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October 19, 2008 sermon

A Questioning Time
(Exodus 33:12-23; Matthew 22: 15-22)

Reverend Minister Sally Harris

Another week full of questions, taxing questions – what difference did the elections make? Was it worth $300 million dollars? And who will be the next president of the super power that is losing power? When will the stock market hit bottom? How will the global economic crisis affect me? Where is the visioning of Trinity leading us? Who are we to be here in Kitsilano? Global questions, political questions, economic questions, personal questions, faith questions, visioning questions - it is a questioning time. Even within our texts this morning, there are questions. Moses asks God: How can it ever be known that I have gained your favor, I and your people? How can your light shine within me and within your people except you are with us? God will you stick it out with me?

In the gospel story we have the Pharisees and supporters of Herod asking Jesus a political and economic question: Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar? What is the right and good thing to do? The contexts are vastly different. The intent of the questions could not be further apart and yet questions were being asked.

What questions reside within us today? Let us take a few moments to listen for our questions within…

God, you know our thoughts. You know our hearts, our intent. You know the questions we wrestle with, the questions we run away from, questions of fear, questions of control and.. the answers we long to have. We offer the questions of our minds, of our hearts, of this community to you now. Grant O Holy One your presence, both in our questions and in our reflections. Amen

The people of Israel had once again disappointed God and Moses. They had created an idol - a golden calf - and so God has told Moses that an angel would take them to the Promised Land but God could no longer walk with this people. And Moses exhausted, disappointed and dispirited says to God: "Look, you started this with a covenant and I got involved and you cannot just abandon me like this. The wilderness has been hard enough but now the Promised Land is in sight and I cannot go on without you. Without you we are nothing. There is nothing that makes us different from any other group of people if you do not walk with us. Without Your presence I cannot go on.” Moses is questioning, is pondering, is pleading for God's presence not only with him but with all the people of Israel. Moses is yearning to know God. "Show me your ways that I may know you." Moses asks questions from the heart. Soul questions. Reverent questions. No longer wanting to live on the surface of things Moses delves into the heart of the matter. “God if You aren't with us, we have no identity. Isn't it Your presence with us that makes us who we are? Is it not Your Presence that gives us our identity? Our purpose? Our hope for the future? A Promised Land without Your presence is no Promised Land. Show me your ways that I may know you."

The question in Matthew is different. The point of this passage, which also appears in Mark and Luke’s gospels, isn’t really about paying taxes. Each of these three evangelists makes a point of stating that Jesus’ questioners are seeking to entrap him with their queries. A couple of details are added in Luke’s version, noting that the religious leaders sought to “trap him by what he said, so as to hand him over to the jurisdiction and authority of the governor.” Luke goes on to say that Jesus “perceived their craftiness” as they asked him, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”

I suspect we all have encountered such questioners. We’ve met them, these folks who have learned the knack of asking questions that aren’t really questions but rather are a litmus test. There’s a kind of violence to this form of encounter in which someone, whether through intention or through an unconscious ingrained pattern, approaches us with an curiosity that harbors a weapon. In these hands, questions turn into snares, nightsticks, tools for distancing and defining and diminishing. Thinking they already know the answer, such questioners aren’t really interested in engaging in a dialogue; a conversation. No, they are interested in finding confirmation of their assumptions and fodder for their prejudices; their bias. No transformation is going to happen in this scripted communication.

Jesus recognizes a loaded question when he hears it. And he doesn’t exactly choose to turn the other cheek here. Jesus possesses a keen awareness to such manipulation. He responds to the question, but he cuts through their assumptions about how he will answer it. Given choices of A or B, Jesus will always come up with an inventive C.

I’m intrigued by his ability to do this—by his capacity to receive every question that every person poses to him, by his ability to recognize when he’s being baited, by his ingenuity in coming up with an unexpected response. Most of all I’m intrigued by the remarkable grounding that helps him to achieve this. This takes an intense clarity, a deep sense of who one is and what one is called to do. Faced with those who approach us with assumptions and ulterior motives, having this kind of clarity and grounding offers some hope of responding as Jesus did. It takes, too, cultivating an imagination that sees beyond limited and limiting choices and the assumptions that underlie them.

The answer Jesus gave amazed them and probably dismayed them as well. It is possible to serve both God and Caesar, he responds. Choosing God does not require stopping the world and getting off. It does however, require some soul searching. Render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's. What part of our soul belongs to the world? What part belongs to God? What part of our life do we surrender to God, what part do we manage? What part of our life together as a church do we surrender to God? What part do we decide? Life isn't black and white. There are no neat formulas for the good life. It is our life-long task to live in the ambiguity, cultivating an imagination that sees beyond limited and limiting choices and the assumptions that underlie them.

How do we do that? I think that is what Moses discovered. The freedom march he set out on 40 odd years ago certainly was not what he could have predicted or controlled. It was far from perfect. In Moses’ weariness, in his seeming defeat and discouragement of an impossible people and a reluctant God Moses seeks to know who God is. "Show me your ways that I may know you. Show me your glory." Moses wants certainty too. Moses wants some visible sign that in the ambiguity of life and people and wanderings and destination there is a God who goes before him; goes before them. Perhaps that is why Moses only saw the backside of God. Because our place is to follow. Moses went up into the gap of aloneness, of loss, of imperfection and discouragement to find God. Moses went into the cleft of the rock to both behold and to be protected from the glory of the Creator whose presence both sustains us and overwhelms us.

If we dare to enter these biblical texts with the desire to meet God we may be able to frame our questions, and to respond to the questions of others, in a dramatically different way. We need to travel the scriptural landscape as pilgrims open to the presence of God in every place, rather than as tourists who think we know everything about a place because we’ve visited it a few times. When we travel as attentive pilgrims we can’t help but cultivate a humility that fosters the kind of clarity and imagination that fueled Jesus’ response to his interrogators. A humility that allowed Moses to be awed by a crack of light while being squeezed between a rock… and a rock

So what about our questions? Are the answers in the face of a coin or in the cleft of a rock? Do our questions box God in, or ourselves in or others in? Do our questions betray a sense of longing for perfection or a willingness to let the light shine through the cracks, the brokenness of our lives, of our church, of our world? What part of our identity as individuals and as a faith community rests with God's presence and what part is a matter of us doing it right? The answer Moses received was much greater than any question he could ask. The answer to many of our questions lies more in a presence than in a perfect solution. More in surrender than in correctness.

Every Sunday we encounter these texts of ancient times so that this story may become part of our own searching and hungering to meet God. We encounter this living Word so we may sink our roots deep into a landscape that helps us grow into those who can recognize and ask the questions that matter, and resist the ones that don’t. Perhaps a faithful, Christian life is a search for the better questions rather than the perfect life.

In these days, may we be people of honest, humble questions and a people of remarkable imagination. Amen [resource: Jan Richardson]

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