The Virtue of Curiosity

Rev. Karen Chakoian
First Presbyterian Church
Granville, Ohio

John 1:29-42

Like so many great passages from scripture, this one contains so much to linger over and spend time with. There are so many details that make it rich! Did you notice all the names for Jesus… “Lamb of God,” “Messiah,” “Son of God,” “Rabbi?” In just a few verses you get an idea just how complex Jesus really is, just by the titles and names he carries. We could spend a long time just trying to figure that out.

And do you find it curious why Jesus changes Simon’s name? What was that about? Does it have to do with his decision to follow Jesus? What’s going on here?

And did you notice how John keeps telling people to look and see? How he keeps wanting people to pay attention to the miracle that’s right in front of them? John keeps asking people – even his own disciples – to see Jesus, to understand who it is that’s standing right before their eyes.

There’s just so much to notice, even in this small passage. There’s so much to notice, so much to see…

Photo by Flickr user LauraGilchrist4

Is it any wonder that Jesus asks John’s disciples, “What are you looking for?” Is it any wonder he invites them to “Come and see”?

Image by fuel media

Richard Rohr is a monk who writes about the life of contemplative prayer. He says that “learning to see” is the place we have to start in the Christian life, learning “to see what is there.” I think that’s exactly right. It’s learning to see the presence of God right in front of our very eyes. “Come and see,” Jesus invites us. “Come and see.”

Lately I’ve found myself wondering what makes some people take up that invitation and why others turn away. What’s the difference between people who are open to seeing God’s presence and those who are not? Even more personally, I wonder why I am sometimes so ready and sometimes so closed off… because it isn’t always the same even with me, and it changes from day-to-day.

Of course there are countless factors. Some days I’m just so busy, so swamped, all I can see is my endless to-do list. Sometimes my anxiety is just too high; I’m swimming in worry and can’t seem to lift my head up enough to see beyond my concerns. And sometimes I feel like I’ve trudged along this journey of faith so long there’s nothing new to notice. Others may find themselves jaded and cynical, questioning what’s labeled “spiritual“ because people seem to slap that label on almost anything these days – and who can blame them? There are a lot of things that close us off from even trying to see.

But there’s one thing that seems to open us up. It’s a simple thing, really, but it seems to work pretty consistently. It is the presence of curiosity.

I think curiosity is an underrated Christian virtue. Curiosity gets you thinking about things and asking questions. It makes you turn over rocks and look underneath to see what’s crawling around. It lets you engage at a whole different level. If the life of faith is only pat answers to boring questions, what good does it do? But what if it isn’t that at all? What if curiosity is really essential to faith?

Photo by Gabriela Ferreira – Flickr user LiebeGaby

Richard Rohr points out how often Jesus lifts up children as the model of faith. “Every time the disciple get into head games,” he says, “He puts a child in front of them. [Jesus] says the only people who can recognize and be ready for what he’s talking about are the ones who come with the mind and heart of a child…. The older we get, the more we’ve been betrayed and hurt and disappointed, the more barriers we put up…. We must always be ready to see anew.”

I think that’s right… The life of faith isn’t so much about learning the right answers, as being open to all of life’s questions. It’s in the questions we learn to see Jesus.

I remember my freshman year in college, I attended a Bible study offered in my dorm. It was sponsored by a Christian organization on campus. I’d been to a retreat they had offered and I liked the people and the energy there, so I was looking forward to connecting and making new friends. But I was so disappointed. We had sheets of paper with fill-in-the-blank answers – and there was only one right answer for each question. We weren’t supposed to be curious, we were supposed to learn the right answers. It made me frustrated and sad. Here we were in college learning all kinds of new things, exercising our brains and being taught to think and question, but with the Bible there were only certain questions we could ask, and there was only one right answer?

I think one of the surest ways to deepen faith is to be curious. And lately I’ve been hearing about all sorts of church members who are following the trail of curiosity. Just this week I had a great conversation with a man who’s interested in the life of Jesus, and is reading voraciously a whole variety of books on Jesus and the society and culture of his day. I talked to a Sunday school teacher who was doing research to try to stay one step ahead of the kids and their questions. I heard from a liturgist about how she investigates the passage she’s going to read so she can ‘get it’ more deeply… Curiosity seems to be part of the DNA of this congregation.

Yesterday at the memorial service for June Mentzer, Hospice chaplain Mark Pierce talked about the long conversations they had together. Every week June had more questions. She had a scientific mind that would not let things rest. She would bring up scripture passage after scripture passage and ask, “How can this be?” She loved to have conversations with Mark, as he did with her. She was willing to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing in order to discover more. I think of the depths she discovered because she was willing to question and be curious.

Photo by Flckr user mnwatts

You know, people just starting out in the life of faith seem to think everybody else already knows everything, that other people have it all figured out. They may think their questions are stupid. They may think they’re not supposed to ask questions – like somehow it’s disrespectful or annoying. I think curiosity is not only necessary to faith, it’s a deep form of engagement.

In fact their questions may be a gift to people who’ve been Christians for years. They may have stopped being curious. They may think they’ve seen it all, heard it all, and know as much as they’re ever going to know. It’s easy to just start going through the motions, like there’s nothing new under the sun. When the truth is there is layer upon layer – so much to discover. And until we are done with life, it will be full of surprises.

I suspect that even then the surprises will continue to come.

In her poem “When Death Comes” the poet Mary Oliver writes,
When it’s over…
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.

I’ve discovered something lately that I never would have guessed. Curiosity and amazement are open doors to the presence of God. They are powerful antidotes to fear and argument. When I am most anxious, when I am tied up in knots because I don’t know what to do, or I think I’m supposed to know, or life simply feels out of control, there is a simple way to untie the Gordian knots that have me bound. Gentle curiosity unlocks the door and lets God in.

“Come and see,” Jesus invites us. “Come and see.”

Come out of your well-worn ruts.
Come out of your frightened hiding.
Come out of your jaded certainty.
Come and see, and be married to amazement.

Imagining Peace

December 8, 2013
Karen Chakoian

Isaiah 11:1-10
Matthew 3:1-12

It’s time to hear again these fiery words of John the Baptist. “Repent,” he cried out to any who would listen. He was not afraid to call it like he saw it. But he saved the worst for the powers that be. “You brood of vipers,” he called them, and he called them out. “Don’t imagine that because you have the power now it will always be this way. Don’t imagine that you can claim you have God on your side and walk away. Something powerful is coming, and soon the tables will be turned.”

I thought of John the Baptist when I heard the news that Nelson Mandela died this week. The airwaves and blog-posts have been full of tributes to this great man who changed the course of history in his home country of South Africa. He is rightly hailed as a hero not only for his work to end Apartheid, but for his impact on human rights around the world.

Like John the Baptist, Mandela called it like he saw it ~ and he called for repentance in the most unequivocal terms. And like John the Baptist, it landed him in prison. While John the Baptist died in prison at the hands of Herod, Nelson Mandela was eventually released – after 27 long, awful years.

by Thierry Ehrmann

I am old enough to remember Apartheid, the horrible South African system of injustice in which whites had all the resources, power and authority, and blacks were confined to small, crowded, impoverished townships. Education, employment, travel all were limited by the Afrikaaner-white government. I remember the ANC – the South African National Congress – and their overt and covert work to overthrow the South African government.

In 1964 Mandela and other members of the South African National Congress were brought up on charges of conspiracy to overthrow the government. They admitted to the charges. The trial opened with Mandela giving a four-hour speech, spelling out the injustices of Apartheid and the plight of his people. He named the evils that required repentance: the enforced poverty and segregation of blacks, the lack of education, their treatment as a separate, inferior breed, the violence of the segregated townships.

But then he gave a vision of a different way, a peaceful way, calling out the common hopes and dreams shared by blacks and whites alike.

Above all, My Lord, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent. I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites in this country, because the majority of voters will be Africans. This makes the white man fear democracy.

But this fear cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the only solution which will guarantee racial harmony and freedom for all…

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. [article]

He had a vision, a vision rooted in the prophecy we heard in Isaiah, the vision of the Peaceable Kingdom:

The wolf shall lie down with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the kid,
The calf and the lion and the fatling together,
And a little child shall lead them.

Mandela and the others were sentenced to prison on Robben Island. A friend of mine toured Robben Island and saw the rock quarry where the anti-apartheid prisoners did years of hard labor. He said, seeing that, he “came to have an even deeper appreciation of Mandela’s legacy of grace, truth, and reconciliation.”

In 1990, Mandela was released. Apartheid was crumbling. And in 1994, against all odds, this prophet was elected as President of South Africa.

Perhaps it seems odd to dwell so much on this today ~ on this particular chapter of history that happened decades ago, in another land, on an entirely different continent. Perhaps it seems to have little to do with us, here, now, in Granville, in this season of Advent and our waiting for the Messiah. Perhaps.

But I find myself wondering: what if we dared to believe, like Mandela, that a peaceable kingdom were possible? What might be unleashed in this world? What if we lived as if God’s kingdom were possible?

As Janice so beautifully laid out in her sermon last week, we are in the season of waiting, and we wait with hope. We dare to hope for healing from sickness and pain and grief… for peace between nations, the end of war, for people to live the way they were created to be and live… We dare to hope that our own lives might reflect the Kingdom of God, the righteousness of God come near.

Reflecting on the Christian life, Lewis Smedes says that:

Hoping for others is hard, but not the hardest. Praying for others is hard but not the hardest. The hardest part for [Christians]… is in ‘living the sort of life that makes people say, ‘Ah, so that’s how people are going to live when righteousness takes over our world.’ [Lewis Smedes, Standing on the Promises, referenced in an article by Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Christian Century, Dec. 6, 2000; quoted by Christine Chakoian in an unpublished paper on Isaiah 11:1-10 for the 2001 Moveable Feast, pp. 8-9. ]

We shouldn’t write off that idea too quickly as naïve or unduly optimistic. Of course we live in a fallen world. Of course it is dangerous and broken. Of course there is unimaginable evil. Of course we are “earthen vessels,” “clay jars” that crack and break, that are scarcely strong enough to carry the hope of peace. That part we know. That part we see every day.

But the dream of peace ~ that is real, too. That’s the part we have to work to hold onto.

Brennan Breed, Assistant Professor of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA

In a recent blog-post on Isaiah 11, Old Testament professor Brennan Breed challenges us to hold on to that vision.

Utopian thinking is important. Before we close our minds to opportunities and possibilities of change, before we resign ourselves to picking from amongst the worst possible political and economic options, we should take some time to imagine a world that resonates with the call for justice, righteousness and peace that we find in Isaiah 11.

What would a just economy look like? We could certainly provide for more people if we wanted to. What would a righteous social system provide for the weakest members of society? We have the resources to do it today. What would be required of us to achieve true peace — not simply the cessation of hostility that keeps all other things the same, but a radical transformation of our world into a model of shalom, the wholeness exemplified by God?

To think we have to settle for the poor not having enough to eat… to think we have to settle for “austerity politics”… to think we can’t afford to tend to the ‘least of these’ our brothers and sisters is simply poverty of imagination, he argues. [article]

It’s an argument Nelson Mandela made himself. He said,
“Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. YOU can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.”

I subscribe to a daily devotional. Each day it ends with a charge and benediction. This Advent the charge has been this:

We’re waiting for a revolution;
Waiting for the impossible.

We’re waiting for change,
For the coming of the One.

We’re waiting to be told, “Yes,”
To be included.

Go with hope that,
Whatever you are waiting for,
God will answer
The prayer of your heart.

May it be so for us: may we dare to hope that God will answer the prayers of our hearts… that God will include us in the coming of the Peaceable Kingdom… that God will use us – even us – in impossible ways. That even we can live the sort of life that people will see and say, “Ah, so that’s what it looks like when righteousness takes over the world.”

It has happened before; it can happen again; it can happen even here, even now.

This Advent season, let us not hope for too little; let us dare to hope for the Prince of Peace in the midst of our very lives.

God is coming near. Let your greatness blossom, for the sake of something great ~ the Peaceable kingdom of God.