The Road of Truth
First Sabbath in Lent
February 24, 2007
Readings:
Romans 10:8b - 13
Luke 4:1-13
This week, Pastor Mohn points out that when we travel the roads less traveled, we will often find ourselves traveling, from time to time, the road of truth. What is true about the world, about God, about our meaning here? For “what is true?” accompanies every part of our journey here. Our path is full of nothing more than it is full of questions!
Questions are good!
They help us take stock, seek God, they are opportunities to learn. I often use the analogy of a question to a key with my freshman college students. I bring a locked box to class and ask them what the key is. We iterate back and forth until they say “A Question”. And I ask “What’s in the box?” Some students invariably respond “The Answer”. To which I will reply “Partly”. Every once in a while a student squints their eyes and says “More keys”. And that’s usually more the truth, part (if any) of the answer and many more keys. Getting at “the truth” is a never ending proposition.
Pastor Mohn skillfully points out that part of the Road of Truth lies when questions are asked to make us stumble – to separate us from one another, making that road harder to travel. What are we to see in how Jesus encounters his tempter? When he is tempted with food when he is hungry, we see in his replies that he avoids the human desire to take charge, and NOT admit that it’s God’s road we’re traveling. Here’s a question Pastor Mohn poses: Is it our responsibility ALONE to take care of everything? Bread is a good thing for any hungry person, BUT if the bread is offered in the name of our own power, our control, our purposes, this leads us away from God.
We can be tempted toward really good things, for sure, but excess takes us OFF the path we were intended to travel. Even good things can lead us to be “off balance”. Human needs cause us to do such things as destroy our environment. Our human prioritizing, rather than the divine, leads us astray. It is our human desires that lead us to behave like Ecclesiastes and seek the answer in excess – to surround ourselves with knowledge, power, pleasure, … seemingly the more the better, no? All these, he finds out, are fleeting, do not satisfy in the long run, and, in the absence of all else, leave us lacking! As Pastor Mohn points out,
“It’s exhausting to be human!”
Jesus knows the struggle of traveling the road of truth – problems of being in a world where truth is NOT obvious – where things are vague, and dimly lit (as by only starlight?!). We remain desperate for control that would “make it easy”. There is an ongoing sense of irony in “the battle of science vs. religion” in which some secular scientists often are quoted as saying that those looking to the world of faith for answers find them “all too easily” in a notion of an omnipotent Deity. Yet, it is secular scientists who are often in an ongoing search for control, a control that makes explanations easy and logical.
Pastor Mohn points out that it is NOT up to us to have the answer. As she said these words, the Chapel on this Saturday night had only a handful of people, the snow was falling heavy and a blizzard forecast through the night. As people hunkered down, I was hearing again the words from an NPR radio essay from the program This I Believe. The title was “Utterly Humbled by Mystery”, the author Richard Rohr is the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
He offers simple and eloquent words to describe his growing lack of need for certainty in life. Along the way, he points out a different irony between secular scientists and those who find answers in their faith. And what he points out is at the center of their quest for answers, for a hint of truth:
"I believe in mystery and multiplicity. My very belief and experience of a loving and endlessly creative God has led me to trust in both. This life journey has led me to love mystery and not feel the need to change it or make it un-mysterious. This has put me at odds with many other believers I know who seem to need explanations for everything. Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity. "Hints and guesses," as T.S. Eliot would say. I often spend the season of Lent in a hermitage, where I live alone for the whole 40 days. The more I am alone with the Alone, the more I surrender to ambivalence, to happy contradictions and seeming inconsistencies in myself and almost everything else, including God. Paradoxes don't scare me anymore.
When I was young, I couldn't tolerate such ambiguity. My education had trained me to have a lust for answers and explanations. Now, at age 63, it's all quite different. I no longer believe this is a quid pro quo universe -- I've counseled too many prisoners, worked with too many failed marriages, faced my own dilemmas too many times and been loved gratuitously after too many failures.Whenever I think there's a perfect pattern, further reading and study reveal an exception. Whenever I want to say "only" or "always," someone or something proves me wrong. My scientist friends have come up with things like "principles of uncertainty" and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of "faith"!
People who have really met the Holy are always humble. It's the people who don't know who usually pretend that they do. People who've had any genuine spiritual experience always know they don't know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all.”
So … in the grand scheme of things, it’s not for us to have the answer, to be in control. It is God Alone who provides life, gives us meaningful relationship, provides “the way” when we abandon a need for control, and seeks to bless us along our paths.
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