(NOTE: For yesterday’s monthly lunch fellowship of a group we call “Geezers,” we were asked: If we had one last sermon to preach, what would be our scripture text, what would be our topic of emphasis, and why? We were given 3 minutes each to share with the group. Being one of the few non-clergy among this group, I saw this as a golden opportunity to prepare and deliver my first ‘sermon’ – well, at least a 3-minute synopsis of a sermon. So please assume the posture of a congregation. Amens will be appreciated.)
As my scripture text, I’ve chosen a verse that has become one of my favorites: 1 Corinthians 13:12. Normally, my Bible version of choice is the New International Version, but for this particular verse I prefer the beauty and simplicity of the King James Version:
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
My life-changing faith epiphany came in November 1970 when I was a sophomore at Oklahoma Baptist University, sitting in Western Civilization class. It was a two-hour course that was team-taught by a history professor and a literature professor. One would teach the first hour, and the other would teach the second hour, but both would be in class for the full two hours, bouncing off of each other to integrate the history and the literature.
That particular morning, the literature professor, Dr. Bill Mitchell, was teaching Dante’s Inferno. I had come to OBU, as many did, with what I would now call a fundamentalist understanding of faith, very simplistic. Everything was black-and-white, everything in the Bible was fact.
For the previous year, I had heard friends around me in Brotherhood Dorm question some of my basic faith assumptions, and I’m sure some of that had been percolating in my brain, although I wouldn’t let it come to the surface. Too scary!
Then, in the course of teaching Dante’s Inferno that morning, Dr. Mitchell uttered those four fateful words:
“There are no absolutes.”
I have no idea what Dr. Mitchell’s context was at that point, but in my mind, in that moment, I realized, Hmmm, he’s right. I can’t absolutely prove any of this stuff I believe, and I walked out of that class no longer believing in God.
But God had, in that moment, started me on a journey of discovery that continues to this day. I ultimately realized that faith doesn’t depend on facts and proof. I discovered that I could better trust a God who I didn’t have all figured out. I became comfortable with the idea of mystery . . . of a God who reveals himself continuously in all kinds of ways but is never so small as to fit into the boxes where we try to confine him.
I remember hearing my Daddy, A. Jase Jones, a Baptist preacher the last 70 years of his life, say something many times that has had a lasting influence on me: “We should never presume to know the mind of God.” Wise counsel!
Tragically, though, many Christians today act as if they have God all figured out, as if they have all the answers, and seek to impose that “God” and those answers on others. If I had a last sermon to preach, I would urge us all to embrace the mystery of God, to quit trying to figure out God, to be open to the God who seeks to reveal himself to us every day, and to look forward to the day when we will see him face-to-face and know even as we are known.