Yield Up Your Answers

(Read last week's Sermon, "Who Am I?")

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"After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.” Luke 2:46

Jesus liked to ask questions. He asked them of the Pharisees, of his Apostles, of the people of Jerusalem and the people he met while traveling the land.

Perhaps he did so in the tradition of Socrates, who used questions as a form of teaching. Socrates would question and re-question his students about a given subject and in doing so, lead them toward answers that Socrates probably had all along. Perhaps Jesus asked questions because he simply did not have the answers. Perhaps he asked them because he was honestly interested in the responses he'd recieve.

Whatever the reason (and that reason changes, depending on whether or not you regard Christ as the actual Son of God), Christ questioned constantly.

I find that to be incredibly important to my faith. The notion of Jesus sitting with the great philosophical and religious minds of the temple and listening – it’s inspiring to me. No matter the motivation, asking questions implies that Jesus valued them. Had he come to the temple simply to instruct the teachers, would he have listened and questioned at all? If the seeking of spiritual and mortal insight is frowned upon by God, would God’s Son have engaged in it?

In her wonderful book "The Sparrow" Maria Doria Russell writes:

“The Jewish Sages tell us that the whole of the Torah, the entirety of the first five books of the Bible, is the name of God. With such a name, they ask, how much more is God? The Fathers of the Church tell us that God is Mystery and unknowable. God Himself, in scripture, tells us ‘My ways are not your ways and My thoughts are not your thoughts.’

It is the human condition to ask questions…and to receive no plain answers. Perhaps this is because we can’t understand the answers, because we are incapable of knowing God’s ways and God’s thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable.

The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up his answers, perhaps one day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.”

I adore that, and I'd like to think that it's the truth. We do not need to surrender our intelligence to worship God. It is a gift, given to us by our Creator, and God expects us to use it. He delights in it.

If you believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, then you believe that he did not come to uphold the law of the Pharisees, but to change it; to question it.

If you doubt Jesus’ divinity, but value his teachings then you may believe, as I do, that he came to shake the people from blind obedience to written doctrine and established law; to question the way they lived and worshipped and thought.

In either case, Jesus spoke against the dangers of stagnation. He warned us that no institution or doctrine can be wholly-trusted because humanity is imperfect. And in crafting his messages, Christ often concealed the judeo-punchline in a story, or parable.

He was fond of relating the same messages – “Love the Lord God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your soul, and love your neighbor as yourself” – over and again by changing the story around the message and requiring his followers to engage their minds in the search for enlightenment.

The parables Christ told require thought. They require consideration. They require interpretation and genuine reflection. To read the parable of the Mustard Seed without some understanding of the concept of allegory is to read a story about literal mustard seeds that some idiot scatters all over the place.

Why would Jesus do this? Surely it's far more helpful to you and I to have God's Son lay out the "rules" in a clear and unambiguous fashion? Why then does Christ choose to frame the majority of his teachings as stories, open to possible interpretation?

Perhaps the fact that so many of every religion's greatest truths are stored in parables and stories-within-stories should hint to us that God is inviting us to engage with our Creator, not simply let the words of long-dead men wash over us. Perhaps the inconsistencies of our faiths are the result of a Creator’s desire to see us working the answers out for ourselves.

The search for meaning is not a spectator sport. It requires us to roll up our sleeves and ask one another the “Big Questions.” It demands that we examine our beliefs, our lives, and our hearts, with a wholeness of purpose and spirit that can be intimidating; even terrifying. The prospect of attempting understanding is terrifying, no matter the goal. To attempt to stare the Creator in the philosophical-face is to invite both joy and sorrow, and there’s so much sorrow in this world already that it may not seem worth it.

But it is worth it.

The rewards of an engaged intellectual relationship with your Creator are powerful. To seek God is to know God, and to know God is to know love in your heart like you have never felt before.

The Quakers, whom I respect beyond measure, believe that there is a piece of the living God within all of us - a “light” that is both us and not-us at once. It is a mingling of the Divine and the human within each and every person. What this implies is that to know God, one must know one’s own self. I like that. It ties in nicely with last week's Sermon.

“Nosce te ipsum.”

“Gnothi seauton.”

“Know Thyself."

In seeking, we may run up against answers that confuse, frighten or amaze us. This is the very essence and potency of religion - to be alchemically changed by an experience with the Divine. We should not be afraid to look into that light - or any light - and learn from what we see. We need only look to Christ to find a man who knew himself utterly, yet was unafraid to listen, to question, and to learn.

In the search for meaning, we must be careful that we do not shun knowledge. The two go hand-in-hand, and one is useless without the other. Science asks us “How?” Religion asks us “Why?” Both are valid questions. By attempting to ask them both, and by attempting to answer them, we seek a wisdom that brings us closer to the mind and spirit of the Lord.

Through them, we all can dance with God - preferably to Michael Jackson's "Thriller."