bring your brain to church

I got an appropriate email from a congregant following Sunday's sermon asking for some clarification on the message. There was a fear that I was preaching an anti-intellectual message given that I took the Sadducees to task for asking a "dead" question (Mark 12.18-27).

I’m a student of theology and enjoy thinking about doctrine and how things work and so forth. I suppose I was making a distinction about the origin of questions, not the substance of them per se. I would argue, and maybe I did that morning, that any question asked as a purely academic exercise without an underpinning of devotion or without a foundation of a relationship with God or without a desire to know the Divine is a dead question. It’s not the question so much as the asker and where that person is that determines whether or not a question has merit.

By that standard, potentially any question could be dead. As well, any question, if asked from a place of seeking, could be alive (to stretch the metaphor—perhaps to its breaking point). The Sadducees engaged in an intellectual dual to tear down, not to build up, to close the Gospel, not to open it.