Moderator's Address

ANY ANSWERS?

[A summary of the address delivered by the Moderator on Saturday July 3rd. The full text can be found here.]

Questions

“Asking questions takes courage because they open up a future we cannot control.” Real questions about the future shape of our lives as individuals or communities are always threatening because they imply an openness to change. Then there are the ‘big hopeless questions about war and hunger and inhumanity’ which need courage because asking them opens the door to compassion and anger. And finally there are the deeper questions about the meaning and purpose of life, the most frightening of all being ‘Does anything matter?’

Religious people look to God for the answers to their questions, and Christians look for God in the Bible and, in particular, in Jesus. We should bring to the search for those answers a passionate faith that there is a God who has the answers and that the answers are worth the struggle entailed. Our success will depend upon how desperate we are to find Jesus – to meet Jesus and to learn from him the right way to live, the way of peace and justice, the meaning of grief and disappointment, the path to forgiveness and reconciliation, the kind of Church he is calling us to be in this present day? The answers will not be cold intellectual ones which can be marked right or wrong but will share the passion of the faith that called them forth. We need a passionate faith in Jesus which is a world removed from the kind of intellectual answers we have inherited from the past few centuries.

Turning to the Bible, we had to face the fact that like any text written between 2000 and 3000 years ago, it was not easy to access for ordinary people, nor does it speak with one voice – it’s authors each had their own context and their own perspective. The Old Testament is the story of God’s dealings with his people and of their growing understanding. At the same time it includes stories of appalling acts, apparently carried out at God’s command. But the Old Testament also includes all the basic questions of life, a great deal of passion and some of it is a passionate desire to find and walk in God’s ways. The New Testament tells of God’s loving purposes coming to fulfilment in Jesus but it too comes from a very different context. We have to ask hard questions about how much we know of what Jesus said and the degree to which Eastern teachings rooted in the 1st century apply in Northern Europe today. It does not provide easy answers.

For all the difficulties, if we are passionately seeking God’s answers, then we must go on seeking them in the Bible – in shared worship, in daily Bible reading (one of the treasures of the Reformation) and through engaging with others in Bible study.

In our engagement with the Bible we may need to be less respectful. It is not a clear window on to God and sometimes we have to get quite rough with it in order to get some of the obstructing stuff off that window. The Bible should even make us angry sometimes and we should not be too proud to use different means to get at the answers, such as paraphrases and lively new translations. We may hate some and be inspired by others, but they all make us think again about Jesus and what he shows us of God – and what that means for our lives.

The real Jesus?

If the Bible as a whole is difficult to access, let’s turn to Jesus. Here we must recognize that each of us – even the gospel writers - encounters Jesus in a different way – there can be no objective picture. A passionate faith in the God we see in Jesus calls us into a personal engagement with him, but that must also mean that we each experience a different Jesus, depending on our personalities, personal histories, and our culture. That is nowhere clearer than in art, where Jesus can be found portrayed as the beautiful young hero, a man at one with the tortured, the despised and rejected, a liberator who shares our joys, the strong, wise, suffering one, the Lord of all, the joyful resurrected one who brings life abundant, the mysterious stranger. Which is the ‘real’ Jesus?

Our present society would urge us each to enjoy our own Jesus, and not be concerned if others have a different one. But that is a passionless choice, devoid of the sense that Jesus has the words of life which the world needs to hear. In fact, rather than ‘tolerating’ each other, differing viewpoints need to engage with one another in order to discover more of Jesus. We need to engage honestly with and listen respectfully to those with very different perspectives from our own, in the search – not for correctness but for truth.

Any answers?

The third problem with seeking answers is that Jesus himself seems to have preferred questions to answers. He questions us, presses us to judge for ourselves, and then questions our answers! And even when answers are given to questions of what constitutes a meaningful human life they are often difficult to accept: ‘love you enemies and bless those who hate you.’

Each time we find a resting place, with an understanding of Jesus’ teaching which we can just about manage to live by, such as ‘We do not surely have to like our enemies but perhaps loving is something different?’ or ‘I must have forgiven him or her seventy times seven by now’ Jesus questions our answers and seeks to move us on again into more uncharted territory where there are no clear answers. Only a passionate faith will keep us moving on for the whole of our lives, always into that uncharted territory.

And in all this prayer is an essential ingredient – and even prayer sometimes takes the form of questions – usually desperate and even angry, hurled at God. We often talk of prayers being answered but answers are not really what is on offer on the Christian pilgrim way.

Lots of other good things are, however, on offer to those who are willing to wait on God with open and empty hands: new light on an old problem; courage to face danger, confrontation, pain and even death; a fresh injection of loving kindness to a tired heart; a clearing of the mind; lightness of heart; conviction of sin and therefore the liberation of forgiveness; and, above all, in the light of our natural human questions, the promise that our life and the life of each human being here on earth is of infinite value.

Wrestling and waiting

Wrestling with the questions of God’s today and waiting on God with open and empty hands are both essential if we are to catch a glimpse of God’s tomorrow. If we are Christians, that wrestling must be with the Bible and wrestling implies a close encounter – all the richer if it is undertaken in a diverse group – particularly culturally. That is why many people have found ecumenical groups so very rewarding and why those of us who have been privileged to engage with the Bible with Christians from very different cultures have often been surprised by God.

Wrestling also implies a difficult encounter. The questions we must bring to the encounter are real, not sanitised ones. All around us are people with serious questions about the meaning and purpose of their lives but who thin the Church is only concerned with its continuing life.

It is not only asking questions which requires courage. Waiting on God in prayer, with open and empty hands also requires great courage. It is that risky open door to the future again – where will it lead? Perhaps as we wait on God together, in local groups, Church Meetings, in District Councils, at Synods, in Mission Council, in Assembly Committees – or even with people who are not Christians - Jesus will give us a glimpse of God’s tomorrow. Or maybe he will give us bread for the journey to that tomorrow and that will be enough.

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