“How to Know that You Know….!”[1]

INTRODUCTION: In the Gospel of John, the author writes of the only time Jesus ever actually wrote anything. Do you know what it was? No one else does, either. The reason? He wrote it on the ground (John 08:06).

            That means for us to know anything of what he said and did, we must depend upon people who were there, who told other people, who told other people, and eventually, many repetitions later, what they said was put in writing, and comprise what we now know as the Four Gospels of the New Testament.

            Something like that also occurred in Athens, Greece, some 500 years or so before Jesus. The philosopher Socrates never wrote anything. He preferred to use the dialogical method, or what we know now as the Socratic method of learning through the asking of questions.

            Doug and Dianne Cartwright, whom many of you know, were high school English teachers. Doug has told about a time in his teaching career when he was trained in, and convinced that, the Socratic method of teaching would be much more effective than the traditional one he and Dianne were using. They began implementing the transition, and at first, it was no fun at all. Students, who were used to information being passed from the teacher to them, many times without passing through the minds of either, were reluctant to say anything. But once they got over their awkwardness, they began to thrive on the Socratic method of teaching, especially the dialogues and questions that ensued.

THE REVOLUTIONARY POWER OF QUESTIONS.

Good questions can even be revolutionary. Some decades back, Paulo Freire lived and taught in Brazil. His nation had significant poverty, and the poor were deeply oppressed by the continuous stream of dictators and military leaders who led Brazil.

During the late1940s, Freire embraced a precursor of liberation theology that focused on the poor. But his effort was born of a unique concern: It was in response to Brazil’s literacy laws which restricted voting to those who could read. Initially, Freire took the challenge of teaching 300 sugar cane workers; and in 45 days, they could read and write and vote.

This model began to spread throughout Brazil, so that by 1964, Brazil’s literacy rate had climbed significantly. Then a military coup took place, and guess who was in trouble? Paulo Freire. He was branded a traitor and imprisoned for 70 days – because, like Socrates, he enabled the oppressed to ask questions about the system in which they lived.

After release from prison, he lived in exile for a while, but continued his support for the poor of Brazil through his writing. In 1968, his influential, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published, first in Portuguese, and then went on to become the source for a whole other way of teaching. (Appreciative Inquiry was one of many spin-offs.)

Crucial to his message was that the poor are not innately dumb. Rather, they have been ignored and treated as incapable of learning by a presumptuous, educated, upper and middle class. By teaching them to have a voice by asking questions about their way of life, introduced a whole new way of living.

Similar patterns of oppression have been part of our America’s history. It’s always hurtful to read the opinions of our Founding Fathers, such as Washington and Jefferson, in their descriptions of what they see as the innate learning limitations of the several hundred Africans they enslaved. It’s the same way the poor were viewed in Brazil. Consequently, they were never consulted on issues that mattered, even though it affected them. They were thought to be too uninformed…too stupid...to know better

Freire did not attempt to demonstrate otherwise by giving the poor, information about their diminished status. Rather, he taught them to ask questions. He harkened back to Socrates, to what Doug and Dianne did in Goshen, Indiana. And Freire, in training the poor to ask questions, unleashed a tidal wave of change responsible in part for the transformation of the political leadership of that nation.

            So what happens when we ask questions…not only political questions, but also religious questions…questions that have to do with understanding our place as human beings in the scheme of things?

            Since this is a religious congregation, what kind of questions should we be asking? Unitarians consistently are listed as the most highly educated of any religious group in America. We also are the most affluent, which is not surprising since education and affluence tend to go together. So what do we ask about life and living, in the world of which we are a part? That question helped formulate today’s sermon title, namely: How do we know that we know?

EPISTEMOLOGY.

Before proceeding let’s stop for a moment to conduct a brief lesson in Greek: episteme means knowledge and logos means word/speech. Put together, epistemology means the “study of knowledge,” how we learn, and what do we know. Put in a religious context, how do we know that what we say we believe or don’t believe is actually so? Why are we right and others wrong? If so, why are there more of them than us?

I can still remember conversations of my Pentecostal mother and father with guests, when they would be discussing other churches or people. It was not unusual to hear them say that, so and so, did not yet have the “light on Pentecost,” which translated meant, “did not agree with them.” At the time, Pentecostalism was still on the other side of the track, with relatively few adherents. But the Pentecostals still spoke and believed without hesitation, as if they were right and all the rest of the churches were wrong.

It’s also important that we understand the distinction between “to know” and “to believe.” When we say, “I believe,” most of us understand that there is some level of uncertainty. But when we say, “I know,” that is indicative of another level of perception. “I know” indicates that all the doubt and caveats, the questions and concerns, have been removed. “I know,” does not invite questioning. I know! Period.

So knowing and believing. What distinctions exist for us between the two? Of course, the big one –numero uno – for people who visit us, many times is, do Unitarians believe in God? Usually, those asking the question want a simple “Yes,” or “No.” But as my kids told me many years ago, I only speak in paragraphs.

Actually, I always want to answer very decisively, with a definite “Yes” and “No.” “Yes,” if by “God” we mean the infinite Mystery of life in the Universe; “No,” if we mean some divine personality separate and distinct from the reality of which we are a part. But why a response so complex? Why not a simple, “Yes,” or “No?” To answer takes several paragraphs.

The history of our search for self-understanding.

In a superb, but long out of print book, entitled, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, by Henri Frankfort and others, describes the early struggle of our evolving species. Our ancient ancestors asked one of life’s most important questions: Why?

            I fly out tomorrow to Oklahoma City where my daughter will meet me to drive to Guthrie, Oklahoma, a little town of slightly more than 11,000 or so, that was the first capitol of the state of Oklahoma. My family and I will be attending the funeral Tuesday of my brother-in-law, Phil, who died last week from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest.

            My sister, Mary Ann, his wife, told me of the pain she felt when her 31 year-old-son stood on one side of his dad’s Trauma Center bed, and knowing his hopeless condition told him, “It’s okay, Dad. Let go.” On the other side, her eldest daughter, 42 and ravaged for years by chronic illness, said, “Daddy, don’t give up. You’ve always told me to keep fighting.”

            Matters of life and death have always posed enormous questions. Our evolving ancestors asked, “Why does the sun shine so bright and make it so hot the rivers run dry and the pools of water disappear? Why do the rains come and so hard that it floods, taking life of all kinds. Why does the lightening strike and cause the forests to catch on fire and burn everything in sight?

“Why do we get sick and die? Why do we have pain and suffering? Why are we constantly searching for food to eat, and water to drink? Why? Why?”

In that ancient primitive past, they made a first step forward out of the darkness when they worshipped their first images of gods. Their doing so was a recognition that there was something more to their world and their lives than could be seen. They gave names and bodies, as well as “godness,” to wind, rain, lightening, heat, and cold. There were all kinds of gods: big gods, little gods, male and female, good and bad, strong and weak.

But the critical and positive component in all of this was that they recognized that life in this world, even if they only had a limited primitive purview – life was more than only they. There was more than what they saw and felt. They expressed that awareness through rituals, sacrifices and worship of many gods.

Scroll forward to a still primitive time, but now we’ve learned to write. There are temples and sacred documents, priests and priestesses, holy days and rites, and beautiful images of the gods. These were all constructed and enacted in the service and worship of their many gods.

Then along came a tribe of people who questioned everything. Their gods weren’t to be found in images or idols. In fact, their gods had been reduced down to only one god, and he needed no images made of him. He was invisible and resided up in the heavens above, where he sat on a throne, administering and dispensing life and death, as he in his great wisdom saw fit. And he could whip any other god around.

As you recognize, this is an evolutionary shift from the polytheism of the ancients, which was a belief in many gods, to henotheism, which was a belief in one tribal god competing with other tribal gods. One of the most vivid expressions of that was when Queen Jezebel and her priests of Baal were challenged by Elijah to determine whose god would strike a calf on the altar with lightening. Yahweh did, so Baal lost.

The next evolutionary shift occurred when the tribes known as Israelites, proclaimed that not only was their god bigger, badder, and better that any other God in all the world, but in fact, there weren’t any other Gods but he. The rest were false gods, unlike their one and only true god: monotheism. And in honor and recognition of him, they offered burnt sacrifices of lambs and sheep, cattle and birds as burnt offerings. They also claimed to have an exclusive relationship and covenant with God that no one else could have!

Now as you can imagine, that did not go over too well with the downtown ministerial alliance of the gods. And in fact, there were a lot of wars and battles, death and bloodshed – some, unfortunately, still going on. And lest we be too condescending about how far we’ve come, the previous president of our United States, who holds an Ivy League MBA, claimed to have received direct guidance from his Christian Father God to go into Iraq and slaughter all those unbelievers and their weapons of mass destruction and their terrible dictator, Sadaam Hussein, and while we’re at it, kill more than a hundred thousand civilians, destroy their university and educational system, their museums and libraries, and create a house of cards that could come tumbling down the minute America and its soldiers leave, especially if the money pipeline to Washington ever stops. And we’re still there!

I’ve never understood how all those so-called “fiscal conservatives” in Washington, justify propping up the government of a nation whose infrastructure we destroyed, and doing it with money we borrowed from China, which our children and grandchildren will be obligated to pay back. Go figure. And when you do, you will probably find that it would more appropriately be called welfare for the military-industrial complex to which America is addicted economically.

But back to primitive Israel and their prized site on the East Shores of the Mediterranean: Socrates was from Greece, one of Israel’s neighbors on the North Shores of the Mediterranean. There, Socrates taught Plato; Plato taught Aristotle; and Aristotle began teaching Alexander at age 13. As a young man, when Alexander the Great went into battle, good student that he was, he always carried Homer with him.

When he came upon the Israelites, he considered them a pagan and primitive people, and he forced them to conform to Greek ways, and Greek culture and education. Gymnasiums were built for the best and the brightest of Israel. And he reconstituted their primitive god, Yahweh, so that by the time the young prophet from Nazareth came along 300 years later, God had already been transformed from a warring, bloody, jealous and insecure tribal god, to a virtuous, justice loving, ethically informed, God of the Universe.

700 years later, the prophet Muhammad passed on his revelation of God in the Qur’an to the people of the Middle East. It was a brutal time, but it reinstated the earlier claims of Israel that there is only one God, adding that Muhammad and others, including Jesus, are his prophets.

In the West, some seven to eight centuries later, Copernicus, Newton, and Galileo made one of the most important of discoveries: The Earth isn’t the center of the Universe. When translated into philosophy and faith, it changed everything, though reluctantly for many.

By the beginning of the 20^th century, Einstein, and many others before and after him, enabled us to realize that in addition to Earth, there are galaxies, super galaxies and maybe even parallel Universes. And the notion that what happened on this tiny planet 2,000 years ago is decisively significant for the rest of the Universe won’t compute.

APPLICATION.

Yet, we too, like our ancient primitive ancestors, still stand before the Mystery of it all and wonder why? Why are we here? Why must we die? Why must we suffer? Why?

We also know that we know…that the word “God,” whether written or spoken, is a symbol for that Mystery which our ancestors puzzled over as well. We know that the beliefs of the great religions of the world are sometimes beautiful poetry to describe the Mystery which cannot be named, because it is a Mystery. And we seek in prayer and meditation, reflection and connecting through nature, to find ways to connect with the wonder before which we all stand.

CONCLUSION.

So what do we know and believe? I read once of an Australian aboriginal culture that believed there is one large “Song of Life.” They also believed that each of us has a “Song Line” to contribute to the wholeness and beauty of that one “Song of Life.” I invite you to sing your song line of faith, hope and love. And in so doing, discover what it means both to know and to believe.

Shalom. Salaam Aleikum.  Amen. And Blessed Be.