Sunday, April 30, 2017 | 8:00 a.m.

Hearts Ablaze

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 116:1–4, 12–19
Luke 24:13–35

Today’s good news challenges us to keep our faith
even when we have lost our hope. . . .
No matter what road we are on, Christ is walking beside us.

Joseph W. Houle

“I know you.” “I know you.” Depending on how it’s said, this phrase means different things. One conveys I recognize who you are: in this crowd, you look familiar. I connect your name with your face or remember where we met. The other—I know you—means I get you; I connect with you in your core being.

Both of these ways of knowing are shown in the movie that won this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture, Moonlight. Moonlight is a poignant, painful, yet sometimes beautiful portrayal of a young, black, poor, gay male from childhood to adulthood, searching to find his place in the world. His name is Chiron. As a child, Chiron experienced rejection for his skin color, his sensitivity and small size, and what others suspected was his sexual orientation. He was a bullied, neglected, and all-but-silent child with very few friends.

But one boy did befriend him: Kevin. They hung out and tussled together as kids and expressed physical intimacy as teenagers. It was to Kevin that Chiron confided, “I cry so much sometimes I might turn into drops.” Later in high school Kevin and Chiron parted ways, their last interaction being a physical fight that was instigated by a bully prodding Kevin to prove himself by beating up Chiron. After Chiron later retaliated against the bully, he ended up in a detention center.

Fast forward to a decade later. Kevin suddenly calls Chiron on the phone and apologizes for beating him up. Soon after, Chiron drives from his home in Atlanta back to where he and Kevin grew up, where Kevin still lives and works. He surprises Kevin by showing up at the restaurant where Kevin is the chef. At first Kevin didn’t recognize Chiron: Chiron had been lifting weights and really bulked up since Kevin last saw him. But then Kevin sees his face: “I know you.” Kevin cooks Chiron a special meal, which Chiron eats while the two of them sit together in a booth. Kevin tells Chiron a bit about his life since they were last together. Chiron volunteers nothing until Kevin prods him: “Whatcha doin’? Who you doin’? Tell me something.” Reluctantly Chiron tells him he is “trappin’”—dealing drugs—concluding with “It is what it is.” Kevin responds, “That ain’t what it is. That ain’t you, Chiron.” Chiron retorts, “You don’t know me.” Kevin looks at him straight and long and says, “I don’t know you?” as if to say, “I, Kevin know you, Chiron, better than you know yourself.”

It wasn’t just that Kevin knew Chiron’s personal history since childhood. It wasn’t only that Kevin knew Chiron’s mother was a drug addict or that he had been confused about his sexuality. It wasn’t just that they shared common experiences, including what it’s like to be incarcerated, poor, a man, and black. Kevin was Chiron’s friend. He knew Chiron, heart to heart.

There are different ways of knowing. There is factual knowledge that is about names and faces, historical events, mathematical equations, and scientific realities such as gravity. In Christianity, this kind of knowledge is foundational, because Christianity is a faith based in history—a whole series of particular historical occurrences that reveal God acting in our world. Knowledge about these events must be transferred from one generation to the next to generate faith. Jesus himself was called “Teacher” and “Rabbi.” He was being a teacher with the two disciples as they walked on the road to Emmaus after Christ’s crucifixion, interpreting for them what had happened in light of the scriptures.

But fact-knowledge alone is not enough for faith. The disciples who actually spoke and walked with Jesus had a lot of fact-knowledge. Observing Jesus as they could in an immediate way—not only hearing his words but seeing his facial expressions as he uttered them; not only watching in a spectator manner but participating in events in Jesus’ life—they gained much information about Jesus. Yet with all their firsthand knowledge, not one of them initially “believed.” It was later that they came to believe and to trust. There is no comparison between fact knowledge and faith knowledge (Douglas John Hall, Thinking the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context, p. 377).

Theologian Douglas John Hall wrote that to understand better the mystery of movement from fact to faith we can identify a second type of knowing that differs from both. It is the knowledge of acknowledgement—the assimilation of knowledge that makes it your own. For example, a young child may learn that 5 + 5 = 10, but it doesn’t become significant until that child stands in front of a candy counter with one nickel and five pennies and sees a particularly enticing candy that costs ten cents. This state of knowing—by acknowledgement—is different from just fact knowledge.

This plays out in our faith journey as well. At some point some of the information we have received from scripture and church tradition becomes significant to us. Suddenly, as with a flash of insight, or perhaps gradually over a long period of time, you realize that some aspect of Christian teaching is meaningful to you. It becomes important, useful, clarifying. Some new constellation of events and attitudes make what was once just information newly relevant. It becomes a window through which you can catch a glimpse of meaning not grasped before. This is knowing as acknowledgement.

Yet even the acknowledgment of some particular truths does not necessarily lead to faith. There is also a kind of knowing that differs from the acquisition of data and the acknowledgment of that data. This is the kind of knowing that we engage in regarding human beings. When Kevin says he knows Chiron, he is claiming a certain relationship between them. It’s not just that Kevin knew a lot about Chiron’s history. Nor that certain aspects of Chiron’s personality or story are especially important to Kevin. Kevin knew Chiron in a deep, interior way. That is also true for our movement from knowing facts about God to knowing God, as in trusting God.

The two followers of Jesus Christ walking on the road to Emmaus at first didn’t recognize the stranger walking with them. It was only after they invited this stranger to stay with them, only after he took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them—a ritual they had experienced just three nights before—that they recognized this man was Jesus. Then, after identifying his face with a name, they reflected on how their hearts had been burning within them while Jesus taught and talked with them on the road. He framed recent events in light of God’s saving work in the world. He restored their hope after their despair. He connected them with God and gave their lives meaning. Their eyes were opened, so they not only could recognize Jesus but trust in him. They knew the risen Christ, not just in their heads but in their hearts, with their whole selves. They moved from knowing facts to knowing as faith.

What has to happen for this movement to occur? We Presbyterians don’t often talk about how we come to trust God, but I heard such a story just yesterday. There was a training day here on how to work for social change and justice. One of the tools for working for justice is to conduct one-on-one conversations with people. Our trainer demonstrated how to do a one-on-one with one of the participants, who mentioned she had become a Christian. “Tell me about that,” the trainer said. The woman responded, “Well, I was raised in the church, but I didn’t have a foundation to really know God. Then I began to read the scriptures, and they came alive. Then I fell in love with Jesus.”

This path echoes what Douglas John Hall thinks is involved. Coming to know God as a trusting believer includes making a decision, or more aptly said—“I find myself deciding”—that God has some claim on me and, correspondingly, that I have some kind of responsibility for God. It involves the whole self, including one’s will. Will in this sense includes both thinking and feeling and also transcends both. Like in a marriage covenant, both partners say “I will” to commit themselves to one another. Belief involves a fundamental trust, a commitment of the whole self. At the deepest level, when a Christian affirms that one “knows” God it is not different from what any person means when she says she “knows” a friend, a child, a partner (Douglas John Hall, Thinking the Faith, p. 384).

How does this trusting in God come about? We cannot engineer it. The Holy Spirit must translate what we claim to know in our heads into a language that we understand and receive in our hearts.

God speaks to us through the given structures of creation—through what is historical, natural, human, finite. As Martin Luther preached, “When God wants to speak and deal with us, he does not avail himself of an angel but of parents, of the pastor, or of my neighbor.” God’s approach to us is in the form of the ordinary: ordinary events, ordinary creatures, ordinary people, ordinary thought and discourse.

God spoke to me through the ordinariness of life. As a teenager, I was active in my home church in a small rural town in central Illinois. As a youth, I was elected to serve as a ruling elder. I learned a lot about scripture and God through Sunday school and sermons. I was surrounded by a community of faith who worshiped together and supported one another in daily life. One evening I attended a one-woman play in another church that the town’s Ministerial Association sponsored. It was about Joan of Arc. I was a sixteen-year-old female watching a dramatic retelling of the faith journey of another sixteen-year-old female. I was quite moved by her experiences of hearing and then obeying God’s voice.

That was on a Saturday night. I think it set the stage for the next morning. I went to the Sunday school class where we were learning about worship. My pastor asked me to administer the sacrament of communion, thinking that our denomination would soon allow ruling elders to do that on their own without a pastor around. So I presided over my first communion in that class. Afterwards, one of my close friends came up to me and said, “You did that really well. Have you ever thought about becoming a minister?” Well, I hadn’t. But in that moment I couldn’t say anything. I was speechless, for I suddenly knew God was calling me into the ministry. I knew it in my mind, my spirit, and my body. It was as if my heart was burning within me.

I have not experienced anything quite like that since. Many may never have an experience like that. God reveals God’s Self to us in a variety of ways and unpredictably. That does not mean you won’t or don’t know God. Douglas John Hall wrote that revelation is “to know ourselves eternally befriended.” All of us can come to that deeper place of trusting that we are eternally befriended, because God sends us the Spirit to open our eyes and move into our hearts.

Frederick Buechner wrote,

The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments, the moments which, if we do not look with more than our eyes or listen with more than our ears, reveal only . . . the gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us, a meal like any other meal. But if we look with our hearts, if we listen with all our being and our imagination—what we may see is Jesus himself, and what we may hear is the first faint sound of a voice somewhere deep within us saying that there is a purpose in this life, in our lives, whether we can understand it completely or not; and that this purpose follows behind us through all our doubting and being afraid, through all our indifference and boredom, to a moment when suddenly we know for sure that everything does make sense because everything is in the hands of God, one of whose names is forgiveness, another is love. This is what the stories about Jesus’ coming back to life mean, because Jesus was the love of God, alive among us. (Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat, pp. 87–88)

Jesus is the love of God, alive among us. Through Christ, we know God. God’s Spirit opens our eyes and sets our hearts on fire. You are eternally befriended. Know this! Amen.