Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on January 7, 2024, which combined Epiphany and Baptism of the Lord. Based on Matthew 2:1-12 and Mark 1:4-11.
Last month, Rhonda and I took a trip to Pittsburgh to see Jesse direct the Pitt bell choir in their Christmas concert. On the way, we visited an old high school friend of mine, Sharon. She has three kids and the youngest is now in high school. We started talking about what comes next. She has a mechanical engineering degree but hasn’t worked as an engineer for more than a decade. Right now, she still has home commitments that limit her career options, but she has been substitute teaching and also teaching an enrichment program for middle school students that is focused on engineering. My comment was that it’s good that she is thinking about the future now, because whatever path she chooses may require a credential of some sort that would take some time to acquire.
I went through something similar a few years ago. In 2017, Lou Ellen got sick one Saturday and asked me to deliver her sermon. Then in 2018, she asked me to fill the pulpit when she was traveling. I was also doing a bunch of other things for the church and wondering what was next in my life. I didn’t know what God had in store for me, but I knew that whatever it was would require some education. So, I started down the path to become a commissioned ruling elder, which meant completing a certificate in congregational leadership through the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary.
Little did I know that I would be called upon to use my skills and talents to help lead this church. Fortunately, I was prepared. I had the knowledge I needed when the time was right. The process towards being commissioned kind of stalled out, but I have started working in that direction again, depending on what the congregation decides to do.
We live in the information age. We are awash in information, some of it good, some of it useless, some of it erroneous, some of it intentionally misleading. Information everywhere, on the radio and TV, on our phones, from legitimate news sources and social media, from experts and from charlatans. In the ancient world, information was hard to come by. That’s why Herod was so desperate to get information from the visiting magi and from the scribes, and to control who knew what and when.
These days, we suffer not from too little information, but from too much. Still, our task is to turn information into knowledge. We need to sift through the information, keep what is good and useful, reject what is irrelevant or misleading, and apply it to the task at hand. This task requires curiosity and, more importantly, focus. I get a weekly email from James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. Recently, he wrote,
Curiosity can empower you or impede you.
Being curious and focused is a powerful combination. I define this combination as unleashing your curiosity within the domain of a particular task: asking questions about how things work, exploring different lines of attack for solving the problem, reading ideas from outside domains while always looking for ways to transfer the knowledge back to your main task, and so on. Even though you’re exploring widely, you’re generally moving the ball forward on the main thing. You start something and you keep searching until you find an effective way to finish it.
Meanwhile, when your curiosity sends you off in a dozen different directions and fractures your attention, then it can prevent you from focusing on one thing long enough to see it through to completion. Curious, but unfocused. You’re jumping from one topic to the next, they aren’t necessarily related, your efforts don’t accumulate, you’re simply exploring. You start many things and finish few.
How is your curiosity being directed? Is it rocket fuel or a roadblock?
James Clear
Clear makes an excellent point. Gathering information doesn’t necessarily lead to the knowledge you need to solve a problem. At heart, I am an engineer, which means that I’m a problem solver. Once I latch onto a technical problem, I am skilled at finding out all of the different possible paths to solve it. If that’s all I did, though, I would not be successful in academia. Research is less about problem solving, and more about problem finding. Sometimes, that means peeling back the layers of a problem to find the root of it, and sometimes that means developing something even more important than knowledge: wisdom.
Thomas Merton once wrote, “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.” Knowledge is the ability to climb the ladder, but wisdom is knowing which wall to lean it against.
Let’s take an example: our preschool. Tracy is a wonderful director who has the skills and talents needed to solve a wide range of problems. More importantly, though, she has identified the right problems to solve. She could have been content to keep serving the same number of kids in the same age groups with the same basic services. Instead, she recognized some additional needs for the kids—such as nutritious meals—and an additional age group that was severely under-served: infants. Once she identified that problem, she set about solving it. Now we have a renovated upstairs classroom with a fire escape so that we can serve that new demographic.
If you look around the sanctuary today, you probably see another problem: a congregation that is smaller and older than when I first joined fifteen years ago. It’s tempting to say that we need more people and younger people to worship with us. But that is the wrong problem to solve. That is perhaps a symptom, but not the root cause.
The fundamental problem is that there are people in our community who have a deep longing for connection, community, belonging, and love, but don’t know where to find it, and certainly are not looking here. According to a Pew Research Center study, about 40% of Missouri adults do not experience a sense of peace and well-being at least once a week. That’s perhaps 10,000 adults in Phelps County who are surviving more than thriving. We have just celebrated the birth of the Prince of Peace. Susan spoke last week about the coming of Christ’s kingdom, in which Christ judges the nations based on how they cared for those who are in need. Perhaps we have a message for our community. Perhaps we can be a source of love, of peace, of connection, of belonging for those who are struggling to find their place in the world.
The danger, though, is that we would expect their problems to be like our problems, and their desires to be like our desires. The majority of adults in Phelps County are younger than me. Many of them either did not grow up in a church, or grew up knowing church as a place of discomfort and exclusion and guilt, not a place of acceptance and joy. Those who grew up unchurched surely assume that all Christian churches are the same as what they see in the media: judgmental, greedy organizations that protect abusers and only really value straight white men. They don’t know who we are. They aren’t staying away because of our worship style, or our building architecture, or whatever. We aren’t even on their radar screen as a place where they might want to go.
So what do we do? Well, the first step is to really identify the problem, and narrow it down to a problem that we can solve together. Paul Shane Spear said, “As one person I cannot change the world, but I can change the world of one person.” I don’t really think that all 10,000 adults in Phelps County who need to experience peace and well-being should show up here next Sunday. If nothing else, that would make me very anxious, that many people trying to mob their way into our sanctuary! This is why I’ve been asking you to think about your calling. What is one small part of the problems in our community that you think you can solve, or that you think we can solve as a congregation?
The next step, after identifying the problem, is to seek the knowledge you need to solve it. A lot of people in the congregation are Baby Boomers, and a few of us are Gen X. Roughly a third of the population of Phelps County is either Millennials or Gen Z. I would wager that very few of us really know the problems facing those generations or what sort of community they are looking for. Sure, you might have kids or grandkids who can clue you in, but that’s a pretty narrow data set. If they grew up in your household, they probably have already heard the message we have to share anyway. I spend a lot of time around college students, but I wouldn’t say that I really understand their perspective, their desires, or their spiritual needs.
Once you have the knowledge you need, it’s time to act on it. We have heard two stories today about being timely. First, we have the magi and the scribes. The scribes spent their time studying the Law, which is what we call the Old Testament plus the interpretations that were accumulated over the centuries. They knew what to expect, but they didn’t know when. The magi studied the natural world. They knew when something important was happening, but didn’t know what exactly. The two groups together found the Anointed One, a baby who was born to be king. Next, we have the story of Jesus’s baptism. John the Baptist was preparing the way. He was working to make sure the conditions would be favorable when the time came for the Messiah to appear. When Jesus came to the Jordan to be baptized, the skies were opened and God announced that it was time. The years and centuries of waiting for the Messiah were at an end, and the world was ready to receive the Incarnation, God With Us.
But how can you know that it’s time? My first nudge came from Lou Ellen, prodding me towards the pulpit and then towards the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. My second nudge came when she left our pulpit, and it was time for me to get to work.
Sometimes it’s not so obvious, though. Most of you know that I’m also involved with LGBTQ+ Rolla. For several years, I was thinking about ways to serve LGBTQ+ individuals in our community. Then the pandemic hit. I would not say that the summer of 2020 was a good time to start a social organization. We couldn’t really gather, except in very small groups outside or else online. Building a community online is very difficult, much more difficult than building one in person. It would have been better if I had started the group earlier, say in 2018. Or I could have waited until all of the conditions were just right, and I would probably still be waiting.
I should have started earlier, but there’s a proverb that goes, “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is right now.” It’s easy to look back and regret failing to act, just like it’s easy to say that the time is not quite right yet and we need to wait for…something. Perhaps we will be visited by some wise men who saw a star, or perhaps the sky will open and we will see the Holy Spirit descending like a dove, or perhaps tongues of fire will rest on us like on that first Pentecost. But if none of that happens, we still need to watch for the little signs that God is at work, and join in.
So my charge to you this Epiphany is to seek first the wisdom to know which problem God wants you to solve, and then the knowledge you need to solve it. My charge to you this Baptism of the Lord Sunday is to remember your own baptism, your own promise or one made in your name to be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his word and showing his love. Let us together find ways to participate in God’s work. We cannot solve all of the problems in the world, but with God’s help, we can continue the world’s transformation into the peaceable kingdom. Amen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Like this:
Like Loading...
