Text: Selections (interwoven) from Mark 1, Matthew 3, Luke 3, John 1 on John the Baptist and the Baptism of Jesus
In Western Christianity, we want to know the right answer.
We have been conditioned, educated, by our schools, our philosophy, our churches, to look at facts and to believe there is only one truth.
2+2=4
Washington D.C. is the capital of the United States.
This is a glass of water… well, I supposed you are taking my word for that one… but at least we would agree it is a glass.
And, this book, the Bible, is the word of God for the people of God… thanks be to God.
We open up its pages and read a single verse or passage of scripture and because this book is true, we think – “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”
But embracing only one right answer, only one perspective is not the way other cultures around the world or throughout history have approached the truth.
Consider the Indian parable about the blind men and the elephant.
Six blind men thought they were very clever. One day, an elephant came into their town. Now these blind men did not know what an elephant looked like, but they could smell it and they could hear it. “What is this animal like?” they said. Each man reached out to touch and feel with their own hands. Without realizing it, they each grasped a different part of the elephant.
The first man touched the elephant’s body. It felt hard, big, and wide. “An elephant is like a wall!” he said.
The second man touched one of the elephant’s tusks. It felt smooth and hard and sharp. ‘An elephant is like a spear’ he said.
The third man touched the elephant’s trunk. It felt long and thin and wiggly. ‘An elephant is like a snake’ he said.
The fourth man touched on of the legs. It felt thick and rough and hard and round. ‘An elephant is like a tree’ he said.
The fifth man touched one of the elephant’s ears. It felt thin and it moved. ‘An elephant is like a fan’ he said.
The sixth man touched the elephant’s tail. It felt long and thin and strong. ‘An elephant is like a rope’ he said.
The men began to argue. But a little girl heard them and said, “Each of you is right, but you are all wrong.”
In the parable, it is only when each person’s experience and perspective is combined with that of the others that the truth is discovered. They were each right… and they were each wrong.
Or, as the Apostle Paul later put it in his letter to the Corinthians “now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (1 Cor 13)
What I find fascinating is that we have traveled a long way from the way Paul saw the world to the way that we have been taught to see the world through a modern, Western lens.
Western thought has led us to believe that there is only one objective reality and therefore only one answer to be found for the questions we seek… but modern science is beginning to shatter those understandings and in fact take us back to ancient was of understanding reality. So… we are going to take a quick dive into the field of quantum mechanics. Now, I LOVE science. I was a physics minor in college and what I discovered with nearly every class I took on cosmology or space-time relativity is that the deeper I got into the science, the more faith questions I had. The more I discovered just how awesome and complex and mysterious the world is. The deeper I went in my understanding of God.
We all know that our body is made of cells. Those cells are in turn made of atoms. And atoms are made up of even smaller particles – neutrons, protons, and electrons. And there are also subatomic particles like photons, quarks, and neutrinos.
What we have discovered is that these quantum particles refuse to be put in a box. Sometimes they act like particles… other times they act like waves.
In fact, there is an experiment that was designed to try to figure out once and for all what these subatomic particles are. They took a photon gun and shot individual photons at a slit to determine how it interacted with the material behind it.
I’m going to use an illustration of this that I heard from Science Mike on the Liturgists podcast.… Imagine if you had a large 8’ by 8’ metal plate with a gigantic slit down the middle and shot a golf ball at it, you would expect to see an indentation the shape of a golf ball on the other side. If you shot a hundred golf balls at this plate, some might bounce off, but others would hit that slit and you would end up with an impression the same shape as the slit on your surface. That’s the way any particle behaves when it is shot at a sensor with one slit.
Now it is hard to imagine how a wave might make a different impact, but imagine this… IF however, you filled the room with water and dropped a bowling ball in the space, it would create ripples, waves, and that same slit could be used to measure the pressure of the incoming waves. You won’t see indentations… you’d see the impact of the energy from the wave instead. Same metal plate, same slit, but the measurement you get looks very different because what you are tracking is a wave.
Waves and particles act differently and create different impressions. So you can use the exact same device and determine what is being shot at the plate.
Now… imagine there were two slits.
Do the same experiments again and you would discover with the golf balls, our scaled up particles, that you would have two identical impressions left in each of the two slits from the impacts.
But… with the waves, what you would instead see is an overlap as the waves interact and interfere with one another.
So what has happened when we have done the same tests with photons, with these quantum particles, is that in a single slit experiment, it acts like a particle. It leaves an impression. But when you add a second slit, they act like waves and you see interference. When you add more sensors… they begin to act like particles again.
In fact, physicists today are running these sorts of weird quantum experiments and are now starting to wonder if what we think is reality doesn’t really exist in the way we think it does until we start to measure it. It’s like that old saying, if a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Well? Does it? And the more measurements we do, the more solid and real and identifiable any particular quantum particle becomes.
It’s the story of the blind men and the elephant all over again. The more data, the more observers, the more perspectives, the closer to reality you come.
This is actually a way of thinking about the universe and existence and truth that has been shared by Eastern cultures and philosophies for millenia…. We learn more about reality by sharing perspectives. Each person, each sensor, each perspective gives you a point of information, but it is the intersection of multiple points that gives us insight.
Or as Science Mike puts it in the Liturgists podcast, “literally, additional observers make the universe exist in Quantum mechanics.”
The cultures and peoples that were inspired by God to write this sacred text were comfortable embracing many perspectives. To be honest, the authors of scripture were not really concerned with the details what really happened. They were not seeking one singular answer to the questions they were asking but were trying to explain how God showed up in their lives and their experiences.
And, the Bible did not arrive on the planet as one pre-packaged and published manuscript. All of these stories and writings and teachings were arranged and put together by later editors and chroniclers. They recognized the limitations of human knowledge and understood that truth comes out of the wrestling that happens as we seek to find meaning in a multiplicity of perspectives.
One example of this is the composition of the first five books of scripture: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The Torah… or the Teachings of Moses.
As biblical scholars have wrestled with how to make sense of some of the contradictions and repetitive stories within these books, there became a theory that rather than these five books being one composite teaching, all written by one person, Moses, it is likely a combination of different traditions, from different perspectives, all woven together at a later time. While we love the idea that Moses sat down with a quill and a scroll and wrote all of these words himself, what we know is that many of these stories were passed down through oral traditions. And just like different members of the family might tell a story differently… same story, same truth, but slightly different perspectives, our scriptural stories were passed down the same way.
At some point, those stories were all woven together. And while we might prefer a neat and tidy compilation where each tradition and perspective is clearly identifiable, that wasn’t important to people in the past. It was how they were woven together that made the scripture come alive.
And so there is this theory that tries to pick back apart those different strands. This is the JEPD theory… Where each letter identifies the source and the background.
The Jawist (Yahwist) story begins in Genesis 2 – and it includes much of Genesis and parts of Exodus and Numbers. God is personal and reaches out in the lives of people.
The Elohist describes God not as Yahweh, but as El or Elohim. This is like Aunt Sally’s version of the same events, but she uses a different name for God.
The Priestly tradition likely comes from around 500 years before the birth of Christ and the stories that it tells often relate to worship and order and the temple. Genesis 1 is understood to be from this tradition… as are the parts of the story from Noah and the ark that talk about not two of every animal, but seven pairs of each of the clean animals… Because you need additional animals to sacrifice!
And the Deuteronomist is responsible for the final book of the Torah. The name literally means, second law, and it was a rediscovering or a retelling of the law for a later generation of people. The stories are often told, as a result, with the knowledge of hindsight.
So… how was the earth created? It depends on if you are looking at the Priestly writer in Genesis 1… or the Jawist in Genesis 2… and what about John chapter 1 “In the beginning was the word and the word was God and the word was with God and all things came into being through him?” … but in the Jewish understanding of scripture, that wasn’t the question they were asking. They didn’t want to know one concrete answer and objective truth… they simply wanted to know who they were and how God wanted them to live… and it is all of those stories, woven together, both a cosmic, orderly God and a deeply personal and intimate God that gets us closer to the truth of the mysterious nature of it all.
But maybe the most easily identifiable example of this, are our four gospels.
Four stories.
Four perspectives.
Each sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with the world.
And yet, they tell that story in completely different ways.
The facts are different. The timeline is off. The people who are important vary.
Believe it or not, aside from the events of what we know today as Holy Week – Jesus’ trial and crucifixion, and resurrection – there are only two stories that all four gospels share in common:
The baptism of Jesus and the feeding of the five thousand.
And as we heard this morning with the four voices reading this shared narrative, each gospel writer has their own take on the events of the day.
Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience and does his best to connect everything that happens with what has come before. “It is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”
Luke’s gospel is meant for people who are outside of the Jewish context and so his connection points are more personal as he invites Gentiles to change their lives in light of Jesus’ actions.
Mark is a short, fast-paced telling of the life of Jesus, probably designed to make it really easy to memorize and share.
And John? Well, John is totally different from the other three. In fact, Matthew, Mark and Luke are often called the “synoptic gospels” because they see through a common lens. But John cares less about the details of the narrative. John focuses on the divine, on miracles, on the difference Jesus makes for the world, rather than in any individual life.
One way to think of these four gospels is to imagine them as four different cable news networks. Each has a different audience. Each has a different bias. And each approaches the way they communicate the truth with those things in mind.
And there came a day when religious leaders sat down and tried to figure out which of the stories about Jesus were the ones that really captured the truth. And they had a choice to make. Do we include just one version? Do we include two? No, they included all four of these gospels… those who were inspired to put them together in this particular way into our Bible knew that it was only by holding all four of these perspectives together, in tension, looking not at the parts, but at the whole, that we would even begin to be able to grasp what is True (with a capital T).
We can’t point to a single verse and capture “the answer” to the questions we ask anymore than in the parable any one of those six blind men’s experience would have captured the fullness of what an elephant is.
Like soundbites and talking points today, on their own they will never contain the fullness of the story or the complexity of the truth. But when we read it all together, when we seek to balance out our own biases, then like the blind men in the parable, or the scientists measuring from different perspectives, we can start to recognize the bigger truths.
That is why we need to read scripture.
That is why we have to read ALLof scripture.
That is why we need to take the time to balance our perspectives and not search for quick and easy answers.
God does not fit into a box.
And the truth of God is more complicated and awesome than any verse or chapter or book.
And that is an amazing, beautiful, and holy thing.
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