I read an article years ago about surfing. It’s about a group of surfers that wanted to surf bigger and bigger waves. But these waves were so enormous that even experienced surfers could not paddle fast enough to get out in front of them in order to catch them. So, they started to use jet skis. They would lie in the water clinging to their surfboard with a friend sitting on a jet ski next to them. And when one of these enormous waves started to approach, the jet ski would pull the surfer out in front of the wave so the surfer could stand up and hang ten. But a funny thing happened. The more the jet skis pulled these surfers out in front of the waves, they started to get a better feel for them. When to start paddling, how to get out in front of them, to the point that they learned how to surf them without help.

About 25 years ago, I read a book by Diana Eck entitled, A New Religious America. It was about how this country had become the most religiously diverse country in the world. And it was based on well-documented statistics as well as people’s personal experience. That 50 years ago when you were driving down the road, no one ever looked out their window and saw a Hindu temple, a mosque, or a Buddhist monastery. But we could all find those locations on our Google Maps today in about three minutes. And like surfing bigger waves, change can feel overwhelming. There’s always been that lingering fear over what is different, even though God breathed life into all of humanity. It means we need to foster a new understanding, a deeper wisdom, and a wider love for the world in which we live, leaning into bigger ways of embodying grace, creating community, and promoting peace.

After the death of John the Baptist, Jesus was walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee and he saw all these fishermen. First, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew, and then James and John, the sons of Zebedee. And they were all tending to their nets, mending them, cleaning them. And Jesus said, follow me and I will make you fish for people, that it was a new calling, a pivot in their lives, where they were to put down those nets and focus on loving their neighbor as themselves, serving others, sharing forgiveness, building community. But none of them put down individual fishing poles. It did not say Zebco on the side of their nets. That when they went fishing, they threw out these large and wide nets and pulled back a huge amount of fish. It’s like that story in the Gospel of John, where Jesus says, throw out your nets, and they pull in a net full of fish of 153 different kinds of fish. That as we practice loving our neighbor as ourselves, we need a new understanding and a deeper wisdom and a wider love because our neighbors are going to be different from us. They are not enemies to avoid, they are neighbors to serve.

And then the apostle Paul deepens our understanding of this calling. Yet again, we’re in 1 Corinthians. There’s all these divisions within the early church. Some are saying, “I follow Apollos. I belong to Paul. I belong to Cephas.” It was a mess. And Paul asks, “Has Christ been divided?” And then Paul says, “As brothers and sisters have the same mind.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t know many brothers and sisters who think exactly alike. Brothers and sisters know what it means to argue, to not get along, to feel that tension that can be between us. But perhaps that’s part of Paul’s point. That as brothers and sisters who know what it means to deal with tension, they also know how to work through it because there is something that we are rooted in together which is far more important. That maybe we not only need the same mind where we agree on everything, but also the same heart. We need the same heart of patience and mercy, wisdom and understanding so that we can care for our brothers and sisters and we can love our neighbors as ourselves.

One thing that can make this rather hard is a hermeneutic of suspicion. Hermeneutic, just a fancy word for interpretation. Like reading scripture and interpreting what it means. That when we open up scripture and we bring to it a critical eye, reading it closer than we have in the past, looking for things that are there, that we didn’t assume they were there in the past. It leads us to deeper, clearer, faithful understandings of Scripture. But if we’re not careful… this can bleed out into other parts of our lives. As Richard Topping, the president of Vancouver School of Theology says, “If we have been trained to have a critical eye, we can bring a hermeneutic of suspicion to others.” That we’re so used to identifying the problem, improving the theory, seeking a better way that we are unable to also see what is good, leading to more division and less cooperation. The theologian Miroslav Volf says it this way: “In order to change the world, we need an I-have-a-dream speech, not an I-have-a-complaint speech.” That we also need a hermeneutic of generosity, where we seek out the same heart with others so that we can serve our brothers and sisters and love our neighbors as ourselves.

That we need what Alyce McKenzie and Owen Lynch call soft eyes. Hard eyes is where we see the trees, but not the forest. That we’re so focused on one thing that we can’t see anything else. That we see that we come from different cultures. We have different viewpoints. We approach things in such different ways that we’re hyper-focused on those things. Which means we fail to see how kind they are towards others, how devoted they are to their family, their sense of humor, their hard work. That hard eyes keep us having the same heart. Where soft eyes enable us to see others with generosity and grace. Or, as someone who has a brother and a sister, I hope they always see me in those ways. And as someone who has neighbors on all sides of my house. I hope they always treat me in those ways. Which means I am called to see and treat others in those ways as well.

And the good news is… Jesus sees all of us in those ways. Because Jesus looked on fishermen, and he looked at a tax collector, and he looked at a zealot. He looked at the one who would eventually doubt him, and the one who would eventually deny him, and the one who would eventually betray him. And Jesus said, “Follow me,” because Jesus has soft eyes. He looks at us, with generosity and grace, which leads us to a new understanding, deeper wisdom, and a wider love. Amen