A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — August 30, 2009
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts: Mark 8:22 - 9:8;  Selections from the Psalms

“This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” — Mark 9:7

There has been a great deal of flack of late about various wild and wildly false charges that health care reform includes Nazi-like “death panels.”  I’m with Rep. Barney Frank who wonders just what planet people making these accusations spend most of their time on.  It all reminds me of a number of years ago when similar bogus claims arose as Oregon was considering a law to allow for doctor-assisted suicide—wild claims that nearly overwhelmed any attempts to consider some of the real ethical issues that needed to be discussed.  Once people are called Nazis, all serious discourse ceases.

I was serving a church in Oregon at the time, and amid all the hue and cry pastors often were asked to weigh in on the issue.   One day a college student called wanting to interview me for a paper he was writing.  As part of his assignment he needed to talk with people with differing views on doctor-assisted suicide.  So he came armed with questions and ready to record the answers he expected I’d give him.  After all, that’s what pastors and churches do, isn’t it?… give answers?  Well, we ended up talking for more than two hours about doctor-assisted suicide as well as a wide range of other ethical issues, with both of us asking questions.  At one point he expressed his surprise that I never offered church doctrine as official “religious answers,” but instead we kept exploring new questions and hypothetical situations.

 

It wasn’t what he expected from a pastor.  But it was how I was trained in seminary to “do theology.”  My first theology professor was always far more interested in our questions than in any answers we managed to come up with.  Our one written assignment for the semester could be on any topic we liked, but it had to address the question:  “What do I know I don’t know now, that I didn’t know I didn’t know when the semester started?”  What new questions had been given birth by my latest answers?  It’s a little turned around from our usual way of thinking.  We usually ask questions in order to get answers.  And maybe that’s all well and good in many everyday activities.  Yet answers can put an end to further investigation—as well as promote a hierarchy with power, authority, and privilege accruing to those who provide the answers.  But when it comes to the kind of ultimate matters that are of concern in theology—theos-logos, which literally means “words about God”—answers are what generate new questions.  It’s a different way of looking at things—like the old saw that “a chicken is an egg’s means of making another egg.”  And it gives us a different take on the divine command in Mark’s story of the transfiguration, “This is my son… listen to him.”

Too often the church listens to Jesus by searching scripture for some particular passage—some “proof text”—and then proclaiming “Jesus says…” or “the Bible says…” for its answer.  But Jesus didn’t just give answers.  Jesus also asked questions… and told stories, very puzzling stories.  And besides, how are we to be sure that any answers that Jesus did give to a specific person in a particular situation apply to us in our situation?  We need to take up the whole of scripture, the whole of what we know about Jesus, his answers and his questions; and only then can we “listen to him.”  This is a dynamic kind of relationship with the living Christ, the living Word of God.  We engage in conversation with scripture, not unlike the one between that college student and myself.  Answers would end things; whereas questions extend the conversation and even begin it anew.

The church focuses on answers so much, I remember being surprised when I realized just how many questions there are in the Bible.  I’ve preached a “20 questions” sermon before just from the book of Psalms—and my selection by no means exhausted the Psalm’s supply of questions.  Here are those 20 questions:

Ps 8:3-4  • (1) When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are human beings that you are mindful of them?  (2) [What are] mortals that you care for them?

Ps 130:3  • (3) If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?

Ps 76:7  • But you are awesome!  (4) Who can stand before you when once your anger is roused?

Ps 137:4  • (5) How [can] we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?

Ps 139:7  • (6) Where can I go from your spirit?  (7) Or where can I flee from your presence?

Ps 22:1  • (8) My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  (9) Why are you so far away from helping me, from the words of my groaning?

Ps 13:2  • (10) How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?  (11) How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Ps 77:7-9  • (12) Will the Lord spurn forever, and never again be favorable?  (13) Has his steadfast love ceased forever?  (14) Are his promises at an end for all time?  (15) Has God forgotten to be gracious?  (16) Has he in anger shut up his compassion?

Ps 121:1  • (17) I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come?

Ps 42:2  • My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.  (18) When shall I come and behold the face of God?

Ps 27:1  • (19) The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?  (20) The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

I grew up thinking that faith involved accepting the answers the church gave me and never questioning them.  But in the Psalms—hymns and prayers treasured by Jews and Christians alike—it is clear that questions can be a vital part of a living and dynamic faith.  In fact, faith seems to require the asking of questions.

In his book It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It, Robert Fulghum tells a one of my favorite stories.  You may recall me sharing it before.  It’s about a question, one of the biggest of all questions—namely, “What is the meaning of life?”  Fulghum says he asks that question every chance he gets.  A speaker will end a lecture by asking, “Are there any questions?”  In the silence that usually follows, Fulghum will ask his question, “What is the meaning of life?”  People generally laugh, and things begin to wrap up.  But he keeps on asking his question, he says, because you never know when someone might offer an answer.

One time, and one time only, he did get an answer, a serious answer—and he says that that answer lives with him still.  He was on the island of Crete at an institute founded after World War II by a man named Alexander Papaderos to foster reconciliation between Germans and the people of Crete.  It overlooks the place where Nazi paratroopers and Cretan partisans fought a pitched battle—now it’s a place promoting forgiveness and mutual understanding between peoples.

It was at that place, at the end of the final session of a two-week seminar on Greek culture, that the director of the institute himself, Alexander Papaderos, rose from his seat and asked, “Are there any questions?” Total silence.  “No questions?”  Only silence.  So Fulghum asked, “What is the meaning of life?”  Well, the audience laughed, and people stirred to go.  But Papaderos held up his hand to still the room, and sensing that the question was serious he decided to answer it.

He took out his wallet fished from it a very small round mirror, about the size of a quarter.  He said that as a small child during the war, he had found this on the road where a German motorcycle had been wrecked.  It was the largest piece of a shattered mirror, and by scratching it on a stone he had made it round.  Then he began to play with it as a toy, and he became fascinated by the fact that he could reflect light into dark places where the sun would never shine—into the most inaccessible places that he could find, deep holes and crevices and dark closets.  It was a challenging game, and as he grew up he continued in idle moments to play it.  Then as a young man, he came to realize it wasn’t a child’s game, but a metaphor for what he might do with his life.

This is what he said.  “I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of light.  But light—truth, understanding, knowledge—is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it.”  And he said, “I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know.  Nevertheless, with what I have I can reflect light into the dark places of this world—into the black places in the hearts of men—and change some things in some people.  Perhaps others may see and do likewise.  This is what I am about.  This is the meaning of my life.”

Then he took his small mirror and, holding it carefully, caught the rays of daylight streaming in the window and reflected them onto the face and then the folded hands of the one who had asked the question.

So Fulghum gets an answer to his question—an answer that he says lives with him still.  But of course, no matter how good or powerful this answer is, it is only one person’s answer.  No matter how meaningful it might be to you or to me as we reflect upon it, it is still Alexander Papaderos’ answer—the meaning of his life.  And it is important to realize that Robert Fulghum, who tells this story, continues to ask his question whenever he gets the chance.  Perhaps it has grown a bit, but his question remains:  “What is the meaning of life?”

Despite answers, there will always be questions.  In fact all really good answers cannot help but generate new questions.  When I put together the eleven passages from the Psalms, I chose the final text from Psalm 27 because it seems to offer an answer for many of the other questions:  “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?  The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”  But these are still questions.  Faith lives on amid all the questions—and maybe even because of them.

In hisbook  Letter to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of our need to live  our lives on the basis of something more than our need for answers.  “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart,” he said, “and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not seek the [final] answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

The light—of truth, or of understanding, or of knowledge, or of God—touches us, and we can take our lives and our questions and use them to reflect that light into the dark places of existence.  Thanks be to God!  Amen and amen.