Experience: The Lens We Cannot Remove

Welcome to the weekly Dulin Podcast, a ministry of Dulin United Methodist Church in Falls Church, Virginia. Each week, we share a short reflection on faith and life in community, exploring how God's grace moves among us and through us. We're glad you're here.

Hello, Dulin Church. This is James Henry, your pastor at Newland, and I want to greet you and wish you a happy new year in this time. In the coming year, I have some thoughts and plans for the podcast and weekly moments that include perhaps doing some interviews with some of the folks at Doolin for you to hear some stories about how people came to faith, how they came to Doolin, and what's feeding their faith at Dulin these days. But we're not quite there yet. Haven't been able to fit those interviews in.

So, as I looked about for ways to begin the year, since we like to look at our Wesleyan roots and understand more fully who we are, I thought that what I would do in this first month, you know on Sundays we're talking about the Lord's Prayer. Well, now we're going to talk a little bit about some of our Wesleyan roots. And I'm going to talk about something that is derived from Wesley but which he never articulated. And that is what is called the Wesleyan quadrilateral. And as you can imagine, quad means four.

There are four pillars upon which our faith is built. These were articulated by Albert Outler, a Wesleyan scholar, and in a book about Wesley that was meant to kind of describe John Wesley's way of approaching faith. Those four items in the Wesleyan quadrilateral are scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. When I've heard them articulated, especially by very orthodox Wesleyans, they would say scripture, it's like a three legged stool where scripture is actually the seat of the stool, the highest part, the most important part that is upheld by the three legs of tradition, reason and experience. I'm going to flip that a little bit.

I'm going to try to take the approach that makes the most sense to me because as much as I'd like to believe that scripture should be the primary one, and I'm not saying it's not, I'm saying that any of the other three are accessed by experience. Long before I begin to articulate even what faith is and belief is, I am coming at life through experience, through the experience of my home of origin, through my experience of living, of childhood, of school, if I'm raised in the church, of what Sunday school, and pastors and teachers and youth leaders, all of those folks may say to me, I experience life first, and it's that experience that I bring to the table long before I articulate it. Faith doesn't arise as some kind of you know, abstraction. It's a lived reality, and I live it, first of all, through experience. Even the Apostle Paul in the first chapter of Romans would say that the first way that we experience God is through nature, that we see and know what God's about by observing closely nature around us.

Experience is what I have first. Now, God is at work, another Wesleyan piece, and perhaps we'll approach this later on. Various kinds of grace. One of the kinds of grace, prevenient grace, is the grace that is at work in our lives before we ever it empowers us, perhaps, to say yes. It is God's spirit at work in us even before we ever say yes to belief.

But it is an experience that we have that opens us and welcomes us and makes us feel the presence of God. And the God that I know, and I think the God that you know, meets us where we are, not where we imagine ourselves to be. We truly experience life and it's that experience that shapes how we see it. So as we begin to seek God through experience, then those other pieces come in. But even as we look at Scripture, we do it through our experience.

We bring our experience to it. We are a part of that equation. There is no such thing in this world, despite the fact we talk about it all the time. There is no such thing as true objectivity. We are always a subject looking at the world, either subject to subject or subject to object.

And there is always subjectivity. There isn't truly a way to suspend the way you look at things. Even a scientific principle, Heisenberg's principle, states that the actual act of observing, in observing, you change what is observed. You change the way that scripture is perceived. Not to mention the fact that scripture was written in a particular context by particular people whose experience of God is articulated for us in the best and most inspired way they could articulate it for us.

Some of it is stuff that makes us struggle. Some of it seems quite obvious. Some of it we try to look for ways to apply in the period of, you know, two thousand years, three thousand years later, depending upon which part of scripture you're looking at, trying to figure out how to fit that into our lives. That's probably partially reason, it's partially tradition, has taught us some things about it, but it is also our experience we bring to that. We are always going to be ourselves before God.

And I want to say to you that that's okay. That it's okay. We don't need to diminish this. It's not like some kind of balancing act of how we're coming to know and love God. It's not, there's not a 50% of this and 30% of this and 10% of this and 10% of that.

It's not an easy balancing act. We are always going to come oftentimes through experience. Sometimes it's going to be reason. It's going to make sense to us about who God is long before scripture even comes into the picture. But reason is for next week.

This week is experience. The experiences we've had in life shape how we see God. The good, the bad, and the ugly and many of us carry ugly wounds. And you see, God loves and accepts you, the good, the bad, and the ugly. What you perceive to be ugly because God sees that, embraces that, and brings healing to that.

And as we experience that healing, is that not part of the transformative experience of faith? Now, I'm not trying to say that experience is primary. I remember recently I was with one of my teachers and he was reiterating something he had taught before. Richard Orr was talking about how it's kind of like a big wheel. If you remember what those are, it's I grew up with big wheels.

They had two smaller wheels in the back and a great big wheel in the front, and you pedaled it, it was like a tricycle, and you were back like this. He said that the big wheel that leads the big wheel, the big one in the front is experience. It leads the way. It's where it starts. It doesn't have to be where it ends, but we are always experiencing life, always experiencing life.

It's the lens that engages us in the world. The smaller ones he called tradition and reason. But experience often leads the way. So don't diminish your experience when you come to faith. Even if scripture turns out to be primary, and I understand why people would say that, and I even feel that way myself.

I'm always bringing my subjectivity to the experience of scripture. When I preach, when I teach, it is my experience and reason and the tradition that has come to me that informs the way I interpret scripture for you. But it is my experience and I share it with you from my own experience. I'm not trying to relativize your faith or mine. I'm just trying to recognize the truth that before there is scripture for you, before there is any Christian tradition for you, and even before you develop reason, any of us do, we are experiencing life.

And if I understand who God is, God is already always in all the experiences of my life. Not as a causative factor, but certainly as a presence factor, as an accompanying, God accompanies all those pieces of my life and all those pieces of your life. So, we are embodied beings, incarnate. We have experiences. And one of the great tools we have to experience who God is, is this body of ours.

Our hands, our feet, our eyes, our nose, our taste buds, skin, what we hear, what we see, all those pieces. Otherwise, would someone like the Psalmist say, taste and see that God is good. Taste and see that God is good. Part of the reason there is because we experience God in our taste, in our seeing, in our living, in our breathing, in our pain and in our joy, and even in the mediocre moments, God is in them all. So next week we'll be looking at reason and then tradition and then we'll end with scripture.

And it's not because one is more important than the others, but certainly beginning with where you are and where you and I often approach faith is from our own experience. Who is God to me? How am I experiencing and knowing God in my everyday life? I hope that's helpful to you, but if it isn't, I hope that you'll reach out to me and engage me in conversation. You can certainly email me at pastordulandchurch dot org.

You can call and set up an appointment if you want to. Be glad to talk to you or to a group of you, however you wish to address this. Obviously, are lots of things going on at Dylan. We're doing the Lord's Prayer series right now, so this might be a conversation for later on. Could be a class we teach later on, whatever.

In any case, I hope you're having a good new year. Thanks for joining me today, and I will look forward to sharing some more next week. All the best to you.