This week, I heard about two children in our church community who have developed up some interesting ideas about God.
One girl, associating her Heavenly Father with the sky and galaxies—fair enough—has actually been thinking of God as an extraterrestrial, spaceship and all.
The other, a sweet kindergartner, has been praying along all these weeks in church with the understanding that God’s first name is Howard. As in, “Howard be thy name.”
After some big laughs with the parents and grandparents who shared these innocent errors, these kids made me think. It’s so easy for young children to mishear or take ideas about God and put them into other categories of meaning. We adults take for granted that they’ll know just what we mean when that might not be such a fair expectation. From their perspective, why should a child in McMinn County be expected intuit the King James “hallowed be” without our help? Why shouldn’t God in heaven be an associate of similarly mysterious martians? As kids figure out world where everything is new to them, grow in their language, reading, and understanding, it’s delightful and normal to have some mistakes in connecting the dots.
But children are not the only ones who make wrong connections. Adults also get tripped up all the time but our assumptions, mental associations, and Christian lingo. When we read the Bible, at church, in small groups, or in our individual spiritual practice, we bring the other categories of knowledge and meaning-making from our lives and read scripture through them like a pair of colored lenses. This shows up when we assume the emotional tone of a passage without first wondering what the author of a book intends or what the persons in a story might be feeling. If we neglect to study the cultural and historical contexts of the Ancient Near East, we will assume that the world of the Old and New Testament is more or less like our own, and miss the nuances of understanding needed to grasp what we’re reading, much less find the connections between ancient scriptures and our own lives in order to faithfully follow the way of Jesus.
In all of the limits of our knowledge, we are invited to be humble in our understanding. In the scope of all God’s wisdom and all that we cannot understand, so much of our talk and about the matters of faith is just as certain and just as off-base as “Howard be thy name.” We continue to learn and grow in our faith, experiences of God’s presence, and our knowledge of scripture, truth, and love throughout our lifetimes. So let’s release some of our certainties and have faith in the mystery we cannot fully grasp or describe. Let’s be gentle and find good humor for ourselves and one another as we walk together in love. May we apply ourselves with open minds and humble hearts to the lifelong work, as St. Augustine said, of “faith seeking understanding.”