SunFeb52012
Scripture: ISAIAH 40:21-31
A thought-provoking academic paper written several years ago, and intended primarily for the business community, advocates for the power of a good question to stimulate growth and vitality. Ask the right question, says the paper, and you “catalyze insight, innovation, and action.” And the key, say the authors, is not focusing on the negative—what’s gone wrong—but on what you hope to see happen. So if sales are declining, you don’t ask, “What mistakes did we make and how can we correct them?” Instead, you ask something much more like, “What’s the nature of our business and how can we do it better?” That’s a question that doesn’t so much look to assign blame as it encourages dreaming. It’s not problem-focused. It’s guided instead by a vision of what you hope to be.
The key is finding the right questions, the ones that open up the most promising direction. The authors mention several helpful examples, including the question the leader of Johnson and Johnson asked during the Tylenol crisis of the early 1980s: “What is the most ethical action we might take?” Often the best questions revolve around unexplored potential. “What possibilities exist that we haven’t thought of yet?” “What could this good school also be?” The most striking example they use of an expansive question is of a corporate conversation that occurred a number of years ago at Hewlett-Packard. The director of HP Labs wondered why the organization was not considered the best industrial research lab in the world. So as they tossed the question around, “How can we be the best industrial lab in the world?” one of their engineers finally said, “That question is okay, but what would really energize me and get me up in the morning would be asking, ‘How can we be the best industrial lab for the world?’” And suddenly the whole enterprise had been reframed. What had been a bid merely for excellence now became a bid for excellence and a larger purpose.
This is a process in which any organization or community or workplace can participate: finding the right question, one that aims toward a new and productive next chapter. Not “Who’s to blame for our family tension?” but “How can our family increase its trust and affection?” Not “Why did we lose that contract?” but “What will open us to growing our business?” It’s not that people shouldn’t be held responsible for their actions. It’s not that nobody ever does anything wrong. It’s only that the atmosphere and morale of any group are going to be better when a vision is being pursued than they will be when errors are seeking to be avoided. The best questions encourage looking ahead and affirming what’s possible rather than blaming and fault-finding. As the truism says, you become what you focus on (“The Art of Powerful Questions: Catalyzing Insight, Innovation, and Action,” by Eric E. Vogt, Juanita Brown, and David Isaacs). An Appreciative Inquiry approach can make an enormous difference.
The prophet Isaiah was in the middle of a really discouraging run for the people of Israel. They had been carted off to a strange land, where they were essentially made slaves of the Babylonians. They had thought God was their friend and advocate, but here they were rotting away in this strange land. They couldn’t imagine that God really cared about them.
And right in the middle of this pity party, one we’ve probably all engaged in at one time or another, this truth-teller stands up and booms out four questions: “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?” (40:21, 28).
Those questions probably don’t follow the model for the perfect question. When you first hear them, they sound a little snarky, a little doubting: ‘Come on, don’t you get it? When are you going to take this in?’ And maybe, at first glance, they are a little edgy.
But at their root, these questions are far from negative. They have only one purpose, and that is to jar people out of their lethargy and remind them what’s central. Because what they’ve forgotten is the heart of life. What they’ve lost track of is the truth that lies beneath their discouragement: that God does not and will not forget them. ‘Don’t you remember?’ Isaiah seems to ask. ‘God created all the stars and the roses. God inspired Chopin’s nocturnes and the songs of Adele. God has stood by your side through all the awful things—your loneliness and fear, the day you misplaced your child, the time you discovered a lump in your breast, the moment your confidence just vanished. Don’t forget! Remember! God was there! Let that be what grounds you. Let that be at the core.’
For all kinds of reasons we forget that God walks with us. We get sucked in by the world’s pace and by its tendency to focus on the negative. And out the window goes the heart of God’s identity and message. Which is why we need to hear it over and over again. And it’s why Isaiah sings it out so poetically: “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. God does not faint or grow weary; God’s understanding is unsearchable. God gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (40:28-31).
When we’re down and out, this is the answer to Isaiah’s questions: Remember! God is present with you! God has a purpose for you! Don’t forget your roots or what you were made for!
Communion is a tangible reminder of that divine core that undergirds everything. Some of you, I know, eagerly await this meal. But I’m guessing there are others of you who wonder, “What are we really doing when we eat this tiny little bit of bread and juice? What’s it mean?”
There’s no way, of course, to reduce communion to a single meaning, or to several sound bite meanings. What this meal does fundamentally, though, is remind us that the presence of Christ is with us in everything. When we affirm Christ’s presence in the bread broken and the cup poured, we are reminded that, even in the simple elements of everyday life, and even and especially in the brokenness that is so much a part of all of our lives, Christ is present. And what this presence of Christ does is remind us that “whoever we are and wherever we are on life’s journey, we are welcome here.”
So what’s the question that lies behind this sacrament? Maybe the question we ask is this: what does this meal let us become? And among the multitude of answers to that question, at least one of them is this: this meal lets us become stronger. Pat Nichols, soon to retire from her position here at Federated, said at our staff meeting on Wednesday that the one prayer that is always answered is the prayer for strength. We can pray for healing and not get it—at least not the way we wanted. We can pray for success and find only failure. But when we pray for strength, it is always given to us. And this meal is one way we receive it.
Remember Isaiah’s words: “God gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.” Always. And one of the primary ways God does that is by saying to every single one of us: you are always present with me. You are always at home in me. No matter what you’re going through you, I’m with you. And what that lets us become is agents of welcome and warmth.
Andrew Packman, a seminarian in our sister denomination, the Disciples of Christ, has always struggled with being excluded from communion in the Roman Catholic Church. He feels like a second-class Christian when he’s at mass.
Last summer, Packman went to Bosnia to study, and while he was there, he joined an interfaith choir. One Sunday, the choir sang in a Roman Catholic church in Belgrade. They sang stirringly of grace and unity. But when the mass was celebrated, he was back to feeling left out, not allowed to go to the communion rail. “Disappointed by this reminder of religion’s ambiguity, I watched the line form in the center of the sanctuary. I pressed my knees to the side to let my Catholic neighbors pass by me, and I lowered my head to pray my little prayer of Protestant protest.
“When I lifted my eyes, I saw a portly man in a white robe scurrying down the side aisle. His eyes sought me out with an innocent and quizzical look, like a little boy searching for his parents in a crowd. His glasses bobbled down his short, round nose as he raced down the aisle—too quickly for a priest, too quickly for a 60-year-old man.
“. . . [T]his Bosnian Franciscan took a handful of the host and sought me out of the crowd. Nearly out of breath, he lifted the small plate toward me. I stood up from my pew.
“‘Will you have communion?’
“I muttered, ‘Yes, I will.’
“‘Christ’s body broken for you.’
“. . . I felt the emotion welling up from my gut into my throat and reaching up toward my eyes. My head fell . . . in [a] prayer . . . of gratitude.
“I imagine this is what the prodigal son felt when he watched his aged father risk looking like a fool as he sprinted out to meet his son. [This time, finally, I felt] the warm embrace of full inclusion in [this] Christian community.
“. . . [I]n a world marked by violent ethnic strife, cantankerous political divisions and toxic racial segregation, the Lord’s Supper has the potential to be a powerful and hopeful alternative.
“. . . [T]he God who shows up at communion is a God who brazenly . . . seeks us out of the crowd. A God who awkwardly crosses divisions and differences to invite each of us to full participation in life with God” (Christian Century, Jan. 11, 2012, pp. 10-11).
So what’s the question again? Maybe it’s “What does this holy meal let us become?” Maybe it’s “What does it mean to live in God’s house?” Whatever the question is, the answer is something we now and forever live into, an answer rooted in the God who “gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless,” the God who chases after us to include us in the holy circle, the God who pushes and prods us to welcome everyone we meet into that same circle.
And here’s the follow-up question for you and me: where in our lives are we the priest in Packman’s story, with someone who awaits our running toward them and offering them the bread of life? Where in our lives are we the ones to bear grace to someone who needs it? May we go forth and live into the answer to that question.