Some words in the Bible simply don’t get enough airtime…
Like in Acts 17, where the apostle Paul is speaking to a crowd of sophisticated Athenians -philosophers, thinkers, people who took ideas seriously. But in describing the human search for God he uses (at least in the NRSV bible!) a wonderfully simple, relatable, down to earth word – fumble.
It’s not a very dignified word. It’s the word for groping around in the dark, not quite sure what you’re looking for, not quite sure if anything is there. It’s a term that implies struggle, disorganisation, incompetence, perhaps even complete failure.
But Paul uses it without embarrassment.
This Sunday is Mother’s Day. A day of celebration which can feel a little loaded. Because one of the quiet myths of parenthood (and of faith, and of adult life in general!) is that everyone else seems to have it all together.
Other people seem confident, competent, clear on what they believe and how to live.
Other people seem to have figured out the things you’re still secretly working out.
Most of us are carrying, somewhere, a low-grade suspicion that we are the only ones still fumbling.
But Paul encourages us. Fumbling isn’t a sign that you’re doing it wrong. It’s actually the shape that honest searching takes. None of us has a clean, clear, unobstructed view of who God is. We’re all reaching and groping – through doubt, through questions, through the ordinary and sometimes overwhelming texture of our lives – hoping to make contact with something real.
In fact, God has arranged the whole of human existence so that we might fumble about for him.
The one we’re fumbling for is already close by. God is not waiting at the end of a long and successful spiritual journey, available only to those who’ve got their act together. He is near. In the messy everyday. In trying to hold it all together. In pretending we know what we’re doing. In the midst of the fumbling itself.
This Sunday we’ll sit with that idea together and see what it might mean for all of us who are still, in various ways, fumbling our way through life.
Box Hill Baptist Church 