A sermon: “Questions and Answers”

Steve Turner was a Christian poet popular in the 1980’s. In one of his books he has this poem:

“Do you need to go to the toilet when you are dead? Does God grow old? Life is full of unanswered questions when you are five years old and late for school.”

 

Life is full of unanswered questions, and difficult ones we want an answer to. I’ve been bombarded with questions while I’ve been in hospital…

Can I take your blood pressure?

What is your name and date of birth? (Asked before any pill is given you.)

Have you had your bowels open? 

And my favourite – would you like a bottle for the night? 

 

They were asking the man opposite me  some questions the other day to test his memory. The questions were:

Do you know where you are?

Where do you live?

Can you count backwards from twenty to one?

Who is the Prime Minister?

I thought asking him that was a bit unfair as there was a different Prime Minister from when he came into hospital! 

 

The Episcopal Church in America has this sentence as part of its raison d’être: “We don’t have all the answers and we welcome others who love the questions.” There are hard questions and then there are questioners who just want to trip you up. 

When I was minister in West Sussex, I did a lot of Bible studies and discussion groups and I had a man called John who didn’t believe Jesus was anything other than a good man. He would come to every gathering to try and tie me up in knots. He saw it as sport and fun! His wife would shout at him “oh John, stop it!” After five years of this when I was about to leave that church, I told him he wanted to believe more and he was searching really otherwise he wouldn’t have kept coming. Ministers after me told me he did the same to them! 

Luke Chapter 20 opens with Jesus in the Temple. It is the start of the final week of his earthly life and takes place after his ‘cleansing’ of the Temple from the misuse it had fallen into. 

Loved by his crowd of listeners, Jesus has also made many enemies amongst the various religious leaders, and in this chapter, each group attempts to question his authority, to catch him out or trick him into a falsehood or blasphemy which will give them the opportunity to arrest him. Jesus answers them all faithfully.

 

When the Sadducees, a sect that didn’t believe in resurrection, made their challenge, it was in the form of a hypothetical situation fantastical, almost ridiculous. Yet Jesus doesn’t dismiss them, and listens to their question with patience, without laughing, and answers seriously. Evidence of the truth of resurrection will not be found in a reproduction of the structures and confines of earthly society, but in the Sadducees’ own Jewish history, where God is the God of their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who are alive with Him as demonstrated to Moses in the burning bush. 

To question this would be to deny their own beliefs; the Sadducees are silenced, and even the scribes admit “Teacher you have answered well.”

 

To hear that marriage as we understand it is not recognised in heaven, where each individual is a child of God and like the angels, may be a disappointment to many people, whether Christian or not, who fondly imagine loved ones reunited after death. 

After the death of our late Queen, there were some lovely cartoons of her and Prince Philip together; in one cartoon Her Majesty is walking hand in hand with Paddington Bear, and the speech bubble says “Paddington, I have worked hard and I’m very tired, please let me go to be with my husband.” It is a consoling picture, and let us hope that they are reunited, even if not in marriage, nor as monarch and consort, but as angels and children of our heavenly Father.

 

Let us hope that all people who have died in faith have risen again in that place where “there is one equal light, one equal music” as John Donne wrote in his prayer:

 

“Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven, to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity: in the habitations of thy majesty and glory, world without end. Amen.”

 

There is a lot we don’t know, but as Christians there are things that we do know. How confident would you be if you had a John or a Sadducee challenge you? Would you be able to give an answer or would you freeze? We know despite much uncertainty, of new life, a heaven, victory over death, that how it is today is not how it will always be. We need some hope. 

Collins Dictionary this week shared it’s new words of the year. One was “permacrisis” – did you know we are living in a state of permacrisis? Permacrisis: a term that describes ‘an extended period of instability and insecurity’.

 

We don’t have all the answers about what is to come,but we know it is true. Job even knew it in the midst of undeserved and unbelievable suffering: “For I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God.”

While Jesus’ answer to the Sadducees’ question silenced his critics, it still leaves all of us mystified as to what form that kingdom of God will take. Will it be the ‘heavenly city’ of the Book of Revelation, or will we be made to ‘lie down in green pastures’ as in Psalm 23? Will there indeed be a heavenly banquet? Or are all these things just an extension of what we have wished for in our earthly lives, and the reality something yet more wonderful? I remember a vicar coming to our youth group to talk on “what is heaven like?” He stood up and said “I don’t know, I’ve not got there yet.” 

 

Life is full of unanswered questions. That’s okay. 

But we do need to be more certain in what we do know in our hearts, as it said on the front wall of the chapel at Kirkby Malzeard, “great is our God, Jesus Christ is Lord.”

 

Part of my trouble in recent weeks has been a corneal abrasion on my right eye, got in my first stay of my two in hospital.  

That has meant I haven’t been able to read very clearly. While off sick, I’ve attended some Evensongs in the cathedral. I have found I know the words of the creed by heart. These words are, in the midst of all the questioners and doubts we face, what we treasure and what we proclaim as the Church:

 

“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. 
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man. 
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. 
On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. 
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.”

That’s the right answer!