Into The Unknown
What we believe about God shapes our lives and our world.
Everything from how we relate to one another, to how we treat those who are different from us, to the foreign policy of superpowers with regard to the Holy Land is affected by how we think about and speak about God. This means that faith and religion are, literally, life and death issues in our world.
What we believe about God has real world consequences. And that‘s why we need to explore what we mean when we think and speak about God. For too long people of faith have been held captive by a vision of God as a man in the sky. This image of God dispensing blessings to the faithful and curses to faithless, and intervening (sometimes) in response to prayer, has not changed in centuries. The sciences have shown us that the three-tier view of the world with heaven above, hell below, and earth in between, is simply not true. Our understanding of creation, the universe, physics, and quantum physics has grown in leaps and bounds. Yet understandings of God have changed very little for most people.
It‘s time to move beyond our limited, safe, knowable, certainty about God.
We need a bigger God than our ancestors, and we need a God that is truly worthy of the name. And a God like this cannot fit into human brains or categories. For God to truly be God, God must be Unknown.
The Season from the Epiphany to the Transfiguration is traditionally focussed on who Christ is. Coming immediately after Christmas, it invites us to get to know the man whose birth we have just celebrated. And it invites us to see how the glory of God is revealed in Jesus. In this sense it is also a call to examine our beliefs about God and allow them to grow and change.
Into The Unknown
With this in mind, Into the Unknown: A Spiritual Journey for the Epiphany and the Season After leads us on a journey to encounter God through seven different metaphors. Like different lenses, each chapter helps us to let go of our existing ideas of God and invites us to encounter God in a new and deeper way. At the heart of this journey is the conviction that God has to be beyond our ability to know God. This means that Into The Unknown is a challenging journey, but also one that promises to lead us into a richer and more meaningful experience of God.
It may feel more comfortable to live with a small, understandable view of God. But a small God is not actually God. And so I invite you to take the risk, let go, and dive Into The Unknown in this season. And as we do this, we discover that the Unknown God can also be known. We can find both familiarity and mystery if we are willing to open ourselves to it. And this vision of God will lead us into humility and awe as we get lost in the wonder of the Divine Unknown.
Into The Unknown is only available as a Liturgical Guide for congregational worship. It includes:
● Reflection chapters as a springboard for your sermons for every service of the series based on the Lectionary readings for Year B;
● Purpose-written prayers and liturgies for every service from the Feast of the Epiphany to Transfiguration Sunday;
● A theme-based Table Liturgy that can be used at any service in the series.
Into The Unknown includes the following chapters:
The Feast of the Epiphany: Look to the Stars!
We can ignore the vastness of the cosmos and concern ourselves only with our tiny corner of the world. But we will never understand who we are or what our lives mean if that is our choice. If we are to find our place in this world, in this universe, we will need more than a small story of individuality. We will need to dive headlong into the unknown.
The Baptism of Christ: The MORE
Diving into the Unknown is both a letting go of the life we have and a quest for the life we seek. It is the path to the More that we instinctively know is waiting for us. There is More to life. We just need to be willing to journey into the Unknown to find it.
Epiphany 2: Seen and Seeing
Nothing heals us and transforms us like knowing that we are truly and lovingly seen. And there is nothing more healing and transforming that we can do for ourselves and others than to learn to see as we are seen.
Epiphany 3: The Way of Wisdom
When Jesus calls disciples, it is not for us to have all the answers. It is not to give us a book that contains all the information we need to navigate our world. It is a call into the Unknown. It is an invitation to be confused by God‘s values and priorities until they begin to make sense—not intellectually but in practice.
Epiphany 4: Unquenchable Life
A God who pours life into the cosmos has to be ever-changing, creating, playing, adapting, and delighting in the new. And this unpredictable Divine artistry is what makes radiant, energising life accessible to us. All we have to do is let go and dive into the Unknown. It‘s frightening, but the alternative is to be dead before we‘ve died.
Epiphany 5: Outside the Box
If we genuinely seek to connect with and experience God, it is inevitable that we will eventually want to break free of boxes. The German mystic Meister Eckhart is known to have prayed, ‗God rid me of God.‘ This disturbing prayer calls us to recognise that the God we seek to know is unknowable.
The Transfiguration: The Unknown Inside
When our spirituality warns us of becoming proud and tells us that we are inherently sinful, we are blinded to the Divine Spirit within us. And when we believe that we always have to find God outside of us, we never think to look inside. But the Unknown hides in every person.
