Why Questions Aren't Enough

When I was in Birmingham, Alabama last month for the UU ministers convocation, we were all divided randomly into small groups that met every day for an hour and a half to discuss topics relevant to our theme; The Mind and Soul on Fire: When Hunger and Passion Meet. That's a pretty sexy phrase; it made our clerical gathering sound very intense and racy and exciting, which, of course, is not necessarily the norm when fuddy duddy ministers get together to talk about our work, so we all liked it. Some of that title is derived from Ralph Richardson's acclaimed book on the renowned 19th century American UU minister, theologian and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Richardson called his book The Mind on Fire. And of course, we'd all like to think our minds can catch fire, blaze into brilliance and uncharted territory as Emerson's did - so there was another reason we liked that theme.

So there we were in Birmingham, in small groups, named after trees, discussing topics about our call to ministry, our faith journeys, our commitments and challenges, our aspirations and failures, our beliefs and changes in those beliefs over our lives. And one of the ministers in my group, the Linden group, spoke about the fabric of her faith being one of questions - that her vocation was to keep questioning and lifting up questions - which of course is right in line with our Unitarian Universalist belief in the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

Now the point of these small groups is to share part of ourselves with each other and to develop connections where there were none to begin with. So part of the challenge when my turn to speak came in finding words to share my vision of ministry and Unitarian Universalism which happened to contradicted hers, without my response being just a criticism of her sharing.

The reason I am preaching about this experience this morning is that I hear a lot about how important questions and questioning are to Unitarian Universalists. One of the aspects of our tradition that really sets us apart from other religions is that ours is a free faith. We hold ourselves and each other accountable for our beliefs; we do not come here out of a sense of obligation to anyone or anything but ourselves and our own understanding - or at least that's the way it should be. If you are here to please someone else or only out of a sense of duty, that's not enough and you're not being fair to yourself or the rest of us. A church is like a restaurant, anyone can come here, and partake, but like any patron that seeks to be sated and pleased, each of us has to be willing to sit down at the table and try what is laid before us. And in coming to this establishment to feed a hunger in our soul for spiritual connection, to slake a thirst in our spirit for human connection, we bring experiences, lessons learned and hopefully questions.

Why should anyone who has lived some even have questions about life or faith or meaning or truth? So much of religious understanding and history have been about answers and living in accordance with the dictates of those answers; what do questions have to do with anything? Look at the story we heard today from John, where Didymus Thomas, Thomas the twin and the doubter, refuses to believe that Jesus can possibly have risen after his death because he wasn't there to see Jesus for himself. He's disturbingly graphic and strong-willed about it. Remember he says "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe." And a week later, Jesus suddenly appears among the twelve and invites Thomas to do just what he stipulated - touch the wounds and believe. The text doesn't tell us if Thomas does that or not, it just tells us what he says, clearly recognizing Jesus for who he is. And Jesus censures him gently for his unbelief, exalting those who don't need proof, for whom faith persists in the face of the experiential realities of this world, saying "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."

I wouldn't presume to argue with Jesus about the importance of faith, or about faith being, at least in part, about beliefs that are about more than just tangible truths and daily ways of living. But Unitarian Universalism has always held up the importance of using all our gifts, senses, and capacities, god-given or luck of the draw, to shape and re-shape our beliefs. And I've spoken before about that this is life-long work, that what we understand or believe today may change tonight or next week because of something we see or hear or learn or suffer. Unitarian Universalists believe the gift of being a blessed, marred, riven, miraculous human being comes with strings attached, and one of those strings is that we must put the gift itself, ourselves, to the fullest, most constant use we can. And sometimes that means questions are a sacred part of our faith journey and our duty as liberal religious people. Thomas is acting as a good UU might when he says, because everything he knows and understands tells him that to have Jesus back is impossible, not that he will not believe at all, but that first he must see and experience Jesus again for himself before he will believe.

Nonetheless, there's a problem with all this emphasis in our denomination and in many of us, myself included, on questions, is that we must not confuse the contribution questions make to our faith with our faith itself. The problem with stopping at questions, congratulating ourselves for coming so far as to own the uncertainty that comes with seeking truth is that articulating only our questions leaves Unitarian Universalism shallow and undefined, unable to respond or progress. Like a house without a firm foundation, we cannot build. Like a tree without roots, if we have nothing to ground us, we cannot grow towards our aspirations. Like a faith with nothing we can claim for ourselves, if we cannot say anything about what we do believe, we cannot say anything about what we do believe - we have nothing to say and that makes us irrelevant, especially by the standards of our own Unitarian Universalist history. If we have never have any answers, we have nothing to affirm, nothing to support us, nothing to rally us. We have no reason to gather, nothing to share, no difference we can make.

Obviously, I think we do have reasons to gather, much to share, a great difference we need to make. In my own soul-searching of life for religious and personal truths, I have not always found the answers I sought. But also, I have never found answers if I was content to quit my search with having established the questions. It was a United Church of Christ minister, my supervisor Mary Martha when I was a hospital chaplain at Mass General hospital, who taught me to search beyond questions for answers. I described to her my experience of being with people as they were dying - that they seemed to be receding, withdrawing,, going away. And I spoke to her about the challenge I felt in working with people who were dying when I was afraid myself of dying, because I believed that death is the end and nothing follows it. She pointed out to me that if my language around my experience of being with people who were dying was accurate, that it suggested a question I needed to answer - if they were withdrawing, going away, where were they going to? If I had any faith in my sense that they were going away, not extinguished, not ended, but withdrawing, than what did that say about what death was? Maybe not the end.

That's as far as I've come, and it's not very far. 'Maybe, maybe death is not the end.' It's not a stirring statement or a biblical-style revelation, it's not as much of an answer as I would wish for, but it's more than I had once, and it's enough. Even just that much answer is precious to me, and I wouldn't have found it if I hadn't been pushed to find that much answer. Every time, only being determined to establish what I believe has led me to being able to articulate my faith as I understand it.

I have spoken from this pulpit to you about my own answer to other questions, how I understand God and the journey of my life so far and our relationship to nature, and more. In each sermon I know I have also stressed that each of these answers was only my own answer, for now, and might change or not. I was not concerned that all of us, or any of us, agree with me, now or later. I am always concerned just that such reflection and seeking of our own answers be part of our life for each of us, whatever the answers might turn out to be, wherever the answers might take us.

My message this morning is still that, but also more. I saw a denominational potential for our focus on questions in Birmingham that I hadn't recognized before. Questions will be our downfall if we stop there. Not only are answers the responsibility of each Unitarian Universalist, they are the responsibility of our denomination as well. In our support for the free and responsible search for truth and meaning, questions are the free part of that equation and answers are the responsible part. As Iris Murdoch wrote in her novel The Unicorn, "Freedom may be a value in politics, but it's not a value in morals. Truth, yes. But freedom...in morals, we are all prisoners, but the name of our cure is not freedom." Truth, not freedom, is a value in morals - and truth is what comes as an answer to a question.

Some of you are familiar with the tradition of midrash in Judaism. Midrash is rabbinic discourse, some of it from thousands of years ago, laid out in two different talmuds, the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud. The discourse always starts the same way, with a question about something from scripture, the Hebrew Bible. When it says in Genesis that Sarah died, the sentence seems to come out of nowhere, right after the wrenching story of Abraham's near sacrifice of his son, Isaac. So, is the implication that she died in some way because of what Abraham almost did? Is there a suggestion in the placement of those two sentences, just after the binding of Isaac that maybe she died of shock at hearing what almost happened to her beloved son? That is an actual interpretation taken from a midrash and Midrash is full of such questions and the lengthy discussion between rabbis in trying to answer them. These conversations and answers were recorded and compiled and became what Jews call the 'Oral Torah' - as opposed to the written Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The oral Torah has become over time another scripture to the Jews, and when Jews are seeking understanding, the Midrash is just as valid and authoritative a source as the Bible itself.

It must've been a wonderful ego trip for at lest some of those rabbis we can read about in the Talmuds to have students writing down what they said to keep for all time. But that's not why I raise it for our consideration now. I raise it now because of the courage and discipline that also is required to ask questions for which you, yourself will have to find the answer, discuss it with others, defend it, as part of that midrashic tradition. The wisdom of Midrash is that any question deserves to be asked, and answered; more than one answer is possible; every answer matters, not only for the person who offers it in the moment but for another who may learn of your answer centuries later and find that it resonates in their own mind and soul as well.

Answers are our responsibility. I cannot charge you to find them, but this morning I am charging you to seek them. Questions are not enough. Knowing what we don't believe is not enough. We must know ourselves and we must be able to identify ourselves to each other and the world. The discipline of answering our questions will teach us what we need to know to prosper as individual souls, and as a church and as a faith. What do you believe? What do I believe? What is the common ground that unites us here? What do we have to teach the world? What do we fear? What do we hope? What do we want and what will we give to realize that vision?

"To ask the hard question is simple...but the answer is hard, and hard to remember." What did the fish ignore, how did the bird escape, did the sheep obey? What wounds have we touched with our own hands and what did we learn thus? What have we ignored, how did we escape, did we obey? What do you believe?

Amen.