Mark 12: 29-31; Romans 8: 37-39

How do you make decisions? Do you just do what feel right? Do you analyze and think about? Are you impulsive? Are you thoughtful? We do know that when it comes to decisions, our personality has a lot to do with it.  Many of you will be familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality scale that evaluates people on whether they are extraverted or introverted, intuitive or sensing, thinking or feeling and perceiving or judging. All of us are supposed to be somewhere on those scales. You put the result of each of these four spectra together, and you will wind up with a personality type.  Different personality types tend to fit best with certain professions.  Roy Oswald and Otto Kroeger wrote a book in which they are published their research about religious leadership and personality. People on the judging end of things tend to be more effective leaders and administrators. The more perceiving less judging types are better caregivers and relaters. So it is obvious, personality is huge in how and why we do things.  But that is not the only factor. Some say gender is very important, but in my experience men and women aren’t always as different as we make them out to be. Some women have personalities more common among men and some men have personalities more common among women.  Culture can be a much bigger factor in how and why we do things.  For instance, there are certain things you don’t do in certain cultures.  In Latino culture you don’t say anything bad about a guy’s grandmother unless you there are specific parts of your body you have no need for.  In Japanese culture you don’t embarrass a person in public unless you really hate them. In Dutch culture you don’t brag excessively or they will let you know in no uncertain terms what they think of you.  So culture winds up modifying our personality. A Japanese woman will have to repress the desire to humiliate a really unpleasant human being. The Dutchman may have to repress the drive to tell the world how wonderful he is. The Latino will have to be really nice to all grandmothers even though perhaps his own grandmother was selfish and rude.  Another thing that really makes a difference in what we do are our spiritual values.  Those values tell us what is right or wrong and what we believe or don’t believe, what we emphasize and play down.  Today’s message is about the Christian Mosaic in North America, it is about realizing the different spiritual perspectives that have shaped Americans and all of us and how they have flourished in the unique North American open space.  Today we are reminded that it does matter what you believe, that we don’t just make decisions because of our personality, our gender and our culture.  What we believe matters.  Some of these beliefs are so deep that they are almost in our bones. There are beliefs we may think they are religious, but they have nothing to do with our faith. Kirk Bingaman, a professor at Fordham University recently wrote on article about neuroscience and belief.  He makes the argument that the whole story of the Garden of Eden, a story most theologians see as a metaphor rather than an actual event, has become part of neurological pathways, in other words, the idea of human sinfulness has now become part of our make-up. Another way to put it is that it is in our bones.

Robert Dykstra, a professor at Princeton, in that same journal (Pastoral Psychology, August 2012) writes about childhood and how children when they are young have this freedom of expression, this sense of the poetry of life.  After a while we teach them what not to say and so we repress their natural expression and inquisitiveness. We do this through our culture and our religious beliefs. Dykstra writes:” what if to become a …Christian…means to become again the child before they took the poetry away?”  Friends, today the passages remind us that there are texts we can accept and embrace and celebrate fully no matter what our theological tradition is, no matter what our personality is, no matter what our gender is or what our culture is.  Let me make it clear. It is very important that we realize what beliefs shape our consciousness and our conscience.  It is important to that for Presbyterians personal faith and the Proclamation of the Word are central and that we like order and that we are guided by confessions of faith and that Ministers of Word and Sacramento are not above lay people, but that we are all ministers together. Those beliefs matter and it is important to know about them. It is also important to know that Presbyterians do not have a monopoly on the truth and that sometimes the way we use our beliefs can hurt or repress people.  In the end we must come back to these texts of today and be touched and moved and amused by them again, not as adults with all these layers, but as children who are free and open and ask honest and sincere questions.  Friends, the Church is a place where critical questions are welcome and where we do not stifle free expression.” Thanks be to God. Amen?