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First Friends Meeting
Isaiah 9:2-7 and Advices and Queries #5
‘Living the Queries, Part 3’
Doug Gwyn
We’re continuing with our series on the Quaker queries, those
questions Friends keep ask ourselves. Questions to keep us honest
with ourselves and honest to God. I decided to continue this
series as we enter the Advent season. It occurred to me that the
queries fit well with the coming of Christ into the world. Christ
is much a question as an answer. Yes, the person of Jesus gives
us a glimpse of the divine. But at the same time, he makes us ask
what it means to be human. We humans are highly questionable
creatures. To be human is to be questionable. Our
questionability is what drives us beyond ourselves. The may
questions haunt us, sometimes torment us. But they also spur our
greatest growth.
This week, I realized that the queries are right there in the beginning
of the Bible’s human saga, in the story of man and woman in the
garden. Or almost the beginning. In the very beginning,
there are no questions asked – either from God or from Adam or
Eve. God gives them the run of the garden, but warns them not to
eat from just one of those trees. But they ignore that warning
and eat that fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
That’s where the questions begin. First, they are ashamed
to stand naked before each other – not quite consciously, they
begin to question themselves. They need God to bring the
questions into consciousness. They hear God coming and hide in
the bushes. God’s first question to them was this:
“Where are you?” Hey, that’s the basic question
of our whole existence – where are you? Where do you
stand? Are you where you need to be, where you need to be
going? Adam answers and explains that he was ashamed to stand
nakedly before God, so he hid. So God asks another
question: “Who told you that you were naked? Have you
eaten from that one tree I warned you about?” Right there
on the spot, Adam invents the classic human shift of shame to
blame. That woman you provided me – she gave me the fruit
from that tree, and I ate. So now God turns to the woman with
another question: “What is this you have done?”
Notice that God simply asks questions. God draws Adam and Eve
from their fugitive state, back into conversation, with some good,
open-ended questions. Fortunately, they are not yet so alienated
that they just run away. They answer. And their willingness
to be questionable and to answer for themselves preserves their
relationship with God and with each other. They have seriously
transgressed that relationship. But God is always ready to start
over with us humans. But we have to remain questionable. We
have to answer for our actions. We have to be real. Because
God is real. Without God, everything becomes a hall of mirrors,
subjective reality, illusion. There’s no truth, just my
truth.
Jesus gives us another version of this story in the Gospel of John, in
his conversation with Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a well intentioned
seeker who comes to Jesus with high praise and compliments. But
Jesus soon has him completely flummoxed, asking questions like, born
again? What does that mean? Jesus is helping Nicodemus
become teachable. Nicodemus comes with the right answers.
But Jesus soon gets him asking the right questions. Jesus ends
the conversation by telling Nicodemus that the light has come into the
world. When people see this light, they either run from it or
come to it. It’s like Adam and Eve hearing God coming in
the garden. Jesus says people run from the light because
they’re ashamed of what they’ve done, they don’t want
their deeds exposed. They don’t want to become fully
conscious and answerable. Those who have done the truth are
willing to come to the light, for then it becomes clear that they have
been acting faithfully.
It’s intriguing that Jesus leaves unstated a third
possibility. As he lays it out, either you come to the light or
you run from it. Because you’ve done either the wrong thing
or the right thing. But he doesn’t describe the very
situation that Nicodemus is in. He leaves the door ajar for
Nicodemus to open for himself. That is to say, what if
you’re confused – not sure what you’re doing?
Or what if you’re pretty sure you’ve done the wrong thing,
but you’d rather know the truth than hide from it? What if
you’d rather make amends than try to justify yourself? When
Nicodemus shows up later in the Gospel, defending Jesus (7:50), we know
that he has opened that door and has come into the light.
He’s living the questions now.
Charlie has read for us Number Five of the Advices and Queries.
It aims to keep us in that questioning and questionable spirit.
It advises us to keep listening to each other, listening to other
people’s experience of the Light. Keep reading the Bible,
Quaker writings, any literature we find helpful for learning the ways
of God. When we really listen to each other, and really listen to
Scripture and other spiritual literature, we inevitably question.
Is that true? Does that make sense? Can I put that together
with my own sense of truth, my own experience of the light? But
if we keep that questioning just within ourselves, we can only get so
far. So this query also asks, “As you learn from others,
can you in turn give freely from what you have gained?”
Yes, respect what other people have to say, but don’t just leave
the other person hanging there. Answer with what you can
say. Join together in the search for greater truth.
This advice echoes one of the great sayings of George Fox at the
beginning of the Quaker movement. In 1652, Margaret Fell heard
Fox challenge the people in her Church: I hear quote Christ. I
hear you quote the apostles. You trade other people’s words
back and forth. But what can you say? Are you a child of
the light, and is what you share from the light? These are
questions that go to the very core of our existence. In that
moment, Margaret Fell was willing to be questionable. She sat
down in her pew and wept, saying, we’ve all been a bunch of
thieves, stealing other people’s words, not speaking our own
truth.
Finally, this query also suggests that doubt and questioning can foster
our spiritual growth. Doubt and questioning can lead us to a
greater awareness of the light that is in us all. How can we
grow, if we have only the right answers, if we become dogmatic, if
other people’s truth must be wrong because it doesn’t
conform with ours? When we aren’t questionable, we become
less than human. We become less than humane toward others.
We turn to stone, because our truth is now set in stone.
Advent is a time to remember the light coming into the world in the
person of Jesus. We remember the history in order to revive the
mystery of our own experience. We start Advent four Sundays ahead
of Christmas to give us an experience of waiting. It’s a
mere taste of the waiting Israel underwent for centuries. We
remember the centuries of hard times the people of Israel went through,
rolled over and oppressed by one empire after another. Centuries
that felt like darkness much of the time. Centuries that inspired
plenty of doubt, tons of questions. We need a taste of that
experience in history. It helps us stop running away from our own
doubts and questions, and live them as mystery. Doubts and
questions are only damaging when we skirt around them, instead of going
straight at them. Or if we prefer our doubts and questions to
answers and new directions. If we don’t want answers,
we’re not really being questionable. We’re hiding in
the darkness.
Charlie read for us the great messianic prophecy of Isaiah.
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those
who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has
shined.” It’s one of the traditional readings of
Advent, because it witnesses so eloquently to the coming of
Jesus. And yet, we know that Isaiah himself was thinking of
events in his own time, centuries before Christ. He was
celebrating the birth of the next king of Judah, someone he hoped would
be a great and godly ruler. And that’s OK. We need to
respect Isaiah’s experience of the light, and how he understood
it in his time and place. Isaiah was faithful where he was
– we can do no better than that.
But it’s also OK that we hear overtones in Isaiah’s words
that he never imagined. We hear the coming of Jesus. We may
also hear these words resonate with our own experiences of darkness,
doubt, and questioning. It’s the same when we listen to
anyone’s witness to the light. They may come from a faith
that’s different from Christianity or Judaism. They may not
be religious at all. But if we listen closely with open hearts and
minds, we may hear something that resonates with the questions we have
asked, or the answers we have received. The light that came into
the world so brilliantly in Jesus, comes into the world in each of
us. And that ray of light often comes in the form of a big
question mark.
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