Sep 7th: Context Matters, with Rev. Dr. Ken Evers-Hood.
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Context Matters with Rev. Dr. Ken Evers-Hood. Series: Beloved. Belonging. Delightful. A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: John 14:1-11.
Join us this Sunday as Rev. Dr. Ken Evers-Hood shares a powerful message about trust, hope, and finding meaning in challenging times. We welcome everyone – online or in-person. Come as you are.
Transcript:
Rev. Dr. Ken Evers-Hood: I had the great honor and privilege of interviewing father Cyprian Concilio this summer. He is the new Secretary General, the new head of inter religious dialog for monastics in the Vatican meaning Cyprian is in charge of all of the inter religious dialog, mostly between monastics, but it means every day of his year, week in and week out, what he is doing is crafting spaces, creating spaces for people from different religious traditions to sit down, to come together, share their faith and learn from each other. And to me, it just that sounds like the most amazing job in the world. And I got to sit down with him, and one of the questions I asked Cyprian was, how do you know if what you’re doing is working, you know? How do you know if you’re on the right track? How do you measure success when it comes to inter religious dialog. And he laughed at that, and he’s like, we don’t really use the word success a whole lot, like in a business way, he said, but if I were to answer your question in one word, and he said something that just really surprised me. He said friendship that we would evaluate whether our efforts are fruitful faithful, if we’re building better friendships across the divide of people who think about God differently. He said, Imagine, imagine if all of the people who think about God believe in God, but in slightly different ways. Imagine if, instead of hating one another, fearing one another and being so divided against one another, what if? What if we actually linked arms and combined our efforts? What if all of the people of faith in the world saw one another as as friends? He said, that’s, that’s what I dream of. And I found my heart swelling as he was talking about this, thinking, yeah, that’s, that’s what I dream about too. But then, as I’m sitting interviewing this man whose entire work. All of his work is about sitting down with people from other faith traditions and finding common ground. I couldn’t help remembering where I came from. I grew up between Dallas and Fort Worth in Texas in the 80s, and the kind of Christianity, the species of Christianity that I grew up around in Texas, was not at all interested in what Cyprian was. Sitting down with people from different beliefs, different backgrounds, and finding common ground. In fact, the Christianity I grew up with was really suspicious, even you know of other Christians that didn’t believe in the same things that maybe we did, or the group did, none of this sense of generosity. And there was one verse that I heard as a young person again and again and again, and it’s the verse we read for this morning. It’s Jesus saying, I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. There is no one that comes to the Father except through me. And I can remember growing up in Texas, and I’m someone who I loved Taoism. I loved what Taoism has become, and Zen Buddhism, I was fascinated with the ways that I experienced God showing up, not just in Christianity, but in other faith traditions. But if I were talking too loudly about this around certain kinds of Christians, if I were, if I were too excited about what I was perceiving to be this truth coming in in a in a strange form, someone would would rush over to me and very quickly remind me of this verse and say something like, but hey, you know, don’t you remember what Jesus said? I’m the Way, the Truth and Life. No one comes to the Father but through me and and it was always like that. It was said very fast, with a bit of an edge. I am the Way, the Truth and the Life No one comes to the Father, but through me, and I found myself sitting with Cyprian, on the one hand, really excited about what he was talking about. My heart warming and enlarging, and then at the same time, remembering back to how I grew up and hearing that verse in my head, and I have to admit, it certainly sounds like Jesus himself isn’t super excited about what Cyprian or I am curious about in other faith traditions. In fact, it sounds like he’s downright opposed to it. So. But Is he one of the things I suspect, that you have learned about scriptural interpretation, one of the most key, important things you’ve learned about scriptural interpretation is context, right context? Read a little bit before the text you’re interested in, read a little bit after because understanding the context right that can help you understand everything that you need to know about the text itself and facts. In fact, if you change or shift the context, you can shift or change the entire meaning. There’s a guy named Stanley Fish stanfish, who was at Yale for a long, long time. He was a professor in law and English, and he wrote a book called, is there a text in this class? Is there a text in this class? And he gave this memorable example where he said, Imagine a text like, keep off the grass. Right? Take, keep off the grass. Let’s say you have keep off the grass, and you put this on a sign, and you put this sign in your front yard, in front of your home. Now it’s pretty evident, pretty clear what it is you mean when you have keep off the grass on a sign in front of your house, right? It probably means if you’re somewhere, like, I live in the Portland area, it probably means like, hey, you know, stop walking off my grass. I’m trying to, trying to get this lawn looking decent. I did have a thought that if you were in Bend, it could have a slightly different meaning, right? If you’re someone who zero escapes in Bend, you could put a sign that says, Keep off the grass in your in your rocky front, I don’t know, not really a yard, but as a as a word to other bend folks, right to say, Hey, quit putting grass down. Keep off the grass. Let’s save the water for something, something useful. Stan fish, though, Stan fish had another idea in mind. He said, If you take this phrase, keep off the grass. And if you take it up out of your your lawn, and you put it say on the wall in a drug rehab facility, right, if you put it under the wall of a 12 step group, keep off the grass. It has a completely, radically different meaning to the text, doesn’t it, right? It means, let’s give the cannabis a break, right, as we’re trying to recover. Now, he would say, what’s the actual meaning of the phrase, keep off the grass? There isn’t any. He says, the meaning of the phrase shifts depending on the context, right? So the context itself is, is what’s going to tell us what the words in question have meaning. So when Jesus says, I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, there is no other way to the Father but through me. What’s the context in which he’s saying this. Have you ever given that any thought I know the implied context, the assumed context that those folks in Texas were always imagining was the case when they were hurling this phrase at me. The assumed context is something like father Cyprian inter religious dialog. They’re imagining that Jesus said these words when he was sitting down in the midst of a whole bunch of people from different backgrounds and traditions. And people are trying to figure out, well, which path to follow, right? And maybe someone, maybe a Buddhist, stands up, or Buddha himself stands up and says, I’m the Way, the Truth in the life. But then, then he sits down somebody else, maybe Shiva or or Ganesha, my favorite of the gods, the elephant headed God, the remover of obstacles. Maybe, maybe he stands up and says, I’m the Way, the Truth and the Life. Until finally, God after God, or tradition after tradition, gets done. And then Jesus, at the end, [Rev. Dr. Ken Evers-Hood]: stands up and says, No, I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. There’s no way to the Father but through Me. Rev. Dr. Ken Evers-Hood: And that’s to me always the assumed context, right, that Jesus is in this inner religious dialog, and he has no room, no room for our sense that God might be speaking to us in other traditions. But is that the actual context? Yeah, not even close, yeah. If we actually read the scriptures, if we read the text, the Bible discloses an extremely different context. The text in question here, it starts, actually a little bit before 14. It starts at the end of 13, and then goes all through, all through 14. The first thing that I want you to notice is that Jesus isn’t addressing anyone but his followers do. All right, there’s, there’s no one from another tradition, no one who’s questioning about Jesus. The only people Jesus is talking to are His disciples, the people who left everything, their homes and families, to follow after Him. And none of them in this text are wondering, it is, should we keep following Jesus? I mean, there’s Mithras, there’s these other options. No, that’s that’s not in question. Jesus, number one, it’s not an inter religious dialog. He’s only talking to the people who have followed him his whole life. So what? What’s the what’s the question? Well, at the end of 13, we find out that Jesus is telling his disciples a hard truth. He’s saying, I’m going to be leaving you and where I’m going, you cannot follow. And he’s saying this with a sense of and it’s going to be okay, right? I’m leaving you where I go, you cannot follow, and it’s going to be okay. Peter’s the first to jump in and say, Hey, this is upsetting, right? Just take me. Just Just take me. I’ll come along. I would die for you. He says, Jesus responds, Peter, you would die for me. A time is coming when you were going to deny that you even know me, not once, but three times. Peter, put your hand. Put your hand down, right? I’m leaving. Jesus says, and where I’m going, you cannot come and it’s gonna be okay. Thomas is next. He’s the focus in our text today, and he’s upset this isn’t okay, right? Jesus says, Hey, I’m going to be going away and preparing a place for you, and I’ll come back and you, you know the way. And Thomas says, we don’t know the way. We don’t know where you’re going, Jesus, how could we know the way? All Thomas is wanting is an answer. He wants to know where Jesus going. He wants a map. He wants some certainty that he can hold on to and know that it’s going to be okay, and it is. It is to that desire for certainty, right? That Jesus says, Hey, Thomas, I am the way. I am the truth. I am the life. No one gets to the father. No one’s going to get through this, except through me. What Jesus is really saying to Thomas is no Thomas saying, We don’t know where you’re going. We want to know. We want something we can hang our hat, and we want something certain. And Jesus says, no, no, you have to trust. This is what faith is about. I’m going away. You’re not going to be able to see me. I will be coming back, and you just have to trust it’s going to be okay, right? That’s what this text means. It isn’t about inter religious dialog. It’s not about not finding truth in other paths. Oh, that’s fine. Now this is about Jesus saying, I’m going to go away and you, you won’t know where I am, you can’t see me, and you just have to trust me and the disciples. It’s not okay. We, we want to know. And, man, I, I sympathize with them. I, I feel like that almost every morning these days, as I wake up and I I try to wade through the news the world that we’re living in right now, politically, ecologically, you name it, there’s so much change happening so fast, so many things that I cared about and and loved are being dissolved or changed or shifted, and I have parts that are like, Jesus, where are you? Where are you? What is happening? I would, I would like to be able to know that you’re here. I would love to be able to know that it’s going to be okay and and this is when I hear these words from Jesus whispering in my in my ear, you know, I don’t get to know that everything’s going to be okay. Jesus is the way. Jesus is the truth. Jesus is the life. And there’s no way through this. There’s no way through the father, except through him, except through trusting in Him. Faith. Faith means we don’t know, right? If we knew, if we had certainty, we wouldn’t need to have faith. We know what our faith is about when we exist at a time of uncertainty. I want to leave you with a poem I wrote for a friend of mine. He’s a pastor, and he went through a period of extreme doubt. We were coming up on Easter, and we were in this Bible study, and he’s like, How am. Supposed to preach the resurrection when I don’t, I don’t even know what I believe. We, at least, did not try to, you know, solve this for him and give him some some pat answer. We just sat there in the silence. We sat there in the uncertainty, and felt it with him. But what I saw in the next couple of months, as he continued to wrestle, I kept seeing him show up. I kept seeing him care for his people. I kept seeing him preach as well as he could. I kept seeing him show up and enter into life, even when he didn’t know what was happening. And I realized [Rev. Dr. Ken Evers-Hood]: that’s That’s what faith is, right? Rev. Dr. Ken Evers-Hood: Faith is entering into this life, not when it’s obvious that Jesus is with us and everything’s going to work out, but when it’s not obvious. This is called resurrection. Is not an argument. Resurrection is not an argument. It is not a belief to which you might agree or not and move on unchanged. Resurrection is a weed, her roots cracking into concrete. Resurrection is the thin man, white shirt, facing down four machines of war, vulnerability. His only weapon, resurrection is the mountain Hemlock fighting through rhyme, ice growing sideways, stunted by the howling winds, but growing anyway. And resurrection is you showing up one more time to a place you know you don’t understand, hoping that she is right when she says you never disappoint. Resurrection is not an argument. It is a song sung in another tongue that somehow still brings tears to flow. Resurrection is the warm hand finding your shivering shoulder on the coldest night after you have turned away. Resurrection is not an argument. Resurrection is life and is stepping into life when all you know for certain is the shadow of death. I.
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