Twenty Questions

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
June 13, 2010

Twenty Questions
Job 38:2-3

I love the game show Jeopardy!
I have watched the show since its debut back in the 1960s
with Art Fleming as its host
and the dollar amounts a tenth their current values.

It is the format that I love:
you are given the answer
and you have to come up with the question:
“The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club
hosts an annual tennis tournament known by this name.”
What is Wimbledon?
“He was the literary character who knew Yorick
as ‘a fellow of infinite jest’.”
Who was Hamlet?
“Jochebed, the mother of Moses, put her infant son
in a papyrus basket in the reeds on the bank of this river.”
What is the Nile?

I love the challenge of trying to respond quickly,
and the extra challenge, as host Alex Trebek reminds contestants,
of remembering to put my response in the form of a question.

My mother always encouraged me to ask questions,
ask questions about anything, everything.
And I did, apparently with a little too much vigor:
By the time I turned nine she bought a set of encyclopedias
and responded to my endless questions with, “Look it up!”

My grandfather, the first Whitworth,
also encouraged my questions.
He was a man of great knowledge and wisdom;
he seemed to know something about everything,
and when he couldn’t answer a question
he and I would search together for an answer.
He always encouraged me to question,
to probe, to look for answers.

God has given us all inquisitive minds,
minds capable of questioning,
of wondering, of inquiring.
Why do leaves change color in the Fall
and then fall from the branches of trees?
Why do some people have brown hair, others blonde,
others red or black?
How come no one is born with blue hair or yellow?
Why is that the foods that taste best
are also often the least healthy?
Why do we call the room outside this Sanctuary a “narthex”?
How did we live through southern summers
before the invention of air conditioning?
How did we survive without cellphones?

Who created the punctuation mark we are so familiar with
that tells us a group of words is a question?
Why does the Spanish language put the question mark upside down
at the beginning of a written question
as well as right side up at the end?
Why don’t we do the same thing?

How do we know that certain groups of words
in the Old Testament
and the New Testament were questions
when neither the Hebrew language nor the Greek language
used any sort of punctuation, much less question marks?

An important part of what we do in our Sunday School classes
is encourage our young people to ask questions.
It is in the asking that we learn.
Someone who asks questions is engaged, thinking,
not just soaking up information like a sponge,
but processing it, unpacking it,
looking at it from multiple angles
all in an effort to try to understand.

Not long ago one of our high-schoolers approached me after a service
and said he had a question about my sermon.
My response led to another question, and then another.
I looked at his bulletin and he had filled it with questions
that had come to him as he listened.

It is much easier to accept information,
accept things as they are,
not ask questions.
Life would have been so much simpler for Galileo
four hundred years ago
if he had not started to ask questions about
whether the earth might have been moving around the sun
rather than the other way around.
Leaders of the church condemned his very questions,
because, they said, they questioned Holy Scripture.
Hadn’t the Psalmist written
“God has established the world,
it shall never be moved”? (Psalm 93:1)
How could anyone dare to question that?
The word of the Lord!

How easy it would have been for Darwin
to have accepted the creation story we read in Genesis
as scientific fact and not to have starting asking questions
that led to his theory of evolution.

To those who argue that the Genesis story
is in fact how God created the earth and all living things,
we can put such a simple question: “how do you know?”
Did those individuals who wrote down the words
we read in Genesis witness God at work?
Did they see with their own eyes what happened?
Perhaps God stopped by one day for coffee
and said to them, “Get out your pencils
and I’ll tell you how I did it.”

To those who think science and faith are mutually exclusive,
we can ask the question:
Why can’t we embrace the science of evolution,
the science of astrophysics,
the Big Bang theory,
all as dramatic evidence of God’s incredible powers of creation?

Three weeks ago I joined our Middle School Sunday School class
and began my time with them with a question:
“If you could ask God one question,
what would it be?”

They had such wonderful responses,
so thoughtful:
•What is heaven like? Where is it?
•Are we the only planet in the Universe with human life?
•Why didn’t God create us fully loaded,
our brains already filled with all those things we need to know
so we don’t have to bother with questions?
•Why did God make icky creatures like ticks,
mosquitoes, fleas, flies, centipedes and spiders?
•If God didn’t want Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the tree
in the Garden of Eden,
then why did God put the tree there in the first place?
•Why did God give us free will if God knew
we’d end up making a lot of bad decisions?
•Why does God allow war?
•Why does God allow suffering?
•If we humans were to destroy ourselves through war,
or by poisoning ourselves through pollution,
would God re-create humanity and start all over again?
•Is God proud of us?

These are all such wonderfully thoughtful, profound questions
from our 6th, 7th, and 8th graders.
The very act of asking these questions
is part of learning,
part of the process of seeking understanding
as we seek to grow in faith.

What is important isn’t finding the answers;
in fact the answers may elude us.
It is the simple process of wrestling with the questions
that helps us to learn more about God.

To the question, why did God make mosquitoes
and other annoying insects,
we can find a simple answer pretty easily:
the insects provide food for birds and other creatures.
But of course that doesn’t answer the question of
why God created mosquitoes that jab us
for a quick drink of our blood,
or ticks and fleas that transmit disease.

Let’s look at a tougher question:
Why did God grace us with free will?
Why did God give us the ability to make decisions for ourselves,
when God surely must have known
that we’d make a lot of bad decisions?

Look what happened in the Garden of Eden.
God laid out the rules for Adam and Eve:
do anything you like, eat anything you like,
just stay away from that tree over there.
And what did Adam and Eve do:
they looked at the tree, listened to the serpent,
and then they exercised their free will,
and made their choice to disobey God’s very clear instructions.

You can imagine God groaning,
shaking his head:
“I leave them alone for 10 minutes.
Ten minutes!
and what do they do?
They paid no attention to what I told them.”

Do you suppose God regretted giving humans free will after that?
Or after Cain killed Abel?
Or after Joseph’s brothers plotted to sell him as a slave?
Do you suppose God thought,
“I didn’t give free will to any of my other creatures;
What was I thinking when I gave free will to humans?”

But even though we don’t know the mind of God,
we can formulate an answer that fits with God’s grace,
God’s love for us:
God gave us free will so we would come to him
because we want to,
because we choose to.
We come to God grounded in love,
not because we are compelled to against our will.
Of all the roads we could take,
the road to God is the one we choose to take,
the one we want to take.

God could very easily have created us as human marionettes,
with God pulling the strings.
But God’s love for us is so great
that God sets us free to decide for ourselves what we want to do,
how we want to live our lives,
and what role we will grant God in our lives,
how far we are willing to let God in.

It is because we have free will that we can choose the paths of
greed, dishonesty, selfishness --
any kind of sinful behavior, large or small,
major or relatively minor.

It is also because of our free will that many of the questions
that we would ask of God
can be turned around and asked of us.
If we were to ask why God allows war, for example,
we would have to ask ourselves
why do we allow war?
God isn’t the one who builds weapons and pulls triggers.
We do.
Why?
God is the one who teaches us that the path
we are called to walk is the path of peace.
We talked about that just two weeks ago.

It is the same thing when we ask why God allows suffering.
We have to ask, why do we allow suffering?
Why do we allow even one person to die of hunger?
Why do we allow one child to die for want of medicine?
Why are we allowing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands
of birds, turtles, and other wildlife and fish
to die horrific deaths in the ooze of the Gulf oil spill?
They are God’s creatures, God’s creations,
in which God delights.
Do you suppose that God suffers the death or injury
of any part of his creation:
animals and plants, as well as humankind?

For most of the book of Job,
Job lifts an angry voice to God
demanding that God face him and tell him
why he is suffering so in his life.
Job doesn’t ask God to lift his suffering;
he just wants to know why he is suffering,
he wants answers.
God is silent until we get to chapter 38,
when God appears.
But as you heard in the lesson,
God doesn’t answer Job’s question,
Instead, God confronts Job with questions.
It is God’s way of reminding Job
and reminding all of us,
that for all our questions,
there will be times when we won’t find answers.

In her book “The Case for God” Karen Armstrong writes
that religion’s task isn’t to provide us with answers;
it is to help us live confidently, even joyfully
in the mysteries of life.
Or, as the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote,
“God keeps his holy mysteries
just on the outside of man’s dream.”
just beyond our reach…
(“Human Life’s Mystery”)
Still, we are called to question,
called to ponder, probe
ask, inquire, learn.

God didn’t load our brains with everything we need to know.
God wants us to explore and learn.
The Bible teaches us the importance of learning,
and the danger of ignorance:
“A fool takes no pleasure in understanding
but only in expressing personal opinion.”
(Proverbs, 18.2)

The more we learn,
the more we live the questions,
the more we discover God’s majesty,
God’s power,
God’s goodness.

The more we live the questions
the more assured we grow in
God’s grace and God’s love,
 answers to almost any question.
AMEN