Living with Unanswered Questions

							                          Living with Unanswered Questions
Some of us may have seen the movie Shadowlands which tells the story of C.S. Lewis, one of the great
20th century defenders of Christian faith. The story begins in his middle years when Lewis was an Oxford
fellow. Jack Lewis, as his friends called him, had discerned satisfactory answers to the hard questions of
life. Why do we suffer? Why is there so much pain in the world? Does God want it that way?

Jack Lewis had come up with an answer to these questions. He argued that God wants us to grow up.
Suffering gets our attention. He would say, “Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” God wants
to get us into shape and pain is the way God does it. “No pain, no gain” we might say today.

Jack Lewis had the tough questions about God all figured out. He even wrote a popular book which
detailed his views called The Problem of Pain. It was a huge success and sold millions of copies, and
even today the book is still widely popular.

Then, a day came, which surprised everyone. Jack Lewis fell in love and married Joy Gresham, an
American divorcee with a Jewish background. That’s when things began to change for this old bachelor.
Many of you may know the story. Joy suffered from cancer, and subsequently had treatments which
resulted in a remission of the disease. The two enjoyed three marvelous years with each other. Their love
was wonderful and beautiful, but the cancer returned. After a time, as they both knew it would happen,
Joy died, and Jack Lewis’ world fell apart.

Lewis was angry, deeply angry, with God. His journal, published after his death under the title A Grief
Observed, tells of a man in deep grief, struggling to find new answers for the ones that didn’t work
anymore. In his desperation, this staunch defender of the faith even referred to God as a “Cosmic Sadist.”

What do you do when you are in that kind of despair? How do you pick yourself up when all seems lost?
All the old pat answers seemed no good to him anymore. Jack Lewis struggled and struggled for a new
answer.

At first, none came. Jack was sure God didn’t care about the kind of horrible suffering that people
experience all the time. Eventually, though, he reached a new plateau in understanding how we live in
God’s world. He had two choices. Either he could run from his suffering, pretend all was well and deny
his feelings. Or, he could meet the suffering head on, accept it, live with it, and allow the suffering to be
part of the happiness he had with Joy.

That’s what he did. Jack Lewis said to himself: “I started living when I started loving Joy.”

Jack Lewis thought that when he reached his mid-fifties that his understanding of God was all settled. He
thought he had done all the thinking and growing he needed to do. Falling in love pulled him up short.
And the tragedy of losing his wife at the pinnacle of their happiness changed everything, including his
understanding of God and his relationship with God.

A change in a person’s relationship with God is what’s happening with Nicodemus in today’s gospel.
Nicodemus is coming to Jesus for a conversation about God. Jesus calls Nicodemus a Pharisee, and as a
Pharisee Nicodemus knew all about God. He had God all figured out. You might say that Nicodemus had
God nailed down in a nice logical box.

But Jesus blows Nicodemus away with a new understanding of God. Jesus says to him, “The wind blows
where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.
So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Nicodemus the Pharisee is confused, confounded and disturbed. He says to Jesus, “How can these things
be?” Jesus then confronts him again. “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these
things?” Nicodemus is shaken. All his ideas about God are being threatened. They are changing.
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Change is part of growing up, isn’t it? As we move on in life, things happen to us. Sometimes the things
that happen are happy, as was the experience of Jack Lewis’ marriage to Joy. Sometimes the things that
happen are tragic, as was the experience of Lewis’ loss of the woman he loved. Sometimes the things that
happen are confusing and upsetting, such as new information difficult to handle, as was the case with
Nicodemus. Where is God in all these experiences? What happens to our ideas about God, the ones we
grew up with? They change, just as we change. God knows it, and intends it that way.

Captain Mitsuo Fuebida was the pilot who led the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
He was an incredibly heroic and charismatic figure in the Japanese Navy. Mitsuo Fuebida was raised to
believe in the divinity of the Emperor. During the war he was willing to die in the service of his Emperor
and obeyed orders without question. But by the end of the war he found himself a devastated and broken
man. His despair led him to convert to Christianity. He then came to the United States to train to be a
missionary, and after finishing his training he went back to Japan to preach the gospel. In the ruins of his
old faith, Mitsuo Fuebida found Jesus Christ.

Contrast that experience with a story told by Fred Craddock, a prominent seminary professor and
preacher. He tells of a friend whose son was killed in a car accident. When people came to the man to
console him, Fred heard the man saying, “Don’t worry. I understand. It was God’s will.”

When Fred heard him saying that, he went up to his friend and said, “You know, my friend, God did not
cause the accidental death of your son.”

To Fred’s surprise, his friend got very angry. “Get away from me,” he said. “Don’t tell me it wasn’t
God’s will. I can’t stand it if you tell me that there is no reason my son is dead. Let me believe what I
want to, and leave me alone.”

Fred discovered that his friend was not ready to learn something new and something difficult about God.

What is your image of God? Whatever it is, it is incomplete and inadequate. We need to know that what
we think about God is filled with mistakes, misperceptions, inadequacies and wrong thinking. God
remains more than we can know. No one, not the greatest scholars, or the most spiritual persons, can
really understand God so well that their idea, their image of God, is whole and complete and perfect.

St. Augustine is probably the greatest theologian whoever lived. The story is told that one day Augustine
was walking along the Mediterranean beach near his home contemplating the Trinity. He saw a young
boy running back and forth with a bucket from the sea to a hole he had dug. Augustine stopped and asked
the boy what he was doing. “Oh, I’m putting the giant sea into my little hole,” the child explained. Then it
dawned on Augustine: that is just what he was trying to do – put the great notion of God into his little
brain.

All our attempts to describe the mystery of God with human concepts ultimately fall short. That’s why
when something happens, when we experience something new in our lives or discover some new
knowledge, our idea of God may need to grow and change.

The Church is filled with people who consistently resist allowing such things to happen. No, we say, my
parents told me about God, or I learned about God in Sunday school, or I heard a sermon once, and it
helped me figure God out. No, I can’t change and grow and I won’t let my idea of God ever be different.

It is as if we were all invited to go on an airplane trip, but we don’t know where we are going. No one
wants to do that. When we get on a plane, we want to know where we are going. We want no surprises.
We want to know exactly what things will be like when we arrive.

But God has a different way of working. “Come and get on the plane with me,” God says to us. “I’m not
telling you where you are going or what things will be like when you get there. But don’t worry. You can

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handle whatever is there or whatever happens when we arrive. You may have to change your way of
thinking; you may have to change what you think about me. But don’t worry. Changing and growing
what you think about me is what it is like to live in my world.”

A book that many of us in British Columbia may know and love is Margaret Craven’s I Heard the Owl
Call My Name. It is about a young priest assigned to a remote First Nations village in northern British
Columbia. One incident has the priest encounter a rather disgruntled teacher who is quite dissatisfied with
the primitive living conditions in the village. As the teacher meets the priest for the first time and duly
complains about conditions, the story continues:

“There was one more thing the teacher felt it his duty to inform the vicar. The vicar might as well know
right now that as for himself, he was an atheist; he considered Christianity a calamity. He believed that
any man who professed it must be incredibly naïve. The young vicar grinned and agreed. There were two
kinds of naiveté, he said, quoting Schweitzer. One not even aware of the problems, and another which has
knocked on all the doors of knowledge and knows man can explain little, and is still willing to follow his
convictions into the unknown. ‘This takes courage,’ he said, and he thanked the teacher and returned to
the vicarage.”

Dear people, you and I can follow Jesus into the unknown, because beyond all our horizons there is God.
Even when we don’t know where our journey will take us, we can trust that when we get there, our fears
will be dispelled and our questions will be answered, and like C.S. Lewis, we will come to trust God
again in a new and deeper way.

Dr. Gary Nicolosi
June 7, 2009
Text – John 3:1-17
Trinity Sunday, B




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