William H. Willimon - "Keep Asking Why" (April 2, 2000)

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-	I don't know why the lectionary divides our gospel	0:09
	as it does today.	0:13
	The lectionary has us reading an answer.	0:15
	The answer,	0:19
	God so loved the world	0:21
	that God gave his only son.	0:24
	It's an answer to a question	0:29
	that is raised a few verses earlier.	0:32
	So what we've got is an answer	0:37
	without including the question.	0:39
	First, therefore, here's the question,	0:41
	for which John 3:14-17 is an answer.	0:44
	A smart man named Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night	0:50
	and he has a question.	0:57
	How can anyone be born	0:59
	after having grown old?	1:03
	How is it is possible?	1:06
	Can you enter a second time into your mother's womb	1:08
	and be born again?	1:13
	It's an interesting question,	1:15
	Nicodemus' question.	1:20
	It is an inquiry into the possibility of starting over,	1:22
	becoming fresh, new,	1:27
	changed, reborn.	1:30
	It's a curious question for an old man to ask.	1:33
	Or maybe it's the only question old men ought ever to ask.	1:38
	How is it possible to start over?	1:42
	How is it possible to be youthful again,	1:46
	to lay aside all of the bad, old things I've done	1:49
	and all of the bad old things that have been done unto me?	1:53
	How is it possible to begin again fresh, to be recreated?	1:57
	I think one ought to cultivate such questions.	2:05
	Here is the answer.	2:10
	Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,	2:13
	so must the son of man be lifted up.	2:19
	That whoever believes in him may have eternal life.	2:23
	For God so loved the world	2:28
	that God gave his only son	2:31
	so that everyone who believes in him may not perish	2:34
	but may have eternal life.	2:38
	Indeed, God did not send his son	2:41
	into the world to condemn the world.	2:44
	But that in that the world might be saved through him.	2:47
	This is the Word of the Lord.	2:54
	Thanks be to God.	2:57
	Something happens to the eyes of a child.	3:02
	Sometime between, I'd say five and 10 years of age,	3:07
	I blame it on the brutality of the school,	3:13
	but I could be wrong.	3:16
	Who dulls those bright five-year-old eyes?	3:19
	Who stifled the questions,	3:25
	the incessant questions of a four-year old.	3:27
	Now, I think those of you who are young	3:32
	will agree with me when I say	3:37
	that you are better off than I.	3:38
	You're young, you're beginning.	3:42
	I am old, I am ending.	3:45
	You are summer, I am fall.	3:48
	Everything about you still works.	3:52
	(audience laughs)	3:55
	You are yet green.	3:56
	Of me and my tribe,	3:59
	the poet, Yeats, said in his poem, The Scholars,	4:02
	"Bald heads forgetful of their sins,	4:08
	"old, learned, respectable bald heads	4:12
	"edit and annotate the lines	4:17
	"that young men, tossing on their beds,	4:19
	"rhymed out in love's despair	4:23
	"to flatter beauty's ignorant ear.	4:27
	"All shuffle there, all cough in ink.	4:31
	"All wear the carpet with their shoes.	4:36
	"All think	4:39
	"what other people think."	4:42
	I have shuffled there.	4:47
	When I write these days, I live off	4:50
	of yesterday's love's despair	4:52
	that once was typical sophomoric speech.	4:55
	I sleep soundly.	5:00
	Unlike the youth tossing on their beds,	5:03
	I cough up a great deal of ink	5:07
	and mostly think as others think.	5:09
	And that is the real curse of old age	5:13
	and I don't care what Bob Dole says in the commercial.	5:16
	(audience laughing)	5:20
	Thus the poet, John Crowe Ransom,	5:21
	advises young girls in school,	5:24
	"Go listen to your teachers, old and contrary.	5:28
	"Please, do not believe a word."	5:31
	And that's not bad advice for the young.	5:36
	I thus urge you who are still young to cultivate skepticism.	5:40
	Pay not too close attention to old words of old people,	5:46
	maybe even mine.	5:50
	I can tell just by looking at some of you,	5:53
	into your eyes,	5:58
	that some of you are quite good	6:01
	at not being too respectful of old people.	6:02
	And that's good, not only because	6:06
	we're sucking away your social security,	6:07
	but also because old, learned, respectable bald heads,	6:09
	suffering as we do from short-term memory loss	6:15
	of our youthful sin,	6:19
	tend to be less knowledgeable of the world than we claim,	6:22
	and you are smarter in your youthful ignorance	6:28
	than you lead on.	6:33
	The truth of things is so thick, so not easily stated.	6:36
	Elusive of our desire to understand.	6:43
	I think you've got to keep cultivating	6:48
	an unconvinced deportment.	6:51
	Not cynicism, which seems to be	6:55
	your generation's particular fault,	6:57
	that Beavis and Butthead MTV smartassness,	7:00
	cynicism is just a mask for a failure to think deeply.	7:04
	Cynicism is being smart enough to know	7:11
	that something is not right	7:14
	but knows not how nor cares not enough to think it through.	7:15
	No, make skepticism your goal.	7:21
	Fortunately, the truth of things,	7:26
	all the way down deep is so elusive, mysterious, thick.	7:29
	It has a way of, it keeps beckoning us.	7:36
	Alluring us, seducing us to think.	7:39
	Despite that cultivated kind of cynicism	7:43
	that says there's no use for the bear to go up the mountain	7:47
	to look over on the other side because when he does,	7:51
	there's really nothing on the other side.	7:54
	No, the great thing is that the sheer weirdness of the world	7:57
	makes us drop cynical defenses and makes us,	8:01
	keeps making us go take a look for ourselves.	8:06
	And I want you to keep cultivating that.	8:10
	I want you to keep doing the Nicodemus thing of,	8:14
	well, how can this be, Jesus, how?	8:20
	Alas, too much of a liberal arts education is anything	8:26
	but liberal, or even art.	8:29
	We teachers present ourselves	8:31
	as if we know something for sure.	8:34
	And we'll tell you what we know,	8:39
	and you'll write it down,	8:41
	and then you spit it back on the midterm.	8:42
	No, absolute certitude about anything ought to be rare.	8:45
	We tend to bed down with facts,	8:52
	what we know for sure, far too soon in the journey.	8:55
	Maybe it's because I'm paid to think about God	9:01
	who is so much more interesting, say,	9:04
	than psychology or French History.	9:06
	But I fear that what we call higher education	9:09
	is just encouragement to give up the fight way too soon.	9:13
	To cut our intellectual losses.	9:18
	To grab a few facts that we've assembled	9:21
	and then leave the table long before the game gets good.	9:24
	We become far too easily pleased with what we know.	9:30
	And apathetic over what we don't know	9:36
	and this is our great defeat.	9:39
	When Augustine was checking out the Christian faith,	9:46
	he tried reading the Bible.	9:49
	And frankly, Augustine was unimpressed.	9:52
	Augustine had been the beneficiary of the very best	9:55
	of a classical liberal arts education.	9:59
	He had read great literature like Virgil,	10:01
	and Cicero, and Levi.	10:05
	And Augustine knew instantly	10:08
	that the Bible is not great literature.	10:10
	He complained to Ambrose of Milan	10:14
	about the inferiority of the Bible's way of doing things.	10:18
	Ambrose told him, you silly little peasant.	10:24
	You have not the skills for reading the Bible.	10:29
	When you read the Bible,	10:33
	you read something like fish	10:35
	and you erroneously think, fish.	10:37
	Or you read about bread and you start thinking	10:40
	about bread and nothing else!	10:43
	No, no, no, no, in the Bible,	10:45
	everyday things keep being transformed.	10:47
	They become signs of sacraments	10:51
	of deeper, thicker, richer truth.	10:54
	And Augustine said when he heard that,	11:00
	it was as if his ears got unstopped.	11:03
	A new world opened.	11:07
	Not long after that lounging one afternoon in the garden,	11:11
	Augustine heard a child singing a little rhyme.	11:16
	Take up and read, take up and read!	11:19
	Augustine wasn't sure, was it a child or an angel?	11:21
	By this point, under the tutelage of Ambrose,	11:26
	he was highly suggestive.	11:29
	He picked up the closest thing at hand, it was a codex	11:30
	of Paul's letter to the Romans.	11:35
	He flopped it open and he read	11:37
	and he said his whole life was reconstituted.	11:42
	His eyes and ears were opened	11:49
	and he knew.	11:52
	Oh, I wish I could get you	11:55
	to develop that kind of deportment.	11:57
	That willingness, that Augustinian expectation.	12:00
	That bible-engendered intellectual eagerness	12:05
	to be surprised by words.	12:08
	People often say Christianity is a revealed religion.	12:15
	A revealed religion, what we mean by that is	12:19
	that it's not self evident.	12:22
	You're not born with it.	12:25
	It's got to be revealed to you.	12:28
	It's got to come as a gift,	12:31
	it's got to come as some kind of word from the outside.	12:33
	During a discussion last year on ethics,	12:40
	a graduate student lectured us.	12:43
	Well, we were learning that there is	12:46
	a certain genetic disposition to certain kinds	12:48
	of adaptively beneficial behavior,	12:50
	and you see, what you call ethics is only	12:52
	that sum of behavior,	12:56
	which has been genetically programmed into the human race.	12:57
	I thought it sad that on some April evening,	13:02
	in the Duke Gardens,	13:06
	a young man might look into the eyes of a young woman	13:08
	and say sweetly,	13:12
	I have a genetic propensity for you.	13:15
	(audience laughing)	13:18
	And I feel that together,	13:20
	we could strengthen the gene pool of the race.	13:22
	(audience laughing)	13:25
	Oh, modernity,	13:28
	modernity, that narrow point of view engendered	13:31
	into us by the enlightenment.	13:34
	Modernity is always saying,	13:38
	well, things are only this or they're just that.	13:40
	I want you to take that word, only,	13:46
	as a tip off.	13:49
	That whenever you hear it,	13:51
	you're going to hear some reductionistic account of reality	13:52
	that falsifies the very stuff	13:57
	it's supposed to be describing.	14:00
	Alright, sometimes I confess I teach	14:03
	as if I'm preparing students to be contestants on Jeopardy.	14:07
	Or Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.	14:11
	Here's the answer, now memorize it and repeat it.	14:14
	Protagoras, that fifth century Sophist declared,	14:21
	"Man is the measure of everything."	14:26
	No, 'cause that confuses the measure with the measurer.	14:31
	Truth, truth always precedes our knowing truth.	14:39
	Life has got more meaning	14:46
	than I would ever be able to tell.	14:48
	You are not, for all of your intellectual achievements, God.	14:51
	And I think to keep appreciating the limits of our knowing,	14:57
	to keep working that distance	15:01
	between the knower and the known,	15:03
	that is wisdom.	15:07
	Curiosity is close cousin of humility	15:11
	and that, I think, explains why fresh persons can be	15:16
	embarrassingly more interesting than seniors.	15:20
	I had a class once read Scott Peck's,	15:25
	The Road Less Traveled.	15:28
	There, the psychotherapist, Peck,	15:30
	implies that some people in this society are sick.	15:33
	They're sick not because of something,	15:39
	some childhood trauma, not because	15:41
	of some inner psychic distress.	15:44
	They're just sick because they're intellectually lazy.	15:47
	When confronted by life's very predictable crises,	15:53
	they dig in, they stick with the accustom routine.	15:56
	They keep working what once worked.	16:03
	They don't take the trouble, the effort,	16:07
	the risk, to investigate, to rethink.	16:10
	Peck says reality takes a constant dedication.	16:14
	Work.	16:21
	That's one reason we make you read like poems of Yeats	16:24
	or we make you do Shakespeare.	16:28
	Because, well frankly, nobody needs this stuff at 20.	16:30
	But the trouble is, there's hardly anybody	16:35
	who can live after 50 without it.	16:38
	'Cause one day, you're gonna need to have a reason to go on.	16:43
	And you'll know where to go when you need a reason	16:48
	just to make it through the night.	16:51
	I know you've been told that curiosity killed the cat.	16:55
	But here at midlife, I can count lots of dead cats	17:00
	who died for lack of curiosity, not because of it.	17:05
	Old Nicodemus came to Jesus in the dark.	17:11
	He comes in the dark to Mr. Light	17:15
	and he asked, how can this be?	17:19
	How is it possible to be reborn?	17:23
	You climb into your mother's wound,	17:25
	you start all over like an infant,	17:26
	how can you begin again, how?	17:29
	Jesus, as is typical of Jesus in the Gospel of John,	17:34
	responds with an enigmatic talk	17:39
	about wind, and spirit, and light, and truth.	17:42
	How?	17:49
	Says Nicodemus.	17:51
	I don't get it.	17:54
	Jesus says, you're beginning to get it.	17:56
	Rebirth, new life, light, is possible in our darkness.	17:59
	Not because of our earnest scholarly investigation	18:05
	but because of the incursions	18:10
	of a God who loves.	18:14
	We got a God, says the rest of John's Gospel,	18:18
	who loves you and the world enough to reveal,	18:23
	to be lifted up, so you can see him.	18:29
	The answer to our questions is before us as light.	18:34
	We shall know.	18:41
	Now we see through a glass darkly	18:44
	but one day will be like being face to face,	18:46
	not as the result of our earnest intellectual inquiry,	18:51
	but rather as a gift, a gift	18:55
	of a God who refuses to leave you in the dark.	18:59
	The answer to our best questions has got a name,	19:04
	has got a face,	19:07
	Jesus.	19:11
	To know him is to be known and to know.	19:14
	Proust writes that	19:21
	much of life is	19:25
	like walking down a dark deserted night time street	19:26
	and you're all alone and you try this door,	19:31
	and then you try that door.	19:33
	But all of them are locked,	19:36
	all secured against entry.	19:39
	But you keep trying, you keep walking.	19:43
	You keep trying each doorknob.	19:46
	Until you come before a door	19:52
	that opens to you of its own accord.	19:55
	And you go in	19:59
	and you know.	20:02
	Keep knocking on the doors	20:06
	and I promise, it shall be opened unto you.	20:09
	How?	20:14
	How can this be?	20:17
	I'll tell you.	20:20
	God so loved the world	20:24
	that he gave his only son	20:27
	so that we might have life.	20:31

Item Info

Title:

William H. Willimon - "Keep Asking Why" (April 2, 2000)

Description:

Sermon start time: (Part 1) 0:09. Sermon end time: (Part 1) 20:36.
This sermon encourages people to persistently seek the truth of God with a humble heart, so that their lives can be born into light rather than living in darkness. God’s answer to the pursuit is Jesus. (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r41834h33

Date:

April 2, 2000

Speaker:

Willimon, William H.

Liturgical Calendar:

Lent

Biblical Book:

John

Chapter and Verse:

John 3:14-21

Subject:

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 CS-1005
ref10167_4zx
uachapelsermaud
duke:321268
dcrau001649
ark:/87924/r41834h33
90e1a739-1d5e-4cd9-9b3b-c31f49ebb1ef

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Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

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Language:

English

Location:

United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

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Provenance:

The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

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Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

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This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

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William H. Willimon - "Keep Asking Why" (April 2, 2000)

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1. William H. Willimon - "Keep Asking Why" (April 2, 2000)

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William H. Willimon - "Keep Asking Why" (April 2, 2000)

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