"What Do We Want?" And Other Upside Down Questions...



"What Do We Want?" And Other Upside Down Questions--February 1, 2017

"Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.  Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven..." [Matthew 6:9-10]

Maybe we have been asking the wrong question about yellow.

There's a line of C.S. Lewis' where the great 20th century theologian suggests that a lot of our questions are unanswerable by God, not because God doesn't know the answer, but because nobody can answer a nonsense question.  Lewis gives as an example questions like, "Is yellow round or square?" A wise old pastor from my childhood used to ask, "Is it further to Cleveland... or by bus?" as an example of a nonsense question. You get the drift--there are some times in life where the very questions we are asking are wrong-headed from the get-go, and so any attempt to answer them skews the conversation that unfolds in the wrong direction from the beginning.

We ask upside-questions like that about God all the time.  "How do I earn God's love?" or its cousins, "What do I have to do to get into heaven?" or the way it was phrased in Luke's Gospel, "Teacher, what must I do in order to inherit eternal life?"  Well, if we are serious about the news of God's radical grace screaming to us from the New Testament, we have to stop the conversation at the outset and say, "Wait--love isn't something that can be earned, certainly not God's love!  You can't do anything to inherit anything in life--inheritance is by definition a gift."  We have to say at the start that these questions themselves are upside-down questions--they make assumptions in their very premises that point toward a set of bad answers.

Or take Peter's famous question in the Gospels: "Lord, how many times must I forgive someone who sins against me--as many as seven times?" The question itself assumes a limit--good ol' Pete just thinks it's a matter of finding the magic number, and Jesus' answer suggests a limitless view of forgiveness that doesn't keep score or keep count.  The question itself needs to be turned right side up in order to make any sense for people who are caught up in the Mercy Movement of Jesus.

The list of upside-down questions pile up in the Gospels: "Rabbi, is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor?" "Whose wife will she be in the resurrection if she was married seven times on earth?" "Lord, now are you going to set up your regime and raise up your armies?" They are questions that have got things upside down from the beginning, and so in a sense the answer will be wrong, too, no matter what response is given.

All of this brings me to a central question we tend to get upside-down in the life of faith: "How do I get God to give me what I want?"  It can be phrased in plenty of other more respectable sounding ways--"How do I get God to answer more of my prayers in the affirmative?" "How do I get the good life I am after?" and so on.  They are wrong-headed questions, all of them, because they all start with the (false) assumption that the critical thing in life is me getting what I want.

But maybe the problem is not that I am not getting what I want--maybe the problem is what I think I want in the first place.

These days, protests, marches, and angry social media memes are practically omnipresent, and on every place on the political spectrum.  And so often, when one group protests, you'll get a host of peanut-gallery critics making snide remarks, to the effect, "I don't even know what they were protesting about--what do they want, after all?  What was their message?"  The implicit criticism is that "just being mad" isn't a helpful or productive conversation, and so you get people comparing protesters to children throwing tantrums.   Left attacks right, and right attacks left, and often the shouting match becomes a contest of wish-lists and perceived grievances.  "You all on that side are complaining about not getting your wants, but what about my list of wants?"  We end up with people arguing at each other over whose list of wants should trump the others' list of wants.  We end up with people acting like if you get your way, it will somehow take away from me.

But what if the real issue is deeper?  What if the real question is not "your list of wants versus my list of wants" but rather, "what is God's will here?"  And I mean that, not in some narrow sense like "It was God's will for me to get a good parking space," but more like, "What kind of life, of community, of world, does God dream for us?"  More like, "What does the living Source of Being and Love want for us to get to experience?"  More like, "What would God's will look like on earth, as it is already done in heaven?"

Because if that's the right question, then all the petty, self-centered questions about me and my personal wish-lists seem pretty pathetic by comparison.  Instead of me asking, "How can I get God to endorse my plan for a bigger house and extra car?" the right question becomes, "How can I re-align my will with the God who intends for everybody to get to eat?"  It's less about getting God to underwrite all my self-centered fantasies, and more about catching God's vision of  a world in which nobody has to live in fear, all are honored, and each is beloved.  It's less about finding the trick to getting God to give me what I want, and more about letting God shape what it is I want after all.

That's the right kind of question to be asking.  Instead of asking, "What do we want?" the right question is "What would God have us want for the sake of all?"  And if I dare to ask that question, I will find myself less and less able to put my interests above the interests of others.  I will have a harder and harder time praying just for a raise for me and success for my business while ignoring the people who went to bed hungry last night, or who went to sleep in their car because they have no bed.  I will have a harder time justifying my wish for the illusion of security by ignoring the needs of those whose village was just bombed out by their own government.  I will have a harder time saying, "We have to look out for our own first!" and looking Jesus in the eye.

Maybe you and I have been praying and thinking the upside-down question "How do I get what I want?" for so long that we have stopped seeing it as the wrong question to be asking. But for followers of Jesus, the right orientation is there for us in the words of Jesus: "Your kingdom come... your will be done on earth as it is in heaven."  For a lot of my life--my church-going, Bible-holding life--I assumed those words meant something like, "Jesus, take me to heaven when I die."  But Jesus frames it differently, doesn't he?  It's less about me praying for my personal comfort or my want-list, but about God reigning in all places and all hearts HERE the way that God already reigns in full in heaven.  It's about asking for God's ordering of things to happen here and now--that new order of things where wolves and lambs lie down without eyeing other suspiciously, where debts are cancelled gratuitously, where bread is passed around for all people, where no one hurts or destroys or excludes at the big table of God anymore.  We are asking, in other words, for God to pull each of us out of our petty, self-interested life-plans and goal-sheets, and to pull us into a new vision for creation.

If you find that you have been asking an upside-down question as I have, then today is the day to start something new.  Today is the day to turn the question right side up, and instead of asking for God to endorse my selfishness, to ask God instead to realign my will and wishes with the dream God has of all creation made new.  Today is the day to stop asking wrong questions that have no right answers, but instead to let Jesus turn our protest signs the other way round, until we are no longer asking, "What do we want?" but rather, "What does the living Jesus want for all people and all creation?"

You cannot answer, "How do I get God to do what I want?" any more than you can answer, "Is yellow round or square?"  But we can ask, "Living Christ, how would you reshape my vision to align with your love for all?"

That, it turns out, is a question worth asking.

Living Christ, reshape my vision to align with your love for all.