This is the second time since I’ve been your pastor that we’ve done a sermon series focused on the questions you submitted. We did so in 2019 and now this year. What I enjoy about this question/answer series is that the pastors have the opportunity to hear what’s on your minds and to engage as well as we can with your questions. If I’m being honest, there’s a part of me that gets excited about having good answers. I like being the expert. After all, I have spent much of my life collecting degrees to justify that expertise.
That’s how I was feeling when I proposed we do this again, but then something happened to me. As the questions started coming in I thought, “Sure, I have some decent answers to many of these, but don’t these questions start to open doors to even more questions?” I found myself becoming more interested in the questions than in the answers.
A few weeks before we began this series, I received this email from David Horne, who is a spiritual director in the area. I’m on his email list because I started seeking spiritual direction as I began sabbatical last summer. Here’s what David shared:
“Somewhere along the way in my own life, I stopped asking so many questions. Growing up, I absorbed the idea that Christianity was mostly about having the right answers. I was even on the Bible quiz team at my church. Later, when I went to seminary I had enough youthful arrogance to imagine that I now knew all the answers. As my answers increased, my curiosity diminished. Curiosity isn’t highly valued in a culture that prizes certainty.
“In Matthew 18, Jesus says, ‘Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’ I don’t pretend to know everything Jesus meant, but spend five minutes with a toddler and you’ll notice some things: trust, dependence, a wild sense of wonder. They don’t pretend to know everything, and they’re not embarrassed to ask. Their curiosity flows from a sense of security and openness.
“What if childlike faith isn’t about knowing more, but trusting deeper? What if curiosity is one of the most sacred expressions of that trust?”
As I have aged, I have found myself needing fewer answers and gravitating towards openness and trust. I mean, it’s understandable when we’re young that we want clear answers. That’s what my church and camp gave me. There’s definitely a place for those things, but it’s not a place we should stay. Over time, I found some of the answers to be overly simplistic. My world grew more complex. I found myself not needing to be right but instead learning how to trust God more deeply.
There’s a whole field called apologetics, where basically really faithful, smart people give very clear answers to faith questions. If you’ve ever read Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis or The Case for Christ by Lee Stroble, those are two examples of apologetics. Earlier in life, I found those books to be compelling and very useful to my faith, but by the time I hit college, I found myself totally uninterested in them. I found that my faith didn’t need compelling answers. Rather, it needed better questions.
I like to think N. T. Wright was thinking about apologetics when he wrote,“[Arguments about God are] like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining.”
Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God, has gone through a similar journey. She writes, “I am beginning to rethink the dichotomy…between a question’s capacity to draw me closer to Jesus and a question’s capacity to unnerve me….It is the intimacy of hearing a true question and of being willing to entertain hazarding a true answer.” That is, it can be easy to assume that a question that challenges what we believe to be true about God, life, or really anything is a threat to faith. Winner’s experience parallels mine in leading me in a place where those hard questions simply make me more open to awe, wonder, and faith, laying my trust more fully at the foot of Jesus.
Questions aren’t a threat. They’re a pathway to faith.
Even though were alive in the 21st century, we Americans are still very much a product of the Enlightenment. We’re children of that movement that started in the 18th century and that has produced everything from our understanding of how to form a new country to the scientific method. Reason and rationality are at the heart of this kind of thinking, and it has led to some amazing advances in our lives. It’s how we’ve learned to combat diseases, fly in planes, and sequence the human genome.
But most of history and much of the non-western world hasn’t operated with this understanding that reason is king. The Bible certainly didn’t come into being in that era (and yet we try to force it through the lens of reason at times). If you’ve ever traveled to the non-western world, part of what you experienced is how much more space they have for the spiritual in the rhythms of their lives. The spiritual and the rational absolutely can coexist, but they are often strangers in our context. And so, even those of us trying to attune our hearts to the spiritual still struggle with it here because rationality is supposedly in charge. (Although, if we’re being honest, we humans can be quite irrational about a lot of things.)
Someone once did the math on this, but did you know that Jesus asks 307 questions across the four gospels? Others come to Jesus with questions; there are 183 questions that people ask Jesus in the gospels. But here’s what I find most fascinating. Do you know how many of those 183 questions Jesus answered? Jesus only directly answered three of them, and if you include those he gives indirect answers to, that total rises to eight. So, even with that more generous accounting, Jesus only answers 4% of the questions people ask him. To put it another way, Jesus is forty times more likely to ask a question than he is to answer one.
That’s something worth pausing over. Jesus asks more questions of people than they ask of him. Of the questions they ask — and there are plenty — Jesus only answers 4% of them. I didn’t count the questions you submitted this summer, but of the few dozen, I think there are only around six or so that we didn’t get to at least indirectly between sermons and newsletter articles. That’s almost 90% of your questions answered, and now that I’m realizing Jesus’ pattern of not answering questions, I’m starting to wonder if I’ve done it wrong!
That’s not to say that Jesus simply ignored the questions. He more often used them as a springboard to think more deeply. A great example of this is the man who asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus didn’t say, we’ll it’s Martha and Philip who live next door to you. No, he replied by delivering the Parable of the Good Samaritan. This parable gives everyone a lot to chew on and a lot to apply into our own lives.
Those questions that he did answer tended to have very direct answers already in the law. Should I pay my taxes? one asked. Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, Jesus said. How many times should I forgive? Peter asked. Seventy times seven, Jesus replied. For those who were here last week, the Sadducees’ question on marriage in heaven is one of the questions Jesus answered.
Do you know what the most common question Jesus asked is? What are you looking for? And that’s a great question because it’s all about purpose. What do you want out of life? What do you want from Jesus? What hopes do you have? When we have a relationship with Jesus, I think that’s one of the questions that constantly stands before us. What are you looking for?
What are you looking for in working long hours?
What are you looking for in how you raise your kids?
What are you looking for in how you spend your time?
What is it that you want out of life and faith?
I love that Jesus asks so many questions because I believe that God created us for wonder. How could we not look at the world and ask lots of questions? How could we not explore the intricacies and extravagance of God and not want to keep digging deeper and deeper into the mystery and wonder of it all.
N. T. Wright once wrote, “Life is full of mystery… You can study biology and human genetics, and know everything there is to know about fertilization, reproduction, pregnancy, birth and childhood; but when you see your own newborn child, and two eyes meet yours with a look that seems to say, not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘So – it’s you!’ you glimpse a mystery which no physical explanation can ever begin to explore.”
The word “mystery” shows up with frequency in the New Testament. Jesus uses it in Matthew, Mark, and Luke when he describes the purpose of giving parables rather than straightforward answers. He tells the disciples, “To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God.”
Paul writes often about mystery. Our text from 1 Corinthians 15 last week included one of those observations. “Listen, I will tell you a mystery,” Paul writes. “We will not all die but we will all be changed.” So, resurrection is part of this mystery. He does so again in Colossians, “I want their hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” So, Christ is God’s mystery in this case.
We heard this in both of our texts this morning. The final words of Paul’s letter to the Romans, “Now to God who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed.” So, in this benediction the mystery is that Jesus would welcome all, Gentiles included, into God’s family through Jesus.
Writing to the Ephesians Paul is talking about his imprisonment for the gospel and speaks of “how the mystery was made known to me by revelation…a reading of which will enable you to perceive my understanding of the mystery of Christ.” And we know Paul’s wild story of encountering the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, where he is blinded by Jesus’ glory and receives the mystery of the risen Christ he now preaches to all who would hear at incredible cost to himself.
We tend to think of mystery as something to be solved, but that’s our western-world-Enlightenment-rational minds bearing down on texts that aren’t thinking like us. No, mystery takes on a different meaning in the Bible. Mystery, in how Paul uses it, is a “secret or mystery too profound for human ingenuity.” As in, you can’t make this stuff up. Only God could, and now we get to spend our lives working our way into the mind and heart of the infinite and eternal God involved on this mortal sphere. Our minds are limited and will never fully grasp what God is up to, but that doesn’t mean God doesn’t want us to keep going further up and further in.
One question answered should lead to another question asked.
And another.
And another.
I’ll close with a story. There once was a legendary theology professor who was giving his final lecture before retiring. As he spoke his last words, the auditorium erupted in applause. The professor stuffed his notes into his bag and headed for the door. But as he got to the door, he turned and faced the applauding class. The students fell silent, awaiting an encore. He took a hard look at his class and said one more thing. “Just remember. Jesus is the question to all your answers.” And with that he left.
I love that. Jesus is the question to all of your answers. Every time we think we have a handle on it, Jesus asks us something to draw us in even deeper. Our faith seeks understanding, but faith also goes beyond understanding…deeper and deeper and deeper still.