Rev. Dr. Bary R. Fleet - Pastor
August 24, 2008 – 15th Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 1:8-2:10
Romans 12:1-8
Matthew 16:13-20

Good Questions

When we are small, we tend to be full of huge questions, questions like “How did God make the world?” and “Why can’t cats have puppies?” and “Why is the sky blue?” … Anyone with a young child can talk about the almost endless “How” and “Why” questions.

When we get older, our questions sometimes get smaller, like “How much money do I need to be really happy?” (By the way, the answer to that is pretty consistently: “A little bit more.”) Other questions are “How long THIS sermon is going to be and when we will get out of here?” But we also have bigger questions, like “Why do good people suffer?” “Why is there evil?” “Why does it seem like the good often die young and the miserable people live long lives?”

The Bible itself is full of questions … some are rhetorical and others are thought provoking. A philosophy professor once said that philosophy deals with two types of questions: questions to which everybody already knows the answer and questions to which no one has ever really known the answer.

Religion deals with questions and many people believe that the point of faith is to have all of our questions answered … or to get to the point where we don’t have any more questions … or to get the feelings that there is something wrong with us if we do have questions.

There are churches that profess to have all the answers … and one of the criticisms of our denomination is that we don’t profess to have all the answers. We are a church that believes questions are important … and the process of asking questions is one of the best things we can do to strengthen our faith … and to realize that some questions just don’t have answers … at least not answers that are available to us in this life.

Jesus was a question asker.

“Are grapes gathered from thorns; are figs gathered from thistles?” (Mt. 7:16) The obvious answer is “No!”

Again he asks, “Should you give someone a stone when she asks for bread?” “Is it right to light a lamp and then hide it under a bushel?” The answers are obvious here also.

Then he asks, “Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you season it?” (Mt 5:13) What kind of question is that … because we know that sodium chloride can’t lose its saltiness.

That’s where we start having trouble, because we don’t usually come to church to try and struggle with the meaning of questions. We come to church because we want answers to OUR questions:

“Is my life worth living?” “Does God really know me and care about me?” “How can I live with confidence and hope in the future?” “What about eternity and my place in it?”

I remember Walt Patterson used to have two questions that he would raise frequently in Bible Study: “How can God hear everybody’s prayer when we are all talking at the same time?” and “How will we recognize people in heaven when their bodies are in the ground?” Pretty good questions! It was his way of asking how he can be assured that God hears HIS prayers.

In today’s scripture Jesus asks his disciples a question: “Who do men say that I am?” Then he asks a more pointed question: “Who do YOU say that I am?”

So, if Jesus were to ask that question of us today, who would WE say that he is?” (See how I cleverly inserted my own question.)

Next question: What difference is that going to make in how WE live our lives?

NOTE: Today’s sermon is credited to a sermon by Will Willamon entitled “Daring Impossible Questions” and can be found in Pulpit Resource, Vol 36, No. 3., 2008.

SERMON IN A SACK: A small “Moses” doll. Talk about the people that God used to protect Moses … and the people God uses to protect us.