Faith That Thinks

Hi, friends, and welcome to the weekly Dulin podcast, a brief weekly reflection from Dulin United Methodist Church in Falls Church. Here, we take time to think together about faith, community, and what it means to live as disciples of Jesus in today's world.

Hello, Dulin Church. It's good to be with you for another week in the Doolin weekly podcast. We hope you're enjoying the weekly podcast as well as the weekly moment that we share. And certainly, as always, I invite your responses, your thoughts, topics you might want us to consider. Obviously, we're right in the middle of the Wesleyan quadrilateral.

We have today and two more weeks beyond that to finish up the Wesleyan quadrilateral, the four things that kind of feed into faith that we began last week. But I'm always interested in the things you might want to hear about, pastordulanchurch.org. So if you have thoughts, I encourage you to send them along and I always look forward to hearing your feedback. This week we are talking about faith that thinks. We're talking about the word reason.

Now I want you to think for a moment that reason is not the enemy of faith. It is the God given capacity for us that helps us make sense of God's revelation in real life. God gave us a mind and God hopes that we will use it. In fact, when Jesus invites us, you know, he tells us that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. So the mind is a part of that.

For us in our Wesleyan tradition, it's important to remember that reason does not replace scripture. It does not stand above God. And it does, however, help us to discern, interpret, test, and apply our faith faithfully every single day. It's the means by which faith becomes livable. It doesn't tell us who God is but it helps us live honestly with the God we encounter in everyday life.

We talked about experience last week And experience is something that we all have long before we even begin to reason. But as we develop reason in our lives, we can begin to discern how we apply the faith, what we do with the information we receive. So here's well, John Wesley never named the quad or formally even outlined the quadrilateral. His practice shows that he believed that scripture gave the story, tradition gives us wisdom across time, experience gives us context and texture, it's what we bring to the story, and reason gives us coherence and accountability. Without reason scripture can become a weapon, tradition can become rigid, and experience can become untethered.

Reason helps us helps us stay away from confusing certainty with faithfulness. I've heard people say that faith really is certainty and it's not so much certainty. In fact, I would say certainty is the opposite of faith. It's knowing that what I know is right in such a way as to not even question what I know. Because what I know right now may grow.

My understanding of the thing that I know right now may grow, may change. I may discover that the thing I'm sure I know right now, it can be dispelled. And reason helps me do that. Reason helps me stand back. It was perhaps reason, we call it doubt, when you think about Thomas, doubting Thomas, the one who questioned the resurrection.

He wasn't the first to question it. Mary Magdalene announces it to the other disciples, they question it until Jesus shows up and shows them. Thomas comes back, questions because he wasn't there when they saw it. And doubt is, he wanted to be more reasonable in his reality. So his reason caused him to doubt and invited him to a deeper encounter.

Our God given ability to think, question, connect, and make meaning always aware that we are finite creatures. You see, reason doesn't mean I'm going to have all the answers. And it allows us to ask questions like what makes sense here? What aligns with love of God and neighbor? What holds together the whole witness of scripture for us?

And what kind of fruit might this belief bear? I think it's important for us to remember that reason is a way of discerning. It's not a way of controlling. Now, what's interesting is some of the earliest learning I did about evangelism after I was graduated from high school, went off to college and I was involved in a couple of Christian groups or was exposed to several Christian groups whose training was to list some points of scripture and then lead you down a reasoned path to come from your place where you were to believe in Jesus. Now, by that time I already believed in Jesus, but that didn't stop people from thinking I didn't believe in Jesus the way they believed in Jesus and hence was outside of that.

And they tried to use a reasoned approach to draw me to their side, tried to weaponize faith, if you will. And sometimes we do that. We think that faith can we can win people to faith with reason. Reason doesn't give us control over anyone else or the narrative. It doesn't certainly give us any kind of control over God.

Reason helps us respond wisely to what's rising. We need to remember that faith isn't about shutting off our minds. It's about letting our minds be formed by love. We do that by accepting the mysteries that come to us, receiving them, and engaging them in ways that don't demand a rightness on our own part. Reason gives us space to ponder, to question, to look, and to come to some conclusions.

Right or wrong in the moment, that can help us move forward on the path of faith. So, you know, oftentimes when we talk about these things, concrete examples are helpful. So, think about it. Scripture tells us, Jesus says, it's let's say for instance, the second great commandment, I've already mentioned the first, that includes the mind, the second is to love our neighbors as ourselves. In both instances Jesus was quoting the Hebrew Bible, was quoting something else altogether.

When scripture says love your neighbor, Next week we'll be talking about tradition. Tradition may have shown us ways that Christians have tried to do that. Experience brings us into this moment, this neighbor, this context we're in. Reason will then help us ask the question, what does love look like here now with these people in these places and these consequences in which we face them. How do I love my neighbor as myself in this moment?

You know, what is the most loving response? And reason allows us to think through some possible ways that we can respond to the scripture inviting us, telling us to love our neighbor as ourselves. What does that look like when I do it? So, reason helps us move from the principle that Jesus gives us to a way of practicing it. And as we know with in our Wesleyan tradition, John Wesley was all about taking having faith as something in our minds to how do we practice it.

So not just the principle, in principle I love everyone, I love all my neighbors. What does that look like in real practice in everyday ways? I have to tell you something that tends to be something we think about reason. We tend to think that reason allows us to be neutral or objective. That's just false.

You're always going to be you in a moment and as I've mentioned before, you're observing what's going on around you affects what's going on around you. It impacts, so it can't be neutral or objective. Reason can be distorted when it refuses to admit its own biases. You know, I happen to be born in a first world country in The United States. I was raised in a certain culture with a certain way of seeing things.

I happen to be a white male in that culture, and I bring certain biases just by the fact I'm those of that. Add to that the fact that I have an you know, I graduated from high school, I have an undergraduate education, as well as a graduate education, and there's all sorts of biases that I bring to any given moment. And that can distort my reason if I can't admit that I have biases. Sometimes reason leads us to be defensive rather than curious. We feel like what we have right now needs defending as opposed to curiosity to hear what other perspectives we might bring and find a way to accommodate into our faith and understanding.

Reason works best when it knows it isn't the center of the universe. I'm not, it's not. So, what I want to invite you to do in the coming week, It's a simple practice, an opportunity to use your reason. When you feel yourself becoming reactive in a situation, when something is happening, when you read something, if you're on social media or you watch a news story and it makes you reactive, Pause and ask these questions and this comes from reason. What am I assuming about this situation?

What are my assumptions? What else might be true? Reason helps us think that. And what response here is most aligned with love? These are all questions of your reason.

So let reason be your companion this week. And thus ends this talk about a second part of the Wesleyan quadrilateral. Remember scripture, tradition, reason and experience and we began with experience, we've moved to reason, next week is tradition and we'll follow that with scripture. Thanks so much for joining me. Again, I welcome your input, your responses, your thoughts, always interested in hearing.

Until the very next time that I see you, I wish you all the very best.