Pastoral Ponderings- Think about it…
I saw a big truck this week that was painted up like a portable billboard, as so many are these days, and it caught my eye as I’m sure was the intent. But I think I saw something there that wasn’t intended! The truck was advertising a convenience store proclaiming it was SO convenient, that the character on the truck was excitedly proclaiming, “I don’t even have to THINK about it…”—and the ad goes on to imply that numbed, non-thinking brain as a REWARD??
From at least as far back as Socrates some 2500 years ago, and getting a huge resurgence in Western culture– even a “renaissance” one might say with the Enlightenment era of the 15th and 16th centuries– “thinking” has been highly valued the world over. Yet this traveling billboard proclaims it a “reward” that “I don’t even have to THINK.” What’s going on here?
Have we gotten tired of thinking? Would we rather let someone else do our thinking for us? Do we think someone else can know God’s thoughts for us better than our own sense of God’s discernment, or should we follow others’ thoughts that God is too inconvenient for us these days? Has thinking become so inconvenient (per the “convenience” store “reasoning?”), that it has become more a bother than helpful?
The accidental father of our Methodist tradition, John Wesley, in one of his many letters, expressed how important reason, or the responsibility of good thinking is to faith: “It is a fundamental principle with us [i.e., Methodists] that to renounce reason is to renounce religion, that religion and reason go hand in hand, and that all irrational religion is false religion.” (Letter to Dr. Rutherford: 28th March 1768). In other words, an irrational faith, such as one based on a “greatest commandment” of love, expressed in what appears to be hateful ways, makes no sense, and can thus be no true faith. Think about it (if it’s not too inconvenient…).
That stuff inside our skulls is not there just to keep our hearts beating and ensure our faces keep their shape, God put it there with its vast capacities to explore the glories of God’s creation and graces, and to find creative ways to share God’s love with a hurting world. I’m sorry if that seems inconvenient. Just thinking– perhaps God has better plans for us than merely our convenience? But what’s the use in thinking like that?
Just keep thinking—Pastor Jim Lewis—Twin Falls, Ravenna and Charlestown UMCs