Good morning Vietnam. Morning.
Any music lovers? Anyone recognise the song I was
playing whilst we were talking? No, let's have a bit of fun,
shall we? Yeah, yeah, it's all right.
It's all right. Isn't this beautiful?
It's really easy words. It's not even part of the
message. But why not?
It's all right. You fade it down for me,
Michael. I can't just cut it.
We have to fade that. It's too good.
Daddy.
Really really stoked to do this and really grateful to be in
front of your people. There's so much I I want to say.
We know when we were singing with with Michael Meredith and
shouting the name Yahweh. And I was thinking about times
when wanting to shout out whether because you're so
frustrated and things are up in here or you're so happy and just
thinking about that name, God's name and all his names.
And I just thought right now with you guys, just before I
even start, the name that you are most familiar with for God,
how you see him, whatever that name is.
Can you just think of that name now, whether it's like Jesus,
Father, Daddy, Yahweh, El Shaddai, whatever that name is,
think of what that name is for you.
And then I'm going to ask you to do something like being in one
of my old drama classes where the students know when they see
me in front of the class, Mr Mack might ask them to do
something that is a little bit outside of their comfort zone.
I don't put them in the risk zone where they're going to get
hurt. I put them just a little bit in
the out of the comfort zone. If it's OK with you, would you
shout out that name that you call God?
I'll give us a countdown and I'll shout with you.
And obviously, you know, I have a big mouth, so it'll probably
be what you hear the most. But shout it out like not with
the usual Western conservativism, but like no one
else is here and you're on top of a mountain and there's wind
blowing in your face and you need to fight that wind with
your shout. I'm going to count to 3 maybe.
Yeah, 123 man, he loves you. What does this image say to you?
I know it's sometimes hard to see on the projector in here.
If you can see it, what does it say to you?
Yeah. If you can't see it, get to
somewhere where you can. It's OK, we're not going
anywhere. Can help you a bit like this for
sure. Most def I don't even need to
talk today. I think you guys got it a hole
in one from the Bristol Light Festival this year.
That was in the Royal Fork Gardens just by my old school,
you know, where they got those metal things that are shining
like a little maze. And that was one of the
sculptors up there and amazing piece of art and it really spoke
to me and God really spoke to me through it.
Walking with questions. So I gave it a title.
You don't need to give anything a title really, do you?
But I love film, I love stories, I love theatre.
So I like to give things titles sometimes.
It helps me remember. So this is what I've kind of
called our chat today, Walking with questions.
It's job 42 three Chris was asking, you know, maybe we could
have a scripture at the start that kind of connects what
you're talking about or something that we can tie into.
And I didn't actually have it. I had what I was talking about,
but I didn't have it. And then I sat and listened and
he does what he always does. This is Job talking back to God.
You asked who is this that obscures my plans without
knowledge. That was, that's what God said
to Job. And then Job says, surely I
spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful
for me to know. In this season of life, I know I
am. Are you wrestling with a
particular question or some reoccurring questions?
Can you have a little think what that might be if it's safe for
you to do so? I'm in a long season, seems to
be going on for some time, and there is a refrain, A chorus, A
motif that is constantly coming back to me, and it's Louis.
You have to learn how to walk with questions.
I can't remember the first time I heard that someone said it to
me or I saw it somewhere, but in that wisdom, it has been planted
in here and it keeps on producing that sentence to me
over and over again at different times of the day, different days
of the week, different events. Louis, you need to learn to walk
with questions. And what I got from that was,
you don't know everything yet, and you may not, but keep
walking. Keep walking.
I was saying to Chris that I am enraptured with the wisdom
literature. That's Proverbs, Ecclesiastes,
Book of Job, and also Songs of Solomon, but especially the
former three. I am besotted, beguiled by them,
especially Job. I'm really grateful for the
Bible Project, John Collins, Tim Mackey, without what those that
team is doing, I know there's a lot of people who would miss out
on some amazing teaching and they have really fed me.
And recently these books, which I've read before have become
Technicolour man, you know that. What's that film?
Where what is it? It's like a cartoon.
And I think there's a guy singing who's is he an African
American singer? He's singing.
When all these little birds come up and all these cartoon
characters all come out, what is that?
Yes, say pretty dude. That's what it's like reading
these books now. It's like, I'm like, where has
this been? More likely?
Where have I been? But what I like about them is
the questions that they they deal with how we're supposed to
live in this world. I like them because they're
practical. I like them because they're not.
They're not so difficult for me to try and grab grasp some
theoretical way that I'm struggling because you can get
in Christendom. Teaching that is so amazing,
sometimes find it hard to even touch it.
And that may be because of opinions I've got about my own
academic ability maybe or experience.
And that might be hindering me a little bit.
But also sometimes the language used is so complicated, I can't
get it. I can't hit it.
And what I love about the Wisdom books is they're dealing with
here today, right now, some of the questions that they ask can
lead us to what we infer about God's character from the justice
or the injustice that we perceive in the world.
So from how do I put it? So from what we see as what we
consider that's justice or that's injustice.
Sometimes from that, that then begins to mould and shape how we
see the character of God, which then I think can have effects on
the narrative we listen to about how we see God or who God is or
what God is. And I put dot, dot, dot question
mark, the narrative that we listen to about God's character
is, but it's not for me to say what it is.
It's for all of us. The wisdom books are cool, man.
They step out of the linear arc of the Bible story just for a
moment temporarily. You know, normally you got like
Moses story, the lineage of Abraham, the blessings, the
covenant, the high priest, the prophets, the temple, the
messianic king. That's the over reaching arc of
the Bible. But then the wisdom books go one
SEC Also, let's talk about how to run your business.
Let's talk about you ain't chatting to your brother and
your family is feeling it right now and it's hurting you.
Let's chat about your employee thinks that you are bullying
them and upon reflection, your language is actually not that
healthy Maybe. Or let's talk about why my child
is no longer here. The hard questions.
Hard questions. Different kind.
One of the cool features about the wisdom literature is that
it's a different kind of authority which they speak to
us. So back in the day, Old
Testament got Moses, he's up on the mountain getting them 10
commandments from God. And then he comes down the
mountain. Yeah, it's probably
disconcerting for the people seeing the big cloud over there
too. And he comes down and says thus
saith God, well, you've got the prophets, Elijah, Elijah,
Samuel, and hear from God. I'm like, listen, man, this is
what God said. Do this.
But then you get the wisdom books.
They're not like that. It's kind of different.
They contain human words. First nine chapters, there's a
dad talking to his boy. Listen, son, this is the
instruction. Do this.
Rare, rare, rare, don't do this. You do this.
This is what happens. Cause and effect, etcetera,
etcetera. In the wisdom books, the wise
counsel of God fearing people and all the insight accumulated
throughout generations upon generations becomes God's word
to his people in these books. That's like the wisdom passed
down from grandparents to grandchildren to grandchildren.
That kind of wisdom. I think about my nanny, Nanny
Mackenzie, who's no longer with us, and some of the wisdom that
she passed down to me, it's like that.
I remember being a boy and didn't want to walk anywhere I
love, was obsessed with cars and my nanny didn't drive.
And you know, I grew up in a small town up in the Midlands, E
Staffordshire, and when I went to stay with her, I'd want to
get the bus into town and she wanted me to try and stay
mobile, stay fit, not be obsessive or be lazy, I think.
And so she used to say you've got 2 choices.
I give you the bus fare and you can get the bus and we go into
town or you can save the bus fare.
And when we go into town there's some sweets in the shop you can
buy and you can use that. And I was like, that's a great
idea. Yeah, yeah, I'll take that
money, Nanny. And this is just this wisdom
from this amazing woman. There's so many stories I could
tell you about the things I learnt from that woman that I'm
now the beneficiary of, about making the bed in the morning,
ironing my clothes. You know, my nanny used to iron
her clothes before she put them in a suitcase.
And then. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then we should come down to Bristol, come down to Dad's, get
to #6 Elm Grove, open a suitcase, and then she'd add
them again. Same way.
This is the kind of woman I'm talking about.
She's just, she's different man, different cloth.
But it's that wisdom passed down from generations to generations.
Is that what we're seeing in the literature, wisdom literature,
which is different to other books in the Bible?
And I think that's profound. There's a whole set of books
that validate there's a divine wisdom in the council and the
wisdom of the elders. This collection of books is like
a gift to God's people. It's God's word, but the content
of that divine word is human wisdom.
Very unique. It's really unique.
It's cool. Another thing that I love is the
creative tension that there is between these books.
There is a creative tension between the three, the four if
including songs, but the three that I'm talking about today.
So the main questions in these books are, you know, how should
we live in the world? What's the good life if I try to
live wisely? What should we expect?
What will God do for me if I try really hard and do the right
thing? And they offer a different
perspective. So Proverb says, let me
paraphrase that. Be wise, fear God.
Things will kind of work out for you if you're foolish, and if
you're stupid, do evil things, they'll go back for you.
You'll die young, you'll perish. For example, Proverbs 39, the
light of the righteous rejoices. It's like the righteous person
who's wise has a light and it shines.
Believe in happiness, but the proverb finishes.
But the lamp of the wicked snuffed out.
So if you're righteous and you're wise, you'll be
prosperous and happy. And if you're wicked and stupid,
you'll die young. Then Job, of course, is about as
righteous as God says it, remember, and as wise as a man
as they come, and horrible things happen to him for reasons
that he never discovers. Why later on in the book of Job,
he actually uses that same proverb in Job 2117.
Let me change the tone of voice that he might have had if he was
saying it. How often is the lamp that we
could put out? Does their calamity really ever
come? Wicked people have got it, man.
I've been doing the right thing and look at my life right now.
So he's questioning the message of Proverbs, and that's the part
of wrestling, of his wrestling in the book.
Not only is he wrestling with Proverbs, Proverbs ain't working
for him. Not working.
Computer says no, baby, it ain't working for him.
The book of Proverbs does not work for Job.
It's not working out for him. This kind of weird thing to say
in it, there's a divinely given wisdom book that tells you, do
this and it's going to be great. Yeah.
And then you've got another book that says, hey, this guy did
that, didn't work out for him. They're both found in the Bible.
And you've got my man Ecclesiastes.
He's sometimes seen it work for Joe people, sometimes not.
Ecclesiastes 7 The teacher says I've seen a righteous man who
dies despite his righteousness, and a wicked man who has a long
life despite his wickedness. And then he says this is absurd.
Man, got to be careful when you see the word meaningless.
I think the original word is heavil.
That heavil is like, remember when Chris had that incense
thing and the smoke was coming up?
You can see the smoke, but you can't hold it.
But it's real. It's like an enigma.
It's like a paradox. That's what my man is saying.
He's not saying that I have seen everything.
And you know what? There's no point.
He ain't saying that. He's saying, boy, this is, I see
it, but I don't see it. This is an enigma.
It's heaven, heaven. Look that up, man.
Make sure that I'm not chatting rubbish.
So for the teacher who I call the critic, it's not just that
the book of Proverbs doesn't work, but sometimes it does and
sometimes it doesn't. And if so, it's not a guaranteed
system, so what's the point? That actually really frustrates
him. It drives Job to pray, get
angry, wrestle with God. It drives the speaker and
Ecclesiastes to despair. What is going on?
How comes that this don't make no sense?
This is an enigma, it's a paradox.
It's absurd, the creative tension between those books in
the same Bible. All of these viewpoints in our
Bible, but I don't think they're contradicting.
I think that's an immature, unsophisticated way to look at
it. They're opposing tensions.
Sometimes Proverbs is true, I suppose, to our experience.
Not always. Sometimes Ecclesiastes,
sometimes Job, the wrestling match in different seasons of my
life can be spoken about by these different books at
different times. Anyone ever heard of dialogical
views of truth and reality? Yeah, I didn't.
It's bonkers. The Hebrew Bible, Old Testament.
You can see how it's clearly influenced kind of post Old
Testament Jewish theology. So like when you think about, if
you think about the Mishnah and the Talmud, you've got these
things called dialogical views of truth and reality where you
might have a subject like the Sabbath, what to do on the
Sabbath and how they rocket is they get bare rabbis to say
their opinion and then that's it done.
That's it. They say their opinion, full
stop. And you're like, yeah, yeah.
But what, what do I do then? So how, what do I do on the
Sabbath? Then how how do I?
There's none of that. It's just use all these
different people's opinions. I think they're getting that
from this culture that we're seeing here in the Hebrew Bible.
Could you imagine coming here, hear Chris speak on Saturn?
Alice comes up and says something from a complete
opposite point of view in the creative tension, and then Bill
comes up and says something completely different.
We would be like, what's this division up in the church?
Get behind me, Satan. We need to trust and pray.
What's going on in Hope Chapel? Because it's kind of
disconcerting because in my opinion, me, just me, not just
me, but how I feel. I kind of lean towards the
proverbs way of looking at life. Do this.
This happens if I was the Frenchman from The Matrix, Cause
and effect. This is what happens if I do
this, bam, I keep doing this, man, I'm going to get enough
films. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Do it like this. That will work because that's
easier in it. It's like AI love an instruction
manual. Can't go wrong with the
instruction manual. I can't remember what it was,
Hannah. There was 1 something you said
for me to do and I said give me really clear instructions.
I can't remember what it was. Before we go on the way on the
holiday, I think there was a list of things.
And I was like, Hannah, you need to, if I could pull my phone out
of wood, I'm like, I need bullet point.
Tell me exactly where to go, where to find the powder, what
drawer do I put it in? And I said, if you don't do it,
I'm not doing it. And she did it obviously because
I like that. We like that.
There's something in the Jewish tradition that takes its cues
from the Hebrew Bible, that contains within itself a message
that is sometimes doubted. And then you come out of it the
other side, still believing the main message, but knowing that
it's probably more complex than you first thought.
Which is why I used that picture from the start.
I think it's really interesting to wrestle with the fact that in
our scripture, we've got books that require you to hold them in
creative tension, that they're having a conversation with each
other and that the books nuance each other.
Ecclesiastes forces us as the reader of the whole Bible to
recognise that life is complex and sometimes things that don't
fit into our grid doesn't mean that God's not real or faithful.
It just means life is more complex than I thought.
I need to take that into account.
That might be helpful for me in this season.
We know it, but we need to know it.
Christopher Wright, big boy, Old Testament scholar.
Love this. The most challenging difference
between the Wisdom writings and the rest of the Old Testament
arises when Wisdom authors express doubts about or question
the validity of some of the mainline affirmations of other
parts of the Bible. And yet this is precisely the
purpose of the material in the Canon of Scripture, to compel us
toward an honest faith that's willing to acknowledge the
presence of doubts we cannot dismiss and questions we can't
always fully answer given our human limitations.
Which is why Daddy brought that scripture from Job for me when I
didn't know what to use. Big up Christopher Wright.
So walk in with questions as I'm coming into land.
I would love that somewhere in the near future you are able to
jump into the wisdom books. But together, the point is, is
that together they give a sophisticated account of human
experience. And if we read 1 in isolation,
we're getting a narrow view. We need to have the light
shining from the other angle that shows you that the the
sculptor has done it in such a way that actually there's more
going on here. You still, I'm not going to, I'm
still never going to understand how this sculptor did this.
By the way, All I know is it's not how I thought it was, and
it's a little bit more sophisticated than I first
thought. And some things I'm not going to
know, some things I am. It's easy to say about a piece
of art in it, but it's differently when it's my life.
Yeah, man, I hear that. I'm there.
I'm there all day long. I'm there.
One of the fun things that Tim Mackie and John Collins do is
they have a thought experiment about the Wisdom books and they
say what if they were three people in a bar?
Boston, That's me, Channel 4 with my mum watching Cheers
before we watch Frasier, which is my favourite.
Frasier, Bang, Cheers, Bang, Big Up, Love them series.
So that's the bar, there's no norm.
But what if the wisdom books were people chatting in a bar
because I'm an actor, try and put things into ways that I
understand. And if we turned the scriptures
into a person, how might they be?
How might they function? Because then that means I can
talk to them and it means I can imagine them talking back to me,
which means I'm interacting with the with God in a way that, oh,
that's not what they taught me when I was younger.
So Proverbs AKA Lady Wisdom, if you don't like the term Lady
Wisdom AKA Hokhmar, you know that wisdom, that of God, she is
awesome. You know, they use the female
pronoun in the script. It's about wisdom.
She is like the person who, if they wrote a book, bestseller of
the century, the person you go to, how to run your business,
the person you go to, how to advise you about your
relationships by marriage, by your kids.
This woman knows it. She's the TOP man.
She's the TTP total package. And you've got Ecclesiastes, AKA
the critic. He's a little bit older.
He's he's a bit older than me, middle-aged.
He's brilliant. He can cut through anyone's
argument and just destroy the other side of things.
You know them people who can just hear what you're saying and
just can be like they see, it's like they like Neo in the
Matrix. Like that's how I feel when I
chat to Paul. When I'm chatting to Paul and if
I'm chatting rubbish, Paul is like, what are you chatting
about, man? He can just see the numbers in
what I'm saying. And he's like, stop.
He just sharper than a Ken Home knife.
If you know what, Ken, if you remember Ken Home, you remember
Ken Home knives anyway, Yeah, he's cynical, though.
This is not Paul, but he's cynical, a little disenchanted
because he's seen a lot, done a lot.
Something's worked out. Some not built projects, built
things. He's parted Blasto, Coachella,
Wireless. He's done the rave thing, parted
when he was younger, but now he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't know what I'm doing now. And I could talk to the kids.
And is that weed? Yeah, I know.
What you can't tolerate is people with black and white,
simplistic thinking, people who are building their lives on
false meaning and unreliable hopes.
And then you've got Job. Who?
If you were in the bar with those three, you probably
wouldn't even know it's Job. He's just cutting in the corner,
almost invisible old boy, grey but soft.
He's listening to these guys chop it up.
And he's like, all right, yeah, yeah, these guys are talking
about this. He's lived it, been through it.
Used to be kind of cynical, bitter, like Ecclesiastes, but
he's worked through it. And there's a piece about him
that you can trust God in spite of all that he's been through,
but he has a different kind of wisdom.
And it's not answers ain't 1 + 1 = 2.
If you get the chance to sit down in a bar with these three
in the near future in your NIV with your King James, I really
encourage you go to that bar. It stops it from being these
words that are this far away from me that I'm like, unless
I'm like that person, I don't really get it.
And I just sometimes get it on a Sunday.
Maybe 2 comes in here. You get to know it.
You get to know them, but sit with all three of them.
Don't sit with just one of them. Maybe, maybe, maybe you just
might see another perspective to that sculpture that we're
living. That's me done, Chris.
That was very good. Thank you, Louis, so much.
We've got 10 minutes, 10 minutes and it'd be great to respond.
And so just let's have let's have we've got this little
window of time. And for me, one of the, I think,
healthy and challenging things from what Louis is saying is
that I imagine that all of us have got questions that we walk
with and I'm just guessing. And, and I think part of the
courage is to let them surface, isn't it?
And it's be aware of them and even to hold them before God.
I think it's probably quite easy to think actually, life's too
busy or I'm just going to push these things down.
But part of the bravery is to let them surface and give them
time. So I'm just going to just going
to pray that God helps us to be conscious of what our questions
are. And then as always, really three
ways that you can respond. You might just like to process
on your own and just pray, reflect.
You might like to share with the person next to you or someone
near to you. Or if you'd like to come to the
front and myself or Louis or I can grab somebody else who can,
who can pray with you as well, if that would be helpful.
So I'll I'll start us off with a prayer and then we can respond
in one of those three ways.