| Three Little Words, part two | January 26, 2012 | |
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If you missed part one, click here.
As I grow older, I find there are some other three word utterances that catch in the throat, feeling every bit as vulnerable to speak aloud. One is ...
I don't know.
We live in a culture that highly values education, knowledge, and intelligence. For the first part of our lives, it is a primary measure of our competency, as we receive grades, test scores and intelligence quotients. We say, "knowledge is power." And with all our scientific and technological advances, we can feel like there is always more to know. There's not just a set of World Book encyclopedias to be learned; there's the whole World Wide Web, with endlessly expanding knowledge! If we will just read and study more, and think harder, maybe, just maybe we can keep up, be smart enough.
As a pastor, I remember how much pressure I felt to know. People had questions; I wanted to provide answers. People had doubts; I wanted to offer assurance. Plus I didn't spend three years and thousands of dollars in seminary for nothing! I had my framed Master of Divinity and bookcases of books behind my desk to try to convince folks (and myself) that I knew something.
Then there was one week when I was preparing a sermon, when my grand illusions about my knowing self shattered into pieces. The questions and needs, the pain and suffering, the brokenness of the world were all so huge and unwieldy, I succumbed. I had no idea why things were the way they were, what they meant, how we could change them, or when God's beautiful vision from Isaiah might finally, really, wholly become true. I knew I couldn't fake it or BS these people for whom I had such love and respect. So I got into the pulpit, and in a moment of humiliating integrity preached, I don't know.
Strangely I felt an odd liberation and peace in doing so. Because I wasn't saying I don't know in a hopeless vacuum. It was conceding I don't know in the context of trust and prayer in One who does.
I came to see that in the Isaiah text I was preaching, the crux of the problem was that the Israelites were carrying on as if there were no God. And in some sense, you can read all of scripture as a narrative of folks who forget who is God and then remember again and then forget and so on. And it's when they forget, when people think they know more than God, when they take matters into their own hands, that's precisely when they get in a whole heap of trouble.
So perhaps admitting we don't know, that we don't have all the answers, is the first step in remembering who is God. In letting God be God.
I encourage you to give those three little words a try. It is vulnerable and humiliating, no doubt. But I believe in the context of prayer, the humble confession I don't know opens the floodgates to grace.
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