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

Not long ago, I heard a story of a Vietnamese leader of a city.  His son was getting married and he wanted to throw a huge party for him.  He owned a huge brewery, and gave his hired hands the day off to hand out invitations to all his friends and family.

The servants passed out over a thousand invitations, but the majority of them called and said they couldn’t make it.  One of his servants was even mistreated by the people he invited.  They began to beat him with a baseball bat.

The leader was so angry at the shame brought on his family that he called up one of the ruling military junta.  He showed the junta the list of guests he had invited to the party and said he would provide $100 for each head brought to him dead.  The city was in an uproar as the junta descended upon the city.

All of the thousand people on the list were found and brought out to the public square.  Their families were forced to watch with their eyes open as the military shot them through the head and burned down their houses.  All of them were found and the military junta made $100,000 in fees from the rich leader.

“I will show them how it feels to be rejected and truly shamed,” the leader replied after he had given the junta their pay.  “I will bring in the disgraced and the downtrodden.  They will come to my son’s wedding and then all those who should have come, but didn’t, will be left outside in the cold.”

And it was so.

The servants brought the homeless, the destitute, and the sick to his son’s wedding.  One woman was angered to see that the leader of the city had brought a convicted rapist into the party and a convicted drug dealer.  He opened up the jails and let the worst criminals, the ones who had raped and sexually abused children, sit in the front row.  This was the way of the leader of the city.  They had all been given the best clothes to wear, no matter what they had done.

Suddenly, however, he noticed that one man was still dressed in filthy clothes.

“What are you doing here?” the leader of the city asked.

The man said nothing.

“You dare to come into my son’s wedding without proper attire?  Get OUT!”

And at that the servants grabbed him and through him out into the cold.

This is like the kingdom of heaven.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.