the cosmos is watching

When I was about 12, the people I most could not stand in life were other kids my age who acted like know-it-alls. Ironically, I think the main reason they bothered me so much was because I was convinced that I knew it all—or at least knew better than they did—but I didn’t have the skills to assert my voice with confidence. I felt a strong sense of injustice that the people who pretended to know it all were the ones being heard, and I—the one who, in my view, actually knew it all—was being ignored or passed over.

Oh, 12. It’s not an age I miss.

What I do miss sometimes is the certainty of being right. Being sure that my perspective is the best one, that I’m the one who has considered all the contingencies, that I can righteously claim that if Jesus were to come comment on XYZ topic, He and I would be pretty well aligned. The older I get the less space there seems to be for self-righteous self-certainty. I think I expected the opposite.

I recently read this quote from Anne Lamott: “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”

That quote makes my evangelical bones shiver a little. Didn’t I take half a dozen “spiritual gifts quizzes” that told me I had the gift of faith—precisely because of how I answered questions about certainty? It was never hard for me to believe what I was supposed to believe, and to also believe that I was 100% right. Did that make faith my spiritual gift? Or might my certainty have been a spiritual handicap?

To ask the questions differently: Has my spiritual gift atrophied as I’ve grown older—despite the fact that my walk with Jesus has grown in length and depth—because I’m less of a know-it-all at 31 than I was at 12? Or was I mistaking my propensity to take refuge in knowledge as an unalloyed strength, when it is sometimes my Achilles heel?

Looking back across the churches I’ve lived in over the last few decades, my sense of injustice is still a little bit activated—no longer because I’m convinced I’m the one who really knows it all, but because I think we as a collective may have a know-it-all problem.

Like I measured my “gift of faith” by how much certainty I had, many Christians and congregations measure the genuineness of people’s faith by what they factually “know.” Rather than placing the value on knowing Christ and Him crucified (experientially and actively, as well as propositionally), the unspoken litmus tests for these churches sound more like end-of-year school examinations. How well do you know (and can you spontaneously rehash) your specific church’s statement of faith—right down to its stance on the controversial culture war issues of the day? That’s how we know if you’re a real Christian. That’s how we know if you belong here.

Add to this the fact that all different denominations or non-denominational churches will have a slightly different set of these implicit test questions, and a different set of answers to them, and it’s no wonder the know-it-all problem in Christianity has become a unity problem as well. We are a movement shattered into a million shards.

If the goal is Jesus, then what truly matters is knowing Jesus, recognizing His voice, and faithfully following His lead. But if the goal is being right (and displaying how right we are), we will struggle mightily to exercise our faith in a way that makes space for the Spirit of God to do His work in us and in the world.

When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith would not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.

1 Corinthians 2:1-5

I believe this is one reason why moving into the Anglican tradition has been such a relief for me. We say the Nicene Creed together every week before we participate in communion, and all the rest we discuss amicably, over coffee and snacks or a feast with mulled wine, as the less-than-primary issues they are.

When Jesus was about to face Pilate, and with him the powers and principalities of darkness, His prayer to the Father was “that they [believers] may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me” (John 17:21).

Unity within the Church, and between the Church and the Trinity, is our testimony to the cosmos. All of Creation and its inhabitants are watching.

Do we look anything at all like the One we claim to represent?