The Questions You Leave In The Porch

There are four of them and you could set them out in order in about two minutes.

They are not clever questions and they are not new ones and you are not the first person in the history of the world to have them. Two of them are about suffering. One is about a passage that says a thing you cannot make fit with another passage that says a different thing. The fourth one is the one you would find hardest to say out loud, and it is about whether any of the last nine years has been anything other than you.

You have carried all four for nine years and you have never asked any of them in that building.

Not because anybody told you not to. Nobody has ever said a word about it.

You worked out, somewhere in the first year, in the way a person works out the temperature of a room, that questions of that kind arrive there as a sort of weather. Not forbidden. Handled. There would be a warm answer and a hand on the arm and a small closing of the subject, and the closing would be done kindly, and it would be done.

So you put them down in the porch on the way in.

And you pick them up on the way out, every single week, for nine years, and you carry them home and they sit on the kitchen table until Thursday.

Here is what that has cost, and it is not what you would expect. It is not that the questions have gone unanswered. It is that you have been going into that room in two halves, and the half that goes in is the half that is easiest to be, and there is a whole person who has never once been in that building.

Jesus comes back into the room specifically for the man with the question

There is a scene eight days after the resurrection that people use to scold doubters, and it is the opposite of a scolding, and the detail that proves it is in the timing.

Thomas has said, out loud, in front of everybody, exactly what he needs and it is a physical and slightly shocking list. And then there is a week. And then Jesus comes into a locked room and goes straight to him.

Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.John 20:27

Reach hither thy finger.

He does not answer the doubt with an argument. He gives Thomas the exact thing Thomas asked for, in his own words, quoted back to him, which means Jesus had heard the question in full and had not been offended by a syllable of it.

And notice where He does it. In the room. In front of the others. The question was asked publicly and it is answered publicly, and nothing about it is handled quietly at the side.

So take this now, nine years in. You are welcome in that room with all four of them in your hands. The written word has the risen Christ walking through a wall for one man's specific question, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that scene in the book, and there is no version of it in which the question had to be left outside.

The room may handle it. That is not the same as the room refusing it.

Let me be careful here, because I am not going to hand you a grievance about your congregation and this site does not prosecute anybody.

Your reading of that room may well be accurate. Some rooms do handle questions rather than sit with them, and it is almost never malice; it is that people are frightened of not having an answer, and a warm closing feels kinder to them than an honest I do not know.

But notice what you have never actually done in nine years, which is test it. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

You have a hypothesis about a room, formed in your first year, held without evidence for nine, and acted on every single week. And in nine years the composition of that congregation has changed, the leadership has probably changed, and there is at minimum one person in there right now who has the same four questions in their own porch.

You are welcome with your hands full. His word puts the question and the answer in the same room, out loud, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept those four alive in you for nine years, which is not the behavior of a Spirit who wants them left on a step.

The plain hall and what people brought in with them

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and made a rule that not one seat in it could be rented.

Free seats did something people do not expect, which is that they changed what got said in the room.

Where a household has bought a pew, there is an investment in the room being a certain way, and things that would unsettle it tend not to be raised. Where nobody has bought anything, people arrive with whatever they arrived with, and a hall full of people off the street brings in every question there is, out loud, usually badly phrased, often at the wrong moment.

Those halls were not tidy. Read the accounts. People said extraordinary things in them.

And that is where the founding happened, in a room that could not control what came in through its own door.

The written word has a locked room opened for one man's question, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the opening.