When Dan and I were first married - before there were smart phones and instant on demand video distractions and we had to wait through the high squeal of dial up just to check our email, we would play Scrabble. And Dan would smoke me. Every. Time. He not only had, and still has, a superior vocabulary, but he also had this knack for maximizing on the triple letter scores with the Ps and Js and Ks. One night, I’d had enough. I was getting so frustrated that Dan always beat me, and was currently trouncing me by over one hundred points. I was annoyed that I couldn’t seem to master this game like Dan had. I was discouraged at the threatening thought that Dan might be smarter, cleverer, better, than I. I was clearly spiraling. I could feel the discomfort climbing up from my stomach. My head was getting hot. My vision began to blur with irritation and resentment. And I watched him as he gently played the tiles on the board: W. O. L. F. “That’s 78 points,” he said with a triumph. And I looked at him, and I looked at the board, and looked at him and looked at the board and I kid you not, with something very near tears in my eyes I asked him, with all the seriousness and confusion and a truly, authentic, lack of comprehension, but also with this sort of triumph, as if I’d finally called him out on making this word up, I asked, “What is ‘wolf’?”
And I don’t remember exactly what Dan said or how he responded. I have a vague memory of a kind of bemused incredulity. “Uh, Jenn? W.O.L.F. Wolf. You don’t know what a wolf is?” And I swear, for some really long seconds, I honestly had no idea what what a wolf was. I was so frustrated and so angry and so wrapped up in my desire to, for once, beat Dan at Scrabble, that I pretty much completely lost my mind. I lost a certain grasp of reality. I couldn’t recognize familiar things. Words had lost their meaning. I was so swallowed up in what I wanted, what I needed to be true, that suddenly “wolf” was no longer a word in my lexicon.
We joke about it now. Whenever one of us misunderstands something, or we miss the obvious, or we have a hard time comprehending what, to the other one of us, seems like a fairly simple concept, we’ll say, “What is wolf?" And then laugh at the situation.
John Calvin once lamented: “So great is the influence of preconceived opinion, that it brings darkness over the mind in the midst of the clearest light.” In other words, our preconceptions, our biases, our assumptions, and our versions of reality carry so much weight for us that when we are presented with opposing facts, these preconceptions, biases, and versions of reality cloud up and hide the truth.
This was the Copernican Revolution, right? Copernicus essentially proved that the Earth and the other planets of the solar system revolved around the sun, and disproved that these planets and this sun revolved around the Earth, and this idea rocked the entire world. This concept, this idea that perhaps we humans weren’t the center and the focus around which all of creation revolved, was completely unfathomable to the Christian Church. Their preconceptions clouded their acceptance of the truth. They looked at the facts and they saw the evidence and its implications and they basically said, “what is wolf?”
Eratothenes pretty much proved that the earth was round way back before Jesus was even born, and still, today, after geometry and explorers and photographic pictures from outer space, we have flat-earthers who cannot handle the truth of it.
We have climate change deniers who focus on the now debunked studies of a few scientists who question the negative impact that humans are having on this world, despite the hurricanes and floods and droughts and fires and pandemics and the rising tides and temperatures and the melting ice caps and the scientific consensus of 99% of climate experts that all say that human-made climate change is real, and is a serious threat to our health and the future of the human race.
A few people saw some behavior changes in their children after their first MMR vaccinations, and that inspired a quack so-called scientist to run a faulty, now debunked experiment that supposedly proved that vaccines cause autism, and now we have an entire antivaxer movement, and so now we have rising incidents of whooping cough and measles and a resurgence of polio, which was once so close to being completely eradicated.
In all these situations, people have held on so tightly to their preconceived opinions, that they couldn't see otherwise, even when presented with facts.
What is…wolf?
This is a human condition. We all do it. It’s called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable thing that happens when we are confronted by a truth that contradicts what we previously thought. It’s when we encounter evidence that fails to meet our expectations, and we kind of flip out. And over and over again, we choose the option that meets our preconceived notions, rather than revise and adjust our worldview.
And more information doesn’t help. In fact, it can make this cognitive dissonance worse. Studies have shown that people more easily believe the resources and the articles and the studies that already support their perspective. And we more quickly disregard any evidence that might contradict our idea of what is true. “We learn and remember agreeable information more easily. We seek it out, and we ignore, avoid, and devalue information that does not fit our view or our expectations.” We “selectively expose” ourselves to new information - that is, we tend to pick and choose the “new” information that will confirm what we already believe to be true. We surround ourselves entirely with others who agree with us. We manipulate the facts in order to fit them into our narrative. This is the “alternative fact” society, where, as an article in The Atlantic states, “There are facts and there are beliefs and there are things you want so badly to believe that they become as facts to you.”
When we’re confronted with conflicting ideas, it’s just our human nature to brush them off, forget them, devalue them, or ignore them altogether. Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable. It forces us out of our own little worldview and into the perspective of another, and this does not feel good. What feels good, is being right. And we will pursue that feeling of being right all the way to the end of the world. Instead of opening ourselves up to other possibilities, we double down on our previous beliefs. We do this kind of “motivated reasoning” where we do theological or sociological or even so-called "scientific" backflips in order for us to remain convinced of what we already believe.
Now for most of us, this doesn’t happen in every situation. If we walk out the door and encounter rain after the forecast told us to expect sun, we grab our umbrellas and we go on with our day. If the bus is scheduled to come at 8:17 and it’s already 8:19, most of the time, we just wait a little longer. But when our beliefs are tied to our identities and our communities, there’s much more at stake, and that means it’s much, much more uncomfortable when we are confronted with something that might threaten to shift those beliefs. We need each other, and we think that we all have to think and believe the same things in order for us to stay connected to each other. And so, suddenly, wearing a mask to the grocery store isn’t just about doing our part to protect each other from a deadly virus, it becomes a symbol of who is on your side, it’s an expression of what group you belong to, it becomes a political and moral and sometimes even spiritual stance. Even if we are confronted with the proven evidence that masks and vaccinations save lives, we will resist that evidence, avoid masks, refuse the vaccination, because to accept those things might mean that we are no longer members of that group. And we so, so, so long to belong. And in order to belong, we start to focus more on the symbols, the rules, and the definitions rather than the relationships.
Relationships tend to destroy preconceived notions. They wreak havoc on static belief systems. Relationships cause us to rewind the tape and question everything we thought we knew.
What is…wolf?
So this isn’t just a thing that we are experiencing now in our information-overloaded, politically dissected, instant-gratification, social media world. This is a human thing. It’s our condition. It’s exactly what was going on here in our reading today.
Jesus is walking along, telling the disciples, once again, about this hard thing. He’s going to be betrayed by humans, by people just like you and me, and they’re going to kill him and then three days later he’s going to rise again.
Uh, say what now?
Over and over again, Jesus confronts them with an entirely new paradigm, a conflicting set of facts that upend everything they believed the Son of Man was supposed to do and mean and achieve. This is the disciples experiencing complete and total cognitive dissonance. This can not be what is true about the Messiah. This doesn’t match the king and the political power and the reunification of Israel that the Messiah is going to bring. This is not the belief system around which my community has defined itself. This doesn’t make sense, and this is not what we expected. And they don’t understand. And they experience fear. They have anxiety. They lose a certain sense of what is real. We can't criticize them for this because we do it all the time.
What is…wolf?
And then they, like us, double down on their previous narrative. They not only think that all of this is going to turn out great, but they also start arguing on the way about who is going to be the greatest. Jesus has told them about the fact of suffering, and the disciples have rejected that fact in order to hold on to their belief in triumph.
And Jesus calls them out on it. He basically says, “Your expectations are different from the real. Your beliefs don’t match up with the truth. You think it’s all about being the first and the greatest and the best, but really, the fact is, the truth is, whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” And he doubles down on this. He really wants to drive this home. He takes a kid, someone who has no current value or claim on being “the greatest” and he wraps this kid in his arms and he says, “if you welcome one like this, you welcome me, and if you welcome me, you welcome the One who sent me.”
This isn’t a story about a cute kid sitting on Jesus’s lap and telling him that he wants a Red Ryder bb gun for Christmas. This isn’t just a feel good story about how we should value children. (Of course we should). This is about how Jesus calls us to enter in to those spaces where we are experiencing a cognitive dissonance, those spaces where we are so very tempted to just hear what we want to hear and expect what has always been, and be open to something new. You know, like kids. Kids aren’t just cute and silly and messy. They’re a little rebellious. They ask “why” and “who says” and “so what?” They question the status quo. Kids are malleable and moldable and flexible. They’re resilient. When given a new situation or a new set of information, they’re quick to change their minds. They aren’t threatened by new ideas or new perspectives because it’s all new to them all the time.
When Jesus calls us to be a servant to all, to welcome the child as if we are welcoming him, he is asking us to see the world outside of our limited perspectives. You can’t serve anyone if you can’t see what they need. And you can’t see what they need until you get out of your own cognitive space and try to occupy someone else’s. And that’s gonna be a little uncomfortable. We need cognitive dissonance in order to grow and change and learn and be in relationship. Kids have this in spades, but somehow, at least for awhile, they aren’t threatened by it. They take it in stride because they know that their value isn’t in what they think or what they believe or the symbols they adhere to. They know that they belong simply because of who they are. They can change their minds, they can explore, they can get uncomfortable and try something new because their belonging isn’t tied to any of those symbols of membership or expectation or how things have always been.
Our belonging isn’t tied to the fact that we drive on the right side of the road or that we vote a certain way or fly a certain flag or whether we wear masks in the grocery store or not. Our belonging is tied to something deeper and more flexible and more malleable and more true than any of that. Our belonging is tied to the dynamic of relationship. No matter what changes all around us, no matter what new facts come to light, we can adjust, we can adapt, we can survive and even embrace the dissonance because we are moored to the One who resisted all definitions, who avoided all simplifications, who upended all expectations, and who calls us into the dynamic, terrifying, ever-changing, paradigm shifting, revolutionizing relationship with Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ: Two triple letters on a double word score plus a bingo for using all your tiles: 144 points.
Thanks be to God.
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