There's a little town up the Fraser Valley in British Columbia called Lillooett. There's a small-town newspaper published in Lillooett. And for many years the editor of that paper was a woman named "Ma" Murray. "Ma" Murray was kind of a tiger, in her own way. She was a social activist. And every issue of her paper rode concerns about labor and about human rights and about native issues.
But here's what was so striking about "Ma" Murray's paper. She always wrote in a frenzy. So much so that she didn't pay much attention to punctuation. She wouldn't put quotation marks around the things that other people had said. She'd run sentences on and on, without throwing in a period now and again. And people criticized her for it. If you're going to publish a newspaper, they told her, then do it right! Put the punctuation marks where they belong!
So here's "Ma" Murray. And she doesn't really care what people think about her style. So what does she do? On the first issue each year she covers the whole front page with nothing but punctuation marks! Commas, and colons, and exclamation points, and quotation marks, and periods, and question marks....They're all there! The whole front page! "There!" she'd say, "I've given you all the punctuation marks you'll need for the whole year! Just use them whenever you think they're necessary!"
This evening we want to deal with one of the punctuation marks of life--the question mark. Not just any question mark, but a question mark that gets at the root of our lives:
WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?
Some of you watch the television program called "Quantum Leap." It's about a time traveler who pops in and out of other people's lives. And each time he has to ask himself: What am I doing here? And the reason he has to ask that question is because the people who's lives he gets into, haven't been asking that question. They've just been coasting along, one day to the next. And then, all of a sudden, a crisis erupts. And now somebody's got to figure it all out before it's too late. What am I doing here? What's my life all about, anyway?
We need question marks in our lives, don't we? We may not always want them, but we need them. Two English writers, George Elliot and Herbert Spencer, were once having a conversation together. They were talking about the lines on people's faces. The wrinkles that we earn over the years. Sometimes we call them laugh lines. Sometimes they look like worry lines.
And George Elliot noticed that Herbert Spencer's forehead was smooth. There weren't any wrinkles there at all. And Herbert Spencer smiled a bit, and he said, "Well, that's because I'm never perplexed!" And George Elliot replied, "Well, that's the most arrogant thing I've ever heard!" And it is, isn't it? Don't you just hate it when somebody is a "know-it-all"? Never perplexed. Never disturbed. Never having any questions about life, or about why things happen.
Our Scripture reading this morning was first addressed to very perplexed people. They were Jewish Christians. They thought they had it all together. They knew their history. And they knew their identity. And then one day something happened to change it all. The legions of Rome marched thru Palestine. And they plundered Jerusalem. They killed the priests. And they destroyed the Temple till it was less than a dusty ruin.
This was crushing to those who had grown up in the Jewish faith. They'd suffered a lot throughout their history. They'd endured more than most people should have to. And one of the things that kept them going was the Temple in Jerusalem. It was the doorway to heaven. It was the gateway between this world and the spiritual realms. It was the place that God promised to meet with them. And now it's gone! And the questions come. Who is this Jesus we thought we knew? What good is religion if it lets you down?
Where's God when you need Him most?
You ask those questions too, don't you? That's why this letter was written. That's why it's in the Bible. Because there are profound questions at the bottom of our lives. And even if we don't always think about them, even if we drift on from day to day, they come back to us in the crisis. Why? For the same reasons that these verses are planted in the Scriptures.
BECAUSE THE MEANING OF OUR LIVES IS ALWAYS BIGGER THAN OUR EXPERIENCE.
Remember the games you played as a child? You sat there at the table, in your high chair. You covered your face with your hands and you said, "Mommy! Mommy! Where am I?" And you thought that if you couldn't see her, she couldn't see you. Your world was only as big as your senses. Your world was only as big as your experiences. What you see is what you get. And nothing more. And then, somewhere along the line you had to learn the truth. The world is bigger than our experiences.
The early Jewish Christians couldn't just cover their eyes and all of the problems of their faith would go away. They needed to know that there was something bigger to their lives than the doubts of perplexity and the mysteries of experience that pummeled them.
Life means more to us than our experiences. It has too. For the Jewish Christians, the meaning of their lives was bigger than the Temple, bigger than the sacrifices, bigger than a legal code. Faith, says the scriptures, is the certainty of what we do not see!
There was once a man named Tertullian who loved to ask questions. He had an inquiring mind. And before he became a Christian, he tried to find the meaning of life in a lot of different philosophies. And each time, as he kept asking Why? Why? Why? Eventually the answers gave out, and he wandered on, a disappointed man. And then one day he met a man whose answers made sense. He didn't pretend to know everything. But he did know God. And Tertullian became a Christian that day.
Some of you have read the book by M. Scott Peck called THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED. M. Scott Peck is a psychiatrist. And he wrote that book to try to help people find meaning to their lives. When he began writing that book, he wasn't himself a Christian.
But the longer he wrote, and the more he observed those who came to him for help, the deeper he realized that life doesn't make sense if all we see is all we get. M. Scott Peck became a Christian when he followed the question marks in his soul. The meaning of our lives is bigger than our experiences.
Here's the second thing:
WE BELIEVE IN GOD BECAUSE THE MEANING OF OUR LIVES IS ALWAYS FOUND IN PLUSES RATHER THAN MINUSES.
That's why it's such a shame when people sometimes define their Christianity in negative terms. What does it mean that you're a Christian? Well, it means that I don't do this, and I can't do that...It means that I shouldn't and wouldn't, and couldn't...
A little while ago I mentioned M. Scott Peck. You know what he says? He says that the psychiatric profession owes its very life to the church. And do you know why? It's because, he says, most people who have great emotional difficulties come from religious homes where God was portrayed as a minus sign rather than a plus sign. God was always out to get you. Don't do this or you'll be sorry! Live in fear because God sees every mistake you make!
Peck tells of Kathy. Kathy who wanted to die, because the torment of an all-seeing and all-punishing God ripped the very life out of her waking hours. Peck tells of Theodore, who entered his office an atheist, because he couldn't stomach the God of his parents. Always on the take. Always looking down in judgment. Always waiting to strike. Today Theodore is a minister of the gospel. Because he finally asked the deepest questions of his soul. And when he did, he found that God didn't hate him for it.
What's the meaning of your life? Isn't it found in the pluses rather than the minuses? Do you know that a negative Christianity is no Christianity at all? The Hebrew Christians wanted to go back to playing a game, where God was a scorekeeper, and they had to make the grade. Don't you see? says the writer. Don't you know? Don't you understand that you can never find God on the scorecard of your own accomplishments? We believe in God, not because he takes life away from us when we don't deserve it, but because he adds life to us when we don't know where else to turn! We love because he first loved us!
Why do we believe in God? We believe in him because the meaning of our lives is always bigger than our experiences. Because the meaning of our lives is always found in the pluses rather than the minuses. And here's one more thing this evening.
WE BELIEVE IN GOD BECAUSE THE ULTIMATE MEANING OF OUR LIVES IS ALWAYS STILL AHEAD OF US.
Why do we believe in God? Because life is too precious to be wasted in these few years. If the meaning of my life is finished when I've ended my brief pilgrimage here, then what was the good of it? Says the Apostle Paul when they asked him that question, "If, for this life only, we hope in God, then we are to be pitied more than all men!" But life is more than just this short race. And we know it, because we believe in God, and we believe in the power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
There's an old legend told among the peoples of the Hebrides. It's the legend of the god of the sea, who always wanted a child of his own, a human child. And once it almost happened. They were going between the islands, some of the peoples, in small canoes. And the ocean god tossed his waves, causing one of the canoes to capsized. The passengers fell into the water and a young boy among them almost drowned, though they fetched him back from the waters. "But," said the god, "I shall not worry, for I was able to toss a wavelet into the little one's heart. He will come back to me, because the sea is in his soul."
And that's the picture of the scriptures as well. We are born with a hunger in our souls, a hunger for meaning, a hunger for purpose, a hunger to make sense out of our lives. And that hunger leads us full circle round again to the one who made us. There's a verse in Ecclesiastes that puts it like this, "He has set eternity in the hearts of men." (3:11)
That's why life is a pilgrimage for us, why we look for the meaning of our lives in the future, why we carry our question marks with us toward that far horizon. William Wordsworth put it beautifully in one of his poems. He describes our life as a journey across a tiny island. In the morning of our lives, we touch the eastern shore. And thru the days of our lives we wander our way west.
But all across the island we can still see the Sea of eternity that surrounds us, and we can still hear the lapping of the waves in our hearts, "...in a season of calm weather/Though inland far we be/Our souls have sight of that immortal sea." And it beckons us on to the far horizon, the western shore, where God collects us once again with all of our new experiences into the grand mystery of His serenity.
The wavelet of eternity has been tossed into your heart. It calls and it beckons you. And you may not want to hear it. But in those nights, when you're silent upon your bed, you feel it.
It's like a short story by H. G. Wells, "The Door in the Wall." A little boy, about 6 years old, is wandering about, and he comes to this white wall and there's a green door in it. He opens the door, and when he goes in, he enters a country of enchantment--a world of charm, where he's perfectly loved, and fully accepted. And he wants to stay there, but for some reason he can't. For the rest of his life he's haunted by that country. He's haunted by that place where he was most himself. And he spends his life trying to find it again.
What are the question marks in your life? What are you asking? "Does my life have meaning? Is there a purpose for it all?" Do you know what those questions are? They're the echo of eternity, still bobbing in your soul. They're the call of the Western Sea, and they're the enchantment of heaven. And the meaning of your life, the full meaning of your life, is still ahead of you. Because you won't find all the answers to your questions till you cross the River Jordan, till you open the door in the wall that Jesus has unlocked. There, by the grace of God, all questions will become one question. And this is the question you will hear. It's the question Jesus posed to Peter one day. It's the question at the heart of every other question: Simon, do you love me? Child of eternity, do you love me? And when we find the answer to that question, the rest of our questions form the doxology. And there we will be: Lost in wonder, love and praise!
