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Sunday, July 28, 2024: Faith Story – Paul Knowles

Faith Story: Paul Knowles

Scripture:

(Deut 6:4-5): Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. NIV

Mark 12:28-31 NIV

28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.[e] 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’[f] 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[g] There is no commandment greater than these.”

My Faith Story:

I was raised in a fundamentalistic, Baptist church.

In my opinion, there are some distinctive traits of such congregations. They are entirely committed to their view of scripture, their take on social mores, and their understanding of acceptable lifestyles. In consequence, they by and large become extremely judgmental of anyone who believes or lives differently from their concept of what constitutes a godly life.

I remember overhearing a conversation at the door of the church, after a service one Sunday. The minister, supported by some (male) deacons, was explaining to a first-time visitor that while she was welcome to attend the church, they were aware she was living in an unmarried relationship, and therefore would never be allowed to join the church or volunteer in any way at the church. Surprisingly, she never came a second time.

I also remember my friend David, the amazing church organist, who was kicked out of the church and his family home when he came out as a gay man.

Now, I am not here simply to bash fundamentalism, today.

My assignment this morning is to tell you a bit of how I got from there to here. And key to that is the scripture you already heard:

Mark 12:28-31

29 “The most important [commandment],” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.[e] 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’[f] 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[g] There is no commandment greater than these.”

When Luke, Matthew and Mark quote Jesus here, Jesus is quoting a very important text from Deuteronomy: the Shema, a declaration at the heart of both Jewish and Christian faith:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

But notice: Jesus added something. “Love the Lord your God WITH ALL YOUR MIND.”

The best part of my fundamentalist church experience involved a subversive character named Dan Klassen. Dan was raised a modern Mennonite, but that denominational option was not available in Tillsonburg, so he and his family attended the Baptist church.

Dan – a high school teacher who later became Dr. Dan, a psychology professor at Lakehead University – was my youth leader when I was in my teens. We had a lot of conversations, which led to some advice that changed my life, and frankly, preserved my faith.

And it all had to do with those four words Jesus added to the Shema: “With all your mind.”

Dan recognized that the biggest weakness in fundamentalist theology is that they ignore that part of the verse. There is little effort to apply reason or logic to faith. And if my faith is entirely based on what I feel, then it’s easy for my feelings to keep me in a comfort zone where true religion is religion that looks like me.

But Dan told me to read a couple of Christian writers who did use their minds, as well as their hearts, souls and strength. He loaned me books by Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis.

Today, I would probably tell you that Schaeffer’s work is too fundamentalistic for my liking, but Lewis has been vitally important to me for almost 60 years. We also happen to share a birthday.

When I began to realize that God wants us to use our minds, as well as hearts, souls and strength, it freed me to think, to question, to challenge.

And over the many years, that has led me to two overall conclusions about being a Christian that may, on the surface, seem to be contradictory.

On one hand, using my mind has allowed me to open wide to the realities of what it means to be human. The second part of Jesus’ quotation is really important here: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

If you stay within the safe parameters of conservative “Christianity” – and I am almost loathe to use that word to describe what I see today on the religious right – your neighbours are those who you feel comfortable with.

But that’s not the gospel at all, and as I began to challenge the tenets on which I was raised, my view of loving my neighbour expanded exponentially.

Over the decades, I came to understand – first with my mind, and only then, with my heart and soul – that all humans are creations of God, loved by God, accepted by God. Raised to be homophobic, my perspective changed to the extent that I had the great pleasure of being one of the few straight founding members of the London Pride Men’s Chorus.

Raised in a church where missionaries came from the “foreign fields” to tell us of their work to convert “natives”, my perspective changed to understand the real meaning of showing the love of Christ in tangible, practical ways with no strings attached.

But I mentioned that there is another, perhaps surprising, result in how I view the Christian faith, which also arises from loving God with my mind.

It’s this: for me, anyway, the Bible story makes logical sense. I don’t mean there is no poetry, drama, story-telling or mythology in the Bible. But I do mean that a logical approach to the Bible story, and especially the Jesus story, give structure and sense to the complicated world we live in.

In fact, there have been times when I have wished I were not a Christian, because it can be hard, and frankly, because there have been times when I have been a terrible Christian.

But I could not abandon my faith, not because of tugging at my heart-strings or hope of eternal life, but because only the Judeao-Christian account of creation and humanity makes logical sense to me.

It explains the dichotomy of human nature – our capacity for great good and massive evil, a capacity that exists in every one of us. The story of creation and subsequent sin answers that question, for me.

It explains the role of love – love that is not dependent on feelings of the heart or the spirit, but that originates in a loving, interacting Creator, a Creator who loved so much that she took on the painful role of becoming human, the better to communicate love to us.

I love the first chapter of John, where “the Word, which was in the beginning, became flesh.” What an incredible act of love!

 And when you think about it – pondering this “with all your mind” – what an incredible role model!

And finally – and this is where you may not agree with me, perhaps, and that’s okay! – practicing faith with my mind engaged has meant, for me, that miracles make sense. I can blame C.S. Lewis for this, from his argument that when we consider all the things Jesus said and did, he was either the miracle-working Son of God, or “a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell.”

I do understand this is grounds for debate. But I must say that for me, using the mind God gave me, miracles, from feeding 5,000 to rising from the dead, do not offend my reason, and actually fit perfectly into the big picture of God’s love. My logic says, if God is, and God gets personally involved with his children, amazing results are to be reasonably anticipated.

So that’s my story. I want to conclude by saying what a joy it is for Julie and I to be part of a church where our story is not your story; where there is room for all. Where big questions can be asked, opinions can be challenged, and acceptance is the norm.

Where we are called to think… and most of all, to love our neighbours as ourselves.