Matthew 13:10-17

July 29, 2007

Then the disciples came and asked him, "Why do you speak to them in parables?" He answered, "To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that 'seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.' With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says: 'You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people's heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn - and I would heal them.' But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.

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One Christmas when I was a kid I remember my parents giving me a children's joke book. Most of the jokes were pretty awful; like this one: "TB or not TB, that is the congestion. Consumption be done about it? Of cough of cough." Terrible. One joke I remember though made an interesting point. It goes like this. There's a boy running terrified across a field. A friend stops him and asks, "Why are you running? What are you afraid of?" The first boy says, "I just saw a snake, but it turned out to be a stick." The friend says, "You are not afraid of a stick?" "No," the boy replies, "but the stick I picked up to hit it with turned out to be a snake."

Now, ignoring the fact that this joke is not particularly funny - I didn't think it was all that great when I was eight years old - ignoring that, what I find interesting is that, clearly, what the boy saw was not nearly so important as what he thought he saw. And as ridiculous as it may seem, there's actually a profound lesson in that simple story. Reality, for us, for people, is not so much a matter of what is real, as it is what we believe to be real.

Now at some level, everybody knows this. If you're paying any attention at all to upcoming presidential race, you know that all the candidates, as always, are pouring tremendous amounts of time, energy and money into trying to influence our perceptions. They sometimes call it, "impression management." "I am the one you can trust. I am the one who will save Social Security. I'll bring health care to everyone. I'll protect the environment. I'll get government off your back. I'll cut your taxes. Vote for me. Not that other one. If he gets into the White House (or if she does) it will mean the end of civilization as we know it." All this political maneuvering drives me crazy, though I have to admit, there's something of a morbidly fascinating quality to it.

Think for a minute though. The truth is, no matter how committed we may be to any particular candidate, we do not and cannot know who among all our current choices, would make the best president. All we can know, and what we ultimately will base our votes on, is which one we perceive to be the best choice. And the one who wins the race will be that person who most successfully influences the perceptions of the greatest number of people. The fact is that we don't know how the future will play out, now or ever. Some of my friends like to play a game called, "Al Gore would have made a better president than George Bush." In fact, that may or may not be true. Without an opportunity to actually experience an Al Gore presidency, for the sake of comparison, there's no way any of us could possibly know. We can certainly have our opinions, and we certainly do. But in reality, despite what we might perceive to be the case, we have no way to judge.

There was a time, not long ago, that the phrase "perception is reality" seemed to be on everyone's lips. I may have felt that way because, at the time, I was living in Westport, Connecticut and much of my congregation was made up of corporate business people. The phrase "perception is reality," was all over the business world, for awhile at least. It came from the same kind of thinking that brought us, "image is everything." The point in both cases is that it really doesn't matter whether, according to some absolute standard, your company makes the best cell phone or car or soda. What matters is what people believe, what they think, their impression, their perception. I happen to believe that Apple has always made a far better computer than anyone else. But their market share suggests that most people perceive otherwise.

What does this have to do with the church? Well, everything. Why are you here? Is it your perception that this is the best church for you? Do you perceive Christianity to be your best choice among the various religions? Or maybe you've never been here before, and you just came to check the place out? Maybe your perceptions are still in the formative stage. You're here to discover what the "reality" of First Congregational Church of Camden is. If that's the case, I certainly hope we are managing to create a good impression. In my experience, most people seem to believe that there is one reality that we are either in touch with, in which case we are normal, or out of touch with, in which case we are crazy. That certainly is one way of looking at things. But in these post modernist times, many people have come to believe that, although we do have some common ground in our human perceptions, each individual's perception of reality is, in many respects, uniquely their own.

Which raises a very interesting question: namely, is there any reality beyond our perceptions? I'm actually not completely comfortable with this idea that "perception is reality." I think it implies, to many people, especially to young people, that nothing is true or valuable or important in any absolute sense. For a good many people, beyond their own perceptions, beyond what they think and feel and believe, there simply isn't anything at all. And that's a problem, because, if my reality is all that matters than I am fully justified in being rude, selfish and dishonest, or on the other hand, generous, happy and fair, if it suits me. But the center of gravity in that system is always me. It's all about me, my perceptions, my reality. That's what's valuable.

And make no mistake, this is precisely the philosophy that is driving much of our culture and economy. Think of all the products and services that have become wildly popular recently that pander to our inflated egos: from Reality TV to personal websites like MySpace, to iPhones, and iPods. Don't get me wrong. I love my iPod. I have over 7500 songs on my iPod, and it's only half full. I also get a lot of mileage out of my personal REVKEV license plate. But the underlying message in all this is what concerns me. We are being encouraged from just about every direction to think of ourselves as the center of our very own personal universe, and a lot of people are buying it.

Christianity has a very different center of gravity. Our faith tells us that there is a reality greater than our own, whether we perceive it or not; a reality which we call God. And while it may be true that we live within our own perceptions, nonetheless, we believe that our individual realities, as beautiful, unique and creative as they may be, are small and cramped and egocentric things compared to "the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God," as St. Paul said.

One of the things I've always appreciated about Jesus is that he was forever trying to change people's perceptions. He well knew, even all those years ago, that our perceptions generally define what we believe to be true about reality. Much of his ministry can be understood in that way; as his trying to break down and shake up our old perceptions, so that new and expanded ones could take their place. He wanted to change our perceptions of who was wealthy and who wasn't, who was blessed and who was cursed, who was sick and who was healthy, who was faithful to the true nature of God, and who was only leading people astray. Unlike our culture, Jesus was never interested in turning us back onto ourselves for his own profit. Instead, he constantly tried to move people beyond their narrow selves out into the larger self of God.

"Why do you speak in parables?" His disciples wanted to know." Well, he might have said, not everyone is comfortable hearing what I have to say. Most people don't see, even though the truth is right in front of their eyes. Most people don't want to change their perceptions because they think the perceptions they already have are right. Most people won't call what they believe to be true into question, and don't like it if someone else does. But, he said to his disciples, your eyes are blessed, because you have a chance to see differently and think for yourselves and open up to a new reality of God. People don't always appreciate it when you shake up their ideas of what's real and what isn't.

It's important, I believe, for us to know that what we think does largely define our understanding of reality. But it is even more important to realize that just because something is part of our perceived reality, that doesn't necessarily make it true. A lot of the things we have believed over the years have proven not to be true.

That's actually one of the things I love best about leading adventure camps; the chance to change perceptions. I've now led 15 adventure camps over the course of my Ministry. I love taking senior high kids off into the wilderness and giving them a chance to actually engage the world in new and challenging ways. At the end of the week we always gather together for a chapel service. This year we stayed overnight at the end of the week in our UCC church in Bridgton. Late in the evening we all gathered in the darkened sanctuary for reflection and communion.

After giving them a chance to talk about what was meaningful for them that week, I said that they were all different than they had been when we started. I said, "A week ago you did know each other, but now you do. A week ago, you may not have known that you could climb 70 feet up a sheer rock face, but now you do. You may not have known that you could scramble across 20 miles of ragged peaks, but now you do. You know that you can do these things. And you know something else as well, if you didn't know it already. The world is pretty interesting place, and it deserves to be loved and cared for.

Nature has always been a challenging thing for the church. Of course we love nature. We can easily appreciate somebody like St. Francis, who cared for the animals and wrote poetry to brother sun and sister moon. But he's the exception. The church, in fact, has always been about changing nature. It's always been about overcoming nature. Right there in the first couple chapters of Genesis, God creates all these beautiful things and says over and over again, it was good. But then the Bible says God created people and gave him dominion over the world. Dominion. And for some reason we've always understood that word Dominion to mean that we have the freedom to use nature in any way we see fit. We can control nature, or change nature or improve on it, or simply cast it aside.

And that's exactly what we've done. We've reshaped nature to our own liking. One of the things I asked the kids was where do you ever walk on a surface that hasn't been flattened out, that hasn't been smoothed by carpet or wood or some other kind of technology. When we're on top of the Presidential Range, one of the things that becomes readily apparent is that the natural world isn't flat or smoothed out. It's not climate controlled or weeded or entirely safe. The first time someone steps on a rock that shifts underfoot, I usually take that opportunity to tell them to be careful because the Presidential Range isn't Disneyland. They don't have an army of little elves running around securing every rock.

Clearly, we're in an increasingly difficult spot regarding nature. We can't simply dominate it anymore. We have to learn to live with it, in a way that keeps it healthy and whole, so that we can be healthy and whole ourselves. We can't fix our environmental problems unless we learn to love nature, and we can't love it if we don't know it, and we can't know it if we don't get out there and engage it. As much as I love the Adventure Camps for all the fun we have, my ultimate goal is environmental. I help people to engage nature so they can learn to love it and will more likely be motivated to care for it. Finally, it's about changing perceptions.

There's an old story about a group of tourists who became stranded in a remote area and had nothing to eat but some questionable food. Before eating, they decided to test it by throwing some of it to a dog. The dog seemed to enjoy it and suffered no ill effects, so they all ate and were satisfied. The following day though, they learned that the dog had died. Everyone was panic-stricken. Many began to be sick and complained of fever and stomach cramps. A doctor was called in to treat the victims for food poisoning. The doctor began by asking what had happened to the body of the dog. Inquires were made. Finally, a neighbor was found who explained, "Oh, we threw the dog's body into a ditch after the car ran over it."

There's a great deal of truth in the saying, "perception is reality." But we should bear in mind that our perceptions are not infallible. We should be willing to call them into question when it might just be that someone else's perceptions may be better than our own. And though our perceptions may define our own reality, it's vital to remember that there is a reality beyond ourselves, the reality of God, to which we do well to aspire.

Amen.