Life is a riddle
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Juli Belian
October 25, 2026 — Proper 25
Today’s lectionary readings – and, to be honest, much of life lately – seem to focus on a common theme. You always kinda hope they do … unless you don’t really care for the theme, eh?
There is a traditional Latin phrase to describe certain limits of Property law: Nemo dat quod non habet. It translates simply: “No one can give what they have not got.” I put that phrase on a slide with a picture of little clownfish Nemo to help them remember it. The phrase simply makes the common-sense point that if you do not hold title to property, you cannot convey title to that property, because you cannot give what you have not got.
Our lessons today seem founded on a corollary: You cannot give what you have not got – and you can’t always get what you have not got, because you can’t always get what you want.
I.
Consider today’s gospel. As a teacher, I gotta say, I really feel for Jesus here. My heart sinks to the bottom of my soul when no one in class will dare to ask me any questions.
You get a little crazy inside when every single person in front of you is just avoiding eye contact, hoping against hope and physics that they will thereby, somehow, become invisible.
And when, as a teacher, you get a little crazy inside, you’ll reach for anything – anything – that might prompt them. Prod them. Provoke them. Even an argument would be better than the dead silence of averted eyes. So you grab whatever you can. Like, maybe a riddle.
So Jesus, a.k.a. the Riddler, asks the lawyers, “Hey: Riddle me this: You say the Messiah is David’s son – but how can David call his own son, ‘Lord’?”
Except it doesn’t really seem like that great a riddle, does it? Not really … I mean, nowadays, we call each other all kinds of things without any regard for the logic of our words. As one example, many of us casually address each other as siblings even though we’re not even remotely related.
Bro.
So what’s the big deal about David calling the Messiah “Lord”?
Well, now is the time when we do the mandatory Belian vocabulary thing. But I promise it’ll be brief.
“Lord” in this passage is the Greek word, kyrios, a respectful title for one’s superior, one’s master – one’s boss.
(See, that didn’t hurt, did it? Much?)
On the other hand – and this is not vocabulary, really – on the other hand, the speaker is King David. Emphasis on the word, “King.”
A king has no boss, nor any co-workers, really. At the time of King David, there wasn’t anything like G7 economic forums where you could hang out with all the other nation-running bros. Other kings were rivals. If you were a king, there was generally only one way you would lose your job: Death. Whether peacefully at home, with your offspring inheriting your throne, or violently on the battlefield at the point of a sword, death was kingship’s main retirement program.
So the riddle comes down to this: How can a king call his own successor his boss?
And Matthew tells us, “No one was able to give [Jesus] an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.”
I can almost hear Jesus sighing heavily as he stands there looking at the class, their eyes darting up to the clouds or over to the street, not a one of them willing to engage him, not a one of them willing to learn or to be persuaded from their prejudices, not a one of them even willing to fight him.
Yeah, been there. Sorry, Jesus. You can’t always get what you want.
II.
Moses could tell you all about that.
Moses had finally reached the end of his own career, a long, exhausting 40 years leading the Israelites – first out of bondage, and then through decades of Civil War-type battles, not against Egypt, not against Amalek, but against each other. Against themselves. Battle after battle as the people God had chosen struggled to decide, ultimately, whose side they were on, as a people. And then finally, finally, God decided the Israelites were ready: Ready to commit to God, ready for the Promised Land.
But not all of them.
Moses climbed to the summit of Mount Nebo and God showed him “the whole land” and then told him, “I have let you see it, but you may not enter.”
I mean, what the heck? This is how you reward your best guy? What’s up with that?
Scholars across the centuries have explained God’s decision in different ways. There are multiple versions of the water-from-a-rock story, and the versions themselves can’t agree - one says God told him to whack the rock; one says the problem was that he whacked it; one says only that he broke faith. Whatever happened at that well, the scriptures themselves do not settle it. It’s also possible that this was just God’s recognition that a departing leader’s continued presence is the single most reliable predictor of an institution’s failure. It occurred to me last night that maybe God was just finally letting Moses get away from those people. We really cannot know. The text is telling us about a conversation no one else witnessed – it was just God and Moses, and Moses walked on up the mountain and never came back down. These are not minutes from the meeting; they are an effort to explain what happened. Moses worked his tail off for nearly half a century and never got to see his people enjoy the fruits of his own long labor.
Sorry, Moses. You can’t always get what you want.
III.
Most of us don’t need scripture to know this. We learn it in our own lives – eventually if we’re lucky, earlier if we’re not. A few days after Holly was diagnosed with breast cancer, we traveled to Ontario to play in a curling match, and while we were on the ice, I just couldn’t stop my brain from praying, “Please, God. Please, God. Please, God.” Over and over. I didn’t even know what I was asking. I wasn’t irrational enough to think the diagnosis could be a mistake, and I wasn’t brave enough to be asking for help in facing the situation. I think, like a child, I was saying, “I don’t wanna.” I didn’t want to face it. I didn’t want it to be true.
Sorry, Juli. You can’t always get what you want.
This is a hard truth, made all the harder by the fact that there is no second line, even if you’re a Stones fan. You can’t always get what you want does not inevitably lead to getting what you need. It’s a full stop. You just can’t always get what you want.
All things may work together for those that love the Lord, but there’s no time frame on that promise, is there? The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but as MLK Jr. noted, it is a very. Long. Arc.
[Long pause]
IV.
So now what? Is there any hope in all of this? Is there any light at the end of the tunnel other than an oncoming train?
I think there might be, but we might have to adjust our expectations a bit.
Today’s psalm gives us some assurance and might point the way a little bit:
Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked,
nor lingered in the way of sinners,
nor sat in the seats of the scornful! …
They are like trees planted by streams of water,
bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither…
I will note a couple of things about this psalm. First, it is not a promise and certainly not a contract. It doesn’t say you get this prize if you do these things; it is descriptive: Happy people do these things. For all we know from this translation, being happy is what makes you avoid sinners and snarks, rather than the other way around.
This frustrates me a bit, because I personally like knowing which way the causal arrow goes and because I’m never sure exactly who the wicked are. I hate having to guess who the sinners are, because that’s a weapon that can be yanked out of your hand and turned on you in a heartbeat. As for the scornful, I was already avoiding sitting in their seats, in self-defense, quite honestly.
But the part that really frustrates me is that the psalm says these happy people are like trees “bearing fruit in due season.”
Well, what exactly is “due season” and when does it roll around? I kinda wanna know that, please. I kinda wanna know when I’m gonna get my fruit.
[Long pause]
[Heavy sigh]
Feels like we keep coming back to the same point, doesn’t it?
You can’t always get what you want.
V.
And this sermon of mine stalled precisely here for quite some time, because I could not see any way out of this flat truth about life. Seemed like a mean thing to do in a sermon, just to drive in and park it over a black hole like that.
But as I kept thinking and thinking about it, I found my mind wandering back to the first thought I had on these texts and wondered, what if I take that seriously? Call it inspiration if you want, call it hoping to get lucky, call the whole thing an exercise in madness, but what if I take that Latin phrase seriously and apply it to my own relationship with God?
Nemo dat quod non habet.
No one can give what they have not got.
You cannot control what you do not own.
It is a ledge so slim that it feels like a Bruce Willis Christmas movie to stand on it while the winds of life are whipping all around, but it’s the best I have come up with: We should well know by now that we are not our own property. We do not belong to ourselves. We belong to Christ, and him crucified.
We can’t always get what we want for the simple reason that none of this is about us. Not us alone. Not us by ourselves.
It’s about us standing shoulder to shoulder with our neighbors and friends, straining to hear Jesus. It’s about looking Jesus in the eye when what he says challenges us to become more than we are right now. It’s about throwing our hands in the air like we just do not care when the Teacher asks, “Any questions?”
Jesus tried to wrap it up in what I flippantly called a bad riddle. I’ll try to follow suit:
How many members of St. Luke’s does it take to get a single one of us through this life?
(And the answer?)
All of us, my friends; every single one of us.
Amen