Living the Questions

What a gift to stand in a Mennonite church and preach. Here's the text of today's sermon, Queen Vashti, the spirit and all.

I’ve wrestled with exactly how to preach on our summer theme, faith at work: many gifts one spirit. For me, this is a difficult sermon to write. It is difficult because I do not have a job. It is difficult because I do not know what I want to be when I grow up. It is difficult because I cannot seem to claim a gift, cannot seem to believe that Paul was talking about me when he wrote down that stuff about wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment, tongues, and interpretation as gifts of the spirit. So for today, I’ve found a different way to talk about gifts.

I was at home in Kansas three weeks ago for my younger sister’s wedding. It was a large, community affair, akin at times to a family reunion, which made it a good time and place for stories. The best story I heard all weekend was in the form of my parents blessing to Megan and her partner Brad. They recalled her childhood and took us through her growing up years, but what I remember most was their mention of her curiosity. Mom and Dad said, “What a test of intellect to answer your hundreds of thousands of questions: Why are my eyes blue instead of brown? Why don’t I have a name from the bible like Hannah, Sarah and Daniel do?”

Like my sister Megan, I’ve always had an inquisitive streak, asking everything from why is the sky blue to why aren’t there more women preachers. Not so long ago, I had a habit of calling home from college to share something new I’d learned in class and ask, “Hey, mom, what do you think of this?” There is something pleasurable for me when I come across a new idea, a new phrase or concept that I have never thought of before. I often want to chase an idea all over the place, to measure it against others, to reduce it to its lowest terms, to see if it holds up when it clashes against my own experience of a wide open world.

This persistent curiosity is why I picked Esther chapter 1 as the story to enter into today. In this text, King Ahasuerus, king of the massive Persian Empire, has thrown a seven day party. On the seventh day, he tells the Queen, Queen Vashti, to appear before him and all the people gathered so they can see how pretty she is. The Scripture says, he commanded his attendants “to bring Queen Vashti before him wearing the royal crown, in order to show the peoples and the officials her beauty; for she was fair to behold.” Keep in mind that in this ancient Persian context, the king’s command is equivalent to law. What he says goes. In other words, he doesn’t just follow the rules; he sets them. Continuing at verse twelve: “But Queen Vashti refused to come at the king’s command.”

Vashti’s refusal is the embodiment of a question. Why should I come, she asks. Why is your word, King Ahasuerus, like the law? Why must I do things the way they’ve always been done?
I suspect that if we lift Queen Vashti out of the text for a minute and encounter her as a human being, we can figure that this is not the first time she has refused to obey a command. This is not the first time she has questioned the rules. This is not the first time she has asked why, and though she disappears from the biblical text after chapter one, I imagine it is not the last time she has asked a question either.

When I was a sophomore in college, my questions also forced me to a turning point. I had been attending an answer-driven church in the Springfield, Missouri area, a church that had singular, concrete ideas about sin and salvation, a church that knew the one correct way to read the Bible. Yet there was something a bit off about my church experience, something that didn’t match what I was learning in a class on the New Testament that I was taking at the university. On one hand, in church were the answers to all the questions I asked. On the other hand, at school was the permission to ask all the questions to which the church’s answers seemed inadequate. As I studied the gospels, I began to notice their differences: Professor Mark Given showed us with the text the Jewishness of Jesus in the book of Matthew and Luke’s more Cosmopolitan Christ and that there really is a difference between blessed are the poor in spirit in Matthew and blessed are the poor Luke. I came alive in the ambiguous space that was created for interpretation and story, and that’s when I had to make a decision. I realized to take this scholarship seriously would require modification of the ideas about God and Christianity that I’d church, and it was a scary thing. It meant letting go of some of the answers to life that I thought I’d had. In the end, I decided that if God was a God of answers, and boundaries and boxes around correct thinking, that if God was this kingly ultimate, my sincere study and searching would lead me back to this God. And if God was not this kind of God, I needed a new understanding of God anyway. Thus began my “leap of faith,” which propelled me into religious studies as a major and the further theological education after that.

It’s a scary kind of freedom to open your deepest convictions to scrutiny. It can cost friends, even for some people family. It’s a frightening freedom that asks questions of the reality in which we live, and sometimes it causes panic. Look at what happened when Queen Vashti refused to come at the king’s command: the king and his advisors panicked. They were afraid that when women heard of Vashti’s actions, they would also rebel and (quote) “there would be no end of contempt and wrath.” A royal order was issued proclaiming all through the kingdom that “women were to give honor to their husbands, high and low alike.”

It seems a bit ridiculous today, doesn’t it? A whole kingdom so afraid that women could make their own decisions that a royal order is issued? It’s enough to make any feminist go nuts. But for me the questions that Vashti embodied extend beyond questions of women’s rights. Yes, they directly address those, but they also point to an even broader set of questions about our assumed social realities.

It’s like my favorite piece of art at the Seattle Art Museum, which I visited a couple weeks ago. Just off the escalator on the second floor is a red octagonal sign with white letters on it. Red, eight sides, white letters – it all sounds familiar. But the letters did not say stop; they said go. Iain and Ingrid Baxter’s work of art ironically asked me to stop and ask a question of how static, how stable the reality we inhabit really is.

There are many such realities that I have a lot of questions about today, structures of our society, of our theology, of our church, of our relationships:
· Why do we find such a sense of identity in the modern concept of nation-state?
· Do I exist as an individual or as part of a relational whole?
· How can we both have a solid identity and be radically welcoming?
· Is human nature static or flexible?
· How do I know that I am a woman?
· What does justice mean?
· What makes a family?

I am compelled, it seems, to ask these questions. And to respond to them in conversation, in study, in observation of the world around me, in the intersection of what I’ve been taught, what I feel, what I read, what I experience, and what I believe.

When I asked a big question like what/who is God as a sophomore in college, the normal answer, the answer I was given, was not adequate and so I looked again and again, and I continue to ask. So often today, as for Vashti millennia ago, it seems like the normal answer, does not satisfy the curiosity behind the questions.

I hope that the normal answer is never quite satisfactory. I remember a few years ago at Easter Dinner, I asked my then eighty year-old grandmother what she thought about women in church ministry. After thinking about it for a moment, she said she thought she’d probably like a woman pastor. I asked her if she would have said the same thing five years ago. The answer to the question: probably not. I hope that when I’m eighty, my faith will still be at work asking questions toward an ever expanding picture of the world.

It occurs to me that this movement of question – response – question, question – response question… it occurs to me that this movement so prominent in my life is a lot like the movement of the spirit. Spirit is elusive; it is a shimmering, translucent concept. It is like the breezes that blow through this sacred space and unpredictably move the banners that hang behind me today. As soon as we recognize the spirit, it disappears to another form. It is dodging and shifting and overwhelming and intangible and vague and subtle. The spirit defies a solid, concrete form. The spirit cannot be set into a rigid, conventional pattern or behavior, belief or attitude.

It seems, then, that the curiosity and questioning that I have named have much in common with the spirit. While I perhaps cannot claim my gift as knowledge or healing or miracles, the gift of being curious in a world that tends toward normality, I humbly claim as its own kind of spiritual gift. Along with Queen Vashti, this is my faith at work.

I am lucky to have, at least for now, a safe space for this faith to work. My Divinity school experience at Vanderbilt has been a time of creativity and freedom. There is space to question over and over and over again. There is time to explore creative ideas. For me this is theological education at its best, and in a setting where Baptists and Presbyterians and Catholics and Mennonites and Pentecostals and Disciples of Christ study together, it makes sense – the sense of discovery. I can ask the questions that have propelled me forward in my life:
· Who is God?
· What is normal?
· What does it mean to be a daughter, a sister, a friend, a student, a minister, a lesbian, a human being?

Indeed for me, there, in the questions, the spirit is at work.

Last summer I read Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. In one particularly moving letter, Rilke, the established German poet, writes to the young student: “I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now…” Live the questions now.

The spirit is alive in all of our questions. The spirit was moving in the questions of Vashti thousands of years ago. The spirit is alive when this community meets together to ask how to be faithful. The spirit moves when our youth stand and ask why Lamentations or the Song of Songs aren’t read more often in worship. The spirit is present when we wonder how to be more welcoming and more diverse. The spirit moves when we ask how we can do something different with our campus to provide housing or services to the community. The spirit moves in the questions we ask of the norm that says war is normal. Indeed, I am confident that the spirit is alive in all of our questions.

May there always be space in this place for our questions.