“Ventures of Which We Cannot See the Ending”

“O Lord God, who has called us, Your servants, to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden and through perils unknown: Give us faith to go Out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that Your hand is leading us and Your love supporting us. Amen.” (The Prayer of Invocation 10/11/2009, First Congregational Church of Ramona, Rev. Steven E. Swope)

This past Sunday morning our little community of Christ followers prayed that prayer. In some profound way, as I prayed, I felt that I was praying something deeply controversial and subtly subversive of the kind of Christianity we’re often sold in American culture… “Do you know where you’re going when you die? If you were to die today do you know for certain where you would spend eternity?” is their sales pitch and these questions seem to be the mantra of American evangelicalism. Although these questions are almost incoherent to the ears of emerging culture, they are still alive and well in Christianity today because the idea that Christianity is primarily about “where you are going”, about certainty thereof, and about what happens to you when you die, is still alive and well in Christianity today. The shadow of a doubt pertaining to the destination is seen as heresy and a lack of faith. But this is not the attitude of faith, this is the attitude of spiritual arrogance with a hint of ignorance.

In response to a question about destination, a question about entering God’s kingdom, Jesus said, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). There is a beautiful uncertainty about true faith and following Jesus. Christ called his disciples to follow him without revealing any sort of destination but only by promising a sort of becoming, by inviting them on a kind of journey, “Come follow me… I will make you fishers of men” (Mark 1:17). He called them to “ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden and through perils unknown” and spoke much more of the following itself than he ever did about any kind of destination, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). Never did he talk of being certain of the destination and yet that has become the center-piece of American Christianity, even to the point where Christians often overlook actually following Jesus and taking up their cross because they’ve come to see everything on Earth as secondary to their heavenly destination. For Christ, the world and the here and now were primary, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son” NOT “for God so loved heaven that made sure that people could know they were going there.”

God calls us to follow him because of what we might become NOT because of where we are headed. The destination may indeed be uncertain, the path may well be “untrodden,” but we go with faith because the way of the cross is ironically the best possible way to live. In this uncertain path we may find life that is truly life. In these “ventures of which we cannot see the ending” where we are called to see all we have and give it to the poor we will discover “in this present age homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—and with them, persecutions” (Mark 10:30). May we live in uncertainty so that when the path takes the unexpected turn toward the cross of Christ we will not abandon him for another destination but faithfully take up our cross and follow the crucified Jesus to become resurrected people.

As I prayed that prayer I felt indescribably free and I felt a sense of new life, empowered to live today in the uncertainty of tomorrow guiltless and with the hope of God’s leading love here with me now.

Let our faith not be defined by where we are going but let it be defined by the one who is taking us there, that our destination will not become our god but that the tortured and crucified Son of God would be the One God of our wandering hearts. May God lead us on paths of justice and mercy here, now, and always.

Wesley Ellis
from Living in the Kingdom