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Introduction to Worship for 7/23/2017

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Looking Ahead—Seven Weeks on “Gifts of the Dark Wood,” by Eric Elnes: 

I want to prepare you for the rest of the summer, starting on July 23, when we will be exploring the ideas raised by Eric Elnes in his book called “Gifts of the Dark Wood: Seven Blessings for Soulful Skeptics.”
     Dr. Elnes writes, “This book is about finding your place in the world at the very point where you feel furthest from it. It’s about recognizing the fierce beauty and astonishing blessing that exists within experiences that most of us fear but none of us can avoid…failure, emptiness, and uncertainty are as critical for finding our way through life as they are unavoidable” (p. 2).
     Dr. Elnes takes the expression “the Dark Wood” from Dante Alighieri, who wrote in the Divine Comedy that the Dark Wood was a place of stumbling, of turning away from God because of sin and terror. Yet there is also a strong tradition in Christianity that insists that the Dark Wood is the place where you meet God. In the Dark Wood, facing the unknown and embracing the unknowable, you “bring all your shortcomings with you… to embrace them in such a way that your struggles contribute meaningfully to the central conversation God is inviting you to have with life.”
     Using the book as a conversation partner, I will be preaching on the seven gifts that Dr. Elnes identifies: Uncertainty (July 23), Emptiness (July 30), Being Thunderstruck (August 6), Getting Lost (August 13), Temptation (August 20), Disappearing (August 27), and Misfits (September 3). During the series, I’ll be starting from scripture, as is my custom, so the blog posts will focus on the reading that we’ll be using in worship each week.
     If you would like to read the book, please let us know in the office, and we’ll order a few more copies. (We read this in the book study group last winter and everyone agreed that it would be a good sermon series.)

The Gift of Uncertainty

The Scripture lesson for this week is 1 Corinthians 13: 8b–13. This is the less-familiar half of Paul’s famous chapter on love, and it is reflecting on a lifetime of trying to live faithfully in an uncertain world. The people of Corinth have been arguing over “the right way” to do things in their lives together, and have experienced hurt and splits and destructive behavior because of the power struggles involved. After begging the people to remember that EVERYONE plays an important role, and to work together in Christ, Paul launches into the beautiful hymn of love. And at the end, he pauses, and reflects on what maturity is.
     Spiritual maturity comprises three gifts: faith, hope, and love, and they are the tools we need to walk in the dark—to live together and work together in times of uncertainty. Dr. Elnes writes:

“The call of the Holy Spirit, as inviting as it is, also tends to shake things up and bears with it a particular Dark Wood gift: the gift of uncertainty.
     “To most people uncertainty seems more like a curse than a gift. when you cannot see the endpoint of your journey, or the path ahead is not clearly marked, you grow nervous…
     “Yet religion does a disservice when it seeks to remove uncertainty from life. Have you ever noticed how the more certainty a religion claims to deliver, the more frenzied and hysterical are its adherents? The fact of matter is that life is messy and no amount of doctrine or dogma changes this. Faith built upon certainty is a house of cards that falls apart when the ‘unshakable foundation’ shifts even slightly” (p. 25).

Elnes encourages the distinction between “certainty” and “trust”, and argues that an approach to life that trusts that uncertainty is a mystery to be explored, rather than a problem to be denied, opens us to the possibility of being surprised by God. When we embrace uncertainty, we allow space for the Spirit to act.

Connecting Faith and Life

  • Do you tend to approach life as a problem to be solved, or a mystery to be lived? 
  • What kinds of people tend to be problem solvers? 
  • Are there any parts of life that simply cannot be solved? 
  • What are some spiritual practices that you think might help people become more comfortable with mystery?

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