WHAT WAS THE QUESTION? The Unitarian Church of All Souls, New York, N.Y. June 23, The Rev. David J. Robb. Reading: Genesis 3: 1-13

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1 WHAT WAS THE QUESTION? The Unitarian Church of All Souls, New York, N.Y. June 23, 2013 The Rev. David J. Robb Reading: Genesis 3: 1-13 Back in the mid-1980s my second son, Nathan, had just completed middle school. At his graduation ceremony one of his teachers recalled a somewhat awkward moment involving one of his classmates. The teacher had offered a course in world history and was administering an oral exam as part of the final requirements for the course. After the student had settled himself comfortably in his chair, his teacher offered the first question, What can you tell me about Mao Tse Tung? Long pause. Awkward silence. The student tried to buy a little time. Um...what was the question again? Very patiently his teacher repeated the query: What can you tell me about Mao Tse Tung? Another long awkward pause before he finally replied: Mao Tse Tung, um...well, let s see now Oh yes of course! Now he had it: Mao Tse Tung was an ancient religion practiced by the Ibeldonian people on the island of Malaria. You see, they believed every person had a Mao inside of them. It was sort of like your heart only a little different more like a small lung. Well, I still get a little choked up whenever I recall that hapless student. Clearly caught by surprise, he still bravely carried on by concocting what he believed might still pass for a plausible response. Recalling that story brings to mind a somewhat similar moment in the life of the American author and ex-patriot, Gertrude Stein. Stein as you no doubt know, spent most of her adult life in Paris, where she cultivated a coterie of friends among the artistic community. She was a writer who liked other writers and hosted a weekly salon that included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Sinclair Lewis, among others. She also had a fine eye for paintings and assembled an astonishing array of work by contemporary artists, many little known at the time including Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Stein died in 1941 of stomach cancer. As she was being wheeled into the operating room for surgery she turned and asked her dear friend and companion Alice B. Toklas who was by her side, What is the answer? When Toklas did not reply, after a long pause she then inquired, In that case, what was the question? I like both of these stories, because they seem to represent two different kinds of experiences that any of us may be called to face at various times in our lives. What was the question? Sometimes we ask that in order to stall while we try desperately to dredge up an answer to get us out of hot water or to keep in the good graces of the inquirer. On other occasions though, What was the question? may be a most profound acknowledgement of our perplexity, that we have lost our way, that we no longer know who it is that we have become,

2 that we are estranged from whatever it was we imagined our true purpose to be, that we no longer have any certitude about what in our life holds any meaning for us whatsoever. It was a very long time ago now that I completed a degree at Union Theological Seminary here in New York City somewhere back there before the Punic Wars I think. To be honest when I entered seminary I did not really know what my life s work would be. I felt I had no intention at that time of ending up in the ministry. So, eventually becoming ordained and working as a pastor certainly came as a surprise to me a few years later. I entered seminary thinking that I wanted to try to reconcile my religious upbringing with my intellectual development. I suspected that religious answers no longer held credibility for me, but I was not entirely sure. Then a remarkable thing happened as I began to open myself to the study of religion and biblical literature and theology. What I discovered was this. I did not think that religion or theology had all the right answers, but, much to my surprise, I came to realize religion and theology were asking mostly the right questions. It was at that point that I allowed myself to be drawn deeper into the dialogue. And it was then that I came to see that wrestling with the right questions is really at the heart of any authentic religious faith. Continuing to wrestle with the right questions and helping others to do the same began to emerge at that point as a serious vocation for me. i I think that most people with a passing acquaintance with the Bible believe the heart of the message is invariably given in the imperative mode. We tend to assume that it is mostly about an authoritarian God who hands down orders and commandments that we are to obey or else suffer dire consequences. You know what I mean: Thou shalt do this, or Thou shalt not do that. Well there are some commandments, some imperatives, in Bible tradition, that is true. But I have come to believe that the most important grammatical form in Biblical literature is the question. Take the narratives in the opening Book of Genesis, for instance. Those stories really revolve around deeply wrenching questions: Adam and Eve having tasted the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge are now trying to hide in the Garden of Eden. God approaches and asks: Where are you? What have you done? Cain in a fit of envy slays his brother Abel. God seeks him out and asks, Where is your brother? God tests Abraham by requiring him to sacrifice Isaac, the very son he had long ago promised. In silence he and Isaac walk a great distance to the top of a great hill where

3 together they prepare the altar for the sacrifice. And the young boy calls his father and asks innocently, Father, I see the wood and the fire, but where is the lamb for the sacrifice? Jacob after having cheated his brother of his rightful inheritance is required by God to return and face his brother after 14 years in exile. The night before the encounter he is left alone to wrestle all evening with an angel. And the angel challenges him: Who do you think you are? What is your name? These are the truly great questions of every person s life. And notice these questions do not just well up from within us. In the perspective of the Biblical narrative, they are God s questions addressed to each one of us and before which each of us stands. These are the questions by which the meaning and purpose and depth of our experience is to be measured: Where are you? What have you done? Where is your brother? Who are you? Tolstoy once wrote that unto each one of us individually are posed certain questions that do not yield themselves to concrete answers. They are the kinds of questions that force us to struggle with them for many years, even at times for an entire lifetime. Is it not then the case that our lives are shaped less by what we claim to know with certainty, and more by the questions we choose to struggle with, or else the questions we refuse to entertain? The poet Rainer Maria Rilke made a similar point in his Letters To A Young Poet. Herehe is addressing a young man who had contacted him for help to learn the craft of writing. At one point he writes: You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as you can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like the books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not yet be able to live them. And, the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. ii Just in case you are wondering, by the way, I don t find all of this particularly easy. Like most of us I am a little impatient. I want to know what I am supposed to know and when I am supposed to know it. But if the heart of religious faith has more to do with asking the right questions than having the right answers, there are some surprising conclusions we may be able to draw from this. In the first place we should be able to tolerate the fact that God does not simply disappear just because we ask some tricky questions. To many of us the issue of the existence of God is one we settled a long time ago. Some of us concluded that God is an outdated belief that no longer requires our allegiance, if in fact it ever did. We determined that it is an idea that is an affront to our intelligence.well, perhaps that is so. But that conclusion rests entirely on an

4 intellectual proposition that requires no serious existential investment from any of us. Is it not possible, on the other hand, to imagine God as the question toward which we head rather than the answer from which we flee? Then God would remain a mystery to be lived into and toward rather than a proposition we could easily dismiss. None of us is seriously moved to ask the question of God when we are honing our skills in an intellectual debate, or sharpening our proofs for or against the existence of God. Neither is any one of us moved to ask the religious questions when we are so filled with opinions that there is no room left for honest doubt. No, religious questions arise when we have exhausted our resources, when we have tried and failed to accomplish something in which we deeply believed. We rarely ask any kind of question in moments of triumph or great success. No, we tend to address the religious questions, if ever, when we have hit a wall, have been stopped in our tracks and are deeply perplexed. We tend to entertain the religious questions when we have come up short while trying to rely on all the answers upon which we have always placed our bets. In the second place, if the heart of religious faith is located in the nature of the questions we are driven to ask, then a second conclusion follows as well. The answers that emerge after having lived the questions themselves for a long time will usually be unexpected and quite surprising. Many of you will remember a loveable curmudgeon who graced Hollywood films for many years in the 30s and 40s, W.C. Fields. You may recall that Fields was not particularly fond of dogs or children, and that he literally despised all manner of religious hokum. So late in his life--a life famously devoted to dissolution and a general disregard for all the rules of propriety-- late in his life he fell deathly ill. He was not expected to live through the night, and one of his closest friends came to pay a visit. Imagine his surprise when he entered the bedroom to discover Fields thumbing frantically through a Bible. What on earth are you looking for, Bill? he cried. Fields responded in that hoarse staccato voice for which he was famous: Loopholes! Fields problem, of course, is the problem most of us have. We already think we know what it is we are looking for and expect to find, even before we enter the search. But once the religious question engages us we will without doubt be escorted to new and unfamiliar territory, a place we least expected and probably never hoped to discover. And one final observation. The real religious questions I suspect are not those that we dream up or are the ones we are driven to pose in extremity. At the end of the day the real religious questions are those that we stand before, the ones that appear to be addressed to us from beyond. Those are the great questions that we must all live with and have no other way of naming except to say they are God s questions: Where are you? What have you done? Where is your brother? Who are you? What is your name?

5 In a world that frequently seems to be teetering on the edge of madness, a world of suicide bombers, and legislators who claim to believe that global warming is a hoax, a world armed to the teeth with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, and leaders hell-bent on exploiting every vulnerability and fear among their constituents, in such a world let us pray that when we come to the end of our lives we will not need to ask, Well then, what was the question? Let us pray that we will know that we have stood before those awesome questions for most of our lives and have attempted to live into the truth of them all along. Amen.