Difficult Conversations: Unity and Disputation (Philippians 2:1-11; Luke 2:41-52; February 17, 2013)

Difficult Conversations: Unity and Disputation

Philippians 2:1-11; Luke 2:41-52
Lent 1C
February 17, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

During Lent in 2013, I will be preaching a series entitled "Difficult Conversations." It will explore a number of sensitive topics and will coordinate with an adult education offering on respectful communication.
 

Conversation is a rare thing.  I don’t mean talking.  There’s plenty of talking.  I mean conversation—talking about things that matter and doing it in ways that permit new ways of seeing things.  There’s not enough of that kind of talking.  Has that always been so?  Or is this a recent event?  I’m not sure.  It’s hard to see the forest for the trees, so the proverb tells us.  We live in the midst of events, so it’s hard to step back far enough to see patterns.

There are two changes in recent years that threaten conversation.  One is the rise of the so-called social media that tend to favor short and immediate forms of expression.  Twenty years ago we sent each other physical letters written on actual paper, letters you could hold in your hand, letters that some people might keep.  They were replaced by email.  Email messages looked a little like letters, but of course you can’t hold an email in your hand.  Email messages have to be short—no more than a single screen—or they don’t get read. 

Shorter still are the forms of communication that have come after email.  Today’s college students don’t use email much.  It’s too cumbersome.  Email messages are too long.  They prefer texting with cell phones.  The longest text you can send is two hundred characters.  Or they use Twitter or similar services.  Twitter messages, called tweets, are one hundred forty characters long at most.

Just to give you an idea of how short messages have to be, we’ll start the character count now: Our messages have become shorter, more compact, simpler and more direct.  (That’s 73 characters.)  So has our thinking.  (95.)  There is evidence that our brains wire adapt (134, so we’re out of room in a Tweet.) themselves to our forms of thinking and communication. (We’re at 188, just about out of room in a text message.) 

Let me back up and remove the running character count.  Our messages have become shorter, more compact, simpler and more direct.  So has our thinking.  There is evidence that our brains adapt themselves, hard-wire themselves, to our forms of thinking and communication.[1]  Shorter, simpler and more direct communication means simpler thinking.  This means, of course, that it may become impossible even to think a complex idea.  This means, in turn, that we may cease to be able to think our way through complex problems.  A problem like global climate change may become impossible even to conceive, let alone solve.

So that’s one threat to conversation that matters.

Another threat to conversation is what has happened to public discourse, to the way that we talk in public about how to solve problems and build a shared vision of the future for ourselves and our children.  Public discourse has become nasty, even vicious.  Some people say that things have become polarized, but I’m not so sure.  I can certainly remember times when the range of opinions was as wider or wider than it is now, but the tone of the public discourse remained much more respectful than it does now.  Or so it seems to me.

The growth of social media may have something to do with that.  It’s all too easy to find our little corner of the internet where everyone thinks like we do.  Those who don’t are wrong.  They may not even be completely human.  When someone does disagree with us, we react pretty badly.  When it comes to our talk shows and debates, we like blood, well, metaphorically speaking.  The “anger-tainment” industry isn’t really interested in thoughtful conversation.  There’s just not much money in it.

I think it was Garrison Keillor who coined the phrase “pancake politics.”  I haven’t been able to track it down, so maybe he didn’t.  Maybe I only imagined it.  If that’s the case, then I coined the phrase “pancake politics.”  But I think it was Garrison Keillor.  Here is what he described:  There is a group of about men who meet at a local diner every Saturday morning at 7:30.  The membership has shifted a little over the years, but they’ve been meeting weekly for the last fifteen years.  They talk about everything.  They talk about the weather.  They talk about their health.  They talk about sports and their kids.  They talk about how the floral and greeting card industries have managed to get their wives to act as enforcers to make sure that Valentine’s Day sales don’t lag.  Like I say, they talk about everything.  They talk about politics.  They don’t always agree.  Sometimes they get angry.  Sometimes the talk gets a little uncomfortable.  But at 7:30 the next Saturday morning they’re around the table again, eating pancakes and talking about everything.  They value each other and their friendship more than they value winning arguments.  That’s pancake politics.  Pancake politics is threatened by the “anger-tainment” industry of radio and cable talk shows, blogs and Tweets.

As part of the church I’d like to think that we have something to offer here.  After all, we’re God’s children, made in and bearing the image of God.  That should translate into respect.  Respect should translate into an ability to get along.

If only it were so!  We Christians have been a fractious lot!  One really good—or, rather, really bad—example will be enough.  While in Stirling, Scotland, in 2003, Carol and I visited the Church of the Holy Rude.  “Rood” by the way is an old word for cross.  In 1656 a dispute arose between those who wanted to remain Church of Scotland and those who wanted to become part of the Free Kirk that didn’t want local lairds picking their pastors.  The congregation was split down the middle and unable to decide.  They appealed to the Town Council.  Alas, the Town Council was also split down the middle.  So they did the only sensible thing: they built a partitioning wall right down the middle of the sanctuary.  On one side it was Church of Scotland; on the other side it was Free Kirk.  And so it remained for two hundred eighty years until the lack of money forced them together in 1936 during the Great Depression.

In more recent times, the United Methodist Church has been arguing about homosexuality for over forty years with no resolution in sight.  At last year’s General Conference in Tampa, Florida, we couldn’t even agree on a resolution saying that we couldn’t agree.  We have been unable to think together about the ethics or theology of the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Perhaps this is because we are afraid that if we start this conversation we will discover that we are unable to agree.  And we believe that we must agree.  There is after all a thread running through the Bible, and especially the New Testament, that says that we are supposed to agree with each other.  Paul says so in Philippians: they are to “complete [his] joy by thinking the same way, having the same love, being united, and agreeing with each other.” 

Paul, of course, has a problem: how to supervise congregations that he has founded when he is off for years at a time founding other congregations.  Congregation members are supposed to agree with each other.  But that begs the question, What agreement are they supposed to come to?  Thinking in whose way?  Well, of course, they are think in the way that Paul thinks and agree with each other by agreeing with Paul.  That would certainly make managing the Philippians at a distance easier.

The record shows that neither the Philippians nor any of his other congregations were in agreement about much of anything.  It doesn’t seem to be in their nature.  They come by it honestly.  The Jewish tradition is quite disputatious.  It loves a good argument.  The Talmud, the huge Jewish document that comments on the Scriptures and on various questions of Jewish life, is fond of saying things like, “Rabbi Soandso says this for these reasons, but Rabbi Whatsizname says that for those reasons.”  Often it simply fails to say who is right.  All it does is record the conversation.  The reader may choose to take part or not, but in many, many cases the Talmud does not tell the reader how to decide.

Even as a young man, just barely at the age of accountability, Jesus embraced this disputatious life.  Failing to return from the Passover in the caravan with his parents, Jesus was found in the Temple, sitting among the teachers (remember this would have meant that he claimed to be a teacher!), listening, asking questions, replying to their questions, in other words taking part in the debates.

“Didn’t you know that it was necessary for me to be in my Father’s house?” Jesus said to his parents.  The word “house” is not in the original text.  The original only says, “in the of my Father.”  And to complicate things further, “the” is plural.  So it could be “in the house of my Father.”  Older translations had “my Father’s business.”  But I’m wondering if the plural things that Jesus is in, that Jesus assumed that his parents would know he was in, don’t refer to the disputatious conversations that took place in the Temple, the conversations that made ancient Judaism what it was.  Jesus clearly valued vigorous debate and could hold his own in it, even at the age of twelve, even with the Ivy League rabbis in Jerusalem.

Of course, centuries later the church, or rather that part of the church that called itself “catholic,” that is, “universal,” and “orthodox,” that is, right-thinking, took uniform thinking very seriously.  But maybe, like Paul, its main concern was controlling what had become a massive movement.  The church wanted everyone to have the same ideas, namely its ideas. 

We’ve gotten the idea that we’re not supposed to have a thought, at least about religion, that disagrees with the official teaching of the church.  People still come to me every once in a while to know what that official teaching is.  I used to tell them.  Now, if I’m well-rested and have my wits about me, I’m more likely to answer, “Well, some people think this.  And some people think that.  And I find myself leaning toward this.”  I confess that sometimes I just tell them, but I’m trying to get over that.

More and more I see that the Bible is not a single book that says one thing.  It’s a collection of writings that say many, many things.  These writings often agree, but they also often disagree, sometimes wildly.  The Bible is not a statement about God and faith.  The Bible is a conversation, a conversation that is sometimes quite raucous.  This is true of the Christian movement, too.  More and more I’m convinced that to be a Christian is not to believe certain things, but to enter into a conversation. 

And here are a couple of wonderful things that I have found about this conversation.  While I have strong opinions about many things, I seldom find God in my opinions.  I find that God is in the give and take of conversation and even in the parry and riposte of debate.  When I disagree with someone or someone disagrees with me the conversation itself is more important than whether either of us is right or wrong.  I think that’s wonderful.  And I think that’s a gift that the world needs.

Another wonderful thing about this conversation is that, while it began thousands of years ago, it isn’t finished.  We are still in the same conversation that Abraham and Sarah started all those centuries ago. 

Judging by what I see in Washington, in the media and in the social media, our world very much needs to learn the art of conversation.  Who better to model this art than a movement that is a conversation?

But if we’re going to do that well we need to think together about conversation.  We’ll need some practice, too.  So, having consulted with the Staff-Pastor/Parish Relations and Social Concerns Committees, I’m inviting you into a Lenten discipline.  Today during the education hour I invite you to gather in the back of the sanctuary to think together with me about conversation, about what good conversation looks like and how we can learn how to do it better. 

Then for the other Sundays in Lent, the sermon will introduce one of the topics we struggle with in the church and in the world.  I will try my utmost to preach in a way that opens rather than closes a conversation.  That doesn’t mean that you’ll agree with me, but I will intend to leave an opening for you to reply.

In the education hour that follows, we’ll keeping learning about good conversation and practice our skills by continuing the conversation that the sermon started.  We may not be very good at it at first.  We may even fail spectacularly.  That’s okay as long as we agree that we’re going to keep trying.

The habits of our culture are hard to kick.  Our culture tells us that it’s more important to win than to understand.  The competitive nature of vigorous conversation gives us greater clarity about our own and about each other’s thinking.  That’s a good thing.  But our culture isn’t satisfied with that.  It tells us that we have to win.  And the result is the sort of rancor we’re all so tired of witnessing in Washington.   

Our culture tells us that if we can’t win we must at least be right.  But if we’re already right then we no longer need our conversation partners, we no longer need a community.  If we’re already right then we’ve nothing left to learn and where’s the fun in that?

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[1] Carr, By Nicholas. “How the Internet Is Making Us Stupid.” Telegraph.co.uk, August 27, 2010, sec. internet. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/7967894/How-the-Internet-is-making-us-stupid.html.