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Have you ever noticed that some constellations are named for animals that they don't really resemble? If you have ever been in the Scouts or taken a course in astronomy or just looked up into the sky at night, you know what I am talking about. As an undergraduate astronomy minor at Brown University, many years ago, I would give tours at the Ladd Observatory and on clear nights point out constellations from the outdoor gallery. But people often were not satisfied. For example, the stars in the constellation Ursa Major, The Great Bear, do not look the part. There's no bear there, as far as I can see. Where is the bear -- hibernating? We could just as well call it the Great Figure Eight or the Large Ostrich.

People often deal with this problem one of two ways. The first is to suggest that while the ancient people who named the constellations -- the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians -- may have thought they saw the outlines of familiar animals in the heavens, it was because they were so superstitious or just downright stupid that they didn't know the difference between a Bear, a Figure Eight, and an Ostrich. Or it is suggested that you are too stupid to see the outline of the bear that is clearly sitting there in the sky, and that if you'd just pay more attention or squint a little harder or maybe write a special report, you would soon enough see the bear.

Both of these common-sensical responses are examples of intellectual dishonesty, not dealing with the data that present themselves in an open-minded and probing manner. The first solution, that the ancients were simply dumber than we are, is an example of what the great Christian writer and Oxford don C. S. Lewis referred to as Chronological Arrogance -- assuming that we always possess more and better knowledge of all things than earlier, more "primitive" people. If something earlier people thought doesn't make sense to us, they are ipso facto wrong: they could not possibly have anything to teach us! Of course we don't just do this with earlier people, we do it with any group that we consider beyond the bounds of acceptable thought -- what my 83-year-old mother would call "normal people." That might include other nations or cultures, other racial groups, other branches of Christianity, or just other socio-economic groups within our own town. If they think or say or do something that doesn't make immediate sense to me, that is not transparently obvious in my frame of references, it is because they are aberrant, stupid, wrong, or otherwise misinformed.

The second approach -- that you are just not looking closely enough -- is the Blame Game: if you don't see the Bear then it is because you are just not trying, or the one asking you is not asking in the proper manner, or the person who suggested you look at constellations is a sadist, and someone is to blame for this and someone will pay! If we come up with more standardized tests for people looking at constellations or more rigorous training for observatory guides -- or perhaps licensing them -- the problem of not seeing the bear will disappear. In the meantime I can see some lawsuit potential here.

The point is, as many of you know, that neither of these common and evidently satisfying responses is correct. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault, dear reader, is not in our stars. It is in our position in relation to those stars. Because of movements, both of the stars themselves and of the earth, the groupings of stars that suggested the shapes of animals, or other objects, to the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians simply don't look the same as they used to. It is as simple, or as complex, as that. There is neither blame nor fault at work, but there is a need to read a book, look up a web site, or ask a question.

How often we do this to one another in the Christian community! Let me give you three examples dealing with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. One of our brightest and most articulate pre-ministerial students of recent years came from a Pentecostal background. She found the spiritual gift of tongues to be a great blessing, primarily in private devotions. When she began to inquire about seminary education and ordination in her branch of Christianity, she was asked if she affirmed that the gift of speaking in tongues is the most important spiritual gift and the only true proof of salvation: that if one does not speak in tongues, one is not a real Christian. She indicated, in absolute honesty, that she could not accept that position based either on her detailed study of the New Testament or her experience of the contemporary Christian community. She was told that there would be no place for her in that particular denomination.

At the other extreme, some years ago we had a guest resource for a series of Christian lectures at the campus I was serving. He was a high-ranking pastor in a particular denomination which we shall call the Jonesites. He described an occasion when a person came forward after an altar call and began sobbing and rocking back and forth. This pastor told how he went up to this individual, placed his hands on both shoulders in order to stop his rocking and said, "We don't do that in Jonesite churches!" This, he explained, because he felt that such an outburst might precede speaking in tongues which is always demonic in origin. (He had thoughtfully brought along a supply of booklets he had written warning about the demonic origin of tongues.) Lest anyone think that this kind of issue would never affect a middle-of-the-road mainliner like me, I preached not long ago at the Branchville State Prison on the topic of Christian decision making and referred in my sermon to being led by the Holy Spirit. I could see from his body language that this really bothered one of the other volunteers in attendance that evening. Following the service I made a little small-talk and asked from what church he came. He was a member of a well-known area church which I would describe as being quite anti-Pentecostal. Evidently this anti-Pentecostalism had been taken to the extreme of being uncomfortable with any reference to the Holy Spirit who, the last time I checked, was still part of the Trinity and whose job description entails companionship and guidance for believers.

The question, of course, is: How does this kind of divisive attitude which assumes that any viewpoint, any practice other than my own is somehow misinformed, perverse, and just wrong, fit in with Jesus' prayer: "The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one ..." (John 17:22)? As near as I can tell, the answer is that it does not fit in. The three examples I have cited are each, in their own way, cases of intellectual and spiritual arrogance and dishonesty. If we as Christians are to provide the kind of unified witness Jesus prayed for, we must work harder to understand and appreciate the Christian experiences of others, rather than dismiss or denigrate them.

This arrogance and dishonesty is one of the banes of the educated: we assume that because we are smart, observant, and well-informed things should simply be obvious to us, that we can fairly well size up any situation without really trying.

Some years ago my brother-in-law, his wife, and I volunteered to deliver Christmas dinners to homebound persons for the Little Brothers of the Poor on the North Side of Chicago. We went to some tough and discouraging places, none more so than a walk-up one-room apartment. A man of perhaps fifty was lying on a bed in the middle of the room. He had only one leg, and there was a pair of crutches leaning unused in the corner. We spoke a little bit about his troubles: not being able to get around, losing his job, and so on.

Finally, in my best pastoral style, I asked how he had happened to lose his leg. "What!" he asked angrily. "How did you lose your leg?" "I didn't lose any leg," he told me in no uncertain terms. "I was born with one leg. Getting around with one leg is no problem. A fellow can do just fine with one leg. Losing a leg!?" Eventually my Ph.D. psychologist brother-in-law gave me a little help by asking why he was bedfast. It turned out he was one of the very small percentage of men who suffer from breast cancer, and he had radical surgery to remove the cancer which had required the removal of lymph nodes and some muscles in his armpits and shoulders. For the first time in his life, he was unable to use crutches, the crutches that had always enabled him to get around, hold down a job, and be self-sufficient. As he made clear, a fellow with one leg can do just fine!

The arrogance on my part, of course, was assuming that I could size things up without asking any questions. I mean how smart do you have to be: a middle-aged guy with one leg who complains that he can't get around? Well, you have to be smarter than I acted that day.

It reminded me of an occasion when I was with a mission team in Brazil where we had the opportunity to worship a few times in a small Methodist church in a slum. At the first few services the unaccompanied singing was quite enthusiastic and moving, so at a weeknight service when an older, blind gentleman arrived, I thought we were in for a special treat. As the service commenced he began to strum on the guitar and he was awful. If there was any connection between his playing and the congregation's singing, it escaped me. What in the world was happening?

When it was time for testimonies, we went around the congregation sharing blessings from the Lord. "You all know me," the guitarist began. Every head in the congregation nodded. "When my wife died, I didn't know what I would do! Then when I lost my eyesight, I was in absolute despair. But the Lord gave me the gift of this guitar, and now I have a reason to live. I can come and play and praise the Lord." "Amen," the congregation responded, "Praise God! Hallelujah! Glory to God!" I, of course, felt about two inches tall, as I should have. What I misperceived as a musical moment, they understood to be a spiritual transformation. I could tell this guy couldn't play the guitar worth a lick; they could see the glory of God revealed in Jesus Christ, glory revealed to this man because God has loved us through Jesus Christ before the foundation of the world (John 17:24).

Nowhere is intellectual and spiritual arrogance more common or more dangerous than in issues of motivation: why people, institutions, and nations do what they do; how situations got to a certain point; what could have been done differently. Because we seldom have access to persons' innermost thoughts we are left to make judgments based only on rather superficial information. But even then, if we take into account the big picture -- motivation, ideology -- we can avoid the pitfalls of superficial judgments. In his book The Greatest Generation (Random House, 1998) the journalist Tom Brokaw does that with my father's generation, those who fought WW II. Let me quote from the introduction to his book.

At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they were fighting in the most primitive conditions possible across the bloodied landscape of France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, and the coral islands of the Pacific. They answered the call to save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs. They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest. They succeeded on every front. They won the war; they saved the world. They came home to joyous and short-lived celebrations and immediately began the task of rebuilding their lives and the world they wanted.


Is Brokaw overly sentimental and romantic? Perhaps in some cases he is. But without some comprehension of "answering the call to save the world," so much about those years makes no sense at all.

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain1 was "the Hero of Little Round Top." He commanded Union troops that held out against a massive Confederate charge against that knoll at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. Eventually he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his valor at Little Round Top. He went on to fight in many other major battles of the war between the states and was wounded three times (on one occasion the field surgeon pronounced him mortally wounded). But he lived and ended the war as a Brigadier General. Later in life he served four terms as Governor of Maine and for a time was President of Bowdoin College.

From where did this war hero come? Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was Professor of Rhetoric at Bowdoin College in Maine at the outbreak of the Civil War. A graduate of Bowdoin and Bangor Theological Seminary he, like many Northerners and some Southerners, was very much opposed to slavery. His conviction that all persons were created by God and equal in God's sight had been nurtured during his undergraduate years at Bowdoin through contact with a professor's wife who was working on a novel and discussing its progress with groups of students -- what we today would call focus groups. The book was Uncle Tom's Cabin and she was Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Once the war broke out, Chamberlain determined that the best way he could live out his deeply-held value of human equality was to enlist in the Union Army. While the Bowdoin faculty presumably shared his anti-slavery sentiment, they turned down his request for a leave of absence to enlist in the Union forces. They felt that his presence on campus was more important than a role he could play in the military. Undaunted, Chamberlain applied for a two-year study leave, which was readily granted. What he decided to study was how to serve in the Union Army.

It would be easy, given a brief history book entry on Chamberlain, to assume that he was an opportunist, someone who went to war to launch a political career: we have heard of many such people. But we know from his diaries and letters that as a governor and college president, he always looked back to that day on a rocky spot in Pennsylvania as the defining moment in his life. It was at that instant that the value he said was most important to him -- fundamental, God-given human equality -- was put to the ultimate test. Things did not just happen to Chamberlain; he was not swept up by powers beyond his control. He was right where he meant to be. He had deeply held Christian values, and when it became necessary, they guided his actions.

How often we ignore or even impugn the motivations of our fellow Christians. As a child I was taught that the prayers uttered at the church down the street never rose above the ceiling because the people who worshiped there were just a "country club church." As an adult I have heard that Mother Teresa was not a real Christian; and who can forget Jerry Falwell's immortal observation prior to the fall of apartheid in South Africa, that the black folks were really happy and Bishop Desmond Tutu was just "phony"?

In a world that does not know God (John 17:25), it is imperative that we constantly lift up the stories of the saints who have been compelled by the values of our faith; but we so often doubt each other's motives.

I recall the day my son Tim, then in the eighth grade, came home from school aggravated over their social studies lesson on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "You would have never guessed he was a preacher," he said. So we sat down and went through his text. He was right. From the presentation there, and evidently in class as well, there was mention of neither Jesus Christ nor the Church, nor was the influence of the teachings of Mohandas Ghandi even hinted. King, from that textbook, was evidently some kind of activist or organizer who got a lot of folks behind him. One would never guess the Church had anything to do with the Civil Rights Movement.

We often complain that the media does a poor job of portraying Christians. A student was recently interviewed on the "bias of the media against religious people." She felt, and I agree, that it is not so much a bias as a blind spot. When Christians are portrayed at all it is often as crooks, perverts, or hypocrites. There seems to be self-censorship when it comes to dealing with sincere, deeply-held religious motivation. Unfortunately it seems to me that we cannot simply blame the media if we continue to beat up on each other. In an industry that is driven by acceptance and ratings, it is little wonder they avoid matters that seem so contentious even within the Christian family. So we actually mitigate against Jesus' prayer that our unity of witness shine out in an unbelieving world.

Jesus' prayer in John 17 portrays a church life which is Christo-centric, centered on Jesus who himself is centered in the Father. Our mutual love as Christians, found in Jesus' mutuality with the Father, is to be a beacon in a dark and unbelieving world. Too often, however, we have made a church life which is ego-centric: centered on me and those just like me. We have allowed intellectual and spiritual arrogance to separate ourselves from our sisters and brothers in Christ. Worse than that, we have often felt good about it, because we assume that our limited understanding is perfect; that looking at people superficially, we can read and judge their faith and their motivations.

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1. For a different and more detailed treatment of Chamberlain, see my The Backside of God and Other Occasional Sermons (CSS Publishing Company, 2000) p. 81f.