Every summer, as a child, I attended a church camp that had all the answers.  Heaven was up, hell was down, and we knew who was going in which direction.  God created the world in six days--one hundred and forty-four hours.  The Red Sea parted just like in the movie.  And the whale swallowed Jonah whole.  We didn’t have room for questions, because we were certain of everything.

I loved Camp Aowakiya, and I sang the campfire songs, and cried for all the lost souls, and took canoeing and archery and horseback riding.  And each night, I joined with others, praying that the world would turn to Jesus and be saved.

            And then, when I was nine, my cousin died.  He was sixteen years old, and he died of leukemia, and his family, my aunt and uncle, were agnostic.  He had never accepted Jesus as his personal savior, even though I begged him to do so, as his illness progressed.  He never said that prayer, he never asked Jesus to come into his heart, and then he died.  I remember the brokenness in my family as we lost Alex.

            The nightmares started after his funeral.  I would close my eyes and fall asleep and see him, in a lake of fire, screaming as his skin blistered in the midst of his eternal torture.  My sixteen year old cousin, now residing in hell.

            For some reason, that did it.  I just couldn’t believe it any more.  I couldn’t accept the answers I had been taught in church camp, I couldn’t believe in a God who would condemn human beings to eternal torture, who would condemn my cousin to that kind of suffering.  I was done with those answers, and all of a sudden, as a pre-teen girl, all I had were questions.

            And that’s when I remember falling in love with God.  Closing my eyes and curling up on God’s lap, and feeling God’s hug as I wrapped blankets tightly around my body.  God loved me, God loved us all, and in the midst of all my questions, I experienced that love in a way that I had never experienced it before. 

            We have a lot of questions in our gospel reading for today.  Questions posed to Jesus and questions posed by Jesus, questions that do not have easy answers.  But the scariest thing in our scripture reading is what happens when the questions stop.  What happens when the answers just don’t work…

              First of all, we have to understand that the main question in this scripture is not a question at all.  It is an answer disguised in the form of a question.  It is an attempt to discredit Jesus.  See, this is the Monday of Holy Week.  Jesus has just entered Jerusalem and attacked the temple administration.  The scribes and the Pharisees are desperate, and so they publicly confront Jesus.          

            They attempt to put him in a compromising position, a no-win situation.  Jesus claims to be sent from God, and so he cannot negate or deny any of the 613 commandments given by God.  And so, if Jesus declares that all of the commandments are great, as the lawyer assumes he will, then he is trapped.  For Jesus is guilty of breaking many of these laws.  Working on the Sabbath, keeping dietary codes, keeping purity laws, insisting that the yoke is easy – all of these events from Jesus’ life prove that he doesn’t truly follow the law.  So he is trapped.  If Jesus responds that every commandment in the Law of God is great, as the lawyer expected him to, Jesus would have stood guilty as charged for disobeying the commandments of God’s Law. 

But Jesus doesn’t follow the script.  He does not give the right answer.  Instead, he gives an answer that creates far more questions, for Jesus radically reinterprets and reprioritizes all of the commandments and he declares “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment, and the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Then before the lawyer could ask, “What about the other commandments?” Jesus said, “On these two commandments hang all the law and all the prophets.”

All of a sudden, the question is very, very different.  Every law, every piece of scripture has to be measured by those two questions.  Is this loving towards God?  Is this loving towards my neighbor?  And with that simple statement, Jesus turns all of the answers upside down.

            But the problem is, the Pharisees cannot accept these new questions.  They are so attached to their answers.  Jesus’ answer does not work for them, for it invites all kinds of new questions.  And so then they stop.  They stop asking questions; they are silenced.  And that is when the really scary stuff starts.  That is when they move from debate towards violence.  And by the end of the week, they will kill the man whose answers are just unacceptable.

            It is dangerous to believe that we have all the answers.  And in our scripture, when the questions stop, the violence begins.

            There is an enormous amount of tension in our faith when we start asking hard questions.  In our scripture reading from Leviticus, we hear that we are called to be holy, as God is holy.  What does that mean?  Does it mean we are supposed to be set apart, pure, undefiled?  Or is holiness a call to engage fully with the world, to immerse ourselves in the muck and mire of real life, to exist in the world and thereby risk our own corruption?  And if we believe that holiness calls us to engage with the world, as it is, which this scripture seems to imply, then how do we exist within our culture, while embracing a counter-cultural faith?

            I was recently at lunch with another pastor.  In the midst of our conversation, she admitted to me that she had recently spent $600 on four suits for work.  She explained to me that her congregation expected her to dress nicely, that it was a part of their tradition to be respectable and presentable in their community.  And so she gave in and bought some expensive suits, and explained to me that she really felt she needed to be their leader, to be respected and listened to, so that she could do the work God was calling her to do.  And buying those suits felt like an investment in God’s calling for her life.

            But at the same time, she felt sick about it.  That money could have been used somewhere else, for some other purpose, to feed people who are hungry, to provide medicine for those who are sick.  How was she following Jesus when she was wearing a $150 suit?  And as she asked this question, she asked me the same one, “How do you handle living in this culture and being called to be counter-cultural?”  The second she asked me the question, I was flooded by all the ways that I have resisted the call to be truly counter-cultural.

            These are the questions we need to ask.  Our answers are not clear.  But the questions themselves are so important.  How do we follow Christ in the midst of this culture?  What does it mean to really be holy?  Hard, challenging questions are a part of our faith.  And while we don’t like it when people offer easy answers, we have to engage the hard questions with a depth and an openness that allows us to be wrong.  We may resist a theology that has all the answers, but that does not excuse us from asking the questions.  And I do believe that in the midst of the questions, the hard, challenging, real questions, that is when we fall back in love with God.

            Marcus Borg writes about the tensions in the history of Christianity when we have asked questions and come up with different answers.  “For the first one, we go back in time almost a thousand years to the year 1054. This is the year of what is known as "The Great Schism," the great divide or division between western Christianity and eastern Christianity that produced the Roman Catholic Church and eastern orthodoxy. The bishop of Rome excommunicated the bishop of Constantinople and the whole eastern church, and the bishop of Constantinople excommunicated the pope and the whole western church. The issue that led to this was a theological question concerning internal relationships within the godhead. More specifically, does the Holy Spirit proceed from the God and Jesus--that was the position of the western church--or from God only--that was the position of the eastern church. And when you think about this, you almost want to say, "How on earth could anyone ever know that?" 

“Another example. For this one, we go to the 1600's and the reformed church in the Netherlands. In the early part of that century, the Dutch Reform Church almost split over the issue of supralapsarianism versus infralapsarianism. Now, since I know you all know what that's about, I won't bother to explain. Actually, I will. The issue in this case was did God decide to send a messiah before the fall--because God knew the fall would happen--or did God decide to send a messiah only after the fall because only then was the messiah necessary. Supralapsarians argued that God knew the fall would happen so the decision to send a messiah had already been made before the fall. Infralapsarians argued the opposite. Again, getting those answers right mattered and one wants to say, "How could you know that?"

Borg continues, “My favorite example is a story from the late 1800's in North Carolina shortly after the Civil War. A small town businessman from a remote community in the mountains of North Carolina went to one of the larger cities--I think it was Raleigh--and there for the first time in his life, he saw an ice-making machine. Now, machines that could make artificial ice were a recent invention; he thought this was wonderful because it meant you could have ice all summer long. So he returned to his small community in the mountains of North Carolina--he happened to be a Baptist--and told his Baptist church about this great new invention. Within a month the church had split into ice and no-ice Baptists. The theological issue in this case being is it a violation of the natural order established by God to make ice out of season. If God had wanted us to have ice in the summertime, God would have raised the freezing temperature of water seems to have been the argument.”  These were some of the big theological questions.

            Certainly, we have different questions now, and very different answers.  In this congregation, we will find that our answers, and our questions, are incredibly varied and diverse.  But if we don’t ask them, if we don’t speak them aloud, if we don’t share our questions and share our answers, then we cannot grow in faith.  And if we resist the notion that we really could be wrong, that is when the danger seeps in.  That is when the Pharisees grow silent and start to plot their revenge.

            I was a religious studies major as an undergraduate and I studied theology in graduate school.  That means that I spend 8 years of my life reading, thinking, speaking, and writing about theology.  And in my 10 years as a pastor, I have spent even more time asking questions and coming up with answers.  And so in my life right now, I often fall into that danger zone of believing that I have the right answers.  Of course I do, I’m a pastor, right?

            Scriptures like our gospel reading for today, are full of people who have studied long and hard, and believe that they have the right answers.  And they are a reminder to all of us of the incredible danger of that arrogance.  I love God, and I know God loves me, but God hasn’t given me the answers – just a lot of questions.

            And so I fall back on the one answer that we do get in this text – the answer that Jesus provides.  And his answer is love.  This answer is a question it and of itself.  A question that can guide our decisions, our thoughts, our answers, and our questions.  It can shape our lives.  Is this loving?  Is this loving towards God?  Is this loving towards my neighbor?

            These are the kinds of questions we are called to ask, in the midst of a culture that values answers and certainty and knowledge, we are called again and again to the questions.  Am I asking questions today that will help me grow, help me learn, help me love God more and more each day?  Am I seeking answers, knowing I may be wrong, but following in the ways of love, with an open mind, an open heart, an open love for the God whose mystery is simply an invitation to a life of love and learning.

Amen.