That is the wrong question. . .

We Lutherans tend to be a bit smug about some things, especially when it comes to our written confessions.  That said, we increasingly fall victim to asking the wrong question in just about everything.  Whether it is about the sexual desire or same sex marriage debate or the gender alphabet soup or just about any of the current list of hot button issues, we tend to ask why just like the world does (or why not).  It is the wrong question.  Instead of asking or fighting about the answers to the question why, we would know, if we had read the catechism, to ask what does this mean?

I guess it was inevitable for the world to teach us to view the things of God that challenge our reason or senses as a matter of why rather than what does this mean, but that does not mean it is correct.  There is no end to the questions -- why would God continue to create if He knew we would send ourselves and His creation off the rails in sin or why did God wait so long to deliver up the Savior or why must the Savior be God and man or why the Virgin Birth or, the confirmand's choice, why circumcision?  But even when there are reasonable answers it settles no argument nor does it win over any converts.  The better pursuit is the question of meaning.

Why begs the question of understanding as if faith can be convinced by a good argument or a cohesive rationale.  That is not the locus of faith.  It is not a cerebral act of reasoned understanding by which we come to God but the most unreasonable and illogical act of believing by the power of the Holy Spirit.  The truth is that we have fostered this wrongheaded pursuit of comprehension by turning sermons into debate forms in which the job of the preacher is to change the mind of the hearer.  How foolish we are!  The job of the sermon is to apply the Word to the hearer and the question that begins this whole thing is the one Luther made famous in his catechism:  what does this mean?

We do not really want to know why things go well or we feel blessed and our Christian life easy (unless we are trying to repeat the outcome in some magical sort of way).  We just want it to continue.  But what life goes south and we end out licking our wounds and looking around for someone to blame, why is an obvious question without much change of a real answer.  What does this mean is the question that offers the Spirit the chance to use this circumstance for our good and to help our faith grow.  We must be the products of a mixed marriage.  Jews seek wisdom and Greeks signs but we want both -- we want to comprehend and understand how God works and we want some fairly obvious signs along the way to prove that we got it right and are on board.  What we need, however, is the perspective of faith and that means asking the right question when the wrong one is the one we really want to ask and have answered.  What does this mean?

It is to our doom that we fixate on the question why.  Even when we get an answer or the correct answer, it does not help us to accept what we do not want or to be at peace with it.  I had an elderly member who was a chain smoker for 70 years.  Now, tethered to an oxygen line and constantly out of breath with the obvious afflictions, I asked her if she ever regretted smoking.  She lifted the mask from her face and in her raspy voice told me that if it would not blow us both up, she would gladly light up again.  There was no comfort in the question why she suffered as she did.  In fact, there was not even any regret.  The longing for what she could not have was what consumed her.  Meaning could not be found in a perfectly logical answer to why she suffered but what does this mean pushed her into the arms of her Savior, into the forgiveness that cleared her conscience, into the strength made perfect in her weakness, and into the perfect healing that awaited her when she feel asleep in the arms of her Savior.

Yeah, sometimes it seems like God delights in giving us a good kick in the gut and sometimes it is too frequent a kick at that.  But instead of pondering why as if this were a problem to be solved, the meaning of our suffering can be found only in Christ and His suffering for us.  It is this that St Paul describes when he tells us that Christ was made perfect through suffering and through His suffering and our suffering for His sake, we are given the same privilege.  Why?  Because God said so.  What does this mean?  Always love....