The Big Kahuna

Sunday, March 15, 2009
3rd Sunday in Lent
Lay Preacher: Vince Prantil

Readings:
Exodus 20:1-17
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22



Audio sermon file: http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/90FE6A86-39A3-757E-826E-583E191C282A.mp3


There’s an old Peanuts comic strip where
Lucy, Linus and Charlie Brown are lying on a hilltop looking at the sky on a summer afternoon.




Lucy: If you use your imagination you can see lots of things in the cloud formations. . . What do you think you see, Linus?"
Linus: "Well, those cloud up there look to me like the map of British Honduras on the Caribbean. . . that cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor. . . and that group of clouds over there gives me the impression of the stoning of Stephen. . . I can see the Apostle Paul standing there to one side. . . .
Lucy: Uh huh . . . . that's very good. . . . What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?"
Charlie Brown: "Well. I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie, but I changed my mind."


You can muck around in Paul’s letter and you can see the struggle. The Jews demand miracles, the Greeks look for wisdom. Some of them are Linus, some of them Lucy. Then along comes Charlie Brown. Who’s smart and who’s stupid here? The Jews, the Greeks … they’re not stupid. They know a lot. But they’re not God!!

Larry Ellison is the CEO of the software giant, Oracle.There’s an old joke “Do you know the difference between Larry Ellison and God? God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison.” There’s lots of people who are really smart … but they’re NOT God!

I think we all like to think we’re smart. At MSOE, we polled the students last year and 80% believed they were “above average”. Wow, I thought, I actually teach at Lake Wobegon where “all the children are above average”. We all like to think we’re right about a lot of stuff. What it comes down to is:

We’re uncomfortable being uncertain.

So we demand miracles or wisdom. We carve The Law into stone, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” as the law of economic incentives, Einstein’s speed of light. In economics & science, like religion, we carve out our 10 Commandments, the limits of our uncertainty.

And then … one day … along comes a character … someone who sees something else in the clouds …a different view, someone willing to think outside the box, say “Yeah, but … “ and “What if …”.

John Nash, the mathematician in the movie a Beautiful Mind, said that Adam Smith hadn’t quite gotten it right. And it took a 27 year old Swiss patent clerk named Einstein to turn the world of physics on its head!

And when they do, you can almost always count on one of two things taking place:

(a) Characters are often misunderstood. In the Gospel, Jesus offers an interpretation of the temple so outrageous and so incomprehensible that it’s not until after His resurrection that his disciples finally get it. They’re not able to grasp what Jesus is saying & Jesus is not understood by his audience. Einstein said “Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds.” Now I don’t think we’re the mediocre minds. Mediocre minds are the ones who poke fun at you for seeing a duck or a horse in the clouds. There's an old Korean proverb:

He that knows he does not know is wise; He that does not know that he does not know is foolish.


I think Einstein meant that "mediocre minds" were the fools that did not realize they "did not know", but might have been apt to let others know they did not know.

Research shows that diverse groups of people outperform smarter groups of people, diverse cities are more productive, diverse governments make better decisions … not where everyone sees great things in the clouds, but a greater variety of things in the clouds. No matter who you are or how smart you are, like Garrison Keillor said


“High IQ is like 4 wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places”.


We all get stuck. Getting stuck in different places is what makes diverse groups outmaneuver smart groups.

(b) What these characters said was not that we’ve been wrong or ignorant, but only that our knowledge is only ever incomplete. Nash only revised Adam Smith, Einstein only revised Isaac Newton. They all said “This is great! … But it’s not all there is!” I mean isn’t it refreshing to know that there’s something bigger out there? Einstein told us “to just imagine” … “Imagination,” he said, “is more important than knowledge”. Gerald Schroeder, in his book "The Science of God" took to heart what Einstein "revised" and imagined this ...

When you move close to the speed of light, time shrinks. If creation began at The Big Bang at the speed of light, then the 16 billion years “it’s all been here”, all of creation shrinks into 6 – 24 hour days (give or take a few hours) … and on the 7th day, God rested. How’s that for a duck or a horse? I mean, WOW!!! The Genesis story is great, but Schroeder and Einstein "together" saw something different in the clouds.

Human knowledge and wisdom are always “in revision”. In the text immediately following today’s Gospel, Jesus "did not entrust himself to man because he knew how a man thought". He had to get beyond that. He came to round things out. Jesus was the ultimate revisionist.

In the movie Dead Poet’s Society, John Keating tells his students


“Just when you think you ‘know a thing’, you must look at it from a different perspective.”


He has each one of his students climb on top of his desk and look at the room from “up there”.

Today’s Old Testament text reminded me that … I was preparing for my Confirmation youth group. The topic was the 6th commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill. I thought, “Wow, we’re gonna be going home early tonight.” I mean, really, who’s killed anybody. Is this going to be rocket science?

And then Pastor Johnson climbed on a desk.

He asked if any one of us had ever said anything to someone that just crushed their spirit? … made them give up on an otherwise good idea? … ridiculed someone for being optimistic? Had any one of us seen innocence in another human being and quash it? Had we ever “killed” anyone’s spirit? Well, there went ‘going home early’. It was humbling … I’d never climbed around the three-dimensional 6th Commandment that way before.

So what’s the Good News?

Well, maybe it's just when you think you understand the laws of supply and demand, energy and motion, when you think you’ve got “Thou Shalt Not Kill” pegged, that the temple is quite obviously the building and not the body, maybe what we need to know is that God understands that we struggle with our uncertainty.

Maybe what God wants is for us to lay back and look up at the clouds and tell each other what we see … Some of us’ll see ducks, some horses, some (yes) will even see the Honduras …

... maybe the Good News is that God wants more great spirits and fewer mediocre minds, more imagination and less accumulation of knowledge.

... maybe the Good News is it’s OK not to “stress out” trying to see it all or know it all. That together, we’ll see more, go farther than we could ever go alone. That James Taylor was right in what some arguably call his most spiritual song and one I've asked Laurna to make sure they play at my funeral called The Secret of Life when he sings “Einstein said that he could never understand it all ” Maybe it’s OK to admit “I don’t know enough. I don’t know everything”. God’s the Big Kahuna. Let’s let God know everything. That’s God's thing so let's leave knowing it all to God.

Secret of Life mp3 file: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TlAD-b7yew&feature=related

For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom. And the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.

God chose the lowly and foolish to teach the supposedly wise. He chose a lowly Swiss patent clerk to straighten out the professors

… and he’s spoken through many a Charlie Brown …

As Pastor Johnson pointed out after watching the movie capturing the peopel of Mt. Zion ... we are all just little pieces of glass in a stain glass window. All alone, just pieces of glass. But together, when we stand back, together we all compose the bigger picture ... and God's in the middle.

Maybe what God wants us to know is that we're to sit on that hill and share what we see in the clouds ... that we need ALL those little pieces of glass, every one … we need every Linus, every Lucy and all the Charlie Browns we can get.