Asking the Right Questions

(Audio MP3)

 Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.”

But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” And Abram said, “You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.” But the word of the Lord came to him, “This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.” He brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.

Then he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.

As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.

When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates,


In 1964, two brilliant young radio astronomers at Bell Laboratories began working on a grand and ambitious project. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were their names, the first was a German Jew who fled from Europe at age six to escape the Nazi regime, the second was an all-American kid from Texas with a knack for mathematics. The pair had began to experiment with the latest in high-tech radio astronomy equipment that they hoped would allow them to map the universe. With high hopes, they patched up a old radio telescope in suburban New Jersey, modified it with an innovate cocktail of signal amplification and calibration hardware, and turned the machine on.




And what they heard was a persistent, irritating static that constantly blocked and interfered with their observations. The telescope, it appeared, had a bug. Annoyed, the two young scientists began to test and re-test their equipment without success. They taped aluminum foil over the metal joints, they replaced every possible faulty part, they waited for the seasons and weather to change. Always, the static would return. Taking measurements one day they even evicted a pair of pigeons that had nested in the machinery and spent hours scrubbing pigeon guano off the receiver. Still, they heard the static.

They had one of the most innovative, high-tech and powerful radio telescopes in the world and it was acting like a Blue Light Special with some wires loose. The sense of failure and frustration became unbearable. With the problems unable to be resolved, two of the brightest and most talented astronomers in the world were looking at stalled careers and years of hard work down the drain.

And then, they began asking the right questions. What if the static wasn't a problem with the equipment at all. What if, is there any chance, that it was supposed to be there, and they were supposed to hear it. You see, what Penzias and Wilson has found was not a faulty radio telescope with a screw loose, what they had found was the background radiation present everywhere in the universe, in every corner of every galaxy, what they had found was the first hard evidence of the Big Bang and the creation of everything that exists.

They had been staring at the answer for years. Staring at one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century without knowing how to ask the right questions. When they discovered the question, the breakthrough came with it.

The great failure of Penzias and Wilson would later earn them the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In some ways, I think astronomers are lucky. After all, they are scientists, and in our thoroughly materialistic culture scientists are just about the only people allowed to ask the big questions or attempt to answer them.  We spend most of our lives asking and answering small questions. "What time is dinner ready?" or "Where should we go for vacation?" How do I get from here to my meeting in Walnut Creek?" We ask these questions all the time and these questions have the benefit of having concrete answers -- at least, we think they do. But we are often afraid or discouraged from asking the bigger questions. The ones that creep into the backs of our minds unbidden while we're doing something completely mindless and therefore allow the mind to be free. These are frequently questions we don't want to ask or attempt to answer. The ones we cry to God late in the night, in the small and painful hours before sleep. "What am I doing here?" "Why did I make that choice?" What is my purpose in life?" "Why" and "Why and "Why?"

The great falsehood of the Enlightenment age was that reason and science alone can find the "Whys" of life and not merely the "How's." It was another great Nobel Prize winning astronomer, Steven Weinberg, who remarked that "The more the universe seems comprehensible the more it also seems pointless." An observation about the utility, but also the great limits, of the scientific enterprise.

What do you see when you look up into the heavens? It was towards the same infinity of the galaxy that Abram turns, a vast expanse of stars that dwarfs him, dwarfs us, into insignificance. Abram stares at the gulf of space and asks God the question of his life. The years have past, the seasons have come and gone and while Abram is richly blessed in some ways there are other things that are not in any human being's power to give or to take. "Where are my children?" is Abram's question. I imagine he and Sarah, awake long hours in the night, worrying that their lives would lead to nothing -- that no one would remember their time on this Earth and without heirs to carry on their legacy and their traditions.

But Abram asks the question anyway, asks the hard question despite the fact that the universe appears to be dark and empty and perhaps he doesn't really expect an answer anyway. But when the answer comes it is almost too ridiculous to be believed. God's blessing and promise is to make Abram into Abraham, "Father of Nations." The emptiness of the night sky suddenly becomes populated with countless generations of the chosen people. But the promise is impossible. Any sane person would think it mad. Abraham nearly knocks himself out with laughter. "Fell on his face and laughed" the book of Genesis says in another version of the story. Likewise, when his wife Sarah is told she will have a son, long after retirement and ages after most of us would be collecting Social Security, she laughs at God for even telling her such a ludicrous thing. Laughs because what else can she do except laugh at the Divine Comedy of God's will. And when their child is born they named him "Isaac," or in Hebrew, "Laughter."

It's said that while she lay dying, Gertrude Stein asked "What is the answer?" and then after a long silence "What is the question?" Perhaps it is helpful to approach scripture not so much looking for its answers as listening for its questions.

Anyone who reads the Bible will hear those questions in it. The ones that speak to you and make you pause to listen to your own heartbeat. There are deep questions that are there for you to find if you look. "For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?" or "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" or "Who is my neighbor?" Are a few from the Gospels -- giant inescapable questions that challenge us in our lives of faith.

Some are even harder. I have always been haunted by the one Pilate asks of Jesus before his Crucifixion: "What is truth?" That Pilate asks this question, "What is truth?" reveals much about his own uncertainty, his own weakness and his own fear. Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea, adorned in royal colors, his finest ceremonial armor polished to a shine, adorned as he is will all the marks of rank and power and prestige. But the question reveals Pilate as the one standing naked and broken. The situation is tragic because we see a bit of ourselves in Pilate, in his lack of faith. The situation is ironic because Pilate asks for Truth, and it is Truth that is literally standing in front of him. But because this Truth is poor and dirty and speaks a cryptic foreign tongue, Pilate cannot see it for what it is.

I believe that Jesus answers Pilate's question, but not in His words. What the laughter of Abraham and Sarah and the storry of Pilate witness to is that  God himself IS the answer, the one in whom we live and move and have our being, the one who offers a peace which passes all understanding. "Lord, our hearts are restless," said St. Augustine "till they rest in you."

I do not want to give you the illusion, this morning, that God will give you an answer in some kind of divine instant message. Some questions have no answers, at least, not ones that can be expressed in words or expounded on in sermons. What I am trying to say, in-eloquently perhaps, is that Jesus' life itself is a kind of answer. And if you find the questions I'm talking about in Scripture, the ones that speak to your heart, and you read Jesus' responses, you'll begin to see the ways in which being caught up in His life and learning from His wisdom can satisfy, can answer without words, all the deepest longing of our hearts. St. John calls Jesus the Logos, the "Word" in Greek -- a Word Made flesh and living with us. It is this word that is the final and ultimate answer to all that we seek.

In the Psalm this morning, we have one final question: "One thing have I asked of the Lord;" the song says,  "one thing I seek; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life; To behold the fair beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple." The process of asking, of seeking, of knocking, brings us, in our own halting and half-blind ways, deeper into the way of Life that Christ offers us. It moves us, in slow and fitful steps, toward that Peace which the world cannot give.

In Christ's name, Amen.