by Rev. Dr. Carl Scovel, Guest Minister

A sermon given January 21, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Some of you have probably heard a popular TV preacher, Dr. Laura, who gives her interpretation of Bible answers to people. For example, to one question: "Is homophilia a permissible human option?" Dr. Laura replies, "Certainly not, it’s a terrible thing, an abomination!" Why? Read Leviticus 18:25.

One listener, Dan Petegorsky, wrote Dr. Laura in response to this answer, and put his reply on the web. He thanked her for her decisive answer and asked her to help him with a few more questions. For example, he wrote, "I would like to sell my daughter into slavery as permitted by Exodus 21:7. What do you think would be a fair price?" Again, "When I burn a bull on the altar, as directed by Leviticus 1:9, how shall I deal with my neighbors and the fire department?" And one more, "Exodus 85:2 orders me to put to death my neighbor who works on the Sabbath. Do I have to do this myself?"

I know of no better retort than Mr. Petegorsky’s letter to those who claim that the Bible is a book of answers, that scripture is a law book, that the Word of God is really the words of God, preferably in the King James Version. This mind set, this almost uniquely American brand of fundamentalist Christianity, creates blind believers on the one hand and agnostics and atheists on the other. Of course, our Unitarian Universalist churches pick up some of the latter, burned out Baptists, maimed Methodists, lethargic Lutherans, pooped Presbyterians, crippled Catholics, people who have rejected this literalistic legalism.

So in a way, the fundamentalists have done the UU’s a favor. They provide us with a source of fresh recruits, ready for our liberal gospel. But on the other hand, UU’s tend also to see the Bible as an answer book, but UU’s claim the answers are wrong.

Today I want to point out to you another way of seeing the Bible. Yes, of course, the Bible is filled with laws and answers, some of them relevant, some irrelevant, at least in their literal form, but--the Bible is filled with questions too, questions of all sorts.

I read to you from the book of Job this morning. Now Job is a book of questions. In the first 37 chapters, Job questions God.

Why was I born?

Why do I suffer? Why do we suffer?

Why does God not protect the righteous?

Why won’t God answer me? Why do the wicked flourish?

Why won’t God answer me?

Why won’t God even argue with me?

Why can’t I die?

Job also questions his visitors. He says, "Why torture me with false comfort? Why do you lie for God? Why do you make excuses? Why do you pretend that there is meaning in life?" Job asks all the questions which suffering innocents have asked through all the years of human history.

After 37 chapters of Job’s questions come the passage which I read to you. "Then God answered Job out of the storm." Imagine Job like King Lear upon the moors, rain-blown, windswept, stinking with wounds, bewildered, almost blinded by fate and misfortune. Now God asks Job questions.

"Who is this that darkens my counsel by words without knowledge? Brace yourself. I will question you and you will answer me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you understand who marked off its dimensions. Sure, you know."

And then God proceeds verse after verse in a series of almost 100 questions to confront Job with the limits of his understanding, and the mystery of God’s holy will. And at the end Job says, "I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me. My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you."

Now there are two ways to understand God’s response. First, God is simply beating up Job, already exhausted by his sufferings. God pounds down Job into the ground with question after question, almost 100 of them, thus proving that God is all-powerful, but by no means fair. That’s one way to read this passage.

But I don’t think that is what the author(s) of the book intended. I think they intended something else. Notice that the last thing Job says, "I had heard of you by my ears but now I have seen you with my eyes." In the Bible, seeing implies a deeper knowing than hearing.

You see, this is not so much a report of what God says as what Job heard God say. This is a report of Job’s experience of God, of God’s mystery and behind this mystery, the mercy. Job, I believe, finally trusts in goodness of God, though he still does not understand.

And this makes sense to me. For I once had an experience like Job. It happened over 30 years ago, when the United States and Russia threatened the world and each other with an imminent rain of deadly missiles. I had just seen ABC’s horrendous drama of an ICBM hitting Lincoln, Nebraska. The program was called, I think, "The Day After," a terrible, depressing, disempowering tale of civilization disintegrating in a God-abandoned world of nuclear death. Millions of us saw that program and I, for the next three days, unable to work, wandered the streets of my city, caught in the grip of a horrible vision of what could happen.

And then, in the morning on the 4th day, it was gray, high overcast, and cold. I went out to walk beside the Charles River. As I walked and looked up sometimes at the gray oppressive ceiling overhead, I asked as I’d been asking, "Why? Why? Why?" And then it seemed to me as if an answer came from the heavens, but the answer came as a question. And the question, firm, clear, gentle, was: "Who are you--to know it all? Who are you to understand? Who are you to comprehend the mystery of history and the paradox of life?"

And I cannot tell you why, but that question calmed and clarified my mind as no snappy fundamentalist or liberal answer could have done. The question was my answer. It was my answer because I felt behind these words a good intent, a presence, a power greater than my anxiety, greater than the dangers which threatened our world. These questions were God’s answer to one anxious heart. And I, a stranger to you, have told you this rather personal story because I hope it will help you understand God’s response to Job, the questions that became for him an answer.

Job had heard with his ears (that is, through others) but now he saw with the eyes of his own experience.

What we have seen here is the power of the question and the power of the questioner. The one who asks the question controls the conversation.

For example, the trial lawyer and the defendant: "When did you stop beating your wife?" The teacher asks the student: "What is the formula for determining the area of a circle?" The oppressive parent asks the child: "Who do you think you are?" Yahweh says to Adam: "What have you done?"

The questioner controls the conversation and we, when we are scared and angry and want the illusion of controlling our lives and destinies, what do we do? We ask questions, as if we were in control. We ask, "What is the meaning of life?" "How could God allow that to happen?" "Why do bad things happen to good people?" (My question has always been, "Why do good things happen to bad people?")

We ask as if someone is supposed to answer and satisfy us, as if we deserve a rational explanation. These are all perfectly natural questions, but none of them with a natural answer. Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived the death camp at Auschwitz, wrote at the end of his book about his survival, "We had to learn….that it really did not matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life--day by day and hour by hour. And our answer had to consist not in talk but in action, not in thought but it conduct."

I want to repeat one sentence from that passage for you. "We had to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life."

With this in your mind, let me now offer you a new way to think about Jesus. The Evangelicals have a bumper sticker: "Jesus is the answer." If I ever print a bumper sticker, it will say: "Jesus is the question."

Have you ever realized how often Jesus, in good rabbinical tradition, in good Socratic style, was always asking questions? A young man came to him and said, "What must I do to gain eternal life?" And Jesus asked him, "Well, what does your religion tell you?" And the young man says, "To love God with all my mind and soul and heart and my neighbor as myself." And Jesus says, "Fine, do that and you will live." But the young man says, "But who is my neighbor? To whom must I be a neighbor?" And Jesus answers him with the story of the Good Samaritan, a story which is really a question, a story which asked the young man, "To whom will you be a neighbor?"

Jesus was always asking questions: "Why are you afraid? Why do you call me good? Why do you worry about what you will wear? Why do you doubt? Why are you troubled? Where is your faith? What do you want me to do for you? Are you still so thick? Can you drink from the cup that I must drink from? Which of you by being anxious can grow one inch? Who do you say I am?"

For me, the one question before all other questions is, "What good does it do, if you gain everything the world can give you, and lose your own soul?"

Questions, always questions, but note that these are not questions which ask for an answer. These are questions which ask us to be silent, to think, reflect, consider. These are the questions, not of an interrogator, but a teacher, a teacher of life’s mysteries. "Who are you? Where are you? Where are you going? What do you desire?"

Jesus is the question. Perhaps you are the answer.

Let us pray.

PRAYER

O thou who hast come to us as queries as well as answers, thou light of all ages, all nations, and all hearts, speak through our hearts and minds and wills that we may witness to your truth and mercy, and this we ask in your own holy name.

Copyright 2001, by Rev. Dr. Carl Scovel.  All rights reserved.