Walking With Questions

Good morning Vietnam. Morning.

Any music lovers? Anyone recognise the song I was

playing whilst we were talking? No, let's have a bit of fun,

shall we? Yeah, yeah, it's all right.

It's all right. Isn't this beautiful?

It's really easy words. It's not even part of the

message. But why not?

It's all right. You fade it down for me,

Michael. I can't just cut it.

We have to fade that. It's too good.

It's too good. Daddy.

Really really stoked to do this and really grateful to be in

front of your people. There's so much I I want to say.

We know when we were singing with with Michael Meredith and

shouting the name Yahweh. And I was thinking about times

when wanting to shout out whether because you're so

frustrated and things are up in here or you're so happy and just

thinking about that name, God's name and all his names.

And I just thought right now with you guys, just before I

even start, the name that you are most familiar with for God,

how you see him, whatever that name is.

Can you just think of that name now, whether it's like Jesus,

Father, Daddy, Yahweh, El Shaddai, whatever that name is,

think of what that name is for you.

And then I'm going to ask you to do something like being in one

of my old drama classes where the students know when they see

me in front of the class, Mr Mack might ask them to do

something that is a little bit outside of their comfort zone.

I don't put them in the risk zone where they're going to get

hurt. I put them just a little bit in

the out of the comfort zone. If it's OK with you, would you

shout out that name that you call God?

I'll give us a countdown and I'll shout with you.

And obviously, you know, I have a big mouth, so it'll probably

be what you hear the most. But shout it out like not with

the usual Western conservativism, but like no one

else is here and you're on top of a mountain and there's wind

blowing in your face and you need to fight that wind with

your shout. I'm going to count to 3 maybe.

Yeah, 123 man, he loves you. What does this image say to you?

I know it's sometimes hard to see on the projector in here.

If you can see it, what does it say to you?

Yeah. If you can't see it, get to

somewhere where you can. It's OK, we're not going

anywhere. Can help you a bit like this for

sure. Most def I don't even need to

talk today. I think you guys got it a hole

in one from the Bristol Light Festival this year.

That was in the Royal Fork Gardens just by my old school,

you know, where they got those metal things that are shining

like a little maze. And that was one of the

sculptors up there and amazing piece of art and it really spoke

to me and God really spoke to me through it.

Walking with questions. So I gave it a title.

You don't need to give anything a title really, do you?

But I love film, I love stories, I love theatre.

So I like to give things titles sometimes.

It helps me remember. So this is what I've kind of

called our chat today, Walking with questions.

It's job 42 three Chris was asking, you know, maybe we could

have a scripture at the start that kind of connects what

you're talking about or something that we can tie into.

And I didn't actually have it. I had what I was talking about,

but I didn't have it. And then I sat and listened and

he does what he always does. This is Job talking back to God.

You asked who is this that obscures my plans without

knowledge. That was, that's what God said

to Job. And then Job says, surely I

spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful

for me to know. In this season of life, I know I

am. Are you wrestling with a

particular question or some reoccurring questions?

Can you have a little think what that might be if it's safe for

you to do so? I'm in a long season, seems to

be going on for some time, and there is a refrain, A chorus, A

motif that is constantly coming back to me, and it's Louis.

You have to learn how to walk with questions.

I can't remember the first time I heard that someone said it to

me or I saw it somewhere, but in that wisdom, it has been planted

in here and it keeps on producing that sentence to me

over and over again at different times of the day, different days

of the week, different events. Louis, you need to learn to walk

with questions. And what I got from that was,

you don't know everything yet, and you may not, but keep

walking. Keep walking.

I was saying to Chris that I am enraptured with the wisdom

literature. That's Proverbs, Ecclesiastes,

Book of Job, and also Songs of Solomon, but especially the

former three. I am besotted, beguiled by them,

especially Job. I'm really grateful for the

Bible Project, John Collins, Tim Mackey, without what those that

team is doing, I know there's a lot of people who would miss out

on some amazing teaching and they have really fed me.

And recently these books, which I've read before have become

Technicolour man, you know that. What's that film?

Where what is it? It's like a cartoon.

And I think there's a guy singing who's is he an African

American singer? He's singing.

When all these little birds come up and all these cartoon

characters all come out, what is that?

Yes, say pretty dude. That's what it's like reading

these books now. It's like, I'm like, where has

this been? More likely?

Where have I been? But what I like about them is

the questions that they they deal with how we're supposed to

live in this world. I like them because they're

practical. I like them because they're not.

They're not so difficult for me to try and grab grasp some

theoretical way that I'm struggling because you can get

in Christendom. Teaching that is so amazing,

sometimes find it hard to even touch it.

And that may be because of opinions I've got about my own

academic ability maybe or experience.

And that might be hindering me a little bit.

But also sometimes the language used is so complicated, I can't

get it. I can't hit it.

And what I love about the Wisdom books is they're dealing with

here today, right now, some of the questions that they ask can

lead us to what we infer about God's character from the justice

or the injustice that we perceive in the world.

So from how do I put it? So from what we see as what we

consider that's justice or that's injustice.

Sometimes from that, that then begins to mould and shape how we

see the character of God, which then I think can have effects on

the narrative we listen to about how we see God or who God is or

what God is. And I put dot, dot, dot question

mark, the narrative that we listen to about God's character

is, but it's not for me to say what it is.

It's for all of us. The wisdom books are cool, man.

They step out of the linear arc of the Bible story just for a

moment temporarily. You know, normally you got like

Moses story, the lineage of Abraham, the blessings, the

covenant, the high priest, the prophets, the temple, the

messianic king. That's the over reaching arc of

the Bible. But then the wisdom books go one

SEC Also, let's talk about how to run your business.

Let's talk about you ain't chatting to your brother and

your family is feeling it right now and it's hurting you.

Let's chat about your employee thinks that you are bullying

them and upon reflection, your language is actually not that

healthy Maybe. Or let's talk about why my child

is no longer here. The hard questions.

Hard questions. Different kind.

One of the cool features about the wisdom literature is that

it's a different kind of authority which they speak to

us. So back in the day, Old

Testament got Moses, he's up on the mountain getting them 10

commandments from God. And then he comes down the

mountain. Yeah, it's probably

disconcerting for the people seeing the big cloud over there

too. And he comes down and says thus

saith God, well, you've got the prophets, Elijah, Elijah,

Samuel, and hear from God. I'm like, listen, man, this is

what God said. Do this.

But then you get the wisdom books.

They're not like that. It's kind of different.

They contain human words. First nine chapters, there's a

dad talking to his boy. Listen, son, this is the

instruction. Do this.

Rare, rare, rare, don't do this. You do this.

This is what happens. Cause and effect, etcetera,

etcetera. In the wisdom books, the wise

counsel of God fearing people and all the insight accumulated

throughout generations upon generations becomes God's word

to his people in these books. That's like the wisdom passed

down from grandparents to grandchildren to grandchildren.

That kind of wisdom. I think about my nanny, Nanny

Mackenzie, who's no longer with us, and some of the wisdom that

she passed down to me, it's like that.

I remember being a boy and didn't want to walk anywhere I

love, was obsessed with cars and my nanny didn't drive.

And you know, I grew up in a small town up in the Midlands, E

Staffordshire, and when I went to stay with her, I'd want to

get the bus into town and she wanted me to try and stay

mobile, stay fit, not be obsessive or be lazy, I think.

And so she used to say you've got 2 choices.

I give you the bus fare and you can get the bus and we go into

town or you can save the bus fare.

And when we go into town there's some sweets in the shop you can

buy and you can use that. And I was like, that's a great

idea. Yeah, yeah, I'll take that

money, Nanny. And this is just this wisdom

from this amazing woman. There's so many stories I could

tell you about the things I learnt from that woman that I'm

now the beneficiary of, about making the bed in the morning,

ironing my clothes. You know, my nanny used to iron

her clothes before she put them in a suitcase.

And then. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then we should come down to Bristol, come down to Dad's, get

to #6 Elm Grove, open a suitcase, and then she'd add

them again. Same way.

This is the kind of woman I'm talking about.

She's just, she's different man, different cloth.

But it's that wisdom passed down from generations to generations.

Is that what we're seeing in the literature, wisdom literature,

which is different to other books in the Bible?

And I think that's profound. There's a whole set of books

that validate there's a divine wisdom in the council and the

wisdom of the elders. This collection of books is like

a gift to God's people. It's God's word, but the content

of that divine word is human wisdom.

Very unique. It's really unique.

It's cool. Another thing that I love is the

creative tension that there is between these books.

There is a creative tension between the three, the four if

including songs, but the three that I'm talking about today.

So the main questions in these books are, you know, how should

we live in the world? What's the good life if I try to

live wisely? What should we expect?

What will God do for me if I try really hard and do the right

thing? And they offer a different

perspective. So Proverb says, let me

paraphrase that. Be wise, fear God.

Things will kind of work out for you if you're foolish, and if

you're stupid, do evil things, they'll go back for you.

You'll die young, you'll perish. For example, Proverbs 39, the

light of the righteous rejoices. It's like the righteous person

who's wise has a light and it shines.

Believe in happiness, but the proverb finishes.

But the lamp of the wicked snuffed out.

So if you're righteous and you're wise, you'll be

prosperous and happy. And if you're wicked and stupid,

you'll die young. Then Job, of course, is about as

righteous as God says it, remember, and as wise as a man

as they come, and horrible things happen to him for reasons

that he never discovers. Why later on in the book of Job,

he actually uses that same proverb in Job 2117.

Let me change the tone of voice that he might have had if he was

saying it. How often is the lamp that we

could put out? Does their calamity really ever

come? Wicked people have got it, man.

I've been doing the right thing and look at my life right now.

So he's questioning the message of Proverbs, and that's the part

of wrestling, of his wrestling in the book.

Not only is he wrestling with Proverbs, Proverbs ain't working

for him. Not working.

Computer says no, baby, it ain't working for him.

The book of Proverbs does not work for Job.

It's not working out for him. This kind of weird thing to say

in it, there's a divinely given wisdom book that tells you, do

this and it's going to be great. Yeah.

And then you've got another book that says, hey, this guy did

that, didn't work out for him. They're both found in the Bible.

And you've got my man Ecclesiastes.

He's sometimes seen it work for Joe people, sometimes not.

Ecclesiastes 7 The teacher says I've seen a righteous man who

dies despite his righteousness, and a wicked man who has a long

life despite his wickedness. And then he says this is absurd.

Man, got to be careful when you see the word meaningless.

I think the original word is heavil.

That heavil is like, remember when Chris had that incense

thing and the smoke was coming up?

You can see the smoke, but you can't hold it.

But it's real. It's like an enigma.

It's like a paradox. That's what my man is saying.

He's not saying that I have seen everything.

And you know what? There's no point.

He ain't saying that. He's saying, boy, this is, I see

it, but I don't see it. This is an enigma.

It's heaven, heaven. Look that up, man.

Make sure that I'm not chatting rubbish.

So for the teacher who I call the critic, it's not just that

the book of Proverbs doesn't work, but sometimes it does and

sometimes it doesn't. And if so, it's not a guaranteed

system, so what's the point? That actually really frustrates

him. It drives Job to pray, get

angry, wrestle with God. It drives the speaker and

Ecclesiastes to despair. What is going on?

How comes that this don't make no sense?

This is an enigma, it's a paradox.

It's absurd, the creative tension between those books in

the same Bible. All of these viewpoints in our

Bible, but I don't think they're contradicting.

I think that's an immature, unsophisticated way to look at

it. They're opposing tensions.

Sometimes Proverbs is true, I suppose, to our experience.

Not always. Sometimes Ecclesiastes,

sometimes Job, the wrestling match in different seasons of my

life can be spoken about by these different books at

different times. Anyone ever heard of dialogical

views of truth and reality? Yeah, I didn't.

It's bonkers. The Hebrew Bible, Old Testament.

You can see how it's clearly influenced kind of post Old

Testament Jewish theology. So like when you think about, if

you think about the Mishnah and the Talmud, you've got these

things called dialogical views of truth and reality where you

might have a subject like the Sabbath, what to do on the

Sabbath and how they rocket is they get bare rabbis to say

their opinion and then that's it done.

That's it. They say their opinion, full

stop. And you're like, yeah, yeah.

But what, what do I do then? So how, what do I do on the

Sabbath? Then how how do I?

There's none of that. It's just use all these

different people's opinions. I think they're getting that

from this culture that we're seeing here in the Hebrew Bible.

Could you imagine coming here, hear Chris speak on Saturn?

Alice comes up and says something from a complete

opposite point of view in the creative tension, and then Bill

comes up and says something completely different.

We would be like, what's this division up in the church?

Get behind me, Satan. We need to trust and pray.

What's going on in Hope Chapel? Because it's kind of

disconcerting because in my opinion, me, just me, not just

me, but how I feel. I kind of lean towards the

proverbs way of looking at life. Do this.

This happens if I was the Frenchman from The Matrix, Cause

and effect. This is what happens if I do

this, bam, I keep doing this, man, I'm going to get enough

films. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do it like this. That will work because that's

easier in it. It's like AI love an instruction

manual. Can't go wrong with the

instruction manual. I can't remember what it was,

Hannah. There was 1 something you said

for me to do and I said give me really clear instructions.

I can't remember what it was. Before we go on the way on the

holiday, I think there was a list of things.

And I was like, Hannah, you need to, if I could pull my phone out

of wood, I'm like, I need bullet point.

Tell me exactly where to go, where to find the powder, what

drawer do I put it in? And I said, if you don't do it,

I'm not doing it. And she did it obviously because

I like that. We like that.

There's something in the Jewish tradition that takes its cues

from the Hebrew Bible, that contains within itself a message

that is sometimes doubted. And then you come out of it the

other side, still believing the main message, but knowing that

it's probably more complex than you first thought.

Which is why I used that picture from the start.

I think it's really interesting to wrestle with the fact that in

our scripture, we've got books that require you to hold them in

creative tension, that they're having a conversation with each

other and that the books nuance each other.

Ecclesiastes forces us as the reader of the whole Bible to

recognise that life is complex and sometimes things that don't

fit into our grid doesn't mean that God's not real or faithful.

It just means life is more complex than I thought.

I need to take that into account.

That might be helpful for me in this season.

We know it, but we need to know it.

Christopher Wright, big boy, Old Testament scholar.

Love this. The most challenging difference

between the Wisdom writings and the rest of the Old Testament

arises when Wisdom authors express doubts about or question

the validity of some of the mainline affirmations of other

parts of the Bible. And yet this is precisely the

purpose of the material in the Canon of Scripture, to compel us

toward an honest faith that's willing to acknowledge the

presence of doubts we cannot dismiss and questions we can't

always fully answer given our human limitations.

Which is why Daddy brought that scripture from Job for me when I

didn't know what to use. Big up Christopher Wright.

So walk in with questions as I'm coming into land.

I would love that somewhere in the near future you are able to

jump into the wisdom books. But together, the point is, is

that together they give a sophisticated account of human

experience. And if we read 1 in isolation,

we're getting a narrow view. We need to have the light

shining from the other angle that shows you that the the

sculptor has done it in such a way that actually there's more

going on here. You still, I'm not going to, I'm

still never going to understand how this sculptor did this.

By the way, All I know is it's not how I thought it was, and

it's a little bit more sophisticated than I first

thought. And some things I'm not going to

know, some things I am. It's easy to say about a piece

of art in it, but it's differently when it's my life.

Yeah, man, I hear that. I'm there.

I'm there all day long. I'm there.

One of the fun things that Tim Mackie and John Collins do is

they have a thought experiment about the Wisdom books and they

say what if they were three people in a bar?

Boston, That's me, Channel 4 with my mum watching Cheers

before we watch Frasier, which is my favourite.

Frasier, Bang, Cheers, Bang, Big Up, Love them series.

So that's the bar, there's no norm.

But what if the wisdom books were people chatting in a bar

because I'm an actor, try and put things into ways that I

understand. And if we turned the scriptures

into a person, how might they be?

How might they function? Because then that means I can

talk to them and it means I can imagine them talking back to me,

which means I'm interacting with the with God in a way that, oh,

that's not what they taught me when I was younger.

So Proverbs AKA Lady Wisdom, if you don't like the term Lady

Wisdom AKA Hokhmar, you know that wisdom, that of God, she is

awesome. You know, they use the female

pronoun in the script. It's about wisdom.

She is like the person who, if they wrote a book, bestseller of

the century, the person you go to, how to run your business,

the person you go to, how to advise you about your

relationships by marriage, by your kids.

This woman knows it. She's the TOP man.

She's the TTP total package. And you've got Ecclesiastes, AKA

the critic. He's a little bit older.

He's he's a bit older than me, middle-aged.

He's brilliant. He can cut through anyone's

argument and just destroy the other side of things.

You know them people who can just hear what you're saying and

just can be like they see, it's like they like Neo in the

Matrix. Like that's how I feel when I

chat to Paul. When I'm chatting to Paul and if

I'm chatting rubbish, Paul is like, what are you chatting

about, man? He can just see the numbers in

what I'm saying. And he's like, stop.

He just sharper than a Ken Home knife.

If you know what, Ken, if you remember Ken Home, you remember

Ken Home knives anyway, Yeah, he's cynical, though.

This is not Paul, but he's cynical, a little disenchanted

because he's seen a lot, done a lot.

Something's worked out. Some not built projects, built

things. He's parted Blasto, Coachella,

Wireless. He's done the rave thing, parted

when he was younger, but now he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't know what I'm doing now. And I could talk to the kids.

And is that weed? Yeah, I know.

What you can't tolerate is people with black and white,

simplistic thinking, people who are building their lives on

false meaning and unreliable hopes.

And then you've got Job. Who?

If you were in the bar with those three, you probably

wouldn't even know it's Job. He's just cutting in the corner,

almost invisible old boy, grey but soft.

He's listening to these guys chop it up.

And he's like, all right, yeah, yeah, these guys are talking

about this. He's lived it, been through it.

Used to be kind of cynical, bitter, like Ecclesiastes, but

he's worked through it. And there's a piece about him

that you can trust God in spite of all that he's been through,

but he has a different kind of wisdom.

And it's not answers ain't 1 + 1 = 2.

If you get the chance to sit down in a bar with these three

in the near future in your NIV with your King James, I really

encourage you go to that bar. It stops it from being these

words that are this far away from me that I'm like, unless

I'm like that person, I don't really get it.

And I just sometimes get it on a Sunday.

Maybe 2 comes in here. You get to know it.

You get to know them, but sit with all three of them.

Don't sit with just one of them. Maybe, maybe, maybe you just

might see another perspective to that sculpture that we're

living. That's me done, Chris.

That was very good. Thank you, Louis, so much.

We've got 10 minutes, 10 minutes and it'd be great to respond.

And so just let's have let's have we've got this little

window of time. And for me, one of the, I think,

healthy and challenging things from what Louis is saying is

that I imagine that all of us have got questions that we walk

with and I'm just guessing. And, and I think part of the

courage is to let them surface, isn't it?

And it's be aware of them and even to hold them before God.

I think it's probably quite easy to think actually, life's too

busy or I'm just going to push these things down.

But part of the bravery is to let them surface and give them

time. So I'm just going to just going

to pray that God helps us to be conscious of what our questions

are. And then as always, really three

ways that you can respond. You might just like to process

on your own and just pray, reflect.

You might like to share with the person next to you or someone

near to you. Or if you'd like to come to the

front and myself or Louis or I can grab somebody else who can,

who can pray with you as well, if that would be helpful.

So I'll I'll start us off with a prayer and then we can respond

in one of those three ways.