A pastor tells the congregation the focus of next week’s sermon is going
to be on lying and she wants everyone to read Mark, chapter 17 during the week
to be better prepared. The next Sunday she
begins her sermon by asking how many people had a chance to do the
reading. Almost everyone raises a
hand. Then the pastor says, “Let me begin
my sermon on lying by telling you the Gospel of Mark only has 16 chapters.”
We Episcopalians are smart
enough to know we don’t know as much about the bible as some of our friends who
go to other churches. We don’t have
bible verses memorized and we struggle to know where to find a particular passage. No one in our Sunday morning lectionary
discussion group is afraid to admit to not understanding what the bible is
saying. We know we don’t know a lot
about the bible and no one is trying to hide it. All in all, this is not a bad thing.
Our gospel readings over the last few Sundays have featured a parade of
religious types, scholars, and civil authorities approaching Jesus with
questions to test and trap him. Today
Jesus turns the table on them and says, “Let me ask you a question”
and it turns out to be a doozy. The
learned people who are out to get him are unable to come up with an
answer.
In life, it is difficult to
know what you don’t know. Here is the
interesting thing, the less you know the more you think you know. In psychology they call this the
Dunning-Kruger Effect, named for social psychologists David Dunning and Justin
Kruger. Through a series of experiments
they determined people of low ability mistakenly assess their competence as
being higher than it actually is. At the
same time, people with high ability tend to underestimate their
competency.
They came to this conclusion
after administering a series of tests to a number of students at Cornell
University, covering subjects such as grammar, math, and history. After each test they asked the students to rank
how they thought they did. Students who
scored in the bottom fourth consistently believed they were in the top
25%. Students who actually scored in the
top 10% believed themselves to be about average.
We see the Dunning-Kruger
Effect playing out in today’s reading.
People with substantially lower ability than Jesus continue to come
after him thinking they can best him. We
see it playing out in our national discourse, community meetings, and places of
employment. Rather than thinking and
acting smarter, we turn to talking louder and louder.
Bertrand Russell famously
observed, “One of the painful things about our time is that those who
feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are
filled with doubt and indecision.”
Dunning and Kruger learned the most confident people are the ones with
the least competency. The more you learn
and the greater your skill becomes the more you realize what you don’t know and
don’t understand, thus the less confident you feel.
All of this is to say
there is something admirable about the way we Episcopalians admit our ignorance
about the bible. No one I know in our
church pretends to know more than he or she knows and while we are not out
there trying to hide our ignorance, no one is flaunting it either. We know we don’t know and we’re O.K. with it.
In truth, we know more
than we think. The old Anglican dictum
of majoring in the majors and minoring in the minors perfectly expresses our
approach to the bible. We tend to focus
on what matters most. This morning we
hear Jesus boil down everything in bible to two simple commands: love God and
love your neighbor. It is an idea so
major we cite it every Sunday morning in our Rite 1 liturgy. We tend not to focus on the minors in
scripture so we can’t quote Paul chapter and verse to back up our beliefs. We are too busy focusing our thoughts on how
to love God and how to love our neighbors, especially the ones who are
difficult to love.
So, while we may not
know the bible as well as some of our Christian friends, I think we
Episcopalians excel at living the bible; not in the way some of our Christian
friends do by not smoking or drinking or dancing or playing cards, but by
paying attention to what really matters… by majoring in the majors.
In today’s Epistle
reading, Paul writes to the Thessalonians how he was gentle when he was with
them. I think there is a gentleness
about us Episcopalians. We are more
likely to help you find your place in the prayer book than to beat you over the
head with a bible. There is a humility
at work among us. We are not biblical
scholars nor are we pious monks. We are
simply people trying to do what matters most… loving God while being kind and good
to one another. We are not perfect at
either, but we know we are not perfect and that is not altogether a bad thing.
