Why I don't teach Sunday school.

I've never been good at knowing things, however I'd like to think I've been improving my skills quite a bit in the area of knowing what I don't know. Maybe that's why I've always enjoyed English and philosophy more than math and science. You don't really have to know anything to be good at English and philosophy.  You have to be able to think about things, and form opinions on things, but knowing them is an entirely different matter. Even when I was a kid I was a philosophical thinker, I remember trying to wrap my head around the idea of non existence as a child. I remember, as a kid, trying to understand what it would be like to not exist. It baffled my mind. Still does, actually, I have made no progress in that line of thought.

A few years ago, I thought I was going to be a children's pastor, teaching Sunday school and everything. I'm very happy I didn't go in that direction. To be a Sunday school teacher you have to teach things that I'm not so sure I know any more. One of these things was something that I even struggled with when I was in Sunday school myself. The whole "There's a God shaped hole in everyone's heart and nobody can be truly fulfilled without him" thing. Now, any one who knows me well knows that my life was headed down hill and took a complete turn for the better since I started believing in God again. The idea of being fulfilled by God is not one I take issue with, rather it was the way it was portrayed to me as a child. When I was a teenager, leading a VBS group, I heard it recited to me by kids the same way I had been taught it. People who don't have God in their lives have a big unfilled hole in their heart and are sad because of it, people who have God are filled with God's love and joy. This seems problematic to me because I know many non Christians who seem happy, and many Christians who are completely empty inside. This bothered me even as a kid, and was probably the first thing I ever questioned that I was taught at church. 

Something that bothers me now, in retrospect, that I was taught then, is a romanticised view of the bible. I remember being told things like "the bible is a love letter directly from God, to you." and that the bible was "basic instructions before leaving earth". Now, first of all these two views don't really match up, I mean, an instructional love letter? "baby I love you, here's how to love me back, Step 1: visit me everyday, Step 2: get me nice birthday presents, Step 3: cook me a nice meal" You get the idea. Now obviously these views of the bible are intentionally romanticised and  I believe the people who taught me that knew it was more complicated, the problem is maybe a kid doesn't know better. You see, the Bible wasn't written directly to me by God. The bible was written to a series of people, by a series of other people, between 4000 and 2000 years ago. The world is a different place. This is not to say the bible is irrelevant or anything of the sort, on the contrary I believe the bible is full of incredible amounts of God given wisdom which will live forever.  At some point though, we have to realize that the world has changed and laws pertaining to what to do if your Goat falls in your neighbours hole may not exactly hold weight with us any more. People say things like "read the bible as it is, don't try to impose your own interpretation on it" but if we're not interpreting it, and trying to make it relevant, and trying to understand the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law, we are going to make the bible irrelevant.

I think I went on a longer tangent there than I expected and may have gotten off track, but I'm going to keep running with it.

I was on a Christian message board a few years ago when one member told another that he was going to go to hell because he didn't believe in the Trinity. Something about how he wasn't truly understanding the nature of God. Personally, I didn't know that was a prerequisite to get in to heaven. I mean, the nature of God? God is so much bigger than us, he's so much more than I could ever understand. There's a reason Jewish people weren't allowed to make physical representations of him, or use his name. It's because the second we start to turn God into something physical that we can name and understand, we're already missing him. I've heard one problem some people have is that when they read different books of the bible they have a hard time understanding them all to be a part of the same religion. I've had that same problem, and I think I'm starting to understand why. The books of the bible were written by different people, in different places and different times. Because these people are different from each other, they've had different kinds of encounters with God. For example, if I were to ask everyone you know about you, I'd probably get different answers. Some people would know one aspect of you, others would know another. Maybe your co-workers would know your strong work ethic, your friends would know your sense of humour, and your parents would know what breaks your heart. Well, don't take this the wrong way, but I think God has a much more deep and complex character than you. Different people are going to know him different ways.

At the beginning of this post I said I was getting better at knowing what I don't know. Well I know that I don't know a lot about God. I just don't. I have opinions, opinions I believe are right, but I'm more than willing to admit I could be wrong, and that other people could be right. Right now I'm becoming more and more okay with not truly knowing. That's not to say I won't be seeking truth, I will always seek it. I will always yearn for it. However the truth will never be available in whole to just one man. I am, after all, just a man. In the meantime, I'm glad I don't have to teach Sunday school, because I wouldn't be able to give out the "hole in your heart" "letter from God" answers any more. I believe that there are some fantastic Sunday school teachers out there who are doing wonderful things, I really do believe that. It's just not for me.