What Ails You?

This sermon was originally preached in Isaacson Chapel at North Park Theological Seminary community worship, September 4, 2025.

I’m of the firm belief that we need to take myths more seriously. Far from pagan myths or simple children’s tales, they so often hold hard-earned wisdom passed down generation to generation through that most powerful medium of story. To question whether they actually happened or not is an adventure in missing the point. For “myth is not something that never happened,” the Greek stateman Salon noted, “it’s something that happens over and over again.” So, I want to share a myth, tell you a story that may have wisdom that resonates with our Christian tradition.

Once upon a time in King Arthur’s court, there was a knight of the round table named Parsifal. He was a man engaged in all the usual chivalric adventures you would imagine for a knight: saving damsels in distress and unhorsing evil knights in jousts. Yet like many of the knights, it was the search for the grail that fired his imagination—partly because the land around him seemed to be falling under a shadow of desolation and decay, and only the grail promised to redeem it.

One day far from home, he came upon a fisherman plying his trade in the middle of a lake. Needing a place to stay, he cried out, “Uncle, do you know a place I might rest the night?”

The fisherman rowed over and told him there was only one such place, Wilderness Hall, and he would not only show him the way but serve as his host. As the fisherman led the way, Parsifal noticed that the man walked gingerly, limping slightly. Looking closer, a wet stain spread from the top of his leg. It was a deep wound to the fisherman’s thigh that would not heal.

The fisherman led him to the most magnificent castle Parsifal had ever laid eyes on, and as they walked in, the many servants began to bow low to the fisherman; it turned out he was not a lowly serf but the king himself!  The fisher-king led him and a growing entourage into an equally grand dining hall where a feast awaited them. Taking seats of honor, the fisher-king and Parsifal watched as a procession displayed many of the treasured held in the castle—and at the last, the grail itself was processed out. Agog with wonder, Parsifal barely noticed that the fisher-king seemed to be growing increasingly exhausted. It almost seemed as if he is waiting for Parsifal to say something, anything, but not wanting to offend by saying the wrong thing, Parsifal kept his mouth shut. Finally, the fisher-king brought the evening to a close and sent Parsifal to his lavish chambers to sleep.

Yet, when Parsifal awoke the next morning, the castle was deserted, and not a hint of the previous night’s festivities remained. When he left the castle in search of the inhabitants, the draw bridge lifted behind him, and he was shut out. The more distance he put between himself and the castle, the more turned around he got until he could no longer find his way back even if he tried.

Instead, he came across as strange woman in the forest. She asked what his quest was and, no doubt bursting to tell someone about the strange events, he recounted the whole story. When he got to the part where he actually saw the grail, the woman could hold back no longer:

“Did you ask the question?” she asked.

“No,” Parsifal responded, “I didn’t want to speak out of turn or say something stupid.”

“You fool!” the woman howled. “You had the grail within your reach, and all you had to do was ask the question to set it free!”

To make an already long story short, it would take many years, many battles, many hard-fought lessons for Parsifal to find himself in the company of the fisher-king again. But through a series of events, he did.  The fisher-king still bled from his open wound and seemed to be in even greater pain than when he had last seen him. Looking into the fisher-king’s imploring eyes, Parsifal finally felt the question welling up within him and blurted out, “Uncle, what ails you?”

Uncle, what ails you?

As soon as the question left his mouth, a look of relief spread across the fisher-king’s face, and the grail appeared. The light flowing from the grail spread across the fisher-king’s leg and closed the gaping wound without leaving behind so much as a scar, and then spread outward in all directions, bringing restoration to everything it touched. Dry riverbeds flowed with water, barren fields sprouted new life, dead trees burst into bud. It was the right question, it turned out, that was the start of the fisher-king’s and the world’s healing.

You’re no doubt already ahead of me, but there seems to be several deep truths that are held in this myth. First, when we come across mysteries we do not understand in another, questions are usually better than statements; and open-ended questions better than yes-or-no questions.  During spiritual direction training this summer, I learned that one of my inner tendencies, and many novice directors’ tendencies, is to give advice, because I, in my infinite wisdom, obviously know how to fix the problem the other person is experiencing.

So, if I saw that gaping wound on the fisher-king’s thigh, I might say, “Here’s what you do: First, you’re going to want to clean it out really well so it doesn’t get infected. Then, I’d recommend stitches…etc., etc. But I noticed that these “helpful” statements often had more to do with my own projections of my anxieties or fear of that which I cannot control. I want to help, but as Anne Lamott is fond of saying, “Help is the sunny side of control.”

Yes/no questions are a little better, but they’re also often leading, smuggling in my hidden agenda. “Do you think you might need a doctor?” But open-ended questions, especially good ones like “What ails you?” invites both people to pause and listen for the Spirit of God.

And perhaps that’s why when Jesus encounters others, he is so often not telling them how to change their life or even giving advice (though he sometimes does that too) but is asking questions: What do you want me to do for you? Who do you say that I am? Why are you so afraid? Why did you doubt? By some counts he asked over three hundred questions in the Gospels. Christ is comfortable with questions.

Second, and directly related, because Christ is so comfortable with questions, I believe when we encounter the mysterious and mystifying parts of existence, we too are invited to bring our most thorny and complicated questions to God. One of the great gifts of seminary is the time and space to ask complicated questions, not cynical questions used to tear down straw men, but faithful questions seeking deeper truths that can be asked and held in a community of faith. “Ask,” Jesus invites us, “and it will be given unto you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be open to you” (Matthew 7:7). You are here at seminary to ask and seek and knock.

But what we are given, what we find, what opens up to us might be very different from what we expected when we first asked and sought and knocked. In fact, we might find that the answers we are given don’t seem like answers at all (which is how I often feel when I read the end of the book of Job!).  We might even be led deeper into questions, paradox, mystery. But maybe in a world full of people with all the answers and hot takes, we need more people with the humility to ask questions and be less certain; to wonder rather than to know.

It is no doubt over-quoted, but I do believe that the advice Rainer Maria Rilke gives to the young poet he corresponds with is particularly helpful to seminarians and all engaged in theological inquiry. He writes to his young disciple, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue…Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Next week during our convocation liturgy, we will pray that our community might have “the patience to love the questions,” and in the rite for the new students in our midst, we will charge them to “fear no questions.” Take this prayer and admonition seriously. You are here to live these questions. Do not fear them, for God invites them.

Finally, the story of Parsifal teaches us not only to ask better questions to each other, to bring our most complicated questions to God, but also gifts us with this wise and powerful question—“Uncle, what ails you?” Friend, sister, stranger, congregant, enemy, what ails you? This question, first, is one I believe Christ asks each of us—”Child, what ails you?” He invites us to name our deepest wounds, admit our greatest shames, confess our strongest fears so that their hold on us may be loosened; so that we can have them transformed rather than transmit them to others.

Second, I would suggest that this question, “what ails you?”, might be the key to the ongoing work of justice-making and reconciliation. This realization came when I was listening to a 2016 interview with Civil Rights legend Ruby Sales. In it, she describes an event that was a turning point in her own understanding of her vocation. The epiphany occurred when she went to have her hair done at her stylist’s house. In the middle of that rather long process, the stylist’s daughter Shelley came in. Shelley was a mess—cadaverously thin, strung out on drugs, festering sores all over her body. As Sales looked at what many would write off as a hustling drug addict who should either be ignored or berated and told to change her life,

Sales heard a different voice. She recounts, “So, something said to me, ask her: ‘Where does it hurt?’ And I said, ‘Shelley, where does it hurt?’”

Uncle, what ails you?

Shelley, where does it hurt?

Sales continues, “And just that simple question unleashed territory in her that she had never shared with her mother. And she talked about having been [the victim of] incest. She talked about all of the things that had happened to her as a child. And she literally shared the source of her pain. And I realized, in that moment, listening to her and talking with her, that I needed a larger way to do this work, rather than [simply] a Marxist, materialist analysis of the human condition.”

Shelley, where does it hurt?

Uncle, what ails you?

What if that were the question we asked when faced with the sadness, anger, or pain of another? What if instead of seeing people as problems to be fixed, we first asked where it hurts—acknowledging their agency that is so often ignored or taken from those who are marginalized and oppressed? What if, instead of zero-tolerance policies, mass deportations, longer jail sentences, more prisons, and harsher retributions, we asked those who have hurt others, “Friend, what ails you? Where does it hurt?” Quaker writer Parker Palmer once wisely noted that “Violence is what happens when we don’t know what to do with our suffering.” The question, “Where does it hurt?” allows at least an opening for suffering to be expressed and violence to possibly be averted.

Or, perhaps even more difficult for some of us, what if we sat down to Thanksgiving dinner with our red-hatted uncle spouting conspiracy theories and, instead of being drawn into the usual futile argument, asked,

“Uncle, what ails you?”  For I think we don’t mind the question “where does it hurt?” when we have someone we consider to be mostly a victim or someone at arm’s length. But what happens when it is someone who has hurt people, who is both victim and perpetrator, or whose actions somehow implicate us too by their proximity? I am most definitely not talking about people who have abused us, but those people whose shadow sides reflect our own, whose more public wounds match our hidden ones? It takes great courage and faith in that moment to ask,

“Where does it hurt?”

I am becoming more and more convinced that what our world needs is not better talking points or arguments (since people didn’t logic themselves into these positions, you’re not going to logic them out of them), nor performative solidarity or virtue signaling. It needs more people willing to approach another with curiosity rather than judgment, to not hide behind the defenses of bold statements on social media but become mutually vulnerable with empathetic questions. Not relativizing right and wrong or ignoring injustice, but realizing that because we are all connected, it will only be collective healing that will restore us. And the right question might, just might, hold the key to healing—our own, our neighbors, and our world.

Friends, what ails you?

Where does it hurt?

Amen.