There is no poetry in the accumulation of answers. Poetry, and truth along with it, comes from an encounter with those corners of life which have not yet been filled with language. It comes from entering into our ignorance with the honest courage to question. It comes from a willingness to shake up the mental sediment in which we have hidden our secrets.

On the cross, Jesus was an agnostic. He was willing to face death with a why on his lips. Sometimes, in the comfort of a sunny afternoon, when much less is at stake, I have found the strength to entertain such questions myself. And when my belief is stirred by the gusts of doubt, and my knowledge is silhouetted against the beauty of mystery, I feel the uneasy presence of something beyond my capacity to speak, and I am grateful for all I don’t know.

People are often surprised to learn that Mother Theresa secretly harbored significant doubt. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising. The most difficult questions we ask of God are those that arise out of suffering and in the face of evil - precisely the intersection in which Mother Theresa lived and worked and prayed. It was in the face of unimaginable suffering, personal and intimate and real, that Jesus asked, “My God, my God - why have you forsaken me?”

I don’t think we can ever know God in the same way that we can ‘know’ a formula, a definition, a specification or measurement. We can, however, experience God. This is a very different way of ‘knowing’. The first way - the way of measurement and observation - suggests God exists wholly outside of ourselves. The second - the way of personal experience - suggests he exists within us. Jesus’ words in Luke 17 are ambiguous; various translations state that the kingdom of God is ‘within’ and ‘among’ you. ‘Within’ indicates a personal and individual experience of the Kingdom of God while ‘among’ can refer only to an experience shared in community.  In either case, Jesus’ reply to the Pharisees is unequivocal: it can’t be identified through a rational process. The Kingdom of God can only be experienced and part of that experience might include doubt, questioning and uncertainty.

Press in to God. Do not give up, do not despair, do not walk away. Press in. P.U.S.H - Pray Until Something Happens. This requires considerable effort. It means clearing the decks of all that is irrelevant, time wasting, distracting to our search. No, you probably can’t quit your job, but you can not watch television for two or three hours a day, you can take time from other activities, you can open time in your schedule. You can pray for three or four hours a day - you just have to figure out how. Get up in God’s grill. Hang on. Do not let go. Holler, bellow and wail, plead, beg and cajole. But press in, and keep pressing in, until you hear from God.

To live in the mystery of God is one thing. To reconcile yourself to the questions that cannot be answered is another, and Dr. Hayden suggests he has found a way of living with both. To live in abject doubt, though, is to aimlessly wander the corridors of a peculiar kind of living hell. Trust me on this, it’s awful. I hate it.

Press in. P.U.S.H. My experience has been that I’ve never received the answer I was looking for. Almost inevitably God bypasses the question altogether. But I have always gotten the answer I needed.

P.U.S.H.

People seem to be in one of two categories:

Those who seek stability, affiliation, work worth doing and the assurance it (whatever it is) will be okay.

Those who explore, need to know that failure is an option and quest to make a dent in the universe.

Think about this in terms of churches. Where would you put Third Space on this grid? Which one sounds most like us? Which one sounds most like the Kingdom of God? Why?

Could you make a case for the ‘other option’ as well?

And what does living out our faith look like when failure is absolutely not an option… and what does it look like when it is a perfectly acceptable outcome?

What exactly are the risks, anyway?

The person leading the Well-Planned Life emphasizes individual agency, and asks, “What should I do?” The person leading the Summoned Life emphasizes the context, and asks, “What are my circumstances asking me to do?”

There are some points on which I might question the article. “A 24-year-old,” Brooks says, “can’t sit down and define the purpose of life in the manner of a school exercise because she is not yet deep enough into the landscape to know herself or her purpose.” I’m not sure that’s true. More realistic, I think, is to understand that your ‘life purpose’ at 24 is often very different than it might be at 44. The essay from which the Brooks article is derived is a long but - if you’re the same kind of geek as me - fascinating.

For a church, I think, being driven by a mission statement seems like the logical -and easy - thing to do. Get everybody on the same page, work together, achieve common goals, make an difference. Very few, I’ve found, actually live up to the promise - once the ‘visioning’ process is done it’s business as usual, again. Being a summoned church means that we become rooted in a time and a place - a nighbourhood - and ask, how can we become Christ here, now…It means that we respond to needs that are presented to us and, in doing so, sometimes become vulnerable. It means there’s not always a clear plan of what to do next. It means that we must place huge amounts of trust in the Spirit to lead us. It means we have no visible markers of success. Making a plan and doing a bunch of stuff sounds a lot easier, sounds a lot safer, a lot better.

But is it easier? Is it safer? Better? I’m not sure it’s any of those things. And I’m not sure, if we’re trying to become Christ in our world, that any of those things should be on the agenda in the first place. The fact that they are on the agenda… well, that’s the real problem, isn’t it?

And so as I sleep in a queen-sized bed by myself tonight—the same bed my wife and I once shared—simply knowing that God is there is enough for me, too. It has to be. Of course, I still have questions for God, but I’ve become comfortable with the tension of not knowing, the tension that comes from embracing a faith that cannot be fully deciphered, parsed, chopped up and dissected. Some things are mysterious—especially God. Yes, He can be known, but how can an infinite being who has no beginning and no end ever fully be known by us: clumsy humans who stumble along in the dark, groping for meaning and truth and answers?

I have questions, too. The older I get - and the more I search for answers - the more questions I have. But I’m not comfortable with ‘the tension of not knowing’. In fact, my faith journey over the last five to ten years has been characterized by a slowly increasing discomfort. Very few Christians can comprehend the possibility that God has led me into doubt, into questioning, into this wilderness. For most people, it simply does not compute. But I believe God has done just that. Sometimes I hate where I’m at. Sometimes I get tired of waking up every morning and searching for belief. Mostly, though, I can’t imagine living any other way. It’s the most honest, truthful way of life I know. But it’s incredibly difficult and soul-tiring.

Without doubt faith cannot grow. There is no other way - we must go through doubt, fear and uncertainty in order to experience the faithfulness of God. We cannot learn to trust until we have first learned to doubt. Sometimes this is doubt is purely an intellectual and emotional state, arising out of meditation on God’s word, on God, life, the universe and everything. Sometimes, as in Conan’s case, it is the result of an external crisis that is thrust upon us. The end result is the same - all our sheltering beliefs are broken, pulled down and hauled away. Sometimes all we’re left with is God - and sometimes, in the midst of an almost unbearable crisis, God is absent, silent, distant.

I feel so privileged to be able to open the bible and guide this faith community deeper into its truths each Sunday morning. But I also believe that one of the reasons why Third Space matters is because this is the one place where Christians can say - where I can say - ‘I don’t know, I don’t understand, I don’t have that figured out yet…’ There are times when it takes a great deal of courage to be able to say that. But - take it from me - those words are like life itself when someone is struggling with doubt, fear, uncertainty and deep, painful questions. Most people in the midst of such struggles aren’t looking for answers. They’re looking for someone who hears the cry of their hearts.

Rae Vyn on community.

when we moved here i had big ideas about neighbours and community. i had pictures in my head of the kind of neighbour i wanted to be. the kind of neighbourhood I wanted to be a part of creating. i wanted to be in a neighbourhood where we knew each others names. i wanted to borrow sugar and lend butter. i wanted to share plants from our gardens, and our harvests in the fall. i wanted to feel like i was a part of something good.
at first i felt hopeful. i made more conversations. i put more effort in. we invited people over. we stopped and said hi.
after a couple of years, however, i started to give up.

A must read - Don’t miss it.

Take a few minutes and read the story. Think about. What’s really going on here? Jesus ends up praising the man for trashing his boss’ business - to benefit himself? How does that work?

We’re going to be talking about it on Sunday. We’re going to break into groups, ask some simple questions, try to get a handle on what’s really going on here. I suspect there will be more than one take on this. And you know, that’s part of what makes Third Space unique - we’re willing to hash this stuff out together, knowing that we might not all land on the same square, understanding that it’s okay.

Messy, but beautiful. I love it.

Over the last year or so I’ve found myself increasingly disturbed as I pursue these questions. What unsettles me, far more than the questions themselves, is the way Christians seem to respond to them. No one ever says, ‘yes, I’ve wondered about that too,” or, ‘I’ve really struggled with that issue as well’. No-one has ever said to me, ‘I don’t know’. Instead? Simple, one-size-fits-all answers. I’m so sick of that kind of Christianity. I hate it.

Let me be clear that it’s not the mind-numbingly simple answers to complex questions that bothers me. Not so much. Not any more. What bothers me most is that the struggle isn’t acknowledged or understood. For most Christians, they’ve never wrestled through their beliefs; they been handed a list of pre-approved doctrines and accepted them wholesale. I know this is the case, because I used to be one of those Christians. I have an atheist friend who says that if you haven’t come to your faith without some kind of struggle then what you have isn’t faith. Most of us, however, treat doubt as the spiritual equivalent of a small fire in the kitchen. Kill it - fast, clean up the mess, make damn sure it doesn’t happen again.

That’s just wrong.

This week we’re looking at the testimony of John the Baptist about Jesus. “I must decrease,” he said, “so that He can increase”. So let me ask - how is it that Jesus increases and we decrease? How does that happen? You know what i think? I think if you’ve never heard that question before, and you can answer it in less than three days, you haven’t thought about it. No, really. Three days.

Here’s another possibility - because that’s what thinking for three days does, it opens possibilities. What if it’s just something John said? It meant to apply to him, in his role as a prophet, that he was talking about his ministry fading into the background as Jesus’ fame grew? Nothing more than that. Most of us evangelical types have been taught - our whole lives - that being a Christian means growing to be more and more like Christ and less and less like us. He increases. We decrease. If that’s not what John’s talking about - at all - then a tantalizing vision for a new way of life emerges. What if we’re not supposed to submerge our humanity below the surface of Christ, but to fully live out our humanity? Is it possible that we might be fully human, fully alive in this world and fully present in Christ at the same time? Is this not the ultimate triumph over sin and death entering into the world - the ultimate redemption of humanity in the redemption of our humanness?

How do we live like that - fully human and fully present in Christ, as he is present in us? What does that mean for our everyday lives?

Wait - don’t answer that.

When the waters of the Red Sea closed behind Moses and the Israelites - and drowned the Egyptian army - they also reached a point of ‘no-return’. They were fully committed to the way ahead and, though they might not have fully grasped the significance of it - their die was cast into God’s lap. I suppose it’s indicative of how pervasive the influence of Greek and Roman culture is for us Christians (as oppossed to the Hebraic culture of the biblical world) that the phrase in our language is ‘crossing the Rubicon’ and not, ‘crossing the Red Sea’.

In the New Testament a pretty clear connection is made between the Israelites crossing the Red Sea and Christians being baptized into Christ. The narrative arc of God’s story of redemption, reconciliation and ‘Shalom’ is arcing outward through our lives to the generations yet to come. In the midst of following the Exodus story we’re going to stop for a moment and look at this weird Christian practice called ‘Baptism’. How did we get it? What does it mean? Why do we do it?

Sooner or later, in all our lives, comes a Red Sea decision. Caesar crossed the Rubicon in an act of naked aggression and hostility, initiating a civil war that would see him seize power over the Roman Republic and expand its empire. Moses took God’s people across the Red Sea so that they could find freedom from oppression and enter into the promised land of God. Both men were fully committed to their path, but these were very different paths, taken for very different reasons. On Sunday I want to ask you a very simple question: What journey are you fully committed to? This ritual we call baptism - that has its origins in a story thousands of years old - is a public declaration of who you are and what your life is about. When you make this very public declaration of baptism you’ve crossed your own point of ‘no-return’. It’s an act that places us in the middle of a story - and a family - that spans thousands of generations, and it can’t be undone.

Yes, you believe in Jesus Christ. You’re following him the best you can. But this is something different. Baptism is a transformative moment in the life of a Christ follower - it’s a moment where you publicly declare what your life is about in front of your friends, your family and your community. No, you don’t need to baptized so that your friends and family know you’re a Christian.

You need to be baptized so that you know you’re a Christian.

It’s almost as if this is not the climactic moment in the story and, really, it may not be. From a writer’s perspective it’s not clear that there’s a single, defining scene in the narrative, but rather several. The Passover is one, the Exodus another, the parting of the Red Sea, the Ten Commandments and the golden calf - all are plot-line peaks. It’s a much larger story - so large, in fact, that the climax is well beyond the lives all its characters.

We’re going to look at what this story means in a much fuller, broader context on Sunday morning. I don’t think we can fully grasp the Exodus story without seeing it in light of the person and work of Christ. The Israelites, as they flee Egypt by moonlight, are embarking on a great journey - a journey that takes all of us from Pharaoh’s court to the squalor and misery of the cross and brings us face to face with a God who is bigger than all of our imaginings could ever dream.

And after all the shoutin’ is done we’re going to have a pot luck with the folks from Peterborough Free Methodist. Oh my, how I love a party!