I Did Not Have An Answer

It happened between the potatoes and the pudding, which is where the big ones always happen.

His son is fifteen and was not being clever about it. That is the part that keeps replaying. There was no smirk. The boy pushed his fork through the gravy and said, without looking up, how do we know somebody didn't just make the whole thing up later.

And the father heard himself say: you just have to have faith.

He heard it leave his mouth. He heard the shape of it. It was his own father's sentence, word for word, said across a different table in a different decade, and it had not held him then either. He remembers being fifteen and feeling the door close quietly on a conversation he had actually wanted to have.

The boy said okay. He was not being difficult about it. He said okay and asked if there was custard.

That was Tuesday. It is now Thursday, and he is sitting in the car in the leisure center car park with the engine off, waiting for the same boy to come out of five-a-side, and he has been sitting there for twenty minutes and the football finished ten minutes ago.

Because here is what he has not told anybody. It is not the boy's question that is keeping him up.

It is that he does not have one either.

He has forty years in. He has served, given, taught in a Sunday class, sat with people at the worst hour of their lives and said true things that helped. And if you asked him at half past eleven at night whether the thing at the bottom of all of it actually happened, or whether it was assembled afterwards by people who needed it to be true, he would tell you that he believes it, and then he would go quiet, and he would not be able to tell you what he was standing on except that he has always stood there.

Loyalty. He has enormous loyalty and nothing under it, and loyalty on its own gets very heavy somewhere after year thirty.

And now I am going to stop saying he.

Because somebody asked you something once. In a kitchen, or a break room, or a comments thread you should have closed, and you said the sentence you were given and you heard how thin it sounded in your own mouth.

And you have never said the next part out loud to anyone, and you have half convinced yourself it means something terrible about you.

You want to know if it is true.

Not whether it is helpful. Not whether it works. Whether it happened.

The question is older than you and it is inside the book

There is a man whose name is on the front of one of the four accounts, and he did not know Jesus. He was not there. He came later, and he says so, and the first four sentences of his book are the most surprising four sentences in it.

Since many have undertaken to set in order an account of the things fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses, it seemed good to me also, having investigated everything carefully from the first, to write it out for you in order, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.Luke 1:1-4

Stay with that for a moment, because of what it tells you about the room.

There is a named man. Somebody real, with an address, who had already been taught this and was not certain. And what happened to him when he was not certain is that a man went and did the work and wrote him a book, and the book got kept, and it is in your house right now.

Nobody told Theophilus off.

Nobody said he had to have faith, or that the asking was a symptom, or that a person who wants to know whether a thing happened has a problem in his heart. The response to a man who was not sure was a careful, ordered, investigated account, written for him personally, and the stated reason is right there in the fourth sentence: so that you may know.

That is the first thing to put under your feet, and it is not an argument. It is a door being held open by someone who was there when the whole thing started.

The question you are afraid of is not an intruder in the house. It is one of the reasons the house has a library. That is not my reassurance, it is what stands written at the opening of Luke, where the account says it was set down so that you may know the certainty of what you were taught, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed protecting from a library.

And here is the second thing, and I want to be careful and honest with you, because you are the kind of person who will go and check and you should.

I am not going to hand you certainty this afternoon. Nobody honest can. What is on offer is ground, and ground is different from a closed question: it is the difference between standing on rock in the dark and standing on nothing in the dark. You will still be in the dark. You will not be in the air.

And the ground is this. The faith did not begin as a feeling and it did not begin as a philosophy. It began with a set of claims about things that happened in a specific place, to specific people, at a time you could have traveled to, told by people who kept saying, in effect, we are not making this up and here is who you can ask.

Whether that is enough for you tonight is a real question and I am not going to answer it for you. What I will say is that you have never actually let yourself walk toward it. You have been holding the question at arm's length for years because you assumed that turning to face it would be the beginning of losing everything. Luke 1:3-4 records a careful investigation from the beginning, written down for exactly this reason, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept the question alive in you rather than letting it go quiet.

It is not. It is the beginning of finally standing on something.

You are allowed to ask. That is not the concession at the end of this message. That is most of the message. What is written opens with an ordered account and a stated purpose, and the Holy Spirit has never treated an honest question as the beginning of somebody leaving.