(…continued) William Willimon was, for many years, the chaplain at Duke University. He got tired of seeing eighteen-year-old college students who thought they already had it all figured out. He also got tired of hearing professors tell their students that all they had to do was ‘think for themselves.’ The kids had been told that since pre-Kindergarten, so they were now convinced that all they needed to do was ‘think for themselves.’ So Willimon once gave a sermon titled “DON’T Think for Yourself.” He said that ‘thinking for yourself’ is good on one level; that is, to use your head, have common sense, don’t just blindly follow the crowd, and all that. But he quickly added that before you can think for yourself, there has to be something in your head to think about. He told them to not be so over-confident in their uninformed opinions, be more eager to learn while they are in college, and read books even if they are not on the assigned reading list (better yet, some old classics). He said, “Give your mind something to think about besides Snapchat and Instagram. Think for yourself, yes, of course, but life is too short to start from scratch and try to figure it all out on your own. Learn from the wisdom of your elders; learn from the wisdom of the ages; and most of all, learn from the wisdom of God, the one who created life and gave you your life to live. You are not your own, but you belong to God. God does want what is best for you, but you do need to listen to what he says.” (my paraphrased summary)
This message is also in the Old Testament book of Job, which says: “Ask the former generation and find out what their ancestors learned, for we were born only yesterday and know nothing, and our days on earth are but a shadow.” Jeremiah 6:16 says, “This is what the Lord says: Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But the people replied, ‘No, we will not walk in it.’”
“No!” they said. That is what many are saying today also, and how is that going for us? People are cutting off the restricting bonds of the old morality and are ‘thinking for themselves,’ all right; and the result is that we are experiencing an unraveling of our society that is every day more frightening.
The sixth chapter of Mark describes the large crowds that followed Jesus wherever he went. Even when he tried to get away and get some rest (v. 31), they followed him. This was always happening, wherever Jesus went. What were all those people looking for? Whatever it was, it wasn’t their little inner voice telling them to ‘think for themselves.’ If that was all they wanted, they could have stayed home. But they did not stay home. They followed Jesus all over the countryside because they heard in his words something they desperately needed, something that gave them a word of hope, and something they knew that they would never find within themselves.
Jesus sensed their need and responded to them. Verse 34 says, “Jesus saw the large crowd and had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So, he began to teach them many things.” Sheep without a shepherd are lost and in trouble.
We should, of course, use our head and think for ourselves; in many ways. But on the deepest level, we must do our thinking on the basis of what we have heard from Someone else. We believe we have been addressed by another voice. We listen to a voice from outside of ourselves. When you go to church, you go to hear words spoken by a person, but you expect that what is said is based on something other than the pastor’s own inner voice, thoughts, feelings, or opinions on the matter. Pastors are called to preach and teach the Word of God, a word that comes not from inside of us but from the outside. It is a Word that was revealed long before we were here, and will still be relevant long after we are gone. We may not always hear and obey that word correctly; and good, honest, Bible-believing Christians might disagree on all sorts of things. But we know where to look for the answers– and it is not to our own inner voice. Rather, we look outside of ourselves, to God’s Word, and we do our best to understand that. God is the Creator of all life, and the best way to understand life and how to live it is to look to God’s Word.
We are lost without it. We are lost without Jesus.
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Lord, I am blind and helpless, stupid and ignorant. Cause me to hear; help me to know; teach me to do; and lead me. Amen.
–Henry Martyn (1781-1812)
Pardon, O gracious Jesus, what we have been; and with your holy discipline, correct what we are; and by your providence order what we shall be. Amen.
–John Wesley
O God our Father, who invites us to pray, and grants what we ask; hear me struggling in this darkness, and hold out to me your hand. Send me your light, and recall me from my wanderings. Amen.
–St. Augustine
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SUPPLEMENT:
William Willimon’s sermon at Duke University chapel,
November 3, 1991, on Deuteronomy 6:6-8.
“Don’t Think for Yourself”
In the movie The Dead Poet’s Society, an energetic teacher at an exclusive prep school is depicted as opening up the minds of his hung up, privileged, young students by urging them to “think for yourself.” Don’t trust what your parents have told you. Don’t trust what you’ve always heard. The important thing is to think for yourselves. In one scene he rips up a textbook telling them, “No, don’t listen to the experts. Think for yourself.” A friend of mine noted that despite the movie’s claim that this teacher was somehow liberating his students from social convention, it would be hard to think of a more conformist and socially conventional message in today’s context than to give young people the advice “Think for yourself.” If there ever were a day when such advice was deemed radical, that day has passed.
In fact, here’s how the president of Yale University welcomed the freshmen to Yale last year. He told them, “The faculty can guide you. We can take you to the frontiers of knowledge, but we cannot supply you with a philosophy of education any more than we can supply you with a philosophy of life. This has got to come from your own active learning, from your own choices, your own decisions. Yale expects you to take yourself seriously. Think for yourself.” In other words, the university has absolutely no clue what you’re supposed to be doing here. Oh, we’ve got this smorgasbord of courses and professors. We’ve got this curriculum. But whether it all adds up to something called wisdom by the time you graduate, well that’s really up to you. The important thing is that you think for yourself.
And it appears that we are thinking for ourselves… I have been reading this new book The Day America Told the Truth. That book says that 91 percent of us admit that we lie routinely. Thirty-one percent of us who are married admit to having an extramarital affair lasting over a year. Eighty-six percent of you lie regularly to their parents. Seventy-five percent lie regularly to their best friends. One in five American loses his or her virginity before the age of thirteen. Two thousand, two hundred forty-five New Yorkers were murdered by their fellow citizens last year, an increase of 18 percent. By the way, when asked, religion plays no role in shaping the opinions of two-thirds of those who are asked their opinions about sex. Well, it’s a lie here, an extramarital affair there, and (…so what?) At least we are thinking for ourselves.
Now an alternative way of looking at things is asserted in the book of Deuteronomy, which says, “Keep these words that I’m commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children. Talk about them when you’re at home and when you’re away. Fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” The words Deuteronomy is referring to, are the words of the Law of Israel, the Torah. Torah is not so much the Law that we’re not to break, but it is the divine finger pointing us in the direction we ought to walk. Torah.
Now, interestingly enough in Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus is asked about life’s big question, he simply refers them to Deuteronomy, to Torah. Good Jew that he was, Jesus simply said, “Look, you know the answer. We’re to love God with all of our heart and soul and mind and strength and our neighbor as ourselves.” This is Torah. This is truth. Take these words, advises Deuteronomy, teach them to your kids, paint them over the door to your dormitory room, brand these on your forehead, tattoo them on your biceps. Take these words and just drill them into yourself so that you won’t forget.
Here we have come into a collision with an alternative way of knowing. Alas, you have been the willing victims of a mode of education that has taught you to always locate the all the answers exclusively within your own experience, as though your own experience, particularly your racial, gender, cultural experience, could yield insight on the spot. Think for yourself. And that’s why most of my sermons begin with your experience, because I have a hunch that’s the only thing you really trust. And so, I begin my sermons, you know, always groping around for some point of contact with what you already know.
But Torah, on the other hand, always begins with what you could not know, unless somebody had told it to you. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is One.” Don’t think for yourself. Unlike Yale, or many of my sermons, Israel did not expect her young to devise insight via personal conjuring. You don’t have to be the author of your own faith, for here is a massive faith that lies way outside the limited confines of your individual psyche.
Israel’s sons and daughters don’t have to invent the secrets to life. Their parents loved them enough to tell them the secrets. And it is no coincidence that in today’s text, wisdom is depicted as an exchange between an elder and someone of the younger generation as the giving of an intergenerational gift. Being 19 years old is just way too tough already, without having to make up the world as you go.
I agree with Oscar Wilde who said, “About the worst advice you can give anybody is be yourself.” Don’t think for yourself. As Walter Brueggemann says, “Torah is not just for children… All persons of whatever age face the threat of darkness.” Brueggemann says everybody needs some time of homecoming, when you can return to those sureties that do not need to be defended nor doubted. That’s what Torah is. It’s homecoming.
With no Torah-induced neighbors, the world is only driven by competing, savage, self-interest. Even the people under our own roof become our enemies. The office becomes a battleground for the war between the sexes. Cultural chaos leads to ethical immobility. We don’t make many big moves. Having nowhere to stand, we can’t make big moves.
A recent Duke graduate asked his old man late one night when he went back home “Look, I’m getting ready to go out into life. Tell me what you know. Go ahead. Tell me if you know something.” For this touchingly childlike request he received an hour of ramblings, a confession about how his old man had had affair with his secretary when the son was 13, and about how he hated his job, and he’d love to chuck it all and just move out to a cabin in the woods, and he really despised his marriage and he couldn’t trust any of his friends.
“Man, you are messed up,” said the son. “I’m supposed to be asking you for advice?” Well, you see now that young man is reduced to thinking for himself.
Torah asserts a countercultural way of wisdom, which is intergenerational, public, countercultural, and historical. The beautiful thing is you don’t bear the burden of having to think for yourself. Every time you walk in this building, the chapel, a host of predecessors leans down out of the stain glass windows and tries to speak to you, if we’ll dare to listen. They stare down at us from the windows begging to show us the way.
Saints are people who managed to love God more than life itself, managed to love neighbor more than the self, and thereby found true life. Christians are those who have learned to think with the saints. And, thereby, we think much more creatively than we could if we’d been left to our own devices. St. Francis, Martin Luther King, Teresa of Calcutta, Gideon, Mary—they help us to think beyond ourselves. They help us to think despite ourselves. And thereby, in this act of holy remembering and saintly thinking, new options are envisioned. We’re encouraged, as a new world not of our own devising is offered to us.
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