Pentecost 2B
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
So I have a bit of confession to make. I hate math.
I always have, and I probably always will.
It’s not that I can’t hold my own. I can do math. I can make sense of it. For years I’ve had to write budgets for
churches and programs and read the even more complicated budgets of
multi-million dollar organizations that I’ve helped to govern. I can balance my checkbook. I can even pretty quickly calculate a tip in
a restaurant (even if I do tend to err on the side of rounding up).
It’s not that I can’t do math. It’s not even really that I’m not good at
it. I just don’t like it.
The one exception I ever found to the “I don’t like math”
rule, was word problems. I always loved
word problems. I think putting the
problems into real world scenarios helped me to visualize the math. It certainly helped me to see the value that
could come of the work - in a way that random sets of numbers never could. For me, word problems gave math purpose.
A couple of weeks ago there was this silly post making the
rounds on Facebook - maybe you saw it.
It said, “Every time I see a math word problem, it looks like this: If I
have 10 ice cubes, and you have 11 apples, how many pancakes will fit on the
roof? Answer: Purple. Because Aliens
don’t wear hats.
That seemed to be the way that most of my peers encountered word problems, but not me. Rather than complicating a problem, to me, the words would give the problem structure and relevance.
My disdain for math goes back as far as I can remember, and
continued even through college. I would
always try to take required math classes in college during summer school -
again, not because I couldn’t do the work, but because I just wanted it to be
over as quickly as possible, and summer classes didn’t last as long as regular
semester courses.
As I moved toward graduation at LSU, one barrier that kept
slowing me down was that one final math requirement. Fortunately, as a liberal arts student, I had
the option of getting that final math credit through taking an introductory
course in logic. Imagine - a math course
that was all about word problems!
Numbers would never be a part of the program!
I loved that class. I
loved the grace of logic as a field of study: identifying fallacies, building
premises that would lead to elegant, irrefutable conclusions.
Logic left the world in such neat, manageable packages. All through the simple manipulation of words.
As much as I loved studying logic, it’s ironic that now I
should find myself called to a vocation that so often and so easily eschews
logic.
The practice of faith seeks to identify truth even when it’s
conclusions don’t follow from the premises logically. Think about it: how often does faith stand at
odds with every premise on which we build our lives and our choices? It happens so often that there’s even a
recognizable pattern that we hear from Jesus about breaking down previously
held logic. “You have heard that it was
said, ‘you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I
say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” “You have heard that it was said, ‘an eye for
an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist an
evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the
right cheek, turn the other also.”
There’s a whole list like that - examples of Jesus taking
the established logic of the world and asking us to toss it aside in favor of a
new logic.
And this assault on logic is elsewhere, as well: think about
death for a moment. Every human
experience of death is that it is final - the end. Existence ceases. That’s what our experience shows us. Our faith, on the other hand, dares us to
imagine beyond our empirical experiences.
Our faith challenges us to look beyond the premises that have been
neatly laid out for us, and to find another, unforeseen conclusion.
We hear it today in the gospel lesson, yet again. At the start of the lesson, the crowds had
swarmed around Jesus and his disciples - such that they could not even
eat! The people had heard of this one
whose actions seemed to defy all logic, and they wanted to see him. The leaders of the people - the defenders of
the established logic - had also heard of him, and they feared the affront to
the establishment that he represented. A
human being with that kind of power meant one of two things: he was either of
God or of Satan. They couldn’t accept
that he might be of God - it would challenge all that they knew to the
core. So they accused him of being of
Satan.
In the face of these princes of the logic, Jesus answers in
their own language - with logic: “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that
kingdom cannot stand.” In other words:
how can these good works be the product of embodied evil?
It’s a triumph of neat and orderly logic.
But surely we know this Jesus well enough by now. He’s not going to let it go without
challenging us and our own logic at least a bit…
As the story winds to a close, the people around him remain
baffled - how can this man do these things?
It just doesn’t make sense! Even
his own inner circle - his family: his mother and brothers and sisters begin to
question how it could be. They wonder if
he’s lost his mind. They resolve to pull
him out of the situation before things get too out of hand.
When the word gets to Jesus that they are looking for him,
he turns logic on its head once more: ‘my family isn’t who you think it
is. It isn’t even who they think it
is. These - the ones who have stayed by
my side and who have accepted the challenging world order that I’ve laid out
for you - these are the ones who are really my family.’
“Purple. Because
aliens don’t wear hats.”
It seems to come from out of nowhere - a new way of seeing
the world. Again.
That’s the gift of the Jesus experience: in it, we take
everything that we had taken for granted, everything that we thought that we
knew, and find new ways of knowing.
That’s what faith is: a new way of knowing. It doesn’t tie itself up into neat little
arguments and conclusions. It doesn’t
have the clarity of numbers and solutions.
It’s a word problem that, at first glance, seems to mean nothing; but,
through prayerful engagement, struggle, time, and more than a little bit of
grace, begins to show truth.
There are those who say that faith is a weakness - that it
obscures the answers and the facts.
Perhaps it does. But it isn’t a
weakness. It a means by which we might
break through the answers and the facts and the logic to see the deeper nugget
of truth that lies beneath.
For the past several months of the church year we’ve been
mostly consumed with festivals and other observances - Advent, Christmas,
Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday. But now, for the next few months, we move out
of the festival season into what the church calls “ordinary time”. It’s the time between all the more specific
times. But it’s anything but
“ordinary”. It’s the time when Jesus
does the work that he was with us to do.
It’s the time when he tears open all logic, and dares to share with us a
glimpse of the truth underneath it all.
It might not seem, on the surface, as exciting as the past
few months have been. There may be times
when it doesn’t have the kind of drive that we’ve come to expect from
church. But it’s a very important
time. I invite you into the
journey. Who knows what truth you might
find? Amen.
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