Continuity and Change

March 14, 2021 • Fourth Sunday in Lent •
Reading: 1 Corinthians 13 (New International Version)
John Kleinig, guest preacher

Join me as I pray:
Let the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength, and our redeemer. Amen

It’s good to be part of this joyful, welcoming, and very diverse community. Normally, I am more than content to be a muted rectangle on my computer screen as others lead our services in creative and talented ways: as we exemplify the body of Christ, with its many integral parts working together to comfort, challenge, provoke, and uplift. And now, here I am, unmuted.

In recent weeks, in our series “Living with Loss, Mortality, and Change,” we have focused mainly on loss and mortality. This week I want to center our thoughts around change – not change as such, but on continuity and change, on the ways in which our identity and faith identity evolve and yet retains their continuity over time. I am going to be quite autobiographical in this, and especially because of that what I say is not intended as a template for anyone else, although I hope that at least some of us will be able to resonate with the phenomena that I relate.

Although I will be quite autobiographical, and focused on myself as an individual, and the changes that I have undergone, I think that what I have to say has wider ramifications as we reflect on our larger society, especially after January 6, when we saw what was essentially an effort to stifle change, a desperate attempt to cling to a status quo that was believed to be under threat. Call it White Supremacy, if you wish, but it was wider than that. We also see some of the same ruptures in the clash between conservatives and progressives of various kinds, both religious and political; between those who are Constitutional Originalists and those who see the Constitution as responsive to ”evolving standards of decency”; between fundamentalists and those who are more religiously inclusive. I do not necessarily want to come down exclusively on a particular side in the great social and religious debates of our time. There is probably something to be said for each side, or for not taking sides. Although I think change is inevitable, it can also be very disturbing if it happens too fast, or without regard to its effects, and we find that our identities are threatened rather than enriched.

It’s usually a safe bet that, when 1 Cor 13 is chosen as the scriptural passage for a sermon, you are in for a sermon about love’s primacy. And, in a way, that will be the case. But that is not where I want to start. Toward the end of this chapter, Paul writes the following:

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

Change. I was a child – a very privileged child, as I now recognize – but because my father reached adulthood at the beginning of the Great Depression (he was born in 1912), I was an adult before I realized that behind his insecurities, we were extremely comfortable. My family was not religious, though it was very conservative, and I, as a child, was particularly “wayward.” I use that old Middle English word, because, although I was not overtly rebellious, I was doing “a lot of stuff” – let’s leave it at that – behind the scenes. I spent a good deal of my time in fear that I would be caught.  I feared my father’s hand and I came to fear the police. But I was addicted to my waywardness, and so my life was one of constant concealment and deception and apprehension. At the ripe old age of 13, the first year of what in Australia we called high school, I went with a friend to what was an interdenominational evangelistic camp, at which my first act was to find a local store where I could buy a packet of Camel cigarettes (they were the cheapest you could get: there was no Joe Camel in those days). I came to the camp to get away from home – for freedom, certainly not for the evangelism.

Something/SomeOne at that camp touched me more deeply than I could have expected. I experienced a solution to my addictive waywardness and I underwent what people often refer to as a Damascus Road experience. No, I did not lose my sight, but my first act was to throw the remains of my packet of cigarettes into the sand dunes. With the support of leaders at that camp, I became a different person – still recognizably John Kleinig, but no longer at the mercy of my wayward passions. Not surprisingly, that experience also came with a lot of conservative theological baggage – baggage that in many respects was helpful, but also, as I was gradually to find, constraining in ways that made me more sure and arrogant than would have been good for me in the long run. In my new-found know-it-allness, I became quite argumentative, and when I went to university five years later, I decided that among the courses I would take I would include one in Philosophy – basically, the science of argumentation. This did not sit well with some of my Christian mentors who quoted Paul’s warning in the letter to the Colossians about seeing “to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ“ (Col 2:8). But in my passionate and arrogant way I did not heed their warning and, in the end, I spent my next 50 years as a philosophy student and then a philosophy professor.

The shift to Philosophy did not immediately set me on the path to the Church of the Village – or, for that matter, on the path to perdition. No doubt it improved my argumentative skills and exposed me to a much wider range of thinking than would have been the case had I not gone down that track. But for a good while what happened is that I became increasingly aware that my chosen subject, Philosophy, supposedly the most rational of disciplines, was more divided by competing schools of thought than almost any other academic discipline. The reign of reason was beset by internal intrigue. Meantime, my theological views were looking down on Philosophy’s foibles from on high, along with theological explanations as to why Philosophy was in such a mess. It took me a while to realize that the explanation of what was making such a mess of Philosophy – our very human limitations – was doing pretty much the same to Theology, and that my superior theological perch was as vulnerable to crosswinds as that of Philosophy.

So, was it time to be more open to alternative ways of thinking about my faith? Or should I scrap both Philosophy and Theology? But where would I go? I was still stuck with myself. I lived in a valley, not on a mountain top, troubled with the same human limitations as everyone else. What was importantly different however, was that the moral and psychological transformation brought about by that adolescent encounter had stayed with me through thick and thin. The Jesus who had transformed my young and wayward life was still with me in and through my uncertainties and frailties. And I found that I could manage the possibilities and challenges of change because my Companion on the way had not abandoned me.

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” I do not claim that what I now profess to know, though I believe a considerable advance on what I once thought I knew, is somehow fixed in stone. For, as Paul goes on to say: “For now [even as adults] we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” [I should point out that first century mirrors were not quite as reflective as twenty-first century ones – the older translations talk about “seeing through a glass darkly.”] Even as a man, putting away childish things, I have no right to think that I have reached a new pinnacle of certainty. I have become comfortable with a certain amount of provisionality – as something that is part of the limited nature of my human experience. There is a real arrogance about thinking that what one thought one knew at age 13 should remain unquestioned at age 78. But there is also an arrogance about thinking that what one knows at 78 is all that there is to know.

I often think about the mysterious but righteous Job in the Old Testament, tested, beset by the most horrible misfortunes – in social relations, family well-being, and bodily integrity – and in the end, in despairing anguish, he comes to God and says: “What’s going on? What are you doing this for?” And God says: “Come and stand before me, Job. Where were you when I created the heavens and earth? Where were you when I parted the seas?” And it goes on like this for a chapter or two. And at the end of it Job says: “OK, I was out of my depth. But I have seen you, and I am satisfied.” Job’s questions were not answered in the way that he hoped for or in his lifetime, but through his encounter with God he was able to see enough to be satisfied. “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

It was the embracing, enabling, and abiding love of the Jesus whom I encountered those many years ago who made me able to embrace change, who empowered a broadening of my philosophical perspectives, who aided continuity through change, who brought growth, stability and continuity through change and uncertainty.

It is not as though I no longer have any views. I have many. And I don’t expect others to agree with all of them. But the embracing, enabling, nurturing, and stabilizing love of my life’s Companion have allowed me to gain and keep a much more open and honest mind than I might have had.

It is no accident, I believe, that it is within Paul’s hymn to love (1 Cor 13) – a love coming from God and shown in the Christ who loves and Spirit who imbues us with love – that change finds its safe haven. Indeed, change is central to its message:  

“8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.“

And so I come round to the teaser in this week’s bulletin: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” We don’t know when this dictum originated, but our records go back to about 1620, and it has been repeated by many people since, including by John Wesley. We may sometimes disagree about and even change our minds on what is essential and what is non-essential, but the love that never fails is encloses our living and growing, our core and periphery, our sense of what is essential and what is not essential, what is continuous and what changes. For that love is what draws us to faith and keeps us in faith, what grounds our faith and guides our faith.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Benediction
Through all the changing scenes of life, in trouble and in joy, the praises of my God shall still my heart and tongue employ.
Oh, make but trial of his love, experience will decide how blest are they, and only they, who in his truth confide.
[Nicholas Brady (1659 - 1726) and Nahum Tate (1652 - 1715)]  1696

Go in Peace, and the Peace and Love of God go with you. Amen

(c) 2021 John Kleinig
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