How Do You Know?

1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18 

April 26, 2015

I am a conceptual thinker, but an experiential learner. I don’t know if that’s an unusual combination; I just know that’s how I think and how I learn. How do I know? A lifetime of trial and error … and then pondering the trials and the errors seeking to understand them ever more deeply.

That’s how I know. I don’t know how you know.

But given that I learn experientially, the way that I know things conceptually is by learning them concretely. How do I know that my mother loves me? I learned it as she fed me and cared for me as an infant and young child, and later on as she drove me to practices and to school and to all kinds of other events … and, all the more so a bit later when she let me drive her.

How do I know that my child has a good teacher? When I watch my child come alive talking about class; when she points out things in the world that she’s learned about in the class; when she begins teaching me things she’s learned that I don’t know.

How do I know that we’re on the right track as a church? Well, I could turn to our Book of Confessions where I’d learn that the marks of the true church are these: the word of God is preached and heard; the sacraments are rightly administered; the order of the church nurtures and sustains a covenant community. That’s a decent list and I could check it off one by one. Or I could look at the budget and see that it’s healthy. Or I could look around and see that lots of folks are involved and engaged.

But the way I know that we’re on the right track is this: we see brothers and sisters in need and we help. The church is healthy when the love of God abides in its members. “This is how they will know that you are my disciples,” Jesus said, “that you love one another as I have loved you.”

How do we know that love? We know it when we see it in action.

We saw it – no, we embodied it yesterday when we spent the day rebuilding a neighbor’s home, restoring a house and yard, and making a place where love will abide for years to come.

We’ll see it in just a few minutes when a bunch of us go outside to plant a garden that we’ll nurture for months as it produces hundreds of pounds of fresh vegetables to feed our hungry neighbors.

We’ll see it later this afternoon when some of us will gather for an interfaith worship service to pray together for justice, and to hold the United State Supreme Court in prayer as they prepare to hear arguments on marriage equality this week. And we’ll see it Tuesday morning as many of us gather in front of the Court to stand on the side of love.

Sisters and brothers, “let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”

That’s how we know.

Now the sign that has hung outside over our parking lot for the better part of 15 years proclaims, in words, that we welcome everyone with faith and doubt. I am living proof of the truth of those words because, I promise you, nobody has wrestled with the claims of our faith and the structures of our church more deeply and skeptically than I have.

I dare say that what we consider “doubt” usually circles around words of the faith, creedal convictions about the nature of God, the lordship of Jesus, the understanding of resurrection. In other words: statements about broad concepts that beg the question, “how do you know?”

While I can certainly engage and even enjoy a good conceptual discussion about theology or Christology or ecclesiology or eschatology, such discussion are not how I know anything about God or about Jesus or about the church or about the ultimate fulfillment of history. Partly, that is due to my own limited capacities, but partly it’s due to the limits of language itself and the framework for what we say we know in this day and age.

I mean here, that in a highly technical, scientific, post-enlightenment cultural context our language and framework for knowing are limited too often to technical, scientific, literal understandings of what is far better understood metaphorically and experientially.

Take the passage from the gospels this morning. “I am the good shepherd.”

If your only framework for understanding that phrase is literal, then most of us are at a complete loss because you can’t even have sheep in Arlington County. We don’t have a clue, really, what a shepherd is, what a shepherd does, how a shepherd lives.

The words only come alive when we begin to understand the metaphor. Only then can we even begin to read perhaps the most famous lines in all of scripture, “the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. God makes me to lie down in green pastures; God restores my soul.”

These are rich metaphors, but even in their richness they only begin to come alive when we experience them as lived realities. That is to say, when we experience inexpressible love abiding in the lives of the people of God as they care for us, for one another, and for neighbors in need. Then we begin to know. When that love abides in us, when we find ourselves expressing it and extending it to others – especially to others not like ourselves – we begin to understand. When the love of God abides in us, when we have the capacity to help, and we see a brother or sister in need and offer all we have for his or her sake? That is how we know. Amen.