“Invitation to Change: From Certainty to Curiosity”
Isaiah 40:18-31
John 3:1-17
I was raised to be certain about things—especially anything having to do with God or church.
So strongly was this drilled into me that I had my first little mini-crisis of faith in the third grade. Miss Oehlberg, who I adored, had taught us a wee bit about evolution. I don’t remember the details of the lesson, but I do remember feeling very confused.
So when Miss Oehlberg assigned us to write a one-page summary of the lesson, I was conflicted. In the end, I wrote an accurate, objective report, and then added a P.S. that went something like this:
“I know this is what you told us but I don’t really believe it. I believe what the Bible says: that God created the earth and everything in it in six days.”
I’m pretty sure I felt proud and brave.
Fast forward to my college years beyond the Bible Belt, and things began to get more complicated. In my first couple of weeks, I encountered an ecumenical fellowship group, and I had a hard time believing that the Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans and others who were becoming my closest friends would go to hell because they weren’t part of the one true church I had been raised in.
Near the end of my sophomore year, I wrote my parents a long letter quoting scripture and explaining why I was leaving the church of my family for a nondenominational church in inner-city Chicago. To put it mildly, it did not go over well. My parents all but disowned me for a time, and I began to see the difference between a clear, straightforward life of worshipping a very narrow interpretation of the Bible and rejecting every idea that doesn’t fit into that tiny box of belief, and the much less comfortable life of faith and trust, in which we prioritize life with God and loving God’s people more than our ideas about God and doctrine.
And still I had—and still I have—such a long, long way to go on the journey from the place where clarity and security come from holding certain beliefs to the path where life and meaning are found in a foundational trust in the goodness of God, an openness to holy encounter, and a wonder-filled enchantment with the world.
I have a long way to go and, unlike so many other times in my life, I am willing to consider that even in this I am wrong. And yet I’m beginning to think that this shift—from certainty to curiosity, from a reliance on belief to a trust in encounter, from the God of our making to the God we cannot even begin to imagine—is essential. Not only to a life of faith but to any kind of meaningful, fulfilling life.
The shift is not always easy; sometimes the way feels scary and unknown. But I want to be willing to make that change; by God’s grace, I commit myself to opening my mind and heart to the transforming power of the Spirit—not only in my ideas about God but in my relationships with people and on all kinds of subjects.
Are you willing to change? Will you commit yourself to that opening this Lent?
Before we consider Nicodemus, before we explore some ways to nurture wonder and enchantment, I want to say a few more words about what this change from certainty to curiosity might look like.
You see, while I was raised to be certain about what I believed, these days I am more likely to encounter people who feel very strongly about what they don’t believe. Yet an unwillingness to trust or believe can be at least as dangerous as a refusal to let go of limiting beliefs.
Think about it:Jesus got into trouble precisely because he challenged people’s ideas about God. Jesus said God loves mercy more than righteousness, that God loves extravagance more than fairness, that God loves the very people we take pride in judging and even hating, that God loves not just certain kinds of people but the whole world. As so often happens when certainty is challenged, instead of engaging with the ideas themselves, instead of actually hearing the good news, people attacked Jesus for the trouble his message would cause.
But both kinds of certainty—a certainty in what we believe to be true and our certainty in what we refuse to consider and insist cannot be true—limit God, the gospel, and the potential for life-changing healing and reconciliation, peace, justice, and joy.
Which is to say: If we feel sure about what God is or is not, our God is too small. If we are convinced that God works in some ways but not others, or doesn’t work in us or the world at all, we have put God into a box.
It is something we all do, and Nicodemus was no different. But give him props for his willingness to explore the boundaries of knowledge and belief.
His opening line, however, betrayed his attachment to certainty.
“We know,” he told Jesus, “that you are a teacher who has come from God”—because, his statement implied, we know what someone blessed by God looks like and the kinds of things they do.
I don’t know how Nicodemus expected Jesus to respond to that circumscribed faith statement, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t expect what Jesus said, which was in essence, “Well, no one can really see what God is up to unless they’ve been born of the Spirit.”
Give Nicodemus props for hanging in there with Jesus, for asking him question after question about what he was saying. Unfortunately, he was going for clear, rational answers that fit into his narrow worldview.
Finally, exasperated with a series of answers that he did not understand, he said, “How can these things be?”
To which Jesus, perhaps equally exasperated, replied, “Why do you refuse to believe what I’m saying? Why can’t you and others accept me for who I am?”
The wind blows where it will, so why is it so hard to believe that you can be born again, of the Spirit? God so loves the world that God gives up everything, so why can you not imagine that God’s grace is at work even now, even here?
God, in the person of Jesus, was inviting Nicodemus to let go of his attachment to certainty and be re-born into the love of God. And God is still inviting us—through our sacred scriptures, the heart-melting beauty of the natural world, the transformative powers of love, and the miracle of church—to allow our hearts and minds to be moved from certainty, a reliance on what we can see and know, to curiosity and a trust nurtured by Spirit and our encounters with mystery and the sacred.
“Have you not known?” the prophet asks. “Have you not heard? Haven’t you seen the evidence all around you?”
God is the everlasting God, and with God anything is possible. God does not faint or grow weary, and God can bless you with power and strength, growth and endurance.
“What if,” asks Barbara Brown Taylor, “the whole Bible is less a book of certainties than it is a book of encounters, in which a staggeringly long parade of people run into God, each other, life—and are never the same again? Faith,” she says, “has more to do with staying fully present to what is happening right in front of you than with being certain of what it all means.”
What if we allowed ourselves to be born again, with the curiosity and wonder of children? What if we refused to let our own woundedness, busyness, fear, and the suffering and weight of the world crush our natural inclination toward astonishment and delight? Why not adopt a curious, expansive view of who God might be? Why not open our hearts and minds to the very best possibilities?
What if we began by committing ourselves to notice the world around us? What if we set an intention of naming the people and practices that open our hearts and bring us peace and delight, and then committed ourselves to making more time for them? What if we spent so much time feeling grateful that we fell in love with the Source of all goodness?
One of the best cures for certainty is a willingness to explore, and one of the best ways to facilitate change is to make a commitment to un-learning and growing that is stronger than our commitment to staying the same.
Have you not heard? Have you not known? The creator of the ends of the earth loves you, and the God who is love longs for your wholeness and joy.
Why not accept the invitation?
