Sermon of the Week
Liminal Spaces
A sermon preached at The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on February 23, 2020.
#pcusa
Keywords: threshold, disruptive change, Moses, transfiguration, Impractical Jokers, flat earth, liminal space.
Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Exodus 24:12-18
and Matthew 17:1-9
Sometimes thinkers spend a lot of time thinking about thinking.
I wrote that sentence, and then decided I needed to go back to bed,
because it made my head hurt.
But I went back to it, and found that it seems accurate to me.
Maybe it is just that I’ve taken one too many philosophy classes
but that’s pretty much what a philosophy class is: thinking about thinking,
and then endless papers where you try to explain what you thought
and why you thought it.
There’s even a subset of philosophy that deals with
what you can think and what you can know.
We call that epistemology, the study of thinking, or the theory of knowledge.
But sometimes, for all this thinking,
an experience will come in and disrupt everything,
shake it up.
Twice this weekend I’ve had occasion to see something about flat earth theory.
This is the contention that our decidedly spherical earth is, in fact, not:
that we’re on some sort of flat shaped thing,
the actual details apparently vary.
The first time I encountered this was when we were trying to waste an hour or two
and were flipping around the television
and came across the show Impractical Jokers on Tru TV.
They’re popular enough, apparently, that they even made a movie,
and it is out in theatres now,
though I’m not sure I’ll rush to go see it. Your own experience might be different.
This is one of those shows where they set up hidden cameras
and send the hosts out into some common public space
and give them improvisational stunts to accomplish.
It is silly, and if that’s your thing, fantastic.
These are always a little too much “enjoyment in the foibles of others” for my taste
but I get why we human beings like this sort of thing.
We like to watch other people, even if sometimes we get a bit too close.
But it caught our eye, and we watched it for a little while.
The particular set up for this episode was that the hosts were pretending
that they were a couple, that they were dating
and they were going to fabricate an excuse to break up
while sitting at a table with some stranger
and the goal was to get the stranger to agree with the person
who was going to break it off that, yeah, I get it,
maybe this relationship isn’t working for you two.
And so this couple sits down,
it’s in a coffee shop,
and then one of them makes an excuse to head off to the restroom for a minute
and the other one talks to the stranger to set the whole thing up
and then the first one comes back
they get into an argument,
and they break it off
and if the stranger nods in approval or seems to support the whole thing,
bonus point for the team.
And so after the partner heads to the restroom, the first person tells the stranger
“This whole thing is crazy. We’ve been dating for a few months
and she is great, don’t get me wrong,
but she’s one of these flat-earthers, you know,
and she keeps talking about it,
and I just can’t handle it much anymore….”
And just then, on cue, she returns
and they start talking about the weather
and she says something like “you can’t understand the weather
unless you understand that the earth isn’t round, its flat”
and then the whole scene unfolds…
he breaks up with her, and storms off,
the stranger looks like he is witnessing something private and personal
and he just wanted to listen to his music and eat his scone in peace
and then everyone laughs.
I didn’t think much of the episode at the time.
It works maybe because we know the earth isn’t flat.
The mathematicians and astronomers figured it out eons ago,
going all the way back at least to Pythagoras
even though Galileo Galilei was widely condemned for it by the church
and Magellan had to circumnavigate the globe to convince everybody.
So, generally, we chuckle at this because almost everyone dismisses it as silly.
Right?
And then I saw, just this morning, a tragic story on CBS news
about a guy in California named Michael Hughes.
He died yesterday at the age of 64.
Hughes insisted that the earth is indeed flat.
So much so, he dedicated himself to building these homemade rockets
that would send him up into the sky so he could take pictures
that would prove him right.
He tried this once, in 2018, but he only got about 2000 feet into the air that time.
This time he planned for something far bigger, and it went horribly, tragically wrong.
Hughes died in the accident that followed.
I was kind of stunned, really, when I read about that this morning.
One minute, joking about a fictional break up scenario
and then the next minute, a guy who would just push everything to the edge.
There are a lot of things we don’t know,
as a people, as human beings.
And sometimes, we even push on what we do know,
because we all have our skepticism, our doubts, our insecurities.
It is part of what it means to be human, actually, to wrestle with all of that
and to try to make meaning, the best we can,
with the experience that we build up over a lifetime.
///
I mention all of that because sometimes what we think we know does actually change.
I just don’t recommend building a rocket ship yourself to go exploring like that.
There was a time when most people thought the earth was flat, right,
and now we do not.
We thought that the best way to communicate was carrier pigeon,
but then someone invented the telegraph.
We thought the Chiefs would never win a championship again, and now here we are.
(They said that about the Royals, too, if I remember correctly.)
There’s even a phrase for all that: we call it a paradigm shift,
when all of the categories of our settled understanding
get shuffled, right,
because of some new experience that doesn’t quite work…
and so we have to re-work everything: new concepts, more research,
giving up old ways of looking at it all. [Read more…]
