A Learning People

First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
20 ^th Sunday after Pentecost – October 2, 2005
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Philippians 3:4b-14/Psalm 19/Matthew 21:33-46]

Sometimes we use humor to “poke fun” at others and sometimes we “poke fun” at ourselves. This week I heard a variation on this joke. “What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Unitarian? Someone who knocks on your door for no apparent reason.” Here’s the variation: “What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Congregationalist? Someone who knocks on your door, shoves a Bible into your hand and says, ‘Figure it out for yourself!’” It’s cute, but not entirely accurate and I think you’ll see why as we explore what it means to be a learning people.           

I want to begin our consideration of what it means to “grow in the knowledge and expression of our faith” by addressing a common misunderstanding of our Congregational heritage. The Pilgrims and the Puritans were not really separate groups of people, but two ‘wings’ of a movement. Since the turn of the last century and the work of people like Champlain Burrage and Perry Miller we have understood that there were Puritans who wanted to separate from the Church of the England and those who did not wish to separate from it. The Pilgrims were Separatist Puritans. The settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were Non-separating Puritans.

The Separatists wanted to “come out” from what they saw as a church beyond reformation and went so far as to leave the country to do it. The Non-separatists wanted to give a witness to their “dear mother,” as John Winthrop referred to the Anglican Church, what a purified church could look like. Which is why they came on the “errand into the wilderness” or the “great migration” in 1629. Both groups shared a common understanding of theology and approach to the Christian life and at the Cambridge Synod of 1648 these strains would come together to develop the American form of Congregationalism. So when I talk about the Puritans, I know that they were also behind the Presbyterians, the Baptists and even the Quakers, but I’m talking about us.

Now, why did I do this? To demonstrate our heritage and so that we can see the Puritans were a learning people. They valued education highly and saw it as one of God’s gifts to us so that we could understand the two “books” he had given us: the book of nature and the Holy Scriptures. No other group of colonists were so quick, or so driven, to establish schools as were the Puritans. Boston Latin School, America’s first public school, was founded in 1635 and Harvard College in 1636. We read in the 1643 document New England’s First Fruits, “After God had carried us safe to New England, and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity.’ [in Ryken Worldly Saints, p. 158] This desire, often described as a learned ministry to a literate laity, would lead to hundreds of schools and colleges across what would become the United States – including Beloit College, Ripon College and Northland College here in Wisconsin.

Schools were founded because they understood that reason was a gift from God and as good Augustinians/Calvinists saw it as a sign that humans are made in the image and likeness of God. This gift was to be used, as Richard Baxter said, “We must use our best reason . . . to know which are the true Canonical Scriptures . . . . to expound the text, to translate it truly . . . . to gather just and certain inferences from Scripture assertions; to apply general rules to particular cases, in matters of doctrine, worship, discipline, and ordinary practice.” [in Ryken Worldly Saints, p. 160]  So they would not have advocated or used a literalist approach to Scripture. As Perry Miller and Thomas Johnson point out in The Puritans, “What we know as ‘fundamentalism’ would have been completely antipathetic to them, for they never for one moment dreamed that the truth of scripture was to be maintained in spite of our against the evidences of reason, science, and learning.’ [Miller and Johnson The Puritans vol. 1, p. 4] The Puritan curriculum had the Bible at the center and a firm grounding in the liberal arts all around it. That approach shows they were not only the heirs of all that was the best of the Reformation, but also of the Renaissance and of the Medieval Church and they employed this Christian humanist heritage to the glory of God.

Congregationalists, if they are true to their heritage, are people who are constantly seeking to know and to grow. So “to grow in the knowledge and expression of our faith” means realizing we have a faith to begin with. The Puritans stood in the classical Christian tradition; their quarrel with the Church of England wasn’t doctrinal, but political and liturgical. They looked at the book of nature and saw the evidence, the fingerprints and footprints if you will, of a God who has created a wondrous world and echoed the Psalmist, “The heavens are telling the glory of God. . . Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.” They looked at the Bible and saw there the record of God’s self-disclosure gradually unfolding through the covenants until it was made complete in the person and work of Jesus the Christ. And with Paul they said, “I want to know Christ.” This quest for knowledge of God and then to live out the relationship it established was, at root, the Puritan project. I believe it continues to be our project as well.

When Paul tells the Philippians, “I want to know Christ” it is important to understand that this is not knowledge as fact or as mere intellect. The word Paul uses “to know” is used in the language of human intimacy. To know in this way is immediate, personal, and born of experience. What he is saying is, “I don’t what to know about Jesus – I want to know Jesus.” Paul, then, is talking about coming into a deep and personal relationship. This relationship is made possible because in Jesus, God has come to know what it means to be human from the inside out. All of the good and the bad of what it means to be human, even to our very deaths, God take on and transforms through Jesus. God does this so we can experience new life – not just in the hereafter, but in the ‘herenow;’ one of those already-but-not-yet situations that are so much a part of Christian life. Paul says “I don’t have it all yet,” but we can still know a sufficient amount to continue to grow until we attain the fullness, “the high call of God in Christ Jesus.”

The Puritans would not, and we don’t, tell people to “figure it out for yourself.” No, we do this together, as a community gathered in response to God’s self-disclosure to us in the Word made flesh, in the Word of the Scripture, and in the book of nature. If you look in the back of your hymnal on page 512, number 53, you’ll see the Kansas City Statement of Faith of 1913. When it was written it was presented as being held generally among Congregational Christians. A later document came along in 1945 that expanded a bit on this statement and said something I think is quite important. “Every good form in the Church must therefore (a) witness to God and (b) conform to the apperceptions of those who would understand and profit by it. Congregational Christians have never gone to the extreme of denying the place of forms, but they have resolutely resisted the use of any particular one as sacrosanct. They have striven constantly toward the universal which includes all particular forms. The form of their government, their theology, and their liturgical practice is hospitable to all forms by which Christians, whatever their denomination, point toward God. It is this quality which makes them the interdenominational denomination. Their fellowship is not exclusive, but inclusive. The two great sacraments mean, for them, induction into and nourishing communion in the universal fellowship of all who love and serve the Lord. Jesus.”[in Walter Marshall Horton Our Christian Faith, p. 132]

We stand, therefore, in the great tradition of Vincent of Lerins whose canon said that authentic faith was that “believed by all, in every place, and at all times” and that did not change into something else, but grew into full maturity. Vincent used the analogy of the human person and it’s apt. Hard as it is to believe, I once weighed eight pounds nine ounces. That was a long time ago, but while I weigh a great deal more I am still the same person, though grown into maturity. All of me that was there at birth is still here now, but fully developed. So it is with Christian doctrine. It doesn’t change into something else, it grows more fully into what it is. As Christians we don’t grow that way by ourselves, we need to be guided by the Holy Spirit and accompanied on the journey by those who seek the fullness of truth with us.

As a learning people, then, we don’t shut the doors and say that we have the exclusive hold on knowledge. Jesus told his parable of the vineyard to make the point that knowledge of God is not the exclusive property of religious leaders. He tells this parable, with its foreshadowing of his own passion, to remind his hearers that God seeks to embrace and include, not exclude. The knowledge that we gain is to be shared, rather than controlled, so that others may enter the vineyard. Let me put it this way, our faith should lead us to fellowship and that fellowship is expressed in freedom. It may be wonderfully alliterative to say “faith, freedom, fellowship,” but theologically the other way is more accurate.

“To grow in the knowledge and expression of our faith” means that we’re on a journey together and it’s not “do it yourself,” nor is it “solo.” I think the joke might be a bit more accurate if it went like this: “What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Congregationalist? Someone who knocks on your door, hands you a Bible and says, ‘Come join us. Bring your questions, your doubts, and your baggage with you, but join us. We’re a learning people and we’ll figure it out together under the Spirit’s guidance.” Oh, I know it doesn’t make for a snappy punch line, but it is the truth. We are here to learn – together.