Our Questions Are Our Friends
Dear Friends,
As we have moved through our first week in Lent, I have cherished the conversations I have had with many of you about this season. Some of you have decades of memories that form the foundation of your Lenten journey, and others are experiencing the liturgical season of Lent for the first time. This was something that became clear during our first Lenten Supper session last Wednesday evening. And what strikes me the most is how refreshed I feel by the questions that are asked, questions that help me to see and to think a new way.
This past year, the underlying theme of our Sunday Forum offerings has been, “Our Questions are our Friends.” As we have moved through the liturgical seasons, we have considered the questions that you, the people of St. John’s have asked about faith, God, the bible, the church, and just plain life. As I reflected upon our gospel reading for this morning, it dawned on me that questions were Jesus’ friends, too! And that walking in the way of Jesus during this season of Lent means asking questions.
In the gospel passage, we get to listen in on a nighttime conversation that Jesus has with a Pharisee named Nicodemus, who is perplexed to hear Jesus talk about being “born from above.” “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” he asks. “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born? …How can these things be?”
This passage reminds me of one of the things that I really like about Jesus: he doesn’t strike people dead for asking questions. I find that quite an endearing quality in a deity! We encounter lots of questions in the season of Lent; the lectionary presents them to us nearly every week, from a nocturnal pharisee, to a Samaritan woman at a well, to a cluster of perplexed disciples. Many of the Lenten questions are directed specifically toward Jesus, and he embraces them as a form of spiritual practice: they remind us that we are in progress, and they invite us to lean into and stretch beyond the limits of what we know. Though Jesus may appear impatient with the questioning Nicodemus, he does not silence him or shut him out.
In responding to Nicodemus’s question, Jesus interrupts our tendency to think that chronology has the final power over our lives. When he talks about being “born from above” or “born again” he invites the inquisitive Pharisee to consider that there’s something more than linear time, with its physical progression from birth to death, at work in us. There is another way of being that is open to us. Jesus chooses the image of birth as a way to describe the passageway that he offers to us. Birthing involves gestation, and labor, and the beginning of perpetual change. When we are born, we achieve a new state, but not a static one.
So, how’s that birthing and growing thing going for you? How do you deal with the sometimes-wild unpredictability of the process? In this transformational season of Lent, do you have a practice that helps you reflect on where you are, and where you have been? What questions are visiting you in the dark?
Remember, our questions are our friends,
Amelie+
