Matthew 16.13-20 24 August 2008
“DARING INSCRUTABLE QUESTIONS”
Summertime lingers and the voices of children echo in the grocery stores and the ice creameries and the restaurants. How many of you have spent time talking to a grandchild or any child this summer? Maybe you’ve noticed this about children.
When we’re young, we’re full of huge questions. Questions like, “Where did I come from?” “Who made the sky so blue and the moon so orange?” “Why do I have to tell him ‘I’m sorry’?” I remember watching Dragnet with my father in 1960. The episode was about drug abuse. I kept hearing this word ‘dope’. It was used differently than how my older brother used it to describe me. “What do people do with dope?” I asked dad. Not so savvy in these matters, my father said, uh, peo-ple take dope in order to feel good. “Really?” I said. “Why don’t we take dope? Why doesn’t everyone?” Prepare to backpedal if you spend time with children. Their questions remind us how few answers we have for life’s deepest mysteries.
Conversely, notice how the longer we live, the smaller our questions become. Instead of a tearful, “Why do people say mean and hurtful things to others?” we ask, “Does that come in a generic?” or “Could I get that sauce on the side?” or “Whatever is our preacher talking about today?” Instead of deep, probing, and inscrutable questions, we limit ourselves to questions with simple direct answers.
Maybe this is why Jesus told his disciples to let the little children to come to him. Jesus and children had something in common. Both made their stock and trade opening up the world with big questions. Questions that rock us on our heels. The rest of the grown-up world was trying to button everything down. But Jesus made a living opening it up so the world might come back together differently.
“What does it profit a person to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?” Jesus was known to ask. (Mt 16.26) Few of us expect that any one of us could literally gain the whole world. But the cultural heroes most celebrated through the media are busy doing exactly that. Can you say Trump, Buffett and Pickens, anyone? Jesus says they are losing their lives in the process. Of course, all of us must lose our lives for something or other. Is it profitable to live your life solely on the basis of profits? Jesus excels at raising unfathomable and enigmatic questions.
Elsewhere, Jesus teaches, “Salt is good, but if salt has lost its saltiness how will you season it?” Sounds like a child’s question, doesn’t it? Sodium chloride can’t chemically lose it’s saltiness. That’s impossible. Also, salt itself is a seasoning. How do you season salt? You don’t. You use salt to season other foods. What is Jesus up to? He’s asking whether at our core we remain spiritual beings first and last; whether we first belong to God, not corporations, armies and empires. He wants to purify and protect that core in this corrosive world. Big questions, right?
Religion specializes in dealing with life’s most difficult and inscrutable questions. At least, if the particular house of worship is doing the work it is supposed to do.
Take Ecclesiastes 2.22, what are we mortals left with from a lifetime of toil and strain under the sun? Who hasn’t asked that question after a bad day at work?
You get up in the morning, you go to work, you come home. How is the world a better place? How is your life or anybody else’s better because of it? Then you get up again the next day, go to work, come home, and ask the same questions.
For the thousands of years of Judaism and the thousands of years of Christianity, we have specialized in large, inscrutable questions other sites would never dare.
The problem is that most folks today come to church not for bigger questions, but for bigger answers. Most of us don’t like open-ended, enigmatic, soaring, soul-shaking questions. We like answers. In fact, it could well be that the first reason people come to church is the search for answers. Answers to questions like—“Is my life, as I am living it, worth living?” “Does God really know me and care about me?” “Will all of the costly sacrifices I made ever add up to anything worthwhile?” “Is good really stronger than evil, life stronger than death?” “How can I live into the future with confidence and hope?” “What about eternity and my place in it?”
The best teachers handle mammoth questions not by supplying glib and facile answers. The best teachers give us better and deeper questions we can spend the rest of our lives growing into. The best teachers show us how to break giant questions into groups of smaller questions we can handle on a day-to-day basis, like changing our $1000 bill into 50’s and 20’s we can spend. The best teachers teach in order to stimulate more questions rather than give a list of magical happy-face answers that stop probing conversations. Jesus was such a teacher.
I want to be like the rabbi Jesus. And I want the church to be like the rabbi Jesus.
Sometimes people express exasperation with me and other pastors because they come to us with the vital inscrutable questions. We do our best to respond. But usually we leave them with more, perhaps different, questions. That is frus-trating to people who want things reduced to simple, straightforward answers.
A lot of the really growing churches, the mega-churches as they are called, cater to this desire. The preacher will hand out a sheet before her sermon on how to achieve happiness. And he will have you write out her three principles to happiness. Follow these principles, he will tell you, and you will find happiness. And then he will proceed to preach the three points, let’s say, working hard, keeping a positive attitude, and praying daily, reiterating the three fairly obvious points again and again, giving everybody the opportunity to write them all down. And the preacher has gone from what Paul the Apostle called stewards of sacred mysteries and become something more like a game-show host. Come on down!
This is worth mentioning today because we hope to grow as a congregation. We hope to grow in the depth of our faith, the quality of our service, the numbers we attract our shared pilgrimage. But as we try to grow, we are not going to take any of these shortcuts. We’re not going to lower the ceiling, if you know what I mean. We are not going to dumb down because it would appeal to people’s consumer instinct in shopping for religion. Why won’t we do that? We won’t because here at Dennis Union Church we worship Christ crucified and resurrected, a large and living God who is not so easily contained as with the three keys to happiness.
Friends, we have come too far through the deaths of loved ones, engaging local and world neighbors in struggles of poverty and illness, responding to threats like terror and war, to retreat backward into such simplistic childish answers. For as life rears back on its hind legs thirty feet tall and snarls at us, those answers wilt.
The church in
Lots of folks today want their faith to fit on a bumper sticker. “God said it. The Bi-ble wrote it. I believe it.” Ever see that bumper sticker? Talk about cut and dried. But other bumper stickers on the three spiritual laws, the six basic fundamentals, or the four principles of happiness are not much better. The UCC has a bumper sticker. It sounds more like a big question than a pat answer: God is still speak-ing. Hmm. What is God telling us today? Hopefully, ours is a message for a God as interesting as ours, a Jesus as large as ours, and a life so demanding as ours.
May I ask a favor of you, please? Maybe you can respond to this as I step down to the floor. Will you promise that as I serve as your pastor, you’ll call me on the carpet anytime I try to make life easier or Jesus simpler than they are? Will you promise to keep raising the large, inscrutable, vital questions, for which a lifetime of abiding in the mystery of Christ crucified and resurrected is the only answer?
For our Gospel lesson today, you see, wasn’t about a tough question that we put to Jesus. It was about a tough question Jesus put to us. After walking along the road for some time with his followers, Jesus first asks, “Who do people say that I am?” He gets a variety of answers. Then Jesus gets personal. He asks Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” If we could learn to relate our big questions to this first and central question Jesus gave us, we will be walking the same road as he.
The good news is Jesus is good at questions. He is not just good at asking them, but also entertaining our questions, children or adults. In the final analysis, all of his questions and really all of our questions lead back to this fountainhead-of-grace question: who do you say that I am? And also the next question this first one immediately implies: what difference is that going to make in your life? Amen
Lord, we have come to you today full of questions for you. So sometimes when we talk to you, when we attempt to pray to you, our prayers are teeming with questions: why is there suffering in the world? Why must life be so very difficult? What path am I supposed to take next? What shall I do with the rest of my life?
Lord Jesus, amid all our questions you give us the insight and courage to hear your questions for us: why do we keep you so far from us in our daily living? Why won’t we take time to stop and listen to you? How would our lives have to change to more fully serve you? These are better questions, Lord, than those we become obsessed with, our heads racing and churning through sleepless nights.
Lord Christ, you are the answer to so many of our questions. Help us to see all the ways in which our little lives are the answer to your question: will you come forward and be my people no matter what? We give you thanks and praise for the answers you give us as well as the deep questions that you put to us.
We pray for Linda Reid at the loss of her older brother Douglas Stratton; we pray for Josh Crowell on his mission of mercy to his cousin Sandy Reeves in Florida, who died days ago; for Jesse Mendenhall recovering from back surgery; for all of the children who participated in our three-church approach to Vacation Bible School this past week; for the children, parents, and leaders who will meet downstairs for lunch to plan confirmation for the new class that is now gathering..
