So What: Rediscovering a Surprisingly Simple Faith

“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” -- Ecclesiastes 12:13

High school is a time of exploration. It’s a time of questions. As our minds develop and we mature, we begin to ask questions we’ve never asked before. High school is often when we make faith our own and it’s when we develop a clearer self-concept. Certainly, we’re not completely self-regulated mature individuals by graduation, but we’re starting to understand what that might look like. We’re developing an external locus of control and learning what it looks like to live for others. 

For many of us though, these questions can lead to a disconcerting place. While high school is a time in which many of us solidify our faith, for others, it’s when our faith gets shaken. Sometimes the questions we begin to ask in high school can lead to outright disbelief, but I think more commonly, this questioning opens us up to a reality that’s difficult to accept, and that is this:

Some questions can’t be answered.

In preparing the theme for this year, I thought back over my own faith journey and particularly the reckoning I had with my faith in high school and college. I was obsessed with apologetics in high school, but I also wrestled with some doubt. I think I had led myself to believe that if I just studied long enough, and if I just thought hard enough, I could disprove every objection to Christianity. And I further led myself to believe that if I could prove the claims of the Bible beyond a shadow of a doubt, then my faith would never be shaken again. But there was just one problem:

I am just not that smart. No matter how hard I thought about it, there were some things that I just couldn’t fully make sense of… questions like:

If you've read the Bible lately, there’s some difficult stuff. It’s not all John 3:16.

At some point, I had to ask myself this critical question: “So what?” If I can’t answer every single question or solve every problem, so what? And even if I never find some of these answers, so what? Is the Bible really just problems to be solved and codes to be cracked? Or is there something deeper going on? 

As I asked these questions, I came to the relieving conclusion that God is much more than a subject to be figured out. He’s a person you can fall in love with. The Holy Trinity is not just a mystery; it’s an invitation to a new Life – namely, a life of knowing God and being known by God. 

So what would happen if we asked that question as a community? We want to go back to the basics and find out what might happen if we say, “So what?” What changes if I focus on knowing God and living like Jesus? 

The writer of Ecclesiastes was apparently a literary genius and he uses this character in the book who is referred to as the Teacher. The Teacher is kind of the voice of scrutiny and almost skepticism. The book begins with the Teacher saying “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” And throughout the book, the Teacher slowly deconstructs all of the things in which we try to put our trust and find meaning, be it fame or fortune or pleasure, or even knowledge. And at the end of the book, the writer of Ecclesiastes has a “so what” moment. He ends with this verse: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.”

The question, “So what” is a door. It’s an opportunity to set all of the arguments aside and just find out what might change about our thoughts, feelings, and actions if we just did that: fear God and keep His commandments. 

We’re going to apply that line of thinking to a myriad of topics this semester from church and family life to relationships to politics and everything in between. And it’s my hope, as we pursue that aim, that we would learn to Love the Lord our God with our hearts, souls, minds, and strength; and that our students would leave next semester a little more devoted to God, grounded in the teachings of Christ, equipped to serve, and prepared for the future.