"Bohemian Believers"

"Bohemian Believers"
Matthew 7:7-12


I recently watched the movie version of the musical, “Rent.”  I don’t recommend it to everyone.  It was disturbing to me for a lot of reasons.  But what was disturbing was also thought provoking.  What caught me up the most were the characters of the musical:  young, 20-somethings, who live, should I say, unconventional, nonconforming lives.  There was the Columbia philosophy professor whose questions and searching had to do with trying to find the meaning of life.  Suddenly, for him, none of the answers he’d found previously made sense.  Therefore, none of his questions made sense.  He resigned his teaching position.  He began asking himself different questions, not about the meaning of life, but about the meaning and boundaries of love.

There was the rocker, who didn’t begin to question anything until he lost his girlfriend to a drug addicted suicide.  He wants to write the one, pure song that will encapsulate all his questions.  He’s seeking for answers to why life ends up so tragically.  Like the prodigal son, he runs away, not to a life of sin, but a life of conventionality in New Mexico.  He finally realizes he must take his old life on, rather than run away from it.  Only then does his song start to come to him.

There’s the film maker who wanted to display life in all its rawness and reality, especially for AIDS and HIV patients.  In ways films are not normally made, he puts together his movie as a visual montage.  Sensitively and poignantly he gives his characters a venue and voice to ask, seek, and knock, as one-by-one they all die.  His movie ends up serving as a powerful memorial for those whom “normal” society has deemed to have no voice.  He chronicles the outcasts who are told they don’t deserve to have their stories told.  His movie asks the question, “Why can’t these people be heard?”

And there’s the 19 year old stripper, addicted to heroin because she feels there are no more questions worth asking.  Nothing worth seeking.  No doors worth knocking on, except where to get her next fix.  She gives up.  When her friends finally find her, she is near death.  She is cold from the winter outside, and the winter inside her soul.  She is hungry, but unwilling to eat.  She is poisoned with the drugs of heroin and fatalism.  She breathes her last.  The rocker, who has fallen in love with her, sings the one, pure song he has finally written to her lifeless body.


What I began to ponder while watching the movie--and continue to ponder--was the way the characters in the movie questioned everything.  Nothing was too sacred.  Nothing too profane.  At one point they sing a song about being young bohemians--people who are trying to look at life differently, who refuse to succumb to conventional viewpoints, who renounce the answers most everyone else just swallow on a daily basis.

I sat there watching the movie, and as I am standing here now, I’m struggling with the approach to life depicted by the young bohemians in the movie.  I began to interface that approach to life with the statements Jesus makes about questioning, seeking, and knocking.  This sermon is my struggle with what it means to live a Christian, reflective lifestyle that isn’t afraid to ask questions.

It was the questioning, seeking and knocking that gave the characters in the movie their vitality.  It wasn’t the answers they found.  They even questioned their answers.  It was in the process of always being curious, always being inquisitive, always wondering, never being satisfied.  All of their questions were being bounced off of Mimi’s life--the drug addicted 19 year old.  Mimi never questioned anything.  Never wondered “Why?” or “What if?”  It was her giving up and giving in to the river and current of an unreflective life that played off the energy of all the other character’s questions.

I began to wonder how many of us are Mimi.  Our drug is not heroin.  Our drug is conventionality.  Only willing to go along with stale questions and even more stale answers.  Our drug is the unwillingness to ask, seek, knock.  To resist being what I would call “bohemian believers.”

I began to wonder if we are addicted to the same kind of quiet, desperate, traditional, unreflective, escapist life that is afraid to ask ourselves hard questions.  Are we unwilling to go down a road, that at first sight, appears to be a dead end?  Do we refuse to knock on doors of places that aren’t in the good neighborhood of orthodoxy?

Ask, and you will receive.  Search, and you will find.  Knock, and the door will be opened for you.  Everyone who asks will receive.  Everyone who searches will find. And the door will be opened for everyone who knocks.

Did you listen carefully to what Jesus is telling his disciples/us?  Knowing what you’re looking for isn’t as important as the looking itself.  Jesus doesn’t describe what you’re supposed to be asking about.  He doesn’t even tell us what, exactly, we will receive, find, or have opened for us.  He doesn’t give us a list or even a hint of the questions we’re supposed to ask.  He doesn’t describe what you should be searching for.  He doesn’t say which doors we should be knocking on.  Jesus didn’t expand with any details because what he is emphasizing is the attitude, not the specifics.  It is simply the continual attitude of asking, searching, knocking that Jesus emphasizes.

I think the assumption of Jesus is that as long as we are on that quest, God is going to bring us around to asking the questions we really NEED answered;  that God is going to get us searching for that which we really need to find;  that God is going to direct us to the doors we should be knocking on.  The important thing is that God can’t do that if we don’t have the heart, or the will to ask, search, and knock in the first place.  The heart and will and drive has to come first.

I think there’s something else going on for those who refuse to embark on what I’m calling the Bohemian Believers journey.  It’s fear.  For Mimi, in the movie “Rent,” the fear was that when she went asking there would be no answers.  The fear was that when she went searching for something different, all paths would lead to dead ends.  The fear was that when she went knocking, all doors would open up to emptiness.  That’s one part of the fear.

The other part of that fear, for those of us who have not given into Mimi’s fatalism, is the fear that we will find answers, findings, and openings that will be different than what we want or expect.  So, in order to protect ourselves from the unknown or the different, we just don’t ask, search, or knock.  We keep ourselves sheltered in the secure and non-threatening questions and answers.  We refuse to risk.  We refuse to venture out on a journey of faith that may take us who knows where.  Because, if we do that, what if we get different answers, discover something we didn’t expect, have a door opened up to a whole new environment?  I had a poster once that read, “Ships in the harbor are safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”  What if we find out we’ve just been docked in our own familiar worlds too long, and that it’s time to put out to sea--that is, explore where we are in our faith, and where we need to move out to?  To find out “what we’re built for.”

If we follow Jesus’ lead here, what we understand about God is that God is not afraid of our questions, our search, nor our knocking.  Jesus is telling us that God wants us to do that.  The only ones who are afraid of doing that is not God, but us.  Our fear may be that we just might find out we’ve got it all wrong.  Anyone who reads the Psalms, or the book of Job, or Ecclesiastes, or Lamentations, can see clearly that asking, searching, and knocking is the attitude God not only allows, but expects:
Job asks God:  “Are people mere things to you?  Why all this dodging and shuffling?  Human life is nothing but a struggle, isn’t it?”  (Job 6, 7)

One of the psalmists writes, “God, are you avoiding me?”  (Psalm 10:1)

The writer of Ecclesiastes, in wondering about the meaning of life, starts out his book by asking a lot of questions.  Questions like, “What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone?” (1:3)  And then follows that up with the question, “What has happened before that won’t happen again?  Is there nothing new in the whole world?”  (1:9)

And in Lamentations, a book of tears about the destruction of Jerusalem, and the awful human atrocities that took place, Jeremiah shouts at God:  “Look at us, God.  Think it over.  Have you ever treated anyone as badly as this?  Should women eat their own babies, the very children they have cared for?”  (2:20)  In that same book, Jeremiah asks so many tough questions about how it is that evil happens, and if God is behind it.  He asks, “Do both bad and good things come by the command of the Most High God?”  (3:38)

Here, in the Bible, there is page after page of people God allowed to ask some of the toughest questions about life that anyone could ask.  Like I said, God doesn’t seem to be afraid of such questions, but desires we pursue them, with Him.

Jesus spoke, in our verses from Matthew 7, about the children who ask for bread and fish.  So many of God’s children are asking their questions, searching the ins and outs of their lives, knocking on so many doors, looking for bread and fish, truth and discernment, answers and peace.  I want to believe that any of God’s children, who may be asking for bread and fish, even though they don’t realize it, that for all of us, God will not give stones or snakes.

I think Jesus is telling us something really important, not just about what it means to be a disciple Jesus’ way here, but also about who God is.  Jesus is telling us that God is a God who loves to direct people to the right questions, and then answer those questions.  Our God is a God who loves to find people who are searching for something, even if they have no idea what it is, and then help them find it.  Like the parable Jesus told, saying the Kingdom of God is like a man who happens to find a treasure in a field.  The man didn’t know he was searching for a treasure.  He just happened to be walking in a field.  But God puts a treasure right in his path, helping him find what he’d been looking for all along, without knowing it.  Our God is a God who loves to open doors people are drawn to, without really knowing why.  Then God challenges them to find the courage within themselves to walk up the steps and knock on the door anyway.

I’ve been talking (emailing) with my somewhat bohemian son and daughter about all this.  They are both accomplished questioners, searchers, and knockers.  They are both struggling with their faith right now, and asking some fairly tough questions.  For example, Ryan wrote to me:
I think we are all talking about questions of faith:  What does faith mean?  Who is God?  Where does God fit into my life?  Does God really have plans for us?  Is God the church?  Does the church know God?  Are there any answers to these questions, or just interpretations?  ...  And then when you’ve asked all of those questions, you can question whether the “answers” you arrived at are still valid based on questions you’ve asked since you found your previous “answer.”

He’s asking questions and dealing with stuff I never did at his age (he’s 27).  I love his question, “Is God the church?”  What an amazing question, because for him, if God is the church, what he’s seeing in the church right now, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with God--especially with church’s like Fred Phelps in Topeka, who the Supreme Court, this week, allowed to continue their ranting and craziness.  And the converse question is the same:  Is the church God?  If that is so, Ryan doesn’t want anything to do with the church, because to him, it’s make a very poor God.  And he’s absolutely right.

Ryan and Kristin are preacher’s kids.  Aren’t they supposed to have it all together?  Another tough, and maybe unfair question.  And what about their minister father?  But, even though they are questioning their basic beliefs, can we not, by Jesus’ statement, be sure that God will honor their questions and search?  That we can trust God to bring them around to where God wants them to be?

The point here, for me, according to Jesus’ words, is to keep asking, keep searching, keep knocking, because that’s where God is.  It’s a lifelong process.  And, as Ryan wrote in his email to me, the answers you get at one point in your life may not make sense at another time.  So we have to be willing to ask those same basic questions all over again, at different times in our lives, even though we assume we already know the answer.

The worst thing in life is not to have a bad faith-quest, but to give up the search all together.  The worst thing is to think you’ve asked enough questions, searched enough dead ends, knocked on enough doors.  The sad people are those who just sit, and search no further, who slip their ships into the harbor, and then into the dock, and never untie again, to go out in the risky seas.  To become the Mimi’s who have decided life is not worth asking about, that life’s troubling ins and outs are not worth searching, that closed doors are just better left closed.  The sad people are those who have given up the quest, and by so doing, have given up on God, who is out where the asking, searching, and the knocking is going on.