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| Martellus Map, 1491 |
John 16:12-15
Trinity
Sunday
22nd May 2016
Sometimes our maps
are wrong. Here’s a story about such a
map, the Martellus Map.
Henricus Martellus is the Latinized
name of Heinrich Hammer. Hammer was a
geographer and cartographer from Nuremberg, German, who lived and worked in
Florence from 1480 to 1496. Between 1489
and 1491 he produced a map of the known world, an enormous map, measuring four
feet by six feet, designed to hang on a wall.
There’s only one copy of it, which was discovered in 1960 and then donated
to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. It has a fascinating history. Portions of the map were borrowed from
Ptolemy (90-168), the Greco-Egyptian polymath, who mapped the world around the
year 150. Martellus’ descriptions of
Asia were informed by the writings of Marco Polo (1254-1324). Martellus also used a map produced in Lisbon,
in 1485, by Bartolemeo Columbus (c. 1461-1515), Christopher’s brother. In fact, Christopher Columbus used the
Martellus map to persuade Ferdinand of Aragon (1462-1516) and Isabella of
Castille (1451-1504) to support his desire to find a shorter and faster trade
route to the East, in order to bypass the not always welcoming Ottoman Empire.
The big question, for both the
Spanish monarchs and Columbus, was this: is it three thousand or ten thousand
miles from Europe to Japan? Martellus based his drawings on Ptolemy’s
calculation of the size of the earth (the Greeks had already measured the
circumference of the earth within about a few hundred miles), combined with
knowledge gained from Marco Polo’s travels through Asia. Martellus incorrectly placed Japan about one
thousand miles off the coast of China, he assumed that there was nothing
between Japan and the Iberian Peninsula, except the Atlantic Ocean, thus he
exaggerated the size of Asia to make up the difference. The map that Columbus
used, the Martellus map, suggested that Japan was closer to Spain than it
really was. And there was something else
neither Columbus nor anyone else suspected—that an enormous land mass was there
in between, the Americas, which some of us call home. When “Columbus sailed the
ocean blue in 1492” and landed in the Bahamas he thought he was in Japan. It’s remarkable, looking back, that the
learned of that day could not imagine something other than what was expected.
Sometimes our maps are wrong. We
create them with the best available knowledge, thinking we’re being scientific,
but there always seem to be a bias built in.
We make assumptions about what is and is not true, about what can or
cannot be true. Even GPS systems and our
Smartphones are not always smart.
Sometimes the maps are wrong. I read
this week about a driver in Ontario who blindly followed her GPS system,
through the fog, and drove straight into Lake Huron. The car sank and she swam to shore. Whether it’s Martellus’ map of the then known
world or the maps of our personal lives, sometimes our maps are wrong—there’s a
lot that’s unknown.
Yes, the map was wrong—as Columbus
discovered—but that didn’t prevent him (and others after him) from further
exploration into the unknown. They used
the map, but didn’t trust it completely because they knew they were first explorers and discovers and only second mapmakers trying to map the unknown world. Maps were often drawn and then redrawn and
then redrawn again after experience either confirmed or discounted what they
suspected to be true. For example, there
was a myth floating around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that
California was actually floating, that it was an island. In 1747 King Ferdinand VI (1713-1759) of
Spain made a formal decree, “California [is] not an island,” as it had been
assumed (due to an error in previous maps).
It’s part of the mainland. Even
up to the American Revolution this myth was out there in America and Europe.
In his book Failure of Nerve, Edwin Friedman (who was an expert on leadership
and change dynamics in families, organizations, institutions, and religious
communities) argues that Columbus’ voyage was a hinge event, a turning point in
the history of the world, for a variety of reasons. This discovery catapulted Europe out of a
kind of cultural depression; it metabolized new energy and creativity. It transformed the world and what individuals
considered possible. Friedman writes,
“For a fundamental reorientation to occur, that human spirit of adventure which
epitomizes serendipity and which enables new perceptions beyond the control of
our thinking processes must happen first.”[1]
The spirit of adventure is
needed. It’s easy to get stuck in faulty
patterns of perception and behavior. We
become gridlocked, when what we really need is to break free from the
grid. We Presbyterians love our
order. We have our blessed Book of Order and an Order of Worship,
and we love to quote the Apostle Paul, when he admonishes the Corinthians, “Let
everything be done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:40). Back in the 1980s, I once had a t-shirt made
at the mall that read: Presbyterians Do
It Decently and in Order. Looking
back on that now, that was really odd! I
was an odd teenager. I can only imagine
what the guy at the mall was thinking.
He had difficulty spelling the word Presbyterian.
Reflecting on our obsession for
order today, I wonder if, perhaps, what we really need is more disorder, something to break us out of
what confines the Church today. It’s
tough for me to admit this as one who is very
Presbyterian. I don’t really know what
I’m suggesting or know what more disorder would look like, but I suspect it’s
true. Yes, of course, order is needed
for the Spirit to move. The Spirit does
move in and through order. But the
Spirit also moves through disorder.
Sometimes the Spirit even creates the disorder! She intentionally stirs things up – probably to show us that we’re
wrong and that we need to change!
Humility of knowledge. Maybe that’s what we need today. Humility of knowledge. I’m always struck by the power of human
arrogance, when we think we know more than we really do, and how this attitude
hinders progress, and then gets us into a lot of trouble, and produces a lot of
pain and suffering. The word humility
literally means, from the Latin humus,
“of the earth.” Humility means being “of
the earth,” in other words, being grounded, real honest, truthful. Humility of knowledge means being real,
honest about what we know and don’t know.
Humility of knowledge checks hubris, it keeps us humble, but it also
reminds us that there’s more to learn and discover in the world. This is certainly true for science. Jeff Bolognese shared with me recently, when
we were touring NASA Goddard, that most scientists are actually very humble in
acknowledging what they don’t know, and they are often blown away by new
discoveries about the universe, which then pushes them to want to discover even
more. Consider how our views of the
universe have changed because of the Hubble telescope.
What is true of science is also true
of theology, which was one time known as the Queen of the Sciences. Humility of knowledge is especially needed
among Christians today, needed within the Church. Yes, we need to confess our faith, know what
we believe and why. But we also need to confess our doubt and
honor our doubt as an expression of our faith, as odd as that might sound. We also need to be humble enough to
acknowledge how much we don’t know about God, about Christ, about the Holy
Spirit, about what it means to really be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Each and every one of us needs to acknowledge
that there’s still so much to learn! This
might freak out our Fundamentalist friends, but it’s true. There’s more than one interpretation of a
biblical text. Scholars are always
learning more about the meaning of an obscure Hebrew or Greek word, uncovering
more about the composition of ancient texts, making new archeological
discoveries that alter how we read and hear a text.
There’s still so much to learn! We need a spirit of adventure and discovery
within the Church today, a bold spirit that will allow us to set sail from the
old world into a new world of faithfulness; we need the courage to venture from
the known out into the unknown.
The
novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) tells us that as boy he loved to look at
maps. "I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia,
and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many
blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting
on a map (but they all look like that) I would put my finger on it and say,
When I grow up I will go there."
Two decades later, in 1890, Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness and exposed the violence and brutal suffering in
the Belgian Congo.
Walt Whitman (1818-1892) captured
this spirit of adventure in Leaves of
Grass, using the experience of traveling at sea as a metaphor for life:
O we can
wait no longer,
We too take
ship O soul,
Joyous we
too launch out on trackless seas,
Fearless for
unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail,
Amid the
wafting winds, (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul,)
Caroling
free, singing our song of God,
Chanting our
chant of pleasant exploration.
…
Away O soul!
hoist instantly the anchor!
Cut the
hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail!
…
Sail forth—steer
for the deep waters only!
Reckless O
soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
For we are
bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will
risk the ship, ourselves and all.[2]
What would that spirit of adventure
mean for the Church today, for this
church, for our individual lives? Before
the pilgrims left for Plymouth, in 1620, the Rev. John Robinson (1576-1625),
known as the “pastor of the pilgrims,” offered a Farewell Speech in Delfshaven. He said, famously, “I am verily persuaded the
Lord hath more truth and light to break forth from his holy Word.” This is an extremely significant affirmation,
if you think about it. These pilgrims or religious separatists, these Calvinist Christians, our
theological forbears, are about to leave the safety of home to venture to an
unknown place, a dangerous place, crossing an ocean, all because their
theological convictions were calling them to go forward. It wasn’t a
backward spirit driving them, but a forward movement. Robinson also said in the speech that we must
not look back toward the reformers, to Luther and Calvin, but to discover
things they couldn’t see.[3]
Significantly, as good Reformed
Christians, people who are Reformed and always being reformed, by the Word and
the Spirit, they trust, they know that there’s still so much to learn and
discover and explore in the life of faith.
Yes,
all of this is anxiety producing. All of
this is scary. Of course it is! Who said the life of faith is about being
safe? Jesus never said, “Follow me and I will make you safe.” We’re not called to play it safe. Safety has little or nothing to do with
it.
The
Word, God’s creative Word speaking through
the pages of scripture, still has so much to teach us! We don’t have it all figured out. Biblical scholars are always being humbled by
what they don’t know. For example, the
discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran, in 1946, which date from Jesus’
life, along with the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, in the Egyptian desert
in 1945, a text that might predate the Gospel of Mark, have and are changing
what we know.
There’s
always more to explore, more to discover, more to fathom and understand. Didn’t Jesus say that when the “Spirit of
truth comes, he will guide [us] into all the truth” (John 16:12)? The Holy Spirit still has much to teach
us. I find it striking that the
disciples didn’t learn everything they needed for being disciples when Jesus
was with them. It wasn’t as if they had three years of seminary with Jesus, and
then he sent them off to change the world.
There was still more to learn after his departure. Perhaps they weren’t wise enough or strong
enough or humble enough to learn those things during Jesus’ life, to enter into
“all the truth” at that time. Perhaps
their hearts weren’t deep enough or open enough to fully fathom the truth of
God’s love and grace.
The
same is certainly true of us today. The
Spirit is still the guide and the teacher and the source of truth, who reveals
and discloses to us things beyond our imagining, things beyond our seeing (1
Corinthians 2:6-10), beyond reason, things beyond the limited confines of what
we know, whose wisdom leads us forward.
We have yet to figure out what it means to really follow Christ, to bear
the name Christian. We have yet to fully fathom the heights and
the depths of God’s grace and what is being asked of us with our lives. Our
hearts need to be as deep and wide as the oceans of God’s love. We have yet to discover what it means when we
pray “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”—we
certainly haven’t arrived at that new world, that kingdom world. But that’s where the Spirit wants to take us,
is taking us, will take us, is willing to guide us every step along the way,
even if we don’t have a map, even if our maps are wrong. Trust the Spirit.
George
Macleod (1895-1991) of the Iona Community said, “Christians are explorers, not
mapmakers.” We’re explorers. We’re called to
explore and then revise the maps of God’s grace and justice and love, so that
others coming after us will find a way, so that they may then go beyond us—because
there’s still so much to discover!
[1] Edwin W. Friedman, The Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age
of the Quick Fix (Seabury Books, 2007).
[2] Walt Whitman, from “Passage to India,” Leaves of Grass (1900).
[3] John Robinson’s
Farewell Speech, 1620, "The
Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw. Whatever part of His
will our God has revealed to Calvin, they (Lutherans) will rather die than
embrace it; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by
that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be
lamented."
