Live the Questions

How Searching Shapes Our Convictions and Commitments

Jeffrey F. Keuss

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830870936
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

"Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." —Rainer Maria Rilke Life is full of questions: questions about our identity, our relationships, our faith. Sometimes it seems like there are no easy answers. But our questioning can lead us on a journey into greater understanding and purpose. Jeffrey Keuss says that asking good questions helps us to lead good lives. He takes us on a tour of Scripture to find insights from people who asked questions of God and others. From God asking Adam and Eve, "Where are you?" to the Samaritan woman asking Jesus for water, Live the Questions explores critical questions in Scripture and what they can teach us about doubt, faith, and uncertainty in our everyday lives. Grappling with hard questions is necessary for us to form deeper faith commitments and discern who we are called to become. So don't be afraid of the questions—live them.

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WHERE ARE YOU?

The Big Question

Wanna walk to, walk off

The edge of my own life.

SLEATER-KINNEY

"NO CITIES TO LOVE"

And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal.

TA-NEHISI COATES

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.”

GENESIS 3:8-12

It’s possible, in fact, to read the entire Christian story as a question, one that begins in Genesis, and humanity has been trying to respond to throughout history. It’s the primal question found in the heart of Eden, the question that God has and continues to have for us—and it’s found in Genesis 3.

WHERE ARE YOU?

A bit of background: in the garden, Adam and Eve are part of a grand creation that the Lord God has put into play. As God is creating the stars, the heavens, the earth, the waters, the beasts of the field, the growing grass, and everything else that comes about in God’s creation spree, one idea keeps resounding: in Hebrew, it’s the word tov, which means “good.” The creation is tov. The water: tov, good. Heavens: tov, good. Human beings: yeah, we’re tov too, good. Goodness permeates God’s action in all of creation—pours into it and out of it, pumps through it. As human beings and part of that creation, you and I are thoroughly tov-ed, repositories of goodness that God has simply peppered creation with from the very beginning.

Then the man and the woman enter the picture in this garden and come to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Though they are aware of God’s presence, they start to desire a thing that they are told is not for them: the fruit of that tree. Then, rather than consulting with the living God who is fully present with them, they turn to themselves, choosing to listen to the craftiness of the serpent instead, who twists God’s words of reality, bending them beyond recognition, to such a degree that Adam and Eve make a decision that causes them to trip, to fall, to cascade into a place where they do not want to be. It’s at this point that Adam and Eve realize they’ve broken relationship with God, as we hear in Genesis 3:10 with the fateful words, “I was afraid.” They are exposed, naked. They want to clothe themselves, to cover up their newfound shame. And at this exact moment, God speaks a question to them, the first audible question to humanity in the entire Scripture: “Where are you?” (v. 9). And in many respects, I would say that this is the question for humanity, all of us across the generations. Every question we have fits into that grand one: “Where are you?”

The Hebrew word ayekah requires three words in English, “Where are you?” It’s like a supernova of light that God is giving them, a dense and compact burst of meaning, in order to show them something bigger than they could have comprehended at that moment because of their fall. Grace and the call to reconciled relationship are bigger than shame and loss. But doesn’t God know where they are? So much ink has been spilled over the centuries by theologians and laypeople alike trying to grapple with why God asks this question. Does God have to play hide-and-seek? Really? The all-knowing, all-powerful God of the universe can’t find two people in a garden that he made? Doesn’t it seem kind of strange for God Almighty to say in essence, “Come out, come out, wherever you are”?

But the passage isn’t set up because God is somehow ignorant and has no idea where they are. It’s a rhetorical question, one that God is asking in order to create a space for Adam and Eve to admit that they have run away. It’s like a parent who sees that a child has stolen a cookie from the jar. Fifteen seconds ago there was a single cookie left in the jar, but now there’s none—just a child standing beside an empty cookie jar wearing a chocolatey chin and an angelic expression, trying to hide crumb-covered fingers. When the parent asks, “Did you take the cookie?” it’s not because nobody knows what happened. Instead, the question is intended to give a space for forgiveness and repentance, to allow the child to be reconciled with the parent with dignity and agency. The same is true in the garden: “Where are you?” isn’t a blame game. It’s a loving opportunity for forgiveness, a bridge that God is building with this question to make a way to come back to a right, fully human state.

WHERE: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

As we look further, we can see that the bridge God is building with this simple Hebrew word ayekah has several parts. Let’s look at this first part: Where?

Where is the place from which we will ask questions that matter. Where helps us understand the place in which we find ourselves by probing it for information and insight. Real estate agents will tell you that the first three rules of buying or selling a house are “location, location, and location.” A property’s surroundings are key when buying land, and location is also crucial when we talk about spiritual relationships. Where you are—your context, your station in life, and yes, your physical community—will affect how you understand who you are in God’s eyes and in the eyes of your community. What we say about where we are also matters, and so do the choices we make toward where we are going.

I had a friend in college who had a reputation for being very truthful in the way he responded to invitations. Akin to Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory or the Candor faction in the Divergent book series, there are those personality types who prioritize an idealized form of truthfulness above all else. If someone invited him to a party or to someone’s house, his response would almost uniformly be, “I’ll be there as long as something better doesn’t come along.” He meant it as kind of a joke, but in truth he actually lived that way. He was always willing to say, “Well, I can’t really make it because . . .” When an invitation to a better party would come along, that’s where he’d end up going. Okay, I used to think, he gets points for honesty. Maybe not so much for commitment, but honesty—yeah, okay. My buddy’s approach to commitment taught me about the kinds of questions he was asking with his life: seeking always to have an exit strategy and never having to commit fully to anything, as though he were always dangling his feet in the ocean from a pier but never swimming out into the surf.

When we tell people where we’re going to be, or where we imagine ourselves being, it comes with the crucial dimension of whether we actually end up in that place or not, or whether we even intended to go in the first place. I got an email late one night a few years ago from a student who said she couldn’t be in class the next day because she was sick. These things happen, so I emailed back and said I really hoped she felt better and that I understood that she had to miss a session.

Now, here’s the thing about having a professor who also happens to be on social media—later the next day, this same student started posting pictures from a nearby ski area with her snowboard, having a great day out on the slopes with friends. The next time we were in class together, I just happened to have my laptop, and it was as simple as saying, “Hey, I want to show you something” and turning my laptop around toward her. “Looks like you had a great day on the slopes, didn’t you?” I asked. We had a good relationship and had a good laugh together. I told her, “Next time the snow is that good, be sure to invite the whole class!” But I also reminded her that while I am pro-fun and pro-fellowship with friends, I’m also pro-truth. It was a moment of clearing away falsehood from the relationship between us, asking, “Where are you?” (or really, “Where were you?”), and hopefully giving my student a chance to reposition the physical and spiritual GPS locator to be more in keeping with God’s intent for her and for our relationship. Similarly, “Where are you?” is God’s way of inviting us to be restored to the fullness that God intends for our lives, just as Adam and Eve were experiencing in the garden.

RELATIONSHIP, RELATIONSHIP, RELATIONSHIP

In God’s economy, the move from falsehood to truth is key to understanding that while our physical location does matter, we also need to align our spiritual locator as well. It is vitally important to know that God understands location not so much as place as personhood. It’s relationship, relationship, and relationship—what we might call the where of God. Where we are in relation to God is the location of everything. Where are you in your relationship with God?

Two crucial Hebrew words dealing with where show up in the Old Testament: poh and hineni. Poh refers to a physical sense of here—as in, we are here, in this particular place, weeping and waiting for justice. But what God wants to do is to take God’s people to a different understanding of where they are—not to dismiss the location of suffering or the cries for justice, but to focus as well on the relationship of God with the people present in such a place. And so the word hineni shows up, meaning, “here I am.” Where “I am here” is a statement of geographic location, “here I am” is a statement of availability for intimacy and relationship. In essence, God is saying, over and over, even in a place of sorrow and torment, “Do you understand that I’m still with you? I’m still located in that spot.”

Here’s how that idea might show up in our lives: perhaps God is saying, “You may be in a job right now that you absolutely hate, but do you know that I’m still there, hineni, here I am?” Or maybe you’re in a relationship that’s a real place of struggle and you don’t want to be in a place like that anymore, but really, “hineni—here I am—I’m in that place too, right alongside you.” The grand question of God is that location is where God is in relation to us at all times. In this way we are reminded that presence with God is a full commitment to the question of God’s where. Are we located relationally with God in what we do and what we say? Do we ask our questions of God from a distance or from a place of closeness and vulnerability? Are you willing to get close and intimate when you ask these questions and to let God respond in the same way?

THE TETHERED SELF

The idea of getting close to God, or really to anyone at all, might be a dying art in the Western world. A thought experiment I’ve adapted from MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle’s article “Always-On/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self ” will help to illustrate this. Imagine that you step onto a crowded city bus only to find yourself wedged in a seat between two people you’ve never seen before. Bodily, you may be in very close proximity to them, giving an initial sense of closeness. But as you pull your smartphone out to start texting and surfing, and as the strangers next to you do the same, a distance emerges between you and the people on either side. From this moment, you’ve come to be thousands of miles away from either one of them psychologically and spiritually, just as they’ve become from you. Your elbow might be pressed against his ribs, and the scent of her shampoo might be wafting into your nostrils, but online, you’re texting a friend across town while one of your seatmates is doing a status update for his Instagram story, and the other is lobbing political grenades on a polarizing social media comment stream with an obscure relative in Denver.

The phenomenon of close-but-far is what Turkle calls the “tethered self,” as though our real self is tethered to the social media stratosphere and we are pulled away and distanced from those who are in close physical proximity to us at a given moment. Tethering goes beyond distraction; it’s as though we’re living in multiple locations at the same time and fully present in none of them, living fractured, fragmented lives in different places and pockets all at once. I’m a fan of social media, and I find it connects people in wonderful ways we couldn’t have fathomed even a generation ago. But when we become distant and removed from one another, when we can’t actually be in the same space with another human and ask a deep and abiding question, then our true location is lost, and all that’s left is a tethered fraction of the whole human person.1

ARE: TRUE IDENTITY IS A VERB THAT NEEDS FEEDING

This leads us to the second part of God’s question: “Where are you?” Are is a verb of being. Anything that is action requires fuel, and so this part of God’s question itself raises additional questions around who and what it is that feeds our ultimate questions. What are you feeding on right now? What are you drawing your strength from to ask the questions that frame you into the person that God would have you to be? What sources are you drawing from in order to see God more fully? What situations in life are acting as catalysts to help you to understand your are a...