Advent Lutheran Church

"Information vs. Experience"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            In his modern-day parable titled “The Explorer,” Jesuit priest Anthony DeMello tells the story of a young man who leaves his village in order to explore the far-off, mysterious Amazon River.  After a while he returns, and the villagers swarm around him, filled with excitement as they wait to hear of his adventures.  They’re captivated as he tells them of the tremendous power of the Amazon, the colorful and exotic birds and animals that inhabit the jungle, the native peoples of the region who are so different from, and sometimes so similar to, themselves. 

But he doesn’t know how he can communicate to them what it felt like to approach the wild and unpredictable rapids, or the eerie night sounds, or the odd scent of the jungle in the morning.  So finally he tells them that they simply must go themselves in order to experience it fully. 

To help them in their journey he draws them a very detailed map.  The townspeople are captivated by the map; they make copies, a large one to hang on the wall of the town hall and many smaller copies that they frame and hang on the walls of their homes.  They study the map carefully, and even get together regularly to look at the map and to point out for each other the twists and turns in the jungle trails, the bends in the river. 

Finally, they decide that they are experts on the Amazon.  After all, they know every inch of the map, every turn of every trail; they even quiz each other on the names of the exotic birds and other wildlife.  Yes, they’re experts on the Amazon.

Except for one thing: They’ve never left their village.

The point of the parable is clear: There is a big difference between knowing about the Amazon and knowing the Amazon.

Just so in the life of faith.  In this season of Easter, the season of Resurrection and new life when we hear these Bible stories that to some of us are so familiar, it’s important to remember that there is a huge difference between knowing about God and knowing God.

The people who confronted Jesus in the Temple that day wanted information.  They wanted cold, hard facts; input, data.  “If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly!  Stop beating around the bush and just spit it out!”

“I have told you,” Jesus said.  “But I’ve told you not in words but in my actions.  That afternoon on the hillside when I fed 5,000 people on just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish; the miracles that happened at my command; the healings that took place simply at my touch – they all bore eloquent witness to who I am.”

The problem, of course, is that they were looking for information, and Jesus was offering them an experience.  Big difference.  But that’s always the way it is with Jesus.  He hears our demand for information – whether it comes as simple curiosity to know more or as a desperate cry, as in “Why is this happening!?” – and he responds to it instead by inviting us into an experience.

At the beginning of John’s gospel, Jesus notices two men following him and he turns and asks them, “What are you looking for?”  They begin to ask him questions about himself, and Jesus simply says, “Come and see.”  That invitation to come and see resonates throughout the gospel down into our own day.  “Come and see for yourself; make up your own mind, draw your own conclusions.”  But to do that we must enter into a relationship, into an experience; and once we do we discover that Jesus is far more than a title, that his identity can’t be captured in words or concepts.  His identity can only be experienced, and he – not we, but he – is in charge of that experience.

This is not to deny the role of the intellect in the life of faith.  The Bible tells us that all of our faculties are gifts from God, and that they all are to be used in faithful living.  After all, when a lawyer comes to Jesus and asks, “What is the most important command of all the rules and regulations we must follow?”, Jesus answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength – and mind.”  The mind is one of the ways in which we are to love the Lord.

But in the years following the death and Resurrection of Jesus, the Christian movement did not spread throughout the world because the Church offered convincing creeds, or produced persuasive evidence that the Christian lifestyle was logical.  It spread because followers of Jesus Christ stood up in a culture of fear and oppression and violence and said, “We live differently.  We live differently because we have the spirit of the risen Lord Jesus in our midst, moving among us and within us, and it gives us a power that we have never known.  Come and see how we live.”  They offered people not information but an experience, a relationship.

It’s easy to be hard on these people in the Temple, on their insistence on information about Jesus instead of an experience of Jesus.  After all, we already have a relationship with Jesus, that’s why we’re here, right?  In this season we continually remind ourselves that we are baptized into the death and Resurrection of Jesus, and that though faith in him we have life in his name – not only life here and now but also life eternally with God.  That’s what we know, at least in our heads.

But are we really more like these people in the Temple than we like to admit?  Do we too want to keep Jesus at a safe distance, at arm’s length, content to let knowledge about him substitute for an increasingly deeper experience of him?

A friend recently told me that he doesn’t pray very often.  I asked, “Why?  It’s not like you’re on display, like you’re being monitored.  It’s just you and God in a conversation; you talk, you listen, you talk, you listen – what’s so hard about that?”

“It’s not that it’s hard,” my friend said.  “It’s the listening part.  I’m afraid of what I might hear.”

So how’s your prayer life lately?

Several years ago a member of Advent named Ted Mosher experienced a call from God to enter the ordained ministry.  In fact, today Ted is the pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Lawrence.  At the time, though, Ted was a successful businessman in the insurance industry.  He and his wife Kim were planners.  They had devised a very clear plan for how their life was to unfold, where they would live, how they would live, where their children would go to school.  They had the whole trajectory of their life together all mapped out.

And then one day Ted came home and said, “Kim, we’ve got to talk.”  With great excitement he outlined for her his experience of God’s call, but she was way less than enthusiastic.  In fact, she completed resisted.  What about the plan we created?  The life we had envisioned for ourselves and our two daughters? 

In time – and it took a good couple of years worth of wrestling with herself and God – Kim came to accept and then embrace God’s call to Ted.  She talked about that experience in a sermon here at Advent, and to hear her story of transformation is to hear a compelling shift from self-control to God-control.

Now, I don’t want you all to be on Orange Alert.  This is not to say that if you cultivate a deeper relationship with Jesus that you’ll end up being a pastor or a pastor’s spouse.  No.  It is to say that hearing the Shepherd’s voice and responding to it by following with ever-greater commitment deepens a relationship in which you increasingly give up control to God. 

Scary thought, but a liberating thought.

I encourage you to spend a few minutes this afternoon with Psalm 23.  It’s probably the best known piece of Scripture, and the heart of that psalm describes the peace and security and strength that are available to us when we place ourselves under the care of the Shepherd.  It’s what Kim finally came to experience as she moved from self-control to God-control.

The other day Vicar Anteneh and I were talking about leadership in North American churches.  He was curious: “The people who are on church councils are regular church members who become leaders for a certain amount of time, right?” 

“Right.”

“So what are the qualifications for being on a church council here; what are the criteria?”

“They have to be ready to ask the questions, ‘What is God up to, and how can we help?’  That’s the general qualification, but there are also some specific promises that they make.  Specifically, they promise to ‘work together with other members to see that the worship and work of Christ are done in this congregation, and that God’s will is done in this community and in the whole world; to be diligent in your specific area of serving … ; and to be examples of faith active in love, to help maintain the life and harmony of this congregation.’  That’s what they promise.  And the congregation, for its part, promises to support and pray for the council members as they work to keep their promises.”

“Oh,” Anteneh said.  “It’s different in Africa.”

“How’s that?” I asked.  “What’s the main qualification for church council in Africa?”

“Just one criterion: Can they preach the word of God?”

“Excuse me?”

“Can they preach the word of God?” Anteneh said.

Forget about those agonizing meetings over the budget, or whether to create an endowment, or what color to paint the sanctuary, or what pattern should be in the stained-glass windows.  Can they preach the word of God?

Now, you might think that this would go a long way toward explaining why there are relatively few Christian churches in Africa.  But in fact the opposite is true.  The Christian movement is spreading like wildfire in Africa, and it isn’t because they have a lot of pastors; they don’t.  The Church is growing because church members are less interested in collecting right answers and more interested in sharing an experience, a relationship.

Is this the Messiah, this crucified and risen One?  He gives you the answer as he comes to you in all the varied circumstances of your life.  Listen for the voice of this Shepherd; he knows your name, and he’s calling you even this morning.  He asks you to follow as he leads you ever deeper into the very heart of God.  And who else would you want to be in control of your life?

Amen.