Allowing Ourselves to Question
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
February 27, 2022
Good morning and welcome to Light Reflections. We are on week two of our new sermon series, “To Be Thriving and Progressive Quakers in 2022.” Our scripture for today is Proverbs 2:2-5 from the Message Version.
1-5 Good friend, take to heart what I’m telling you;
collect my counsels and guard them with your life.
Tune your ears to the world of Wisdom;
set your heart on a life of Understanding.
That’s right—if you make Insight your priority,
and won’t take no for an answer,
Searching for it like a prospector panning for gold,
like an adventurer on a treasure hunt,
Believe me, before you know it Fear-of-God will be yours;
you’ll have come upon the Knowledge of God.
Last week we looked at moving from heaven to earth. Today, we will move to looking at another aspect of being Thriving and Progressive Quakers in 2022 – Allowing Ourselves to Question.
Back when I was still among the Lutherans and serving as a Director of Christian Education, I used to teach confirmation to the youth of our church who were, as we said, at the age of accountability – somewhere between 12 to 13 years old.
At the time I was serving a rather large church and we had about 100 youth in that age range who were wanting to go through our new confirmation program (very similar to First Friends’ Affirmation Program but in a Lutheran context).
Our senior pastor had created what he titled, “Wonderful Wednesday Workshop dot come” or www dot come for short - a play on this new internet thing that was taking the world by storm at that point. We had usually three workshops that met each Wednesday night covering a variety of confirmation topics. Also, unique to this program was that we required at least one parent or guardian to accompany their child to the workshop.
I had about 25 youth and parents in my first class. The topical focus for my workshop was the Holy Spirit – always a fun topic to try and wrap one’s mind around.
Well, after teaching an engaging lesson and working through the workbook pages, we came to a time in the curriculum for Q&A. What I was directed to do was ask the participants if they had any questions. Since we would be short on time, I would write down any questions people had and then begin the next session with addressing them.
So, I asked my group if they had any questions and directed them to raise their hand and I would call on them. Looking down at my paper, I waited a moment for what I thought would be very few questions. When I looked up from my paper, not a single youth had raised their hands, but ever parent or guardian in the room had their hands up.
Surprised, I kind of chuckled with a bit of anxiety, and called on the first parent with their hand raised.
She asked, “Why do people at the church down the street think they speak in tongues? And why don’t we?” Interesting question – I explained this was not something I planned to cover in this workshop, but I would write it down and bring an answer next week.
At this point things really blew up, the next parent asked, “Do people who commit suicide go to heaven?” What? I wondered where this was going to go...as I wrote it down.
And the questions kept coming, each a little more difficult and further off the subject we were discussing. Finally, I stopped them and said, “Where are all these questions coming from?” And I will never forget the answer.
A man in the back said, “No one every asks us if we have questions, most of the time we are told what to believe or given the answers.”
I wrote down the long list of questions and headed the next day to the senior pastor’s office. I assumed that since he wrote the curriculum that he had planned for something like this to happen.
I presented the list to the pastor, and to my utter shock and surprise, I was handed the list back and told “You can’t answer those questions. Just go back and skip that part next time and move on with the curriculum.”
What? I tried to explain how I had told my class that I would come with answers the following Wednesday and that these questions were from the parents, but he was not interested. Just ignore those and move on.
Well, I could not ignore these parents who were wrestling with their questions but was conflicted as to how to progress. The next Wednesday, I went back to the class and started the workshop as usual. Immediately, hands went up – parents were saying, “Hey wait, you said you were going to start with answering our questions.”
Put on the spot I did what should have been done a long time before this moment. I told everyone that the senior pastor has said we do not have time for these questions, but if you want to ask him, here is his phone number, write it down and give him a call this week with the questions.
At that point I realized a couple very important things – 1. People need to be allowed to ask questions for true faith formation and community to be built, and 2. Never give out the number of your senior pastor and tell people to call him to ask questions. He was inundated with calls and messages and he was not happy with me at all.
A few years later, I was introduced to the writings of Rachel Held Evans. I believe Rachel was a prophetic voice in our midst before her untimely death just a couple years ago. She wrote a book that intrigued me titled, “Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions.” (later this title was changed to “Faith Unraveled” and I have included it in our reading list). In this book she says,
“With the best of intentions, the generation before mine worked diligently to prepare their children to make an intelligent case for Christianity. We were constantly reminded of the superiority of our own worldview and the shortcomings of all others.
We learned that as Christians, we alone had access to absolute truth and could win any argument. The appropriate Bible verses were picked out for us, the opposing positions summarized for us, and the best responses articulated for us, so that we wouldn’t have to struggle through two thousand years of theological deliberations and debates but could get right to the bottom line on the important stuff: the deity of Christ, the nature of the Trinity, the role and interpretation of Scripture, and the fundamentals of Christianity.
As a result, many of us entered the world with both an unparalleled level of conviction and a crippling lack of curiosity. So ready with the answers, we didn’t know what the questions were anymore.
So prepared to defend the faith, we missed the thrill of discovering it for ourselves. So convinced we had God right, it never occurred to us that we might be wrong.
In short, we never learned to doubt. Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God.
The former has the potential to destroy faith; the latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice, the latter a virtue.
Where would we be if the apostle Peter had not doubted the necessity of food laws, or if Martin Luther had not doubted the notion that salvation can be purchased?
What if Galileo had simply accepted church-instituted cosmology paradigms, or William Wilberforce the condition of slavery? We do an injustice to the intricacies and shadings of Christian history when we gloss over the struggles, when we read Paul’s epistles or Saint Augustine’s Confessions without acknowledging the difficult questions that these believers asked and the agony with which they often asked them.
If I’ve learned anything over the past five years, it’s that doubt is the mechanism by which faith evolves. It helps us cast off false fundamentals so that we can recover what has been lost or embrace what is new.
It is a refining fire, a hot flame that keeps our faith alive and moving and bubbling about, where certainty would only freeze it on the spot.
I would argue that healthy doubt (questioning one’s beliefs) is perhaps the best defense against unhealthy doubt (questioning God). When we know how to make a distinction between our ideas about God and God himself, our faith remains safe when one of those ideas is seriously challenged.
When we recognize that our theology is not the moon but rather a finger pointing at the moon, we enjoy the freedom of questioning it from time to time.
We can say, as Tennyson said,
“Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they.”
I sometimes wonder if I might have spent fewer nights in angry, resentful prayer if only I’d known that my little systems — my theology, my presuppositions, my beliefs, even my fundamentals — were but broken lights of a holy, transcendent God. I wish I had known to question them, not him.
What my generation is learning the hard way is that faith is not about defending conquered ground but about discovering new territory.
Faith isn’t about being right, or settling down, or refusing to change. Faith is a journey, and every generation contributes its own sketches to the map. I’ve got miles and miles to go on this journey, but I think I can see Jesus up ahead.”
About the time I read this, I was introduced to my first Quakers - who happened to be part of my doctoral program in Oregon. I remember over a meal at Cannon Beach learning about the fluidity of beliefs and openness to question Quakers practiced.
I was introduced to something I had believed, but never incorporated into my faith, that being the ongoing revelation of God (which brought many queries to my mind).
Being raised in churches that had fixed creeds, faith statements, and even volumes and volumes of explanations for each and every doctrine, I was pleasantly surprised, relieved even, to find Quakers not having any of these and instead embracing a desire to keep things open to continued dialog and learning.
Or like our scripture for this morning says – I love Eugene Peterson’s translation:
That’s right—if you make Insight your priority,
and won’t take no for an answer,
Searching for it like a prospector panning for gold,
like an adventurer on a treasure hunt…you’ll have come upon the Knowledge of God.
Questioning and processing queries are like a prospector panning for gold or an adventurer on a treasure hunt. That to me is exciting. That keeps me thriving and progressing.
Faith then is an adventure, and ever-changing opportunity to experience the Divine in and through our lives in the present moment.
For us Quakers, queries can be questions that guide our personal and group adventure on how our lives and actions are shaped by Love and Truth.
Queries or questions are so important to our Quaker faith, we even make them part of every meeting for worship. I will never forget my first experience of this in Oregon, after our worship leader shared some thoughts on the scriptures, and even read a poem by Mary Oliver, he then said something that I say almost every week at First Friends,
“Now, let us take a moment to enter a time of waiting worship, where I have prepared a couple of queries in the manner of Friends for us to ponder.”
That first time, I thought, wait? Is he going to leave this open ended?
See, there was some anxiety rising in me…I remember being taught in other religious denominations that unless you “closed the deal” (as they said) and told the attenders that they need not wrestle with these things because Jesus has taken care of this and as long as you believe in him, then everything will be ok – just don’t give them wiggle room to ask questions or doubt.
Here I was learning just the opposite. Our leaders said, “I hope you wrestle with these queries throughout the week and that we can discuss them more as we live and work together this week.”
The emphasis is not on having the final answer, but more on how to live a life more completely aligned with the life of the spirit and our neighbor.
Queries or asking questions, even wrestling with my doubts have become a powerful spiritual discipline for me.
I have found that returning again and again to the same prompt for deep reflection can set the stage for new understandings, changes of heart, and a rising sense of loving action that needs to be taken.
What I have realized and even Mary Blackburn during waiting worship shared in vocal ministry last week, to be a thriving and progressive Quaker Meeting means we must be open to allow people to question the faith and what they truly believe. I agree with Mary that this is an extremely important aspect of what First Friends offers our world in 2022.
To Thrive or to grow or develop well or vigorously, as I introduced last week, takes us asking ourselves queries.
And allowing questions means we will continue to “develop gradually or in stages – step by step - overtime – or again like I introduced last week, progressively.
Or maybe we as Quakers could see this through Rainer Maria Rilke’s eyes, this is how he put it in his, “Letter to a Young Poet”:
…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Part of my most recent spiritual retreat I explored my own doubt and questioning. During the week-long retreat I read the book, “Faith After Doubt,” where Brian McLaren agrees with Rilke in the process. He says,
“Doubt [questioning], it turns out, is the passageway from each stage to the next. Without doubt, there can be growth within a stage, but growth from one stage to another usually requires us to doubt the assumptions that give shape to our current stage.”
That means Questioning, Queries, or simply doubt is key to us becoming a thriving and progressive Quaker Meeting in 2022.
Now, as we enter a time of waiting worship, let us ponder the following queries in the manner of Friends:
· What questions or queries am I hiding in my heart? and why?
· What queries do I need to engage and wrestle with throughout this week and possibly share with a fellow Friend?
· How may my doubt and questioning help First Friends become a more thriving and progressive Quaker Meeting?