Asking the Right Question

You can't get the right answer if you don't ask the right question! Jeremiah reminds us of that truth as we read what he said to the ancient Israelites. They had forgotten to ask the right question, with disastrous results!

You learn a lot when you live with children. You may have completed 12 years of formal education, graduated from Ohio State University with honors, and have a wall covered with post-graduate diplomas – but when you live with children, you learn things that you never knew before! That’s especially true when your children are teenagers. You learn all kinds of skills when you live with teenagers! One very important skill that you learn very quickly is how to ask the right questions. For example, you learn that, “How was school today?” is not the best question to ask, because it only gets a one-word answer in response; usually, “OK.” Instead, you ask, “Is there anything that I need to sign and return to your teachers?” That question has a far better chance of getting a useful response. (After having raised two daughters, my husband and I have developed interrogation skills that rival those of any CIA agent!) Learning how to ask the right questions is a vital skill!  After all, we all need answers not only from our teenagers, but to all the questions in our lives. We have lots of things that we need to know! We need to know how to best live our personal lives. We need to know how to behave as a church. And we certainly need to know how to live together in our country! It should be obvious that we won’t get good answers if we don’t ask good questions!

We can take some comfort in the knowledge that we aren’t the first ones to have this problem. The Israelites didn’t know how to ask the right questions, either! That’s obvious when we read this morning’s Old Testament text (Jeremiah 2:4-9). As it begins, God is complaining about the people of Israel and how ungrateful they are. God sounds a little like the parent of an ungrateful teenager! God says to Israel: “What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthless things? Why, they became worthless themselves! Nobody asked, ‘Where is the Lord, who brought us up from the land of Egypt.’ All you cared about is what worshipping idols might do for you!” It sounds like Dad lecturing his teenaged son. We all know what he’d say. “When are you going to straighten up? Your behavior is an embarrassment to your mother and me! We’ve given you everything that you ever wanted! Who bought you all the clothes in your closet? Who bought you the high-speed computer in your bedroom? Who gave you that new sports car in the driveway? This is the way that you repay us? I didn’t raise you to be a good-for-nothing and like this!”

You may wonder what Israel’s problem was. They weren’t asking the right question! Jeremiah sums it up like this: The people forgot what God had told them in the past, so their behavior turned rotten. The rulers forgot to ask God for wisdom as they ruled; and so their country turned rotten. In the end, they worshiped Baal instead of God, and even their worship turned rotten! They really were like teenagers who get to be too big for their britches. They did whatever they felt like doing without ever once asking, “What should I do?” And it’s all because they never asked the only question that really matters: “Where is the Lord?”

As amazing as it may sound, there are still people around who aren’t looking for God. Some of them are even in our churches! Others want to look for God, but they don’t know how to do it. If you’re one of those people who are asking “Where is the Lord,” good for you; and I have some suggestions as to where to look. First of all, if we want to know where God is today, we need to remember what God did for us yesterday. Jeremiah knew what God did, and he reminded the Israelites of it. “[God] brought us up from the land of Egypt,” he said. “[God] led us in the wilderness, in a land of deserts and pits, in a land of deep darkness, in a land that no one passes through, in a land where no one lives.” God led a bunch of rag-tag slaves out of Egypt, despite everything that the Pharaoh tried to do to keep them there. Then God led those slaves through the wilderness for forty long years until they crossed the River Jordan into the Promised Land. And we know that God did something else, too! When the time was right, God came to us in Jesus Christ to save us from sin and death. That’s what God has done for us! God has loved us, accepted us, liberated us, guided us, and saved us.

So… Where is the Lord? A good place to start looking is in the places where we find love, acceptance, liberation, and guidance; because wherever we see those things happen, we know that God is there. And those are the things that every Christian and every church congregation should be worrying about doing: accepting, liberating, and guiding. Whenever we worry about anything other than that, we risk worshiping something else instead of God. But some churches, I’m sorry to say, worship only themselves. They don’t worry about helping other folks out, because they are only concerned about their own survival. They are preoccupied with how many people are in the pews on Sunday mornings, and with what other folks in town are thinking about them. Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be concerned with sharing the gospel with other folks so that they can join us in our mission, but when we want members only because we’re worried about our own survival, we have stopped worshiping the God who has promised to guide us safely and started worshiping the idol of security. I know about a church that has a $3 million endowment. (The church will remain anonymous.) Now, you would think that they would celebrate that gift by using it for mission! They don’t, though, because they don’t want to risk using any of it! That church reminds me of an episode of the TV show MASH. Hawkeye needed an incubator to do blood cultures so that he could diagnose illnesses quickly and prescribe the proper treatment for his patients. And he found an incubator! In fact, he found three of them, all bright and shiny new, ready to be used, stored in a supply station. But when Hawkeye asked the supply sergeant for one of them, he was denied. “Why?” Hawkeye asked. “You’ve got three of them!” “Yes,” the sergeant responded, “But if I give you one, I’ll only have two.”

Let’s not be churches like that. Let’s not hoard what we have because we worship the idol of security! Let’s worship the Lord, instead – the Lord who calls ourselves to give ourselves away generously, and the Christ who asks us to give up our security in following him. Let’s worry about being loving, accepting, liberating, and guiding. Let’s look day and night for God, because only when we seek him will we find what we are really looking for. Where is the Lord? It’s the only question that matters, because it’s the only question that can help us to live as faithful Christians. As we move ahead into an unknown future, may we never forget to ask it!