Playing with levels at church

John 14:1-14

Let me tell you a story: 125 years ago (or so) there was a First Nations community, the Labrador Indians, living in southeastern Canada. Their lives were intimately linked to local herds of caribou that provided food, hides for making clothes and shelter, bones for making tools and so on. And when hunting became fruitless, the Labradors went to their wisewomen and wisemen who would ritualistically burn a caribou shoulder bone and drop it in the snow. The shaman could then read the cracks that formed on the bone as Wakan Tanka’s gift of a hunting map. Only the shaman had the power to find the correct direction and starting point of the map, so if a trail proved to be a dead-end, they re-oriented and tried again. For decades, they found fresh herds of caribou and life went on.

About 75 years ago, scientists studying the Labradors saw a pattern – a perfectly reasonable one and one that I recognize in myself. The hunters went looking for caribou in the last place they found them until it became habitual. So while they were thinning herds in familiar places, herds elsewhere got larger. The science found that any randomized search would lead the hunters to new caribou fairly quickly and that the ritual was unnecessary.

And then few years later, post-modern thinkers came along who noticed that what is true for one person is not true for another. And so they decided that, because all human experience is relative, then neither the scientists nor the Labradors had the single right way because, if all truth is relative, no one universal truth can exist.

There are two interesting points about all three of these perspectives: first, none is completely wrong and, second, they are all limited by some version of certainty. It was largely true for the Labrador that a properly done ritualistic request of God produced expected results. But they were certain that there was no other way of life and there are now only a handful of them left. And it was correct for the scientists to say that there were other ways to find caribou. But when objective logic trumps ritualistic prayer, certain relationships are lost – their certainty in framing the question of finding caribou in terms of efficiently blinded them to the possibility that there might be more to the search.  The postmodernists are mostly correct in saying that no truth is static and universal…except that stance is itself a static statement of universal truth, and their certainty misses the experiences of something that seems to endure and live.

So why am I telling you all this? Here’s why. I drawn to something that John’s Jesus says in our gospel…or rather, maybe the better way to it is to say it’s what he doesn’t say: John’s Jesus doesn’t say: “I have or I know the truth, the way and the life,” but rather “I am the truth.” He doesn’t say “perform these acts or follow these doctrines,” but instead invites us to participate in loving relationship with the living truth…with Christ. To live, in other words, in the very being of the Risen Christ until it becomes our being.  Paul Tillich said that we meet the liberating truth of Christ in many forms except one: “You never will meet it,” he writes, “in the form of propositions which you can learn or write down and take home.”

I get that intellectually and can often even acknowledge the partial truth of my own experience, but in practice I notice that my tendency is frequently to be like Philip and Thomas, or like the Labradors, scientists and post-modernists. I’m not suggesting that there is no place for seeking factual information, but rather that it’s not the only path: I can find myself looking for certainty, even asking it of God, when I might be better served by turning to a living Christ.

Fortunately, Christ is always, already present with us in spite of our projects for certainty. We may encounter this grace in reading, especially scripture, or in conversation (maybe even in a homily) and be opened to new insights. God’s living truth may dawn on us slowly like the desperately slow change of this spring season or it may break through in one startling moment. It may break us open in an experience of nature or of pain. It may soften us in worship or in long, dark nights of the soul. The heavens may break open as they did for Stephen in the depths of our worst persecution, or the living truth may be carried in experiences of musical, poetic or artistic beauty. It can blossom in the heart of our grief. Regardless of the path it takes, we know it – we recognize this living truth – because it always comes bonded with love.