Kerra's Last 5 Sermons - Be Curious, Not Judgmental
February 26, 2023
Be Curious, not Judgmental (Last Sermon)
Genesis 2:4b-25
Kerra Becker English
I don’t know how many of you are Ted Lasso fans, but for those who haven’t watched the show on Apple TV, it’s about an American college football coach who is hired to coach British soccer for AFC Richmond. It’s intended to be a fish-out-of-water story. In it, Ted, the main character, played by Jason Sudekis, ends up in a dart match with the conceited ex-husband of the team owner. It’s a fabulous scene. And towards the end of the scene, Ted makes a speech about not underestimating someone’s potential. He says, “Guys have underestimated me my entire life and for years I never understood why – it used to really bother me. Then one day I was driving my little boy to school, and I saw a quote by Walt Whitman, it was painted on the wall there and it said, 'Be curious, not judgmental. ' I like that. So, I get back in my car and I’m driving to work and all of a sudden it hits me – all them fellas that used to belittle me, not a single one of them was curious. You know, they thought they had everything all figured out, so they judged everything, and they judged everyone. And I realized that their underestimating me – who I was had nothing to do with it. Because if they were curious, they would’ve asked questions. Questions like, ‘Have you played a lot of darts, Ted?”
The new and most likely final season of the show is coming out this month if that quote makes you curious. You can get the Apple subscription and binge all 3 seasons!
But other than making a television recommendation, what I want to leave you with on my last Sunday of regularly preaching from this pulpit, is the quote from the middle of that scene, which may or may not be correctly attributed to Walt Whitman. “Be curious, not judgmental.”
Curiosity is probably THE most underrated spiritual value – and it is exceptionally important, from cradle to grave, for generating spiritual awareness. It is the spiritual gift that I think all humans are born with – though not all humans are blessed with the opportunities to use it successfully. Growing up in either a strict or a traumatic household can stifle curiosity and replace it with fear as the glue that binds the family unit together. My friends, it may be hard to get past such difficulties in early life, but it is possible. Curiosity can be developed at any and every stage of life, and it does wonders for undermining the hold that fear can have on us.
Let’s start an exploration of curiosity by taking a moment to consider childhood wonder. Perhaps you can flash back to a time in your youth when you felt free and creative, when your imagination allowed you to handle some grand concept about the magnificence of life with an ease that might not even feel possible at your current stage of life. When you hear childhood stories about saints and mystics and the whole garden variety of spiritual leaders and secular innovators, there’s often a memory that highlights how well they are in tune with their very active imaginations. For Jesus, we have the story about him “forgetting” to go home with his family after Passover because he was lost in wonder quizzing the temple priests. In a class I’m taking now about the 16th century mystic, Teresa of Avila, her childhood story is about learning the word “forever.” The meaning behind the word set her to spinning and dancing and imagining what “forever” means in God’s eyes as she repeatedly said it over and over. Can you recall a moment from your childhood when curiosity “caught” you? Because it is caught more often than it’s taught – and it flows in surprising ways. Curiosity and its sister, wonder, are entwined in those moments that allow us to experience awe. And it is awe that allows us to become captivated by life itself or gives us a hunger to know more and more.
Unfortunately, many of us have been led to believe that mature faith comes from having the kind of doctrinal purity that becomes certain about itself, and curiosity becomes a thing to leave to the realm of children. That kind of thinking is what leads us to see the second creation story from Genesis 2 as a curse rather than a blessing. The first creation story is that 7-day time table that has been frequently misused out of biblical literalism, but we have also been taught to believe that this one is about human error, Original Sin maybe even. We eat of the tree of knowledge and then we die. Do we really think that those who wrote down this story to tell the origins of human beginnings were the ones drinking at the bar after work and complaining about how life is crap and then you die? In case you didn’t catch it – when you read the rest of the story – Adam and Eve eat the fruit of this particular tree, and they don’t take a bite and keel over. They gain knowledge about themselves, about God, about the garden, about how hard life can be. That’s what happens to them.
So what is it that God is communicating here when God commands the man of the earth, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die?” Sometimes it helps to get curious about a text like this, to ask questions of it in your own mind, or ask a friend what they see in it. It also helps to ask how other traditions read this text.
I found out in doing so that there is a Hasidic interpretation of this text that goes back to verse 9 to think about the two specific trees that God puts in the garden – the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now what if the humans ate the fruit from both trees? The tree of life carried in its fruit the possibility of eternal life. The tree of knowledge is of course about knowing things and being able to interpret them as good or bad. Now pair immortality with being all-knowing and you have a pretty good description for what the ancients imagined the gods to be. This brings up a whole host of possible questions. Why would God create trees that would give creatures the ability to become like gods? Is gaining knowledge a sign of misbehavior or actually curiosity? How often is childhood curiosity condemned as misbehavior? Did they drop dead the day they ate fruit from that tree? The answer is no. But they did know then that they would die, that they were not going to be like God and live forever.
I like to think of humans as creatures designed with curiosity in mind. They not only work the land, but they name the animals, and then they forge social relationships. They are connected – to the earth, the beings, and each other. We are hungry for all kinds of knowledge, and our Presbyterian spiritual forefather began his tome on religious thinking with the quest for seeking knowledge, saying that there are two kinds of knowledge that people will be about in this world if they long to be wise and bear the image of Christ. John Calvin explains that any knowledge we gain about God or ourselves is useful, spiritual, and really the goal of all humanity. That doesn’t portray the apple-biting in such an unfavorable light now, does it?
A more learned curiosity that we gain with age and wisdom comes after many of those things we built into a prideful sense of certainty are challenged. We lose our innocence about the world. We are confronted with human suffering and the powers of evil still roaming about and causing havoc. We fear that the wonder we had as children that made us stop to smell the flowers or get lost in a conversation that was too big for us to understand but just big enough to make us want to know more are gone forever. That’s precisely when curiosity is most needed. We need to be imaginative exactly when the going gets tough. We can get stuck in the ruts of our own making and deem that the way it has always been is the only way that it can be. We can long for days of yore instead of being excited about the potential we see in tomorrow.
Curiosity is what allows us to be fully who we are in the present moment. Judgment tells us to hold on tightly to the past. Fear keeps us from being confident that the future is some place we want to be. Curiosity keeps us fresh and wondering. Curiosity is the breath of God flowing in us and through us. Curiosity lets us truly see the person in front of us, whether we have just met, or we have known, or thought we have known, this person for 40 years.
This Genesis 2 text, or really just the verses about eating from the tree of knowledge being a death curse, are yanked from their story on the first Sunday of Lent as a reminder that temptation is bad, that it’s linked to sin, that it causes all sorts of human problems. I would like to redeem that curiosity today in the mystical spiritual sense. Teresa, also known as Teresa of Jesus – the mystic I am studying now, imagines temptations as these reptilian creatures that are always nipping at our ankles to stay busy, or get distracted, or keep on tilling that soil and making your paycheck. They may entertain us for a moment – but they certainly don’t encourage us to get to know ourselves very well. They keep us blind to who we are or who we could be becoming. Those temptations are what distract us from the curiosity of the spiritual life, of getting interested in what lies beyond the veil of ordinariness and sets our soul to shining with the light of God that has always been within us.
My friends, humanity has tasted the fruit that makes us long to know more, and more, and more. So be curious. Get curious. Lose any of that judgmental edge that characterizes most of what is called religion today. Religious communities that will thrive in the future will need to be more interesting, more compelling, more authentic, and wondrous. And far more curious. Amen.
Be Curious, not Judgmental (Last Sermon)
Genesis 2:4b-25
Kerra Becker English
I don’t know how many of you are Ted Lasso fans, but for those who haven’t watched the show on Apple TV, it’s about an American college football coach who is hired to coach British soccer for AFC Richmond. It’s intended to be a fish-out-of-water story. In it, Ted, the main character, played by Jason Sudekis, ends up in a dart match with the conceited ex-husband of the team owner. It’s a fabulous scene. And towards the end of the scene, Ted makes a speech about not underestimating someone’s potential. He says, “Guys have underestimated me my entire life and for years I never understood why – it used to really bother me. Then one day I was driving my little boy to school, and I saw a quote by Walt Whitman, it was painted on the wall there and it said, 'Be curious, not judgmental. ' I like that. So, I get back in my car and I’m driving to work and all of a sudden it hits me – all them fellas that used to belittle me, not a single one of them was curious. You know, they thought they had everything all figured out, so they judged everything, and they judged everyone. And I realized that their underestimating me – who I was had nothing to do with it. Because if they were curious, they would’ve asked questions. Questions like, ‘Have you played a lot of darts, Ted?”
The new and most likely final season of the show is coming out this month if that quote makes you curious. You can get the Apple subscription and binge all 3 seasons!
But other than making a television recommendation, what I want to leave you with on my last Sunday of regularly preaching from this pulpit, is the quote from the middle of that scene, which may or may not be correctly attributed to Walt Whitman. “Be curious, not judgmental.”
Curiosity is probably THE most underrated spiritual value – and it is exceptionally important, from cradle to grave, for generating spiritual awareness. It is the spiritual gift that I think all humans are born with – though not all humans are blessed with the opportunities to use it successfully. Growing up in either a strict or a traumatic household can stifle curiosity and replace it with fear as the glue that binds the family unit together. My friends, it may be hard to get past such difficulties in early life, but it is possible. Curiosity can be developed at any and every stage of life, and it does wonders for undermining the hold that fear can have on us.
Let’s start an exploration of curiosity by taking a moment to consider childhood wonder. Perhaps you can flash back to a time in your youth when you felt free and creative, when your imagination allowed you to handle some grand concept about the magnificence of life with an ease that might not even feel possible at your current stage of life. When you hear childhood stories about saints and mystics and the whole garden variety of spiritual leaders and secular innovators, there’s often a memory that highlights how well they are in tune with their very active imaginations. For Jesus, we have the story about him “forgetting” to go home with his family after Passover because he was lost in wonder quizzing the temple priests. In a class I’m taking now about the 16th century mystic, Teresa of Avila, her childhood story is about learning the word “forever.” The meaning behind the word set her to spinning and dancing and imagining what “forever” means in God’s eyes as she repeatedly said it over and over. Can you recall a moment from your childhood when curiosity “caught” you? Because it is caught more often than it’s taught – and it flows in surprising ways. Curiosity and its sister, wonder, are entwined in those moments that allow us to experience awe. And it is awe that allows us to become captivated by life itself or gives us a hunger to know more and more.
Unfortunately, many of us have been led to believe that mature faith comes from having the kind of doctrinal purity that becomes certain about itself, and curiosity becomes a thing to leave to the realm of children. That kind of thinking is what leads us to see the second creation story from Genesis 2 as a curse rather than a blessing. The first creation story is that 7-day time table that has been frequently misused out of biblical literalism, but we have also been taught to believe that this one is about human error, Original Sin maybe even. We eat of the tree of knowledge and then we die. Do we really think that those who wrote down this story to tell the origins of human beginnings were the ones drinking at the bar after work and complaining about how life is crap and then you die? In case you didn’t catch it – when you read the rest of the story – Adam and Eve eat the fruit of this particular tree, and they don’t take a bite and keel over. They gain knowledge about themselves, about God, about the garden, about how hard life can be. That’s what happens to them.
So what is it that God is communicating here when God commands the man of the earth, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die?” Sometimes it helps to get curious about a text like this, to ask questions of it in your own mind, or ask a friend what they see in it. It also helps to ask how other traditions read this text.
I found out in doing so that there is a Hasidic interpretation of this text that goes back to verse 9 to think about the two specific trees that God puts in the garden – the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now what if the humans ate the fruit from both trees? The tree of life carried in its fruit the possibility of eternal life. The tree of knowledge is of course about knowing things and being able to interpret them as good or bad. Now pair immortality with being all-knowing and you have a pretty good description for what the ancients imagined the gods to be. This brings up a whole host of possible questions. Why would God create trees that would give creatures the ability to become like gods? Is gaining knowledge a sign of misbehavior or actually curiosity? How often is childhood curiosity condemned as misbehavior? Did they drop dead the day they ate fruit from that tree? The answer is no. But they did know then that they would die, that they were not going to be like God and live forever.
I like to think of humans as creatures designed with curiosity in mind. They not only work the land, but they name the animals, and then they forge social relationships. They are connected – to the earth, the beings, and each other. We are hungry for all kinds of knowledge, and our Presbyterian spiritual forefather began his tome on religious thinking with the quest for seeking knowledge, saying that there are two kinds of knowledge that people will be about in this world if they long to be wise and bear the image of Christ. John Calvin explains that any knowledge we gain about God or ourselves is useful, spiritual, and really the goal of all humanity. That doesn’t portray the apple-biting in such an unfavorable light now, does it?
A more learned curiosity that we gain with age and wisdom comes after many of those things we built into a prideful sense of certainty are challenged. We lose our innocence about the world. We are confronted with human suffering and the powers of evil still roaming about and causing havoc. We fear that the wonder we had as children that made us stop to smell the flowers or get lost in a conversation that was too big for us to understand but just big enough to make us want to know more are gone forever. That’s precisely when curiosity is most needed. We need to be imaginative exactly when the going gets tough. We can get stuck in the ruts of our own making and deem that the way it has always been is the only way that it can be. We can long for days of yore instead of being excited about the potential we see in tomorrow.
Curiosity is what allows us to be fully who we are in the present moment. Judgment tells us to hold on tightly to the past. Fear keeps us from being confident that the future is some place we want to be. Curiosity keeps us fresh and wondering. Curiosity is the breath of God flowing in us and through us. Curiosity lets us truly see the person in front of us, whether we have just met, or we have known, or thought we have known, this person for 40 years.
This Genesis 2 text, or really just the verses about eating from the tree of knowledge being a death curse, are yanked from their story on the first Sunday of Lent as a reminder that temptation is bad, that it’s linked to sin, that it causes all sorts of human problems. I would like to redeem that curiosity today in the mystical spiritual sense. Teresa, also known as Teresa of Jesus – the mystic I am studying now, imagines temptations as these reptilian creatures that are always nipping at our ankles to stay busy, or get distracted, or keep on tilling that soil and making your paycheck. They may entertain us for a moment – but they certainly don’t encourage us to get to know ourselves very well. They keep us blind to who we are or who we could be becoming. Those temptations are what distract us from the curiosity of the spiritual life, of getting interested in what lies beyond the veil of ordinariness and sets our soul to shining with the light of God that has always been within us.
My friends, humanity has tasted the fruit that makes us long to know more, and more, and more. So be curious. Get curious. Lose any of that judgmental edge that characterizes most of what is called religion today. Religious communities that will thrive in the future will need to be more interesting, more compelling, more authentic, and wondrous. And far more curious. Amen.
Recent
Kerra's Last 5 Sermons - Be Curious, Not Judgmental
February 26th, 2023
Kerra's Last 5 Sermons (Bonus) - Transfiguration: Beloved Sunday
February 26th, 2023
Kerra's Last 5 Sermons - Love Poetry
February 26th, 2023
Kerra's Last 5 Sermons - Salty and Lit
February 5th, 2023
Kerra's Last 5 Sermons - Blessed Are You
January 31st, 2023
Archive
2023
2022
2021
December
Categories
no categories
No Comments