I'm Not That Desperate

Imagine that you've been a little disconnected from church or whatever your faith community is (if you even need to imagine). Now imagine that you're feeling inspired.  You want to reconnect. You want to recommit yourself to your faith practices.  And so you head out to worship, feeling very good.  You even get there early and relaxed.  The service starts, and the preacher looks straight at you and says, "What are you doing here, you vermin? What brought you out?  Your little religious stirrings don't impress God at all." Now perhaps the preacher isn't speaking just to you, but it feels like it.

If that happened to me, I rather doubt I'd ever go back.  I probably would leave right then and there. But in today's gospel reading, those people who are listening to John have not left after he called them a brood of vipers. After he had trashed them, they begged him to tell them what they must do.  And in today's reading, they think he might be the Messiah.  Wow, those folks must have been pretty desperate to hang around after John had treated them so roughly and rudely.  We'd never stand for such.

I've been thinking a lot lately about competency and the ability to hear God. I'm still wrestling with this, but it seems to me that highly competent people have more trouble being open to God's voice. By definition, highly competent people are able to get things done. They trust their own abilities, and they aren't prone to feelings of desperation, at least not on a regular basis. 

Spiritually, a lot of we competent sorts don't desperately need God. We may very well need God, but not in some huge, dramatic way.  We need God only a little bit.  We need some help, but not all that much.  We're able to manage for the most part, and we're not desperate enough to hang around if a religious experience doesn't nod approvingly at our willingness to be religious. We don't need God badly enough to put up with much.

As a Presbyterian pastor, that is a pastor who had to learn Greek and Hebrew and get a Master's degree in Divinity, I am filled with religious competency.  And I wonder if that isn't the worst kind, at least when it comes to hearing God. 

I wonder if when Jesus says we must deny ourselves in order to follow him, part of that is denying our competencies.  I don't mean to deny their existence, but rather to let go of the notion that they get us very far in terms of relationship with God or understanding what really matters.

When I think about my own faith, surely one of the biggest sources of frustration for me comes from how difficult it is to hear God with any real clarity. It happens, but it is rare and often fleeting. And I wonder... Might my own competencies - or at least my trust in them - be getting in the way?

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