Elemental Season 1 - Day 27

I was recently watching the movie Silence, about 17th-century priests and their journeys to Japan. It is a difficult movie and quite brutal. It is not a simple watch and the book by Shūsaku Endō i is just as fascinating and compelling. But there was one scene where a former priest who had apostatized and a current priest were speaking. The former priest was making the case that the Japanese Christians were never really Christians as they did not have the capacity to understand what was being taught to them. The current priest pushed back pretty hard (this is a horrible paraphrase, I apologize). The current priest had a hard time believing what the former priest was saying. But there was something about the interchange that has kept me thinking about it. Here is my question:

Have we gotten so much wrong that our faith is not close to what was envisioned by Jesus when he compelled people to follow him, to trust him, and to believe that he was not only the son of God, but God incarnate? Have we misunderstood, taken for granted, and taken other people’s words for truth for so long that we are very far away from what Jesus was trying to help us understand about God, about love and about the universe in general?

I think this is why studying scripture is so important for us each individually. In our process of breaking down that which we have taken for granted, it is pretty important for us to understand what it is that we are deconstructing, and how we can take what is ultimately true about God and incorporate it into our understanding of who Jesus is and how we can practice our faith in Him in real and relevant ways that do more good than damage to other people and to the communities around us.

The only way that we can do this is to make sure that our study is our own, to find the best guidance out there to help us grow and learn, and to make sure that we are open to thoughts that we have perhaps not allowed ourselves to think because of something we were told or something that happened to us when we were younger.

But to do this, you have to be brave. You have to be serious in your pursuit of God and trust in the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit. When we give our presuppositions to Jesus, it is a journey that might lead you to places you never considered, or it might re-affirm that which you hoped was true about God.

1. When was the last time you decided that you would take your intellectual discipleship seriously? 
2. How can you find out what your presuppositions and assumptions are? 
3. What is a good place for you to start these conversations, and do you have partners in this journey that you trust and can lean into?