9/19/21 “Why Ask The Hard Questions” by Nancy E. Petty
Mark 9:30-37
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”
Back in 2014 an unlikely, some would say scandalous, new political voice caught the attention of Americans. A Roman Catholic Nun from the order of the Sisters of Social Service burst onto the scene of American politics. Her mission: taking on fellow Catholic, Representative Paul Ryan of the United States House of Representatives, and his proposed budget for Americans. Sister Simone Campbell, and the Nuns on the Bus, became a voice for struggling Americans as they traveled across the nation opposing Ryan’s morally corrupt budget proposal.
I was so taken with Sister Simone and the courage of her Nuns on the Bus campaign that I called her office to see if the bus was coming to Raleigh, and if so, could she and the sisters come and speak at Pullen. To my surprise, I was told that the bus was coming to Raleigh, and that Sister Simone’s contact person would be in touch with me to talk about the possibility of her coming to Pullen. I hung up feeling hopeful but also cautious, not wanting to get my hopes too high. For those who have been around Pullen since 2014, you know how this story ends. Sister Simone and the sisters did come to Pullen. They held an educational event in our fellowship hall and joined us for Sunday worship. Sister Simone gave a beautiful and challenging prophetic message that Sunday. In the days that followed, I continued to travel virtually with Sister Simone and the Nuns on the Bus as they took their message across America.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” It was at one of the Nuns on the Bus stops in Des Moines, Iowa that I first heard this Thomas Pynchon quote. It was 2014 and Vice President, Joe Biden was the main speaker at this Iowa social justice rally organized by Sister Simone. During his speech, decrying “a growing gap between the richest American and the rest of the country,” Biden quoted Pynchon. Biden goes on to say, and I quote: “Think of the questions [being asked] over the last 8-10 years…we’ve been asking…Are corporations over taxed? No seriously. Watch the debate. Are corporations over taxed? Second question: Is Wall Street over regulated? That’s what we are debating. Are unions too powerful? Think of the debate we are engaged in. We are asking all the wrong questions.”
We’ve all heard it said, and many of us believe, that the question is more important than the answer. The questions we ask, lay out the path, not the answer. It is what Rilke is saying in the quote on the front of the worship guide. Love the questions themselves…Live the questions now…Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
In the 9th chapter of Mark, the gospel reading for today, the disciples are struggling with the questions, and living into the questions that are before them. Jesus is saying some hard things, concepts that are hard to understand. Specifically, he is trying to prepare them for what he knows is coming – his own betrayal, death and resurrection. This is not the first time he has had this conversation with his disciples. And like the other times, they are not getting it. Surely, we can understand their resistance. The last thing they want is to hear how their leader will be betrayed by one of them, how he will die a brutal death for the cause they are fighting for, and how he will mysteriously be raise from the dead. And even if there is an ounce of knowing in them, the human inclination to avoid talking of such hard things is understandable.
Our text says that they didn’t understand what he was saying. But the gospel writer doesn’t stop there. Mark writes, “and they were afraid to ask him.” Fear is a powerful thing. I don’t know about you, but I can look back over my life and recall numerous times when fear stopped me from asking the hard questions facing me. Fear, I have learned, has its way of helping us avoid the truth. Fear has its way of holding us back, keeping us stuck in harmful places. It has its way of diminishing us, making us believe that we are not good enough or that we can’t do something that we are being called to do. It seems the disciples were stranded in this kind of fear.
So what happens when we are stuck in fear? We do what the disciples did. We ask the wrong questions. We distract ourselves with the insignificant. For the disciples, that meant arguing about who was the greatest among them. Who was going to be first? Who did Jesus like the best? The significant questions facing them were too hard to ask. You mean one of us will betray you? Why would we do that? Do you really think they are going to kill you? Are you not afraid of dying? Will they kill us too? What do you mean that you will rise again? Can you tell us more about what that means?
Most often we don’t ask the hard questions because we don’t want the truth or we are not ready for the truth. Sometimes we distract ourselves and others from the hard questions because the hard questions are precisely the questions that reveal a truth about us and others that we don’t want to face. Let’s be honest. Asking the hard questions is not the easy path. The hard questions require us to look inward. They require us to look at the gap between what we say we value and how we live out those values. The hard questions demand an honesty that sometimes we are not ready to face. And yet, when we withhold the hard questions, we do so at our own peril.
Today, as a nation, as a church, as individual people of faith, we are facing some hard questions. And the distractions and fear-mongering has never been more present.
As a nation that spent $21trillion dollars on war since September 11, 2001, the wrong question/the distracting question is: Where are we going to get money from for economic investment? The hard question is, Are we willing to stop shaming poor people for living the very lives of economic desperation that our financial and social systems works overtime to create, so that the rich can become richer. As a nation, the wrong/distracting question is: Is America still the most powerful country in the world? The hard question is: Are we willing to give up the myth of the American dream to save the planet or will we keep consuming and pillaging to fuel our big houses and our comfortable cars? The wrong/distracting question is: Can we save our democracy? The hard question is Are we willing to admit we’ve never had true democracy and then are we willing to face the injustices of the past, repent of our sins, and actually be a nation that lives out the truth that all people are created equal, with certain unalienable rights, and among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? As a nation, the wrong question is: Pro-life or pro-choice? The hard question is: Do we really give a damn about “every life” or do we simply want to shame and victimize others while we fail to care for the orphans and widows in our midst?
Speaking of the institutional church…As the institutional church, the wrong question is: How do we get millennials to church? The hard question is: Is the church willing to do whatever it takes, change however we must, in order to be what is needed in this time – authentic, truth-tellers, places of refuge for all, a people not focused on right belief but grounded in compassion. For the church, the wrong question is: Can we survive? The hard question is: Are we willing to risk everything to take up our cross and follow Jesus? For the church, the wrong question is: Are we growing and did we meet our budget? The hard question is: Do our members feel their gifts are being used and are they finding meaning in what they experience in this community?
And what of us individually, and as people of faith…As individuals, and as people of faith, the wrong question is: Are my individual freedoms being protected? The hard question is: Will I be responsible for my neighbor? The wrong/distracting question is, as John F. Kennedy said years ago: What can my country do for me? And I will add, What can my church do for me? The hard question is: What can I do for my country, for the planet? And what can I do for my fellow Pullenites, my neighbors near and far?
This is what I know. Pullen Church is at her very best when she asks the hard questions of faith and speaks and acts prophetically to where faith intersects with the moral and social justice issues of the day. For our church, right now, one of most pressing hard questions facing us is: Will we have the humility, strength, courage and spiritual depth to ask the hard questions we need to ask to heal our white fragility? To withhold those hard questions will be at our own peril – not just as a church but as humanity. In pandemic times and in non-pandemic times our faith calls us to ask the hard questions.
Our gospel reading ends with a hard question. Jesus puts a child among the disciples and says to them: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” What hard question is Jesus raising here? It is this: Are we willing to be a community in which the non-persons of society find God’s welcome, God’s love and God’s acceptance? Jesus reminds his disciples then, and us now, that a community that does not welcome the people that society has deemed “the least of these,” the unworthy, the ones without any power, the hungry, the homeless, the ones fighting their demons, is a community without the presence of God. To welcome these is to welcome God.
Alan Neely, one of my early mentors, always told me to leave the people with some hope. So, here is my word of hope. If we are willing to ask the hard questions of our faith, God’s presence will sustain us in all that we do. God doesn’t ask us to be perfect. God asks us to be faithful. And finally, my final word of hope. My rabbi tells me that the Hebrew word for fear and awe are the same word. When we embrace our fear of asking the hard questions, we illicit the awe in our world. That is hope. May we be faithful in living the hard questions.
