|
OPEN MINDS
FLOWERS ARE RED
The little boy went first day of school
And she said....
But the little boy said....
Well the teacher said.... You're sassy
And she said....
But the little boy said....
The teacher put him in a corner
Time went by like it always does
But that little boy painted flowers
Flowers are red, green leaves are green
From the album "Legends of the Lost and Found" In these first three weeks of September, we are talking about the three parts of the United Methodist slogan, "Our hearts, our minds, and our doors are always open." Last week we talked about opening our hearts in forgiveness, and this week is the week to focus on open minds. I think most of us understand what the phrase "open mind" means. Generally it means what other people should have when it comes to our ideas, lifestyle and practices. So I want to first of all help us shift from pointing at the closed minds of others to looking for the ways we ourselves lack an open mind and then, more importantly, to explain why having an open mind is critical to our spiritual development. To begin with, an open mind does not mean an empty mind. To be open does not mean that you have no opinions and no preferences. You can even have strong opinions and preferences and still have an open mind. The difference between a person with an open mind and a person with a closed mind is humility. I am a Christian minister because I have some very strong beliefs and opinions. There are certain things I believe are good and bad, right and wrong, and I believe those things strongly enough that I am willing to spend my life preaching about it. The book that I wrote this summer, however, is largely a form of confession and repentance for the times in my life when I have held strong beliefs without humility. That has come about as I have recognized that a number of the strong beliefs I hold today are polar opposites of the strong beliefs I had when I was in my teens and early twenties. I have finally come to realize that I can have a very strong, very Biblically supported belief and still be wrong. That realization is not going to keep me from proclaiming what I believe, but it is hopefully going to keep me from insisting that if you don't believe exactly as I do that your salvation is in jeopardy or that your faith is somehow less than mine. Those things are in God's job description, not mine. My job is less to teach the truth as it is to introduce the God who is truth to you, so that you can grow and learn truth on your own. I do not knowingly preach things that are not true or things that I do not believe and sincerely try to put into practice. But I still could be wrong. I am not the source of truth...nor is any human being. God is. To have an open mind is to recognize that as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, now we see through a glass, darkly. We don't have a clear view from our limited human perspective, and every one of us is likely to make mistakes and to latch onto beliefs and practices that are at least limited in scope, if not plain wrong. To me, having an open mind means recognizing that whatever our beliefs, we might be wrong. We are not here to tell others what to believe so much as to introduce people to the only one worth believing...God. We don't need to abandon our preferences. As far as church is concerned, those preferences are most evident in a Sunday morning worship service. That's why we have two different styles of worship on a Sunday morning...the more contemporary early service and the more traditional 10:30 service. We are not saying that the organ is more holy than the band or that clapping to music is better than awed silence. We are simply recognizing that there are a variety of gifts and styles and tastes that come to the surface as every different human being expresses their praise to God. You are not closed minded if you prefer organ music and creeds and you are not rigid simply because you like drums and rhythm better than quiet. You are only closed minded if you fail to recognize that God is bigger than your own experience and preference.
One of my favorite quotes is from the first act of Hamlet. Hamlet's murdered father has returned as a Ghost to speak with Hamlet, and Hamlet's friend Horatio sees the ghost as well. As the ghost is speaking with Hamlet, Horatio turns to Hamlet and says: That is the stance of humility. It does not shy away from having beliefs and preferences, but when humility is confronted with something that doesn't fit in the system, humility recognizes that heaven and earth are much bigger than our own experience of it. There are more things in heaven and earth, Church, than are taught in your doctrines or proclaimed from your pulpit. We experience part of God, but the vastness of God is beyond our ability to see or understand it all. So why should I work at having an open mind? Well, two reasons. The first is in order to have hope. The world around us is a pretty difficult place, and sometimes the world within us is just as difficult. There are beautiful things, but the world has a definite dark side. Injustice abounds, precious children of God are abused, tortured and killed. Good workers lose their jobs. People we love die. We get terrible illnesses. Some people starve while others throw food away. When confronted with the dark side of the world, or the dark side of our own lives, it is hope that gets us through. But in order to have hope, we have to be able to imagine a reality different from our experience. When life has been good and suddenly goes bad, we can hope that life will once again be like it was. But if life has never been good, our hope has no basis in our own experience. We have to be able to imagine things that have never been dreamt of in our philosophy. In fact, the greatest hope that the Christian faith has to offer is almost as odd as Hamlet's ghost. We, too, have this proclamation that someone has come back from the dead...but not as a ghost, as a living being. We place our hope in the resurrection of Jesus as the promise that we, too, will experience death merely as a passage from this life to a better one. What the Christian faith proclaims is something beyond the experience of any of us. The more we can recognize that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, the more comfortable we become in anchoring our hope in something that is beyond our experience and beyond our understanding. The second reason we should work to have open minds is shown in the Gospel lesson from Luke. If we are not able to think outside the box, we could well miss the presence of God among us. That's exactly what happened with most of the Pharisees and religious leaders in Jesus' day. A few of them had minds that were open enough to see...Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, Gamaliel. But the bulk of them were so boxed in to their interpretation of the law that they could not recognize God, even when they were talking with God face to face in the flesh. I don't know about you, but that's not something I want to miss. But to be sure we don't miss God's appearing, our minds have to be open wide. That's one of the great underlying messages of the O God movies with George Burns. If God showed up today, it is not likely to be in a robe and sandals. God, like George Burns, shows up in regular street clothes...that just happened to be robe and sandals in 1st century Palestine. It would be different today. Jesus says he is right there in the people who are hungry and sick and naked and in prison. Jesus doesn't just say he cares for those people, Jesus says he IS those people. And yes, God is still showing up on a regular basis today. That's part of our Easter proclamation. We serve a living God...not a dead one. I've seen God here dancing in the body of Shawne Freeman. I've seen God telling about recovering from addiction as Jackie Winslow gave her testimony. I've listened to God play the drums through George Reagan and watched God greet at the door in Gerry Small. I've watched God declare faith boldly in Sherrie Fillebrown as she recites the creed and quietly as Holly Gaudette and Everett Bean live their lives. God has managed to show up in both organ and band, in structured worship and in free, and even last week when we went too long and services crashed into each other and piled up like so many cars in a train wreck, my phone, mail, and e-mail all brought tidings of God's presence and changed lives. Jesus stood on a hill overlooking the city of Jerusalem and wept. "You did not recognize the time of God's coming to you," he said. "If you had only known on this day what would bring you peace." If you don't have the sense that God is present with you, maybe it's not that God is absent. Maybe you just need to expand your thinking to include some new possibilities.
"Flowers are red. Green leaves are green.
"There are so many colors in the rainbow. |