I love questions. Questions open us up, cause us to search and look deeper or wider than perhaps we would normally turn our gaze. They turn up the soil, they expand our horizons, and they open portals into new dimensions. Questions invite power sharing, honor the individual and are provocative and disarming. Questions send us on a quest. Jesus knew the transformative power of questions and utilized their incisive edges quite often. In fact, I’ve been told he asked at least, 325 questions, 236 of them were unique. “What do you want me to do for you?” “What do you think?” “Who do you say that I am?” “Do you love me?” “Do you want to made well?” Which one of Jesus’ questions is your favorite?
What questions are you asking in this season of your own life? What questions are you asking in this season of the life of East Liberty Presbyterian Church?
How would you categorize the season of life that we are in? What do you long to see happen? What are you grieving, hoping for, and working towards? What part are you playing in helping live into the questions we are asking? How do you want to use your gifts, talents, and passions to envision and build the next chapter of ELPC?
Doubts are also a form of questions. Perhaps this is why I love Thomas? While Thomas never asked a direct question, he was present to his doubts, grief, wonderings, and curiosities, all implicit questions. Perhaps he wondered: why Jesus left them or how God could have let Jesus’ death happen at all, or how it was possible that Jesus was physically alive or if the others were lying, among a myriad of other questions. Regardless, he stayed present to his doubts and questions in the context of his community. He kept seeking and asking. What about you? What doubts do you have? What do you need to “touch and see” so that God can help your unbelief about our current season?
Perhaps one of my all-time favorite quotes comes from the Ranier Marie Rilke, where he is offering advice to a young poet.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not 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.”
May God grant us the patience, creativity, and grace to live the questions of this season of our church and gradually live into their answers.
—Pastor BJ