Spiritual Hiccups - Folks Like Us

Luke's gospel speaks of the poor and lowly being lifted up while the rich and powerful are pulled down.  In keeping with this theme of reversal, in today's lection Jesus speaks of God having "hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have  revealed them to infants."  He goes on to tell his followers how blessed they are to have been a part of his movement.  "For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see  it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it."


I've never been quite sure how to reconcile Jesus' words about God's revelation "to infants," with a church where wisdom about the faith seems to be lodged with experts.  All that is required to show this is to ask church members to teach a class.  "Oh, I could never do that," is the common refrain.  Sometimes this is false modesty.  Sometimes it is an excuse.  But underlying it is the notion that real information about the faith is held by experts.  Just as I would never have tried to teach my daughters calculus, so a great many church members assume that faith, biblical knowledge, and so on are best handled by specially trained experts.

But Jesus seems to think otherwise.  His disciples are hardly made up of the religious elite.  The first few are fishermen, one of the very last places one would expect to find any candidates to lead the Church.  And in today's reading, Jesus makes a special point about how God chooses to work this way.

My own Presbyterian/Reformed tradition has long valued having "educated clergy."  To be ordained pastors must have a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from an accredited seminary.  We must have had courses in Greek and Hebrew to facilitate handling biblical texts in their original language.  And it is certainly true that things get lost in translation.  There are things one can see in the Greek that you can't find in English, and there is real value in congregations having someone that can see these things.  But when a congregation comes to see faith as primarily the purview of experts, the value of an educated clergy seems to have done more harm than good.

Jesus tells his first followers to "make disciples of all peoples," so presumably he wants to let all of us in on these wonders revealed to infants, these things prophets longed to see and hear.  Presumably Jesus expects all of us to be filled with the Spirit and thus "know" what no expert can know because of learning or study.  And it seems to me that we sell our faith woefully short, that we sell Jesus woefully short if we do not draw near to him expecting him to reveal to us what prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah could only long for.

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