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The Reverend Mark Byers
February 18, 2006- 7 Epiphany, Year B

Breaking News: God Answers "Yes" to Wrong Question

The irony of the healing of the paralytic man is this: Jesus answered “Yes” to a different question than they were asking. These men broke a hole in the roof of Jesus’ house so that he could heal their friend’s paralysis. And he says, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Can you imagine going through all that trouble, elbowing through a huge crowd, getting to the door, and then realizing there’s no way to get to this miracle-working man of God? So, hey, one of them says, let’s climb up on the roof and break through. Then we can lower Cousin Zechariah… No one really knows the paralytic’s name, so I just pulled one out of my head… Anyway, we can lower Cousin Zechariah down, and shout, “Hey! Can you heal our dear friend Zechariah?” And Jesus, after all this work and planning, after all this improvisation and good-hearted vandalism, just says, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Jesus answered “Yes” to a different question than they were asking.

Sometimes I think that it’s useful to look at the things we seek out every day and see them as answers to questions, too. For instance I’ll look at a product as the answer and then I’ll try and figure out what question is being asked by the people seeking out that product. It’s an interesting exercise.

For instance, what question is being asked by a person who buys soap? Well, I’d say the question might rationally be, “What’s an effective way to keep my skin clean?”

This is a straightforward question, and the answer, soap, is also pretty straightforward. But for some reason, our culture doesn’t have very many straightforward answers to straightforward questions. So we begin to see products that used to meet a practical need, but now reframe the person’s expressed needs, and sometimes even invent an entirely new one.

And as an example, I give you “Olay Ribbons Body Wash.” The advertisement has close ups of a nude woman showering, and the voiceover is a sultry woman saying, “Enter the deep end of moisture.” Olay Ribbons Body Wash is a product that, in the words of its makers, is “The first body wash to add an actual ribbon of moisture!” My wife is often at pains to point out how little I know about skin care and such things, but I’m still bewildered why, standing dripping wet under a stream of water using a liquid product, an ACTUAL RIBBON OF MOISTURE is such a breakthrough.

After a while, I think we become so used to having our needs redescribed and met by others that we don’t spend much time thinking about what they might actually be, apart from Madison Avenue and its friends. In other words, we don’t know what the original questions were, apart from the answer that we’ve now bought in a multitude of different forms.

So it is, too, with the greater questions. Go to the self-help section of a bookstore, or the religion and spirituality section. There are thousands upon thousands of answers, most of which also tell us what question we’re asking, too, which is very helpful.

So what I was driving at, with a seemingly flip title to this sermon, and what I’ve been driving at in these examples, is this: There is a right question, or rather, questions. And there is a right answer, or rather, answers. And these questions and answers are found in the conversations that occur within a community of believers who seek God. I say, “believers who seek God” because, as has been observed by others many times, even Satan believes in God, so belief is not, in and of itself, the thing that we seek.

Have your questions, your big questions, been rephrased for you? Have they been reduced, or limited, by other voices, voices that may have very little insight into God? You would be exceptional people indeed if you were immune to this reduction and limitation. I have not been immune. When I am thoughtful and prayerful, I have sometimes found insight into how my questions have been changed by the answers I’ve been given. But often, I find out this has happened because of a mess that the distorted answers and questions have caused.

Much of what we believe about the world has very little to do with God, even though, for our own comfort, we seek to make God conform to our own vision. God most emphatically answers “Yes!” to Creation, and to human beings, but as I said before, God answers “Yes!” to a different question than we’re asking, because almost invariably, we’re asking the question that we have been given by others, rather than God. We are asking, “How do I enter the deep end of moisture?” But God wants different questions for us.

“God wants different questions for us.” I meant precisely that. Questions mean curiosity, and interest, and seeking, and love grows with such food as these. Answers have the appeal of certainty, but often they point to questions that are not truly reflective of what God has placed in our hearts.

So if a community starts out telling its members who God is and what God needs of them, without giving them a chance to ask, I suspect that the community is afraid of knowing who God is, and has described a God that makes its members comfortable. Perhaps comfortable in one or more of the many other ways that Christians have obscured the God who has been within and over Creation since the very beginning. Perhaps comfortable simply in being judgmental. Perhaps comfortable in uncritical affirmation. When we’re being strict in our theology, we call some of those comfortable falsehoods “heresies,” but in point of fact, every Christian community lives with the “H” twins, heresy and hypocrisy.

So we are just the sort of well-meaning, inconsiderate people who would break through someone else’s roof in order to help out someone we love. We would do this, and then yell out our question to God, and realize that God is answering us in a way that doesn’t seem to address our question as we asked it. And that might bother a lot of us. In fact, it probably does. There is nothing more irritating than to realize that God is doing things in our lives that we don’t really want done, forgiving sins that we don’t consider sins, moving us into relationships with people we don’t really understand or like, getting us to reassess the comfortable things that we wanted affirmed.

Let me give you an example. Once, not very long ago, before I came to Virginia, I was serving in a very traditional, lovely, good-hearted parish. Our beloved rector retired, after years of strong ministry during which the parish blossomed in a lot of ways. An interim rector was chosen by a group of leaders appointed by the vestry. When he arrived, I was already a little bit off kilter because my boss had retired. And this man was a BIG personality, and very different than the people of the parish in a lot of ways. I thought at first that we were up the creek, that the group who had chosen this guy had made an enormous mistake. I mean, this guy was an evangelical, conservative, mission-minded priest in the middle of a 225 year old parish of traditional, broad church, moderate to liberal Episcopalians.

The question, or need, I would have expressed before he arrived would have been something like this: “Lord, would you please send our church a kind hearted, pastoral priest to keep things simmering until our search committee finds a new rector?” So when he got there, I kind of thought, “Wow. I guess prayer and discernment don’t always work.”

But God’s emphatic “Yes!” was to send us this man, who took mission and evangelism from being just two spices in the stew that was our church and began to talk about them as being the meat and broth that make the stew rich and nourishing and delicious. And he brought prayer ministry into our services. And he introduced the idea of small groups. These are things that I think are great, wonderful things now. And for the first two or three months he was with us, I absolutely could not see this stuff. I just saw this guy as a mistake, as someone I’d have to live with until the actual person God wanted in our church arrived.

Somehow, God managed to penetrate my heart. I came to recognize his value to us, the value of his new emphasis on things that hadn’t been as important in the past. And I came to value his courage and strength, even though I didn’t always agree with him, and still don’t. I’m glad today that he is my friend and my brother in Christ, and that I have learned so much from him. He represents, concretely, one example among many in my life of God reframing a question or need that had been distorted. Because of him, I believe I grew closer to Jesus Christ. And because of him, that church called a rector who could help them build and mature in ways that they might not have done otherwise. Isn’t God truly wonderful, who can answer the need or question we should be expressing, rather than the one that we do speak?

Look at this gospel story. Jesus pronounces this paralyzed man forgiven, and immediately, the religious folks in the crowd are angry. “Who does this character think he is? This is blasphemy!” But what if instead of getting angry at God’s “Yes,” we were able to look at the answer and learn what our question should have been? In other words, quit wondering why God is answering “Yes” to the wrong questions, and instead THANK God for revealing to us what the actual questions are.

So we might learn that even though we want healing, that God knows that forgiveness is part of that question, too, and faith. Or we might learn that even though we liked the way that church looked before, that there are still places for us to grow, and grow dramatically. And even though we see uncomfortable things happening in the name of God sometimes, God might actually be there in the midst of them. Or we might, similarly, see uncomfortable but all too frequent things that happen in God’s name, and learn the courage and faith necessary to reject and undo them. I suppose if there is a life application lesson to be taken from all that I’m sharing with you, it’s this: Don’t assume that because our questions are sincere and heartfelt or even prayerful that they are the right ones. If that seems frustrating, remember that we serve the same God who believes forty years wandering in the wilderness was a great spiritual formation exercise for the Israelites. Why should we have it any easier?

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