The importance of experience

This Sunday I gave a sermon about how Jesus’ parables challenged (and still challenge) conventional beliefs about God. The people to whom Jesus first came were not prepared for him in large part because they had accepted as true received beliefs about God (and God’s coming anointed one) that were false.

They assumed they knew things they did not know and instead of starting with their experience with Jesus (his teachings, his miracles, his life) and reworking what they though they knew, they expected Jesus to confirm their assumptions.

When they finally realized he wasn’t going to do that, they got rid of him.

Their error did not die in the first century. Religious people of all persuasions, including Christians, continue to accept received ideas about God as true that are in fact false. We continue to think we know things we do not know.

Like them, we prioritize theoretical ideas about God that we’ve received from others over our lived experience(s) when much of what we claim to believe could be easily falsifiable by simple observation (and maybe a little deduction).

The blind man in John 9 understood this. The religious leaders warned him that Jesus was not from God and yet Jesus opened his eyes. Could an evil person do such a thing?  He began with his experience of a man opening his eyes and coordinated his beliefs about that man based on his experience.

The book of Job is also a great example of this. Job knew himself to be an innocent man, someone who feared God and obeyed the law. And he was right! God acknowledges that to Satan in the opening chapter.

But for most of the book Job’s “friends” challenge him with conventional religious beliefs. “God only does these sorts of things to people who have done evil. Therefore, you must have sinned.” “Who are you to question God? God can do what he wants?”

But Job persists in his innocence because his experience tells him (rightly) that he is.
And by the end of the book when God finally speaks, God judges Job’s friends for speaking inaccurately about him, unlike his servant Job.

But they were so sure of themselves. They were so confident they understood how it worked. That is because they weren’t paying attention to their experience. Had they, they would have seen what Job saw. Righteous people don’t always prosper, and wicked people don’t always suffer. Sometimes the wicked live long, prosperous, healthy lives and the righteous die young.

It’s not as simple as Job’s friends would like to believe it is. Sometimes you do all the right things and life goes poorly for you. And sometimes you do all the wrong things and get away with it.

Job was blameless and yet he suffered. His friends’ theological worldview had no space for that possibility.

But they were wrong. Everything they’d been taught by all their religious experts, the same “wisdom” they then peddled on others, was wrong. Job was right and he knew it from experience.

Experience is a religious authority. It is the only way anyone accesses truth in any way. That does not mean we will always interpret our experience(s) correctly, as Job did, but it does mean that we need to interpret them. We cannot dismiss experience in favor of other supposedly more authoritative authorities, like the Bible or church tradition, for instance.

Our experience in the world, especially our experience with God, and most especially our experience with God in the person of Jesus, is a norming reference for our faith and life. When we think about who God is, what God does, what God does not do, and what God will do, it is our experience of God in Jesus that ought to inform us most concretely, not some theory about God we cooked up by weaving unrelated Bible verses together as is customary in many Christian circles.

The church has lost and continues to lose people because they have been taught (wrongly) to deny their experiences and how those experiences influence their understanding of God and faith in favor of more “objective truth” like the Bible. But what happens to Job is a great example of how this approach goes wrong.

Bible thumpers will argue that trusting our experience is dangerous because it’s too subjective, failing to recognize who subjective their own approach to interpreting scripture is. But regardless, you can’t avoid this. Your experience in the world comes before you access the Bible and you interpret scripture from an experiential vantage point, even if you don’t want to admit that.

You cannot escape your experience. You aren’t supposed to. Experience is where the living God meets you. Pay attention to it.

Like Job did.