Faith Into the Unknown

One of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner, in a book of 'Uncollected Pieces' entitled, A Room Called Remember, examines the words of Jesus in John 14:6, where Jesus says to Thomas, "I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life". Addressing a seminary graduate class, his reflections on this passage address the years of preparation each student has made, to step into a vocation full of unknowns. Why would they do it? Knowing, even only remotely at best, what pitfalls and disappointments and heartaches that will come, why do they make the move into Christian ministry? I quote his reasoning at length:

"If it weren't for him, we would be somewhere else. Our business is to be the hands and feet and mouths of one who has no other hands or feet or mouth except our own. It gives you pause. Our business is to work for Christ as surely as men and women in other trades work for presidents of banks or managers of stores or principals of high schools. Whatever salaries you draw, whatever fringe benefits you receive, your recompense will be ultimately from Christ, and a strange and unforeseeable and wondrous recompense I suspect it will be, and with many a string attached to it too. Whatever real success you have will be measured finally in terms of how well you please not anyone else in all this world, but only Christ, and I suspect that the successes that please him best are very often the ones we don't even notice. Christ is the one who will be hurt, finally, by your failures. If you are to be healed, comforted, sustained the dark times that will come to you as surely as they have come to everyone else who has ever gone into this strange trade, Christ will be the one to sustain you because there is no one else in all this world with love enough and power enough to do so. It is worth thinking about.

It's a queer business that you have chosen or that has chosen you. It's the business that breaks the heart for the sake of the heart.It's a hard and chancy business whose risks are as great even as its rewards. Above all else, perhaps, it is a crazy business. It is a foolish business. It is a crazy and foolish business to work for Christ in a world where most people most of the time don't give a hoot in hell whether you work for him or not. It is crazy and foolish to offer a service that most people most of the time think they need like a hole in the head.

"We are fools for Christ's sake," Paul says. You can't put it more plainly than that. God is foolish too, he says - "the foolishness of God"- just as plainly. God is foolish to choose for his holy work in the world the kind of lamebrains and misfits and nitpickers and holier-than-thous and stuffed shirts and odd ducks and egomaniacs and milquetoasts, and closet sensualists as are vividly represented here by you and me this spring evening. God is foolish to send us out to speak hope to a world that slogs along heart-deep in the conviction that from here on out things can only get worse. To speak of realities we cannot see when the realities we see all too well are already more than we can handle. To speak of loving our enemies when we have enough time of it just loving our friends. To be all things to all people when it's usually all we can do to be anything that matters much to anybody. God is foolish to send us out on a journey for which there are no sure maps. Such is the foolishness of God.

And yet. The "and yet" of it is our faith, of course. "And yet'" Paul says, "the foolishness of God is wiser than men," which is to say that in some unsearchable way he may even know what he is doing. Praise him.

"I am the way," Jesus said. I am the road. There is not a single shoe in this place that does not contain a foot of clay, a foot that drags, a foot that stumbles; but on such feet we all seek to follow that road through a world where there are many other roads to follow, and hardly a one of them that is not more clearly marked and easier to tramp, and toward an end more known, more assured, more realizable. But we have picked this road, or have been picked by it. "I am the way," he said, "the truth and the life." We have come this far along the way. From time to time when we have our wits about us, when our hearts are in the right place, when nothing more enticing or immediate shows up to distract us, we have glimpsed that truth. From time to time when the complex and wearisome and seductive business of living doesn't get in our way, our pulses have quickened and gladdened to the pulse of that life.

By grace we are on that way. We don't want to go. We go in fear of the terrible needs of the ones we go to. We go in fear of our our own emptiness from which it is hard to believe that any word or deed of help or hope or healing can come. But we go because it is where his way leads us; and again and again we are blessed by our going in ways we can never anticipate, and our going becomes a blessing to the ones we go to because when we follow his way, we never go entirely alone, and it is always something more than just ourselves and our own emptiness that we bring.

The world is full of dark shadows to be sure, both the world without and the world within, and the road we've all set off on is long and hard and often hard to find, but the word [I give you] is trust. Trust the deepest intuitions of your own hear. Trust the source of your own gladness. Trust the road. Above all else, trust him. Trust him. Amen"

Wow! To borrow from Buechner, "It gives you pause ; it is worth thinking about." This particular passage has been especially profound to me, as I think back over the recent departure of my daughter Melanie to a two year commitment to serving Christ in overseas mission. In the midst of traveling to Europe, she asked herself at one moment (a particularly trying one, no doubt!) "What have I got myself into?!" Or in the spirit of Buechner's address to the graduates, "What is this road that I've begun to travel on, a road that is less sure than any road I've ever been on before, a road of unknowns that unlike the one I've been on, has no familiar markings, nor definite destination in site?" Thus for her, the call to Trust is paramount - an action of faith that builds faith.

And for me...really for each of us, is it not appropriate to ask what road we are on? Have I veered off the road with the unknown ending to one that is "more clearly marked, easier to tramp, more realizable?" Have I been distracted, allowed the business of living to get in the way? Have fears of the needs or of a sense of personal inadequacy in being able to meet those needs caused us to stop instead of going?

Indeed, a time for thought, and a time for prayer....and Trust. One can only imagine where the road may then lead!


Quotations from A Room to Remember by Frederick Beuchner, HarperSanFransisco, 1984. pp140-150