Oct. 19, 2025 | Word Out!
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Sermon – Pastor Dan Peterson
Keep Questioning
October 19, 2025
READINGS
Hymn of the Day:
“Ask the Complicated Questions”
1 Ask the complicated questions.
Do not fear to be found out;
for our God makes strong our weakness,
forging faith in fires of doubt.
2 Seek the disconcerting answers,
follow where the Spirit blows;
test competing truths for wisdom,
for in tension new life grows.
3 Knock on doors of new ideas,
test assumptions long grown stale,
for Christ calls from shores of wonder,
daring us to try and fail.
4 For in struggle we discover
truth both simple and profound;
in the knocking, asking, seeking,
we are opened, answered, found.
Text: David Bjorlin, b. 1984
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Gospel: Luke 18:1-8
1 Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. 2 He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. 3 In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my accuser.’ 4 For a while he refused, but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’ ” 6 And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? 8 I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
Sermon:
Grace to you and peace, from God, the source of life, and from Jesus, who is that life and light in the world. Amen.
“Keep Questioning:”
Did you know that, over the last 100 years, nearly a dozen films have been made about Martin Luther, starting in 1923 with the very creative title, “Martin Luther,” a film starring Carl Wüstenhagen, was produced in Germany; later, in 1973, once again with the creative title “Luther,” a film was produced in America, starring Stacy Keach as Martin Luther; later in Great Britain, produced by The BBC, a film called “Martin Luther, Heretic” appeared, starring Jonathan Pryce, a famous British actor; and then, as some of you may recall, over 20 years ago in 2003 another movie about Martin Luther, creatively titled “Luther,” starring Joseph Fiennes, appeared here in the states.
Now, for my money, the best of these movies is “Martin Luther, Heretic,” which, as I’m sure you will all do after today’s service, you can watch on YouTube. In the film, there is a wonderful portrayal of dialog between Luther and his students at the University of Wittenberg, which is in Eastern Germany, where Luther taught, as he was working out his understanding of salvation by grace instead of works. Here’s an excerpt that I have condensed and edited down.
A student says, as Luther is teaching, “You say, man can do nothing about his sinfulness.”
Luther replies, “Yes.”
The student replies, “God is to do everything.”
Luther says, “Yes.”
The student: “Then I can do as I please. It makes no difference.”
Martin Luther replies, “Yes. Now, tell me what pleases you. Imagine it. No more laws, no more punishments. What do you do? Drink yourselves senseless. Make faces at the Duke.” (You can tell this is British. Very funny.)
Student: “Sir, I don’t understand.”
Luther, “Well, you say to me, ‘do as you please.’ I say, what you do comes from your heart, what you are in your heart.”
Student: Then what does it take to be a good person?”
Luther: “Faith. It takes faith.”
Student: “Sir, every peasant in Germany has faith.”
Luther, “So?”
Student: “Will Heaven be filled with German peasants?”
Luther: “Might be.”
Student: “It can’t be that easy!”
Martin Luther: “You think faith is easy?”
Let’s dwell with that for a moment. “You think faith is easy?” Now I suspect for some of us, while faith may not be easy, it’s not something we question, not something that keeps us up at night, and that’s fine. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a humble, quiet faith. In fact, to those of us who do question, it’s a nice counter-example, but for others of us, like Martin Luther, faith is anything but quiet. Faith is anything but easy.
“Faith,” as the Lutheran philosopher Søren Kierkegaard put it, “is a restless thing,” which is why I love our Hymn of the Day, “Ask the Complicated Questions.”
Now this morning, I’m going to do something very unusual. I’m going to focus most of my time on our Hymn of the Day and then connect it with our Gospel reading. So I invite you, if you wish, to turn with me to the Hymn of the Day, which is printed in the middle of your bulletin. “Ask the Complicated Questions” was written by David Bjorlin, who was born in 1984. He’s a young ‘un. He teaches at a seminary in Chicago, where he is also a minister.
I want to highlight a few elements of the hymn for your consideration. First, notice the first words of each of the four verses, or first three rather: Ask, Seek, Knock. That’s important. Bjorlin is deriving that from Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount. What it shows is that asking questions of faith is Biblical.
Point Two, look at the third verse, “Knock on doors of new ideas. Follow where the Spirit blows.” Now “where the Spirit blows,” as you may know, is language from the Gospel of John. But this is an authorization that Bjorlin implicitly gives us in our forum programming, where, like this morning, we knocked on the door of new ideas in a big way, and we followed where the Spirit blows. One of my friends and former colleagues says that “Faith is going where the truth leads you,” and that seems to be the spirit here.
Now notice in the last part of the first verse, at the bottom there, his language of “forging faith in the fires of doubt.” That is incredible imagery. It makes me think of Daniel in the lion’s den. But there’s another source here that I’ll reveal momentarily, with regard to that line.
And then finally, you’ll notice what he does at the end in the last verse. What is the consequence of asking the complicated questions? “We are opened, he says, “we are answered, and we are found.” Questions, when it comes to something about which we care, puts us in relationship with that something, in this case, namely God.
Now, I wanted to know more about David Bjorlin, how he came to write this hymn, what his sources were. And so I did what any pastor with a good Cantor would do. I turned to Kyle, and I asked him, “Where do we go for this?” And he recommended a commentary written by his teacher at Luther Seminary, Paul Westermeyer. This is what Westermeyer says about our hymn of the day:
“David Borland grew up in a conservative evangelical context, where he witnessed what is not uncommon in some traditions: how honest questions and doubts were often interpreted as a sign of a person’s lack of faith.”
Have you ever experienced that kind of response when you ask questions? Paul Tillich, my favorite theologian, talks about how the greatest enemy of the Christian faith is not the secular humanist. It’s not Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins. It’s the Sunday school teacher who tells his or her students to “just believe.”
In this hymn, Westermeyer continues, Bjorlin relies on Christ’s directives in the Sermon on the Mount—ask, seek and knock—and attempts to demonstrate the ways in which complicated questions, disconcerting answers, and new ideas are necessary components of a living faith, and the place where God often encounters us. In our current cultural context, where, not only in evangelical circles, complicated questions and discussions are often dismissed in favor of winning for the sake of winning—you see that on social media all the time, where you “own the libs” or “own the conservatives”—this hymn is a welcome and constructive contribution to our life together as thoughtful Christians in the social orders and systems of our day.
Note, asking questions, as Westermeyer points out, is Biblical. It’s an invitation that we see in the Sermon on the Mount.
Note that asking questions can be part of a living faith. The Book of James says faith without works is dead. I say faith without questions can be dead.
But that’s not enough. I wanted to know more about this mysterious David Bjorlin and what influenced the writing of our hymn of the day. And so I did what most of us now do; I went online, and here’s what I found.
Greg Scheer writes a little commentary on Bjorlin’s piece as part of his musical blog, his musical diary. He writes, “It seems that Dave and I grew up in similar church contexts, where easy answers were dished out with as much relish as Jello salad at a Sunday potluck. Unfortunately, those easy answers often overlook the subtleties of real life; use the Bible to confirm pre-existing beliefs; and require complete agreement to stay in the club. Dave’s hymn, ‘Ask the Complicated Questions,’ assumes that God is big enough to handle our questions, doubts and disagreements.” That’s a breath of fresh air. Wouldn’t you agree? God is big enough to handle our questions, doubts and disagreements.
I remember first coming across this idea as an undergraduate student at a fantastic university named Santa Clara, where somebody is starting as a first-year student. I remember sitting in a class at a Catholic school taught by a nun, where I was Lutheran, reading a Lutheran theologian who said, “Serious doubt is a confirmation of faith.”
That changed everything for me. It changed everything for me, and that was confirmed when I was an intern pastor in Minnesota—I call that my cross-cultural experience— where, as my mentor used to say, as does Greg Scheer here, “God is big enough to handle our questions.” If God could bring a universe out of nothing, I think God can handle the questions we raise.
But that still is not enough. It’s not enough. And so I did what most of you probably won’t guess, but maybe many of you will, I don’t know. After consulting Kyle, after reading Paul Westermeyer, after going online, I decided to contact David Bjorlin myself on your behalf. I got an auto-reply, that he is out of the country, but, but, nevertheless, he replied yesterday!
I was so happy. And I love the way he starts out his message. He says, “Hi Dan, First, thanks for reaching out.” Wow, that’s hospitality right there. And then he says, “I’m glad this hymn particularly has struck a chord with people.” And I thought, that’s for Joel; only musicians would make a comment about “striking chords with people.” Notice the pun. “I wrote it generally, he continues, because I grew up in a tradition where doubt was seen as the opposite of faith, it seems to me that certainty has led to the fundamentalisms that are currently tearing our country apart, we could use the antidote of doubt.” And then he says, regarding his influences, here are two quotes that have been especially meaningful to me.
The first is anonymous. It says, “Doubt often brings me to poke at what I believe, and when it topples, I realize, that was an idol. And so doubt and disillusionment have been the divine gifts that have led me deeper into who God is.”
That’s restless faith, that’s searching faith.
And then the next line, he points out, comes from a great author of Russian literature in the 19th century. The quote is this: “It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My Hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.”
Recall the last line of the first verse, “forging faith in the fires of doubt.” The author of that line is Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Now I don’t know about you, but after consulting all of these authorities, what I find resonates with me deeply.
Here’s a little bit about my story. As some of you know, I grew up in a small town in northern California. I was raised in the Lutheran church, but during my adolescence, the area was becoming increasingly evangelical. I learned from friends that it was not right to ask questions of faith. It was important, instead, to submit, and to pretend to be certain. But in being part of the Lutheran church, I had an intuition that there was something more here, that there was something that I didn’t quite know, that there might be an alternative, or, as Paul Harvey would say, that there is more to the story, or the rest of the story.
And so I went to college, and I learned, not just that God is big enough for my questions, but I learned as a Lutheran, or as a friend to grace, that God’s grace, God’s unconditional love, frees me, frees us, to ask questions, and that’s how the Lutheran tradition was born. A university professor of Biblical studies was asking the hard questions, and out of his questions came the rediscovery of the gospel of grace.
Now this is not just my story, it’s the story, or rather the parable, in today’s Gospel reading:
A widow does not get justice against her opponent. What does she do? She persists. “Because this widow keeps bothering me,” the judge says, “I will grant her justice.” And Jesus, because it’s a parable, uses it to teach a lesson. He says, “and will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry out to Him, day and night?”
What’s the lesson? Persistence pays off. The cry for justice, the restless, searching faith, which dares to ask the big questions, is not only Biblical, it’s fundamental to who we are in Jesus Christ, as we are loved by God unconditionally.
Persistence pays off. It is part of the cry Jesus commends for justice, and is part of the searching, restless faith that guides us ever deeply into the mystery of God.
Now, if you still think faith is easy, read the book of Job. Thirty-eight chapters of Job asking and challenging God with questions. Or read the Psalms. Psalm 22 begins, “My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?” Or consider the last words of Jesus on the cross, which was taken from Psalm 22. According to Matthew and Mark, He says, “My God, my God. Why have you abandoned me?” Or read about the faith of the Apostle Paul; or read about the restless faith of Martin Luther, the restless faith of Soren Kierkegaard, or the restless faith of Martin Luther King. Or consider what it means to live as we do, in a time of tremendous uncertainty, in the dawn of the age of AI, in the potential unraveling of our democracy, in the constant fighting and conflict that occur between Americans, as we try to work out who we are as a nation; think about what it means to live in that context, and still trust that God is near. That’s faith. That’s the kind of faith that is able to face uncertainty, that is able to raise questions, that is able to doubt in the midst of tumultuous times.
Faith, I would argue, is anything but easy. And yet. There is this little group of people, some of whom are Lutheran, who dare to face these uncertainties; to ask questions boldly; who refuse to settle for easy, black-and-white answers; who courageously ask complicated questions because of their faith, and because they trust, as I do, that God is not only big enough for their questions, but God’s grace freesthem to ask such questions. Frees, perhaps, you and me, to keep questioning.
And to that, all God’s people should say,
Amen.