I have said it before and I will say it again, I love the disciples in the Gospel of Mark.  They never get it.  Jesus is always teaching and they are never learning.  This morning's gospel lesson opens with Jesus' word to his disciples regarding his fate at the end of their journey.  As their day continues these keystone cop disciples do not expend their conversational energy on grasping the reality of Jesus' approaching death and resurrection.  Their chatting  wanders into the fantasy-denial-land debate over which of them is the greatest.
 
 I always find these accounts comforting.  If Jesus' closest followers could be so ignorant as to what was occurring in their midst, perhaps there is hope for all of us and our own limited comprehension regarding the Son of God.   These disciples remind me that no matter how many times we attend worship, study the bible, read books of theology, and pray, we will never plumb the depths of the mystery of our God.  We will never grasp why life is filled with so many twists and turns.  Our journey for understanding will never be complete.  This reality is never more poignant than when we come face to face with the presence of human suffering as those disciples did with Jesus' ominous words.

 This year, as a congregation, we will be discussing a variety of questions of our faith throughout the program year.  We will be utilizing the new catechism produced by our denomination to explore the foundational beliefs of our tradition.  The questions and answers provided in the catechism will be explored in preaching on the fourth Sunday of each month followed by a talk back lunch where we will engage in dialogue over the topic of the day.  These questions will be explored in our church school with our Sunday school children.  Judith Bryan and I will be teaching a six week series, three sessions in the fall and three sessions in the winter on these questions of faith for adults during the 9:30 education hour.

 Basically wherever you turn this year folks will be grappling with questions of the faith.  Of course your first question may be why grapple with these questions at all?
Catechisms are such an old fashioned method of learning aren't they?  Are you expecting us to memorize the answers?  No, it is not about repeating what is written down.  Our study of the questions of faith will give us all an opportunity to explore the foundational and perhaps the most profound aspects of our tradition.  This will give us a chance to leave behind the vocabulary of our daily lives that tends to hum along on a facile and superficial level.   This vocabulary often leaves us speechless when we face the greatest challenges and tragedies of this world.  Together we will explore the language of our faith. We will seek to give speech to our fears and frustrations, to our joys and delights, to our limitations and mortality, in a language that acknowledges the God who creates, redeems, and sustains us on each new day.

 Perhaps the best way to explain this is to lean upon my friend Rick Spaulding who is a chaplain at Harvard University. He tells this story, "Among the places in the world where the Great Mystery has revealed some small part of itself, there is one shrine whose power, as far as I know, I am the only one to venerate.  I make a pilgrimage there when I can: down the hall of a classroom building in a school north of Boston, to a certain wall at the foot of the stairs.  On it hangs quite a large etching of the Coronation Procession of Edward VI of England.  At the center of the picture -- but you have to look more carefully than you'd think -- there is indeed a plumed equestrian parade, with the boy king just visible in an open carriage.  But the picture doesn't stop there; it takes in pretty much the whole life of London.  In one corner a chambermaid empties slop out of an alley window;  on a side street a pair of lovers keep an appointment; just behind the crowd lining the parade route a thief takes advantage of the epic distraction of history to cut someone's purse strings.  The artist has obviously taken lavish pleasure in viewing a moment of history the 'Where's Waldo' way; but I doubt he or she intended to engrave an icon for a mid-twentieth century schoolboy.

 One day in winter, Mr. Hinkle was holding our 9th grade English class rapt in the usual ecstasy of terror.  Just seconds before the tolling of the bell to mark the end of class he said, without inflection, 'Gentlemen; for tomorrow - go and look at the picture you'll find at the foot of the stairs, and write one sentence which accurately describes it.'

 The next day it took less than a minute to scribble something, barely slowing down in front of the picture we'd never noticed before on the way up the stairs to class.
Around the table we went, reading our sentences proudly.  Mr. Hinkle chewed his mustache without visible emotion, then led us on into the thorns and thickets of 'Moby Dick' or something.  But a moment before the parting bell he said, again, 'For tomorrow: write one sentence that accurately describes that picture.'

 This was a puzzlement.  Most of us stood in front of the etching for at least two or three minutes before committing ourselves to paper this time - and we read our sentences aloud more proudly, the next day, each one of us certain he'd gotten it.  Mr. Hinkle remained inscrutable behind his mustache.

 And for the next two weeks, whatever else we might be discussing, at the end of class the assignment was identical.  By now one or two of the real 'nerds' were stopping at the picture on the way out of class to get a whole day's head-start on the deepening conundrum.  And, even more astonishing, in the ritual of reading aloud around the table we seemed not to be converging at all, but skittering off in all directions.  Some tried the global sweep: the whole etching in the smallest handful of words.  Some did a riff on a tiny bit of narrative in a corner.  Someone tortured us with a three-page Faulknerian sentence that purported to catalogue every detail.  The fever to be the one who broke the code, elicited the smile, brought down the balloons and got the picture Right built toward desperation.
 
 And then one day, without further explanation, Mr. Hinkle stopped assigning the sentences, and we went on to something else.
 
 For maybe the next twenty years I forgot about the picture, the sentences, the impatience, the whole unexplained puzzle entirely.

 One day years later, on the spur of a moment someone asked me to remember a turning point in my education - and for some reason suddenly I was back at the foot of those stairs again, remembering trying to write one sentence to accurately describe a picture so wide, so deep, so rich as to defy the tools at hand...Remembering  the feverish ingenuity, and the exponential proportions of its fruitfulness: a dozen students times two weeks of tolling bells times an increasing number of daily drafts times the number of days it could have continued times the depth of the silence after each new round of reading aloud...
Remembering how each sentence, in telling some part of the truth of the picture, also told some part of the truth of the teller...Remembering how the effort to understand alone
slowly became the effort to understand together... Remembering how the best sentences were lit from within by something remarkable like love for the sheer audacity of the attempt."

 In the months ahead as we grapple with these questions of faith as individuals, and as an entire community we will study a picture of the world and God's central place in the midst of all of the unexplainable joys and unexplainable sufferings of this life.  We will view a place that can only be found when we look more carefully than we ever thought we could.  We will return to the picture again and again, seeking the words, struggling to understand the implications, naming different parts of the truth for ourselves and for each other.  As we poke around the different corners of the scene we will not only explore who God is in the picture but we will be revealing who we are.  Together we will seek a wisdom that is grounded not in textbook theories but in the wellspring of our God who stands with us no matter what may come.  And in the best of moments perhaps our efforts too will be "lit from within by something remarkable like love for the sheer audacity of the attempt."