Jesus Teaches People

Jesus Teaches People

Mark 4:1-20

I’ve been worried lately.  I want to share that worry today.  It’s not Russia or China or Iran or North Korea.  It’s not the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.  It’s not climate change or immigration or crime.  Nope. I’m worried about the confirmation bias that blocks us as a society at nearly every turn from being able to work together to deal with the challenges before us.

Bear with me…Confirmation bias is the tendency that we all have to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs and theories.  In other words, we go through life sorting the world for evidence of what we already believe.  So, if it’s hot today, and I believe in climate change, I may point to the thermometer and say, “See!” Or, if I don’t believe in climate change and it’s cold today, I may point at the thermometer and say, “See!”  The problem is that no matter what I believe, a single day’s temperature is not reliable evidence, either way.  Sadly, that won’t keep us from trying to make the point over and over again: “See!  I’m right!”

If I believe that left handed people are more creative than right handed people, I’ll search for all the creative left handed people I can find.  If I believe that women are this and men are that or gay people are this and straight people are that or young people are this and old people are that then it is not hard to sort the world to support my case.  However, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that such contrived “evidence” is leading us to what’s true.  Yes, we will find examples, even if we have to cross our eyes to make the examples fit.  Yes, we will find other people who believe what we believe.  (Thanks to the internet, no one is ever alone in what they think, no matter how outlandish their thoughts may be.) Yes, we will find ways to filter the world so that we and our children and the other people who matter to us never have to be exposed to things that would challenge our preconceptions.

One of our superpowers as human beings is the ability to think.  However, thinking is hard work.  We have to pay attention and keep challenging our assumptions.  We have to be awake and aware of what’s changing around us.  We have to be curious and open minded.  Maybe what we have to be most open to is the possibility, if not the total likelihood, that I may be wrong, that I don’t know everything there is to know, that something may surprise me and cause me to rethink everything.  We might have to utter the rarest of all phrases in this life: “I’m not sure!”  At that point, we are likely to be labeled, “wishy-washy.”  And if we dare to change our minds, we will be deemed to be “flip-floppers.” 

The truth is that it is exhausting to think carefully.  So, we have recreational and pharmaceutical chemicals to turn off our minds, to make us feel comfortable and to help us sleep.  We have hundreds of channels to pick from so that we don’t ever have to listen to people who disagree with us.  We can choose to listen to people we trust tell us why no one should trust the people we already don’t trust.  When it comes to picking our friends, not many of us are drawn to folks who challenge us or are even all that different from us.  “Life’s complicated enough,” we think to ourselves, “Why would I want to surround myself with people who make life more complicated?”  Every day, we choose comfort and security and belonging over discomfort and honesty and facts.  And, billions of dollars are spent every year to get us to keep making that choice over and over again.

Again, I want to be super careful here.  Confirmation bias happens in every nation, among every ethnic group and religion, in every group that takes a position on any issue.  When people gather, no matter how we arrange ourselves, we are drawn to what is comfortable, what affirms us, what makes us feel safe and secure.  We think, “I can trust these people.  I can relax with these people.  I can know that I’m ‘among friends.’” We want so badly to feel like we are acceptable, like we belong, like we’re doing okay.

Let me loop back to where we started.  Am I saying that conflicts with China and Russia and North Korea don’t matter?  No!  Am I saying that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat?  No!  Am I saying that global warming and immigration and crime don’t matter?  God, no!  What I want you to hear this morning, really hear…what I want you to see this morning, really see…is that when confirmation bias has control over us, we can’t do anything about any of the things that matter most.  All we will be doing is coming up with “evidence” that I’m right and your wrong.  (Surprise!) I will prove to myself and people like me that I’m a good person. Maybe you, my like minded friend, are good, too. (Surprise!). All we will be doing, though, is wasting our time and energy and the air that we breathe because there will be absolutely no constructive conversation and no real progress in getting something done.  Really, the gridlock that confirmation bias produces at best keeps us stuck where we are and at worst is a total waste of precious life.

Here’s the boiled down problem.  Every moment of every day something happens and we respond.  Viktor Frankl, a psychologist and Holocaust survivor, put the matter this way: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Viktor Frankl spent his life trying to get us to be aware of that space to choose in life—the chance to think, the chance to pause and consider our options before we respond.  If we can do that we are free.  If we can do that we can grow.  However, most of the time we aren’t even aware that we have a choice.  We just blindly and instinctually respond as we’ve already responded.  We keep thinking what we’ve always thought.  There’s no room for anything new.

I’m convinced that one of the things that Jesus was most opposed to was just doing what we’ve always done.  Things need to change.  We need to be made new. We need to learn how to live in an entirely different way.  We need to rethink everything and reorder our priorities.  We need to turn the wisdom of the world on it’s head.  But first…first…we need to wake up to the notion that any of that is even possible.

How does Jesus wake people up?  He takes what people are sure they know, what they are sure is the way things should be, what they are sure is just common sense, and he twists those things around.  He doesn’t do this by screaming at people that they are wrong.  He knows that just makes people dig in.  Instead, he tells stories.  He invites people to participate in those stories, almost like an audience at a melodrama.  (I like to imagine the crowds booing and cheering their “heroes” in the stories just long enough to find out that they had the characters all wrong.) Those stories were unsettling, subversive, challenging, mind-jarring tidbits of wisdom.  Those stories were called parables.

We all know some of the parables:  “The Prodigal Son,” “The Good Samaritan,” “The Shepherd and the Lost Sheep.”  They all contain reversals.  The prodigal son should have paid a heavy price but the father loved him, instead.  The notion of a good Samaritan was crazy for people who hated Samaritans.  The Shepherd and the Lost Sheep?  Well, ask yourself this, how long is a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep behind to go look for one going to stay in business?  “Good stories should make us feel good! Come on, Jesus…”

This morning’s parable is a parable about parables in the end.  The question is, “Why didn’t Jesus just say what he had to say?  Why did he have to make the truth some secret message?”  Jesus tells a story about a farmer who isn’t a very bright farmer—kind of like the shepherd and the one sheep.  This farmer takes precious seed and just throws it wildly everywhere.  Who does that? Good seed shouldn’t be wasted.  Plant it where it’s going to grow. At this point, Jesus has his audience hooked.  Like everyone who has ever watched a reality show, the crowd gets to think, “Well, at least we’re smarter than that farmer!” 

So, this idiot farmer carelessly spreads seed everywhere.  When you do that, all sorts of things are going to happen.  If you’ve ever spread grass seed and then watched the birds descend on your lawn, you’ve got one potential outcome.  Maybe you’ve spread some seed only to watch it wither later when the weather got hot or the drought set in.  It was in a spot where the roots couldn’t get deep enough.  Maybe, like me, you put that seed out without really weeding and the weeds just choked the new growth off.  Or maybe you got really lucky and the seed landed in just the right place at the right time and something actually grew.  If you were planting crops, not grass, maybe you got some delicious fruit in the end.

Now, Jesus looks the crowd in the eye and says, “Are you listening?  Are you really listening?”  

Later, Jesus is with the disciples and they circle back to this story.  They ask him, “What’s the deal with the farmer?”  He points out to the disciples that he has shared with them in private some wisdom about how God’s kingdom works.  (And we know as Mark’s audience would have known, that even with that extra instruction, the disciples were not the “soil” where every seed grew lavishly.  They would struggle wildly, even with Jesus’ extra help, to remain faithful and bear fruit!)  What I think he’s implying to the disciples is that when he tells the crowds a good story, he’s actually being a good farmer.  He’s preparing the “soil”—those people— for the seed to come.  Of course, everyone knows that seed shouldn’t be wasted, that work has to be done before you plant.  The crowd just doesn’t realize that they are being prepared as a fertile place where what God plants can grow.  They don’t yet really see.  They don’t yet actually hear.  They don’t yet fully understand.  However, a story that unsettles things, that loosens their rock hard convictions, that uproots a weed or too might be just the right start.

Jesus says to the disciples that if he just bluntly told people God’s truth, it would be just like the seed in the story. Some people wouldn’t be able to hear it at all.  Some would hear it and get really excited about it but their faith would be too shallow and wouldn’t withstand the challenges that came.  Some people would let worrying about the weeds—their wealth, their work, their lesser concerns—choke off their faith altogether.  If you want something to grow, you have to prepare the soil.  You have to clear some weeds.  You have to make room for growth.  That’s what parables do.  They prepare the soil for the seeds that will be planted in God’s own way and in God’s own time.  

I like to think that Jesus then winked at the disciples and said, “Just wait ‘till you see that fruit!  Forgiveness and care and compassion and love— all ripe and ready for the picking.  That, my friends, is what new life tastes like.” 

It boils down to this. Will you look again, listen again, rethink things one more time?  Can you tolerate the unexpected? Can you deal with the discomfort of not being sure?  Will you pause long enough between what’s just happened and the urge to do something to ask, “What am I missing?  What is it about me that’s getting in God’s way? What am we being called to do together?”