When two of them were on the Emmaus road just days after Jesus of Nazareth had been crucified and laid to rest in a tomb, a stranger came along and asked them why their faces were so downcast.  And they responded to this stranger, “Haven’t you heard about everything that’s been happening around here?  About how Jesus of Nazareth was accused of…well, I don’t know what he was accused of…but the crowds were certain that he’d done something wrong.  Anyway, this Jesus claimed to be the Son of the Most High—that he was our Messiah, but now he’s gone.  Everyone wanted a Savior so badly that when one finally showed up, what did we do?  We killed him!  So, now Jesus is gone and we’re walking along this road with no place to go really.  We used to have all the answers, and now we don’t have any.”

Of course the stranger walking on that road with them was the resurrected Jesus.  And as the Gospel tells us, Jesus keeps walking along that road with them and even joins them for supper before he vanishes from the scene.  But when he departs, the two say to each other, “That was Jesus!  I’m certain of it!  I know because my heart was burning, my heart was on fire when he was with us.  Praise God, for our Savior is risen!”

We still have that same certainty today.  We’re certain about matters pertaining to God.  We’re certain about God’s judgments, God’s opinions, God’s intentions.  And we still have that fire in our lives that keeps our certainty burning red-hot.  The trouble is that the fire has left our hearts and now it rages in our human minds.

Shall we pray: O God, fill the caverns of our hearts with the blaze of Your relentless love this morning, we pray.  Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing to You, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.  Amen.

It was a few days before I would be ordained into the Gospel ministry of Jesus Christ, and Stacy and I had just been engaged.  Everything was new (But when isn’t everything new.  That’s another sermon for another day.).  And a friend of mine was in town from Fort Worth were he had I had so recently attended seminary together.  I’d preached his ordination service at a United Church of Christ church in Dallas just days before, and now he was in Austin to support me reciprocally.  So, to celebrate all this newness in our lives, we went to dinner together, Darryl, Stacy and me.

At one point in the meal, I left the table for a moment, and Darryl took that opportunity to corner Stacy with a question.  He said, “So, Stacy, are you ready to be a minister’s wife?”  And she responded in a simple way that spoke volumes.  She said, “I don’t know, Darryl.  Am I?”  In my opinion it was the perfect answer.  It was the kind of response to certainty that lets the real questions begin: “Are you both ready to be a couple?  Do you feel supported by your families in your decision to be married?  How will your friendships change, if at all, when you do this?”  Or just, “Do you think Dan’s ready to be a husband?”  Often times our partners or fiancés can answer that question more realistically than we can for ourselves.

But Stacy was lucky enough to be asked a question in the first place.  Darryl could have said, “You’re ready to be a minister’s wife,” or worse yet, “You’re not ready to be a minister’s wife and here’s why.”  Usually questions aren’t asked, because certainty trumps everything else.

We pride ourselves in this culture on our certainty.  And if we’re not certain of something, then we try our best to make ourselves believe that we are.  Why is that?  Why, when it comes to matters of faithful decisions in our lives, are we culturally required to be absolutely certain of what we’re going to do?  I’m not discrediting preparation or counseling or training.  Those are all healthy and even necessary.  But in the end, are we ever 100% certain of the life-changing decisions we make?

Looking back on it now, were you completely certain at the time that your decision to be in the school band or to run track or to play football or to be in the drama troupe was the right decision?  Were you completely certain at the time that your choice of college or job or volunteer group was the right one?  Were you completely certain when you entered into a relationship of any kind—friendship, partnership, business, marriage—that you were ready for it?

Put it on the world stage for a moment.  We even have to be certain of why things happen after the fact.  In the days after 9/11, who were the loudest voices from the religious community?  Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.  When people of faith were longing for answers as to why this awful terrorist attack had occurred, their certain explanation was that we were attacked because of our country’s embrace of feminism and homosexuality, and because we were letting our guard down on family values.  Well, you are part of the religious community in our country.  Do you take comfort in that certain explanation?

Part of why we come here to worship is because we need a little certainty in our confusing lives.  We need explanations.  Jesus’ disciples want the same thing.  Peter, James, John and Andrew hear Jesus talking about how the world as we see it will change in accordance with God’s plan.  All of the magnificent buildings constructed by human hands—not one stone will be left on another, so Jesus says.

That’s a tough one to buy into.  Lucky for us our friends Peter, James, John and Andrew pull Jesus aside and ask him in private, “Hey, all this stuff you’re talking about, when’s it going to happen!  How will we know when it’s time?”  And this is where we get the Apocalyptic answer from Jesus: “Wars will be waged.  Kingdoms will rise against kingdoms.  Earthquakes and famines will seize the land!”  Well, if you take those words from Jesus and you are certain about what he means, then you can look around our world right now and say, “Well, I guess it’s time!  God’s will be done!”

And we’ve heard many other loud voices from the religious community declaring that the end is near.  Because of our culture’s desire for certainty, many will pontificate on the prophecies of doom and gloom saying to us, “These earthquakes, this famine, these diseases, these hurricanes, these wars…they’re your fault, so clean up your act before God swallows the world whole in a mighty gust of fire!”

But listen again to Jesus in today’s Scripture when he says, “Watch out that no one deceives you.  There are false prophets out there, and they’ll sound more certain than any voice you’ve ever heard.”

So, where does this leave us?  Who has the right explanation for us?  Does the evangelist on TV have the right answers?  Do your Sunday School teachers know what’s up?  Does your pastor have a dose of certainty for you?  Well, if I did, then this could be the last sermon (that might come as a sigh of relief for some), but it would also mean the end of the Church; because the Church is the gift of the Holy Spirit.  The Church is a gift that empowers us to keep asking the toughest questions not so that we can find certainty, but so that God can continue to draw us closer to God.  It’s through that dialog that God pulls us close.

The point is that God doesn’t want for Creation to have all the answers.  God wants for us to keep our relationship with our Creator going through our questions, through our dialog, through our discernment, through our prayers, through our faith.

When the disciples ask Jesus, “Teacher, when is the day when God will change everything—when is that day coming?” Jesus doesn’t answer them with certainty; he answers them with an invitation to faith.  The problem with reading the Scripture that we hear out of Mark’s gospel today is that you can’t read just a part of it, you have to read it all to get the bottom of Jesus’ answer.  If you read on, this is how Jesus answers the disciples.  He says, “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.  Be on guard!  Be alert!  You do not know when that time will come.  What I say to you I say to everyone: ‘Watch!’”

It seems that what’s important isn’t knowing the day that change will come, but being ready for it always; preparing for it always; anticipating it always.

That’s not going to happen with our human certainty.  God sets our hearts on fire with the gift of Jesus Christ, but we, in our human certainty of how things are and how they’re supposed to be—we take that fire and ignite our brains with judgment; judgment of ourselves and judgment of our neighbors.  We are so certain in our culture of how religion is supposed to work, and how religion is supposed to be practiced, and how it’s supposed to be said, and who is supposed to say it that we close all the doors that might allow for God to come in and do amazing things.  We’re so certain of what God wants that we have faith in a doctrine or we have faith in the loudest voice in the land that uses religious language, but we don’t have faith in God.

The funny thing is that in our human certainty, we don’t really know what God wants; we only know what God doesn’t want.  We don’t know who our neighbors are, but we are certain that God does not care for Muslims.  We don’t know what God hopes for us in our relationships, or how God might guide us toward healthy relationships; but we are certain that God doesn’t want gays to be married.  We don’t know how to let God’s Good News reach all of God’s children in our communities, but we are certain that God doesn’t want women to be ordained into the ministry.  And the list goes on.  The point is: our certainty won’t allow for God to speak—it won’t allow for God to do much of anything among us really.

Pastoral search committees will ask hypothetical questions of candidates when they’re looking for someone to come serve their church.  I’ve heard it said many times that a pastoral search committee will ask the hopeful minister, “Now, what is your stance on women serving in the church?” or, “What is your perspective on homosexuality?  We need to know, we need to be certain before we make a move one way or the other.”

At a church I served in Austin, our Children’s Minister Search Committee was about to call a woman to serve our children’s ministry, and it got out that she was engaged to marry an African American man.  So, when one of the more opinionated fellows in the church heard about this, he asked the search committee, “What kind of a message are we going to be sending to our children when we bring a white woman to be their minister who’s married to a black man?”  I found that amusing because I wondered what that man would think if he acknowledged that I, the youth minister of the church, was the product of an interracial marriage.  We hired this devoted and dear woman to be our Children’s Minister soon after that and she remains in loyal, gifted service to that Baptist church to this day.

The fire in our human minds can burn our neighbors so badly that those charred relationships can never grow into what God hopes for them to be.  Human certainty leaves no room for God’s possibility.  Human certainty leaves no room for God’s possibility.

Where I’ve been going with this sermon, and what I want to leave you with today, is a reaffirmation of this church.  I’ve shared examples with you that pinpoint the results of human certainty in religion.  I’m reminded every Thursday as I sit in a class with different Lutheran, Episcopalian, Presbyterian and Baptist students just how far the Church has come.  But I’m even more potently reminded of how much farther we have to go.  When we hear about how the fire of human certainty scorches our sisters and brothers in the name of God, we mourn, we hang our heads and we might say a prayer of Thanksgiving: “Thank You, God, that I am a part of this church community where all are accepted and You are still speaking.”

But friends that quiet prayer is like the parable Jesus tells about the Pharisee and the tax collector praying at the temple.  The Pharisee prays out loud about himself, “O God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.”  But the tax collector just looks down, beats his chest and cries out, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  God have mercy on us all when we boast our human certainty over our Creator’s possibilities.

But the reaffirmation of Friends Congregational Church has more to do with this: Maybe we say that little prayer of thanksgiving so quietly because we want this well-kept secret in Bryan/College Station to remain a secret.  Or worse yet, maybe we think that because we look or sound a little different than other churches in our community that our spirituality isn’t valid or our worship isn’t valid or our message isn’t valid.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

One of the reasons why I love this church so much is because I think Friends is a fundamental church.  It is.  Our culture gives so much power and priority to what we call the “fundamentalist churches.”  And when tragedy strikes, everyone scrambles to the Jerry Fallwells and Pat Robertsons out there.  But, I’m sorry to bust your bubble this morning; we are a fundamentalist church, too.  I believe that Friends stands by the fundamentals of Jesus Christ’s message:  forgiveness, tolerance, acceptance and love.  And I believe that Friends resonates with the fundamental concern of Jesus Christ: that it’s not our concern when God will act; rather, that we should always be ready for that Divine intervention.

When I think about the fundamentals of Jesus’ message and how our world yearns for certainty, I wonder why this place isn’t bursting at the seams.  Especially given that this is our Thanksgiving week, maybe we need to share our prayer of thanksgiving with our community, with our culture and with our world loud and proud: “Lord, have mercy on us all, and let our certainty give way to Your possibility.”

Pastoral search committees often ask those tough questions of candidates that try to weed out doubt and put that minister in a theological box.  I want to share with you another reason why I love this community of faith so much: When it was almost final that I would come to serve this church as your pastor, the United Church of Christ passed a resolution—this was in July of 2005—and the resolution affirmed gender equality in marriage and God’s blessings of those covenants in all human relationships.  That was a turning point in my life where I heard God’s still-speaking voice, because pretty soon after that resolution passed, my phone rang.  The person on the other end of the line was Ruth Schemmer, the chair of this church’s pastoral search committee.  And she had this last question to ask of me: “How do you feel about gender equality in marriage?”  No one had ever asked me that, certainly not in Christian circles, and I thank God for our search committee lighting that good fire in my heart.

So, be reaffirmed in your worship this morning, Friends.  Take hope in God’s possibilities and share that Good News with the whole world.  Let everyone around you know about what God is doing in this place, so that everyone might come to know the vastness of God’s possibilities.  Let the voice of Friends Congregational Church echo throughout our community, so that when days of joy shine all around us, the people will know that God is good. And let our prayer of thanksgiving be heard even clearer, so that when tragedy strikes in our culture, the people will know that God is love.