of that would dispel that but if you get to Psalm 137, it’s the words actually that form the basis of the song, “By the Willows” in Godspell, and it begins, “By the waters of Babylon there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion . On the willows there we hung up our lyres (or our stringed instruments).” Well Babylon is where Israel was in exile after they were defeated in 587 B.C. and David lived around 1000 B.C., so there’s about a 400-year gap. So David probably didn’t write Psalm 137 but he probably wrote some of them.

There are numerous other things that we’ve learned over the years that we thought once were true that are not. The Bible, for example, isn’t a chronological document. It isn’t written by time as much as by theme. Themes are put together. So if somebody wants to read the Bible from cover to cover, from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, you can do that but it’s probably not the best idea because you read through first and second Kings, for example, and you get to first and second Chronicles and some of the same stuff is repeating and other things that already happened are happening again because they have some of the same material. So it can be confusing to do that but it also shows that the Bible wasn’t written chronologically. It was written according to themes.

A couple other things are that the parables of Jesus are not necessarily true stories but stories Jesus used to illustrate something, so they’re not meant to be factual but illustrative. And also the Christmas story. Christmas is coming up, and there are elements to the Christmas story that some people think are true, I think, but they’re not. For example, in the Christmas story there was no innkeeper. Did you know that? There was no innkeeper. It says Mary and Joseph got to Bethlehem and there was no room for them at the inn and that’s it. Plays and pageants and things from there have developed the innkeeper as a key figure, but we don’t know if there was somebody like that or if they got there and saw everything looked like it was full and they wouldn’t get in there and just walked away without even asking. There aren’t necessarily three kings. There probably aren’t any kings, but the wise ones, the Magi, there’s no number in the Bible, it just says they brought gold and frankincense and myrrh, three items, so people thought, “Well, there were three of them.” And on and on. There are things that some people have thought to be true over the years that we’ve discovered are not true. So just like science and exploration, religion has that same element: we think things for a certain time and then realize later on that maybe they’re not as true or as factual as we thought they were.

On the other hand there are things that are pretty clear, as close as you can get to saying are certainly true, certainly factual. It’s true in science when we kept pushing the ranger about whether the ocean or the glacier was causing this box canyon and finally gave up, she went into her speech about how it’s really like a layer cake. She loved this image of a layer cake and I was out there with my bottle of water but I was getting hungry hearing about the layer cake, about how this layer of rock came in and then another layer on top of it, and she said, “We know that that’s true. We know that it’s true that the canyon was built like a layer cake.” We couldn’t get her off the layer cake into anything else other than, “We just don’t know all the rest but we know that it’s like a layer cake.”

There are certain things about the Bible and our faith that we know pretty much for certain too – for example, that the Old Testament or the Hebrew scriptures were written in Hebrew or Aramaic, spoken in Aramaic and written in Hebrew. We have found in the Dead Sea Scrolls some old manuscripts that have it in Hebrew. We know that the New Testament, or Christian scriptures, were written in Greek. We know that Jesus and John the Baptist really lived. There are people who are opposed to Christianity I suppose who like to say that our faith is all a lot of fairy tale, and yet there was a historian, a Jewish historian at the same time Jesus and John the Baptist lived named Josephus who wrote about Jesus as some man who did wonderful things, and about another man who lived out in the wilderness and dressed strangely and ate weird things named John, who was John the Baptist, who wore animals’ clothes and ate locusts and wild honey. That doesn’t sound very good, does it? I like the layer cake but not the locusts and the wild honey. Or the locust part anyway. So Josephus, who was Jewish, and might not have automatically been an advocate for Christianity since many perceived Christianity was taking people away from Judaism, this Jewish writer confirmed there was a Jesus and there was a John the Baptist at that time. We know also from other historical documents that Israel was invaded by the Assyrians in 721 and that it was invaded by the Babylonians in 587 before they went off to exile when they hung up their lyres on the willows. So we know certain things are corroborated in other places.

I like to think that the Bible is like a layer cake, too. That first there were the books that are associated with Moses that give the foundation for how things started and then the works of the Prophets built upon that, and there’s some nice creamy frosting in there, and then there’s the gospels, another layer of creamy frosting, and the letters of Paul, and the Revelation at the end. In the same way it’s built upon one layer upon another just like geology teaches us about box canyons. So we know certain things are pretty much true.

And then there is that category, even in faith, that you just throw up your hands and say, “We just don’t know” and you keep asking me or somebody else the same question over and over again and I’m going to say, “We just don’t know.” Creation is an example. There’s kind of a heated debate developing now around Intelligent Design, Creationism and Darwinism, and I think the real answer of faith is, we just don’t know. I was taught in seminary that the stories of Genesis, about the six days of creation and Adam and Eve were meant to be not about scientific explanations for the origins of the world but about the unfolding of God’s dream. That this was God’s beginning of a world where people would live and there would be beauty and people would build the creation toward something good. And it’s about the idea that God created for a purpose, not how God created in stages scientifically. And I kind of like that. I don’t think that religion needs to be in a debate with science about something. In fact when it does get that way I kind of like the quote that was in the program this morning, up at the top, from Abraham J. Heschel, whose daughter, Hannah Susanna Heschel was in my class at Trinity College . (That’s how I ever heard of Abraham Heshcel, otherwise I probably wouldn’t. He was a Jewish theologian.) But it’s a great quote: “In a controversy,” such as the one about creation, I think, “the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth and we have begun striving for ourselves.” And I think that’s what happens sometimes, in those kind of debates when it gets heated, the truth seems to get lost sometimes and it’s about whose side is going to prevail.

We just don’t know about some other things too. We don’t know, for example, who wrote all those books by John in the New Testament. There’s the gospel of John, there’s the first, second and third letters of John and the Revelation of John and some Biblical scholars say, “Well they’re all so very different they couldn’t possibly be the same person,” and yet I had a professor in seminary who said, “Well, they are very different. Revelation is written very differently from the gospel and the gospel and Revelation are very different from the letters.” But the professor said, “You know, I write a letter to my wife, when I’m away from home, one way, I write a sermon a different way, I write a dissertation to my university another way.” Same person writing, three different styles that don’t seem alike at all. Maybe it was. We just don’t know. We just don’t know.

In the Ten Commandments it says one place, “Thou shall not kill.” Translators think it that it also might say rightly, “Thou shall not commit murder.” There’s a big difference between committing murder and killing. I think that’s something that helps people who find themselves sometimes having to be in a position of defending others or defending themselves, such as soldiers, police officers, others. When someone does die in the process it wasn’t an intentional murder, it was someone died out of self-defense of others. That may be a comforting thought to think that what it really means is you don’t commit murder, it’s not don’t kill anything under any circumstances. The other would be nice but it may be too much to expect. But the truth is we just don’t know which one it really is. People think we can’t add to the Bible because in Revelation it says, at the end of 22 it says, “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if anyone adds to them God will add to him the plagues described in this book.” So nobody’s ever added to the Bible. Revelation 22 is the last chapter. Other people have written marvelous things over the years. Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Joan of Arc… there have been words spoken, stories told about marvelous things that some people thought maybe we should have a new New Testament or something, but they’re afraid to because of that. I think that means the Book of Revelation, not the whole Bible. Maybe someday there might be other holy scriptures. I’m watching out for the plagues….

And then another big issue today that people argue about is same gender relationships, and what does our faith say about that and truth be told, we just don’t know. What did Jesus say about it? We just don’t know. There’s nothing in the Bible where Jesus addresses that issue one way or the other directly. We can read other things Jesus said, and try and understand what Jesus meant about how we should love our neighbors and how we should not be judgmental, and we can read other things that say otherwise. We can try and come to terms with that issue, but we can’t say for sure Jesus said absolutely this or Jesus said absolutely that. If we did, we don’t have a record of it. We just don’t know.

We struggle with these things in faith just like science struggles understanding the origins of rock formations and the ocean and the world. And it’s good that we should but we should also know that with some of it we’re going to continue to say, “We just don’t know.” And Paul addresses that in the letter to the Corinthians. He speaks about life and he says that, “And now we know only in part. Later on we shall know completely. Now we see in a mirror dimly. One day we shall know fully.” We see things only in part now. We see things like we’re looking dimly into a mirror. We don’t know everything. Not everything is proof, not everything is fact, not everything is true even about our faith.

But the good news today is there’s one solid thing we can depend upon. One truth, one fact if you will, and that is what Paul writes about love: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things, and love never ends.” Love is at the center of what our lives should be about as individuals but also as God’s people. Love should be at the center of our discussions with one another about the matters that affect us in our world today. Not about winning our side but about loving one another. “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” That is the truth we can depend upon. We don’t say, “Should we love one another? We don’t know for sure.” Yes, we do. We should love one another. That’s what Jesus came to teach us, that’s what Paul writes about, that’s what these words echo down through the ages through weddings and funerals and even in church today tell us; that that’s what’s most important of all. We can talk about those other things. We can try and strive and understand but what’s most important is that we love one another.

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