Category Archives: mystery

Lord’s Prayer: First Petition (+ Holy Trinity)

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I wrote this to be read by our congregational president when I was out sick on Holy Trinity Sunday, which also marked the start of our Lord’s Prayer sermon series. 
I am not with you because I am at home, sick. The illness is not a mystery. It is just something that I am waiting to finish. Being sick is a little like a puzzle. With enough information, we can solve the puzzle and, usually, things work out.
Of course, we know situations where people were sick and did not get well in the way we had hoped. Nevertheless, we almost always pursue the solution- the full solution, the answers to all our questions. No stones are left unturned. Questions are answered. Puzzles are solved.
We like solutions. There is hardly anything more aggravating than not being able to fix something or know an answer. In this room, right now, with the human knowledge plus the technological benefit of smart phones- there are many questions that could be answered, many problems that could be solved. Facts and figures and history and science- at our fingertips, in our minds, remembered and recorded.
Yet, there are two mysteries that remain here with us- two things we cannot solve, two puzzles that specifically do not have solutions. We cannot adequately explain the Trinity- the idea of one God with three expressions. And we cannot explain prayer.
Even if I were here in front of you, I could not solve these puzzles for you. And, frankly, Megan would probably rather be sick herself than to have to attempt it. The thing is… these are not problems. They do not need to be solved. The work of faith is learning to live both with God’s expansive nature and with the command to pray.
Oh, we do want to solve these mysteries. There are all kinds of object lessons about the Trinity- a three-note chord, an apple (skin, flesh, and seeds), water (ice, liquid, vapor). Ultimately, though, we cannot explain anything adequately. The faithful thing to do, then, is to stop trying. Stop trying to make sense of the Trinity. Stop trying to adhere to a specific kind of orthodoxy that will make it neat and clean.
Rest in the messiness of a God who is both Parent and Child, both enfleshed and ineffable, both eternal and resurrected, who knows all things and also experiences a thousand years like a day. God is bigger than we can imagine and yet we keep thinking we can solve God- like a Rubic’s cube. If we get all the colors lined up, then God- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit- will make sense, will be solved!
We do the same thing with prayer- except that we worry about getting it right. So much depends, we think, on being able to do it correctly, on solving the prayer problem, that we hardly notice when we’re praying all the time. We focus on the “how” and we forget the “who”.
            Jesus teaches disciples to pray, in Matthew’s gospel, by beginning, “Our Father in heaven, holy is your name.” God’s name is holy because it is the name upon which we can call for all things- for healing, in distress, in joy, for hope, for help. We begin by calling on the name of God because we can ask things of this name (and in this name) that cannot come from anyone or anything else.
            Yet, when people tell me they have a hard time praying, often they are concerned about “getting it wrong”. We want to have all our ducks in a row because, surely, if we pray in the right way, we will receive the thing for which we are asking. And that, right there, is the tough mystery of prayer. The part we want to solve. It is hard accept that a God who has made us, who has lived as one of us, and who sighs with us in prayer is present and at work in all things, even when our experience is bleak and dark.
            If things are not improving (in the way we expect), then God must not be listening (so we think) and if God is not listening (according to us), then we must be doing it wrong (it stands to reason). We are able to do so much, so quickly now and to know so many things… waiting with mystery is hard. What is hard is uncomfortable and what is uncomfortable is to be avoided. No one ever says, “Let’s go to the park with the hard benches! I love how uncomfortable we are there.”
            Part of living in faith, in trusting God, is learning to be consoled by the mystery of God’s relationship to God’s ownself (as Father, Son, and Spirit) and the mystery of God’s relationship to us- as we experience it through prayer- our prayers with words and our prayers with actions. God is bigger than our knowledge, than our imaginations, than our dreams. We cannot solve the mystery of God. That actually is good news. A puzzle has a solution. A riddle has an answer. But God, God is forever- and we live and rest, not through our own doing, in that eternity- even when we do not understand it.
Amen. 

It’s A Mystery (Sermon, 6/17)

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2 Corinthians 5:6-17; Mark 4:26-34
            When I was back on the East Coast a couple weeks ago, I went to visit my maternal grandparents’ grave. I went by myself and took flowers and water. I brushed off the stone, pulled the dead grass from around the edges, and then sat for a while and talked. My grandfather has been dead for just over eight years and my grandmother, for not quite four.
            I miss them frequently. When I was sitting at their graveside and talking to them through my tears, I kept thinking about what I was doing. If I believe they are resting here until the last days, why have I occasionally perceived them with me? Or if I believe that they are now in the presence of God, why is it so much more meaningful to be here in the place where I last saw their bodies?
            Somewhere in the mix of experience and emotion, in the tangle of reason and hope, somehow I hold to be true that my grandparents are resting in God, cheering me on, and waiting with all until the time of judgment. Yes, I realize some of those things seem contradictory, but they are all part of the presentation we receive in the written Scriptures about the life after death.
            Paul exhibits that same mix of future hopes in the passage from 2 Corinthians that we read today. 2nd Corinthians is pieced together from at least four or five letters that Paul wrote to the community at Corinth. If you read it straight through, it feels a little disjointed and Paul’s emotions and examples seem all over the map. In this section, he’s talking about how God calls the faithful into different kinds of ministries. That sounds like familiar Pauline stuff- the different gifts or different members of the body.
            He is also saying that all people receive help, through the Spirit, for the ministry of hardship and the ministry of reconciliation. Regardless of what your other gifts may be, Corinthians or Anchorage-ites, you will come to learn that there is struggle in the life of faith, but that you are never alone in that struggle (ministry of hardship). As we are learning to live and to die in and with Christ, we are also equipped for and brought into the work of sharing his message with those around us (ministry of reconciliation).
            Paul is writing so vigorously about these things that he points that out that he only sounds sane when he’s making the effort to talk to people. Usually, he’s just crazy for God. (“If we are beside ourselves, it is for God. If we are in our right minds, it is for you.”) As Paul writes furiously, he comments, “while we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord.”  What is Paul saying about the body here? And about when we return to Christ?
            When Paul talks about the body as treasure in clay jars or that being in the body means being away from the Lord, he is notlamenting that somehow our physical existence separates us from God or from God’s love in Christ. (Think Romans 8:36-38.) Paul does not believe in the immortality of the soul without the body. In the same way that he trusts in God’s resurrection of Jesus in the body, Paul trusts that this will happen to all those whom God has redeemed through Jesus.
            The struggle for Paul, in part, is that the degradation of the body in this life makes it hard for us to do all the work to which we have been called. By the time Paul is writing his 8th, 9th, 10thletters to the Corinthians, he’s older. He’s been beaten and jailed. Things are not quite as easy as they were. While this might not take a toll on the faith of his heart, the literal walk of faith has become more of a stretch for him. Paul laments to the Corinthians that the breakdown of our physical bodies in this life can make it hard to perceive or to dare to hope for (or to desire) their resurrection in the next.
            The other issue is that Paul expresses here, in one sense, the expectation that the dead are immediately in the presence of the Lord. This is an immediate hope. Elsewhere, in Philippians and in other letters to Corinth, the judgment and the life eternal are far off- a future hope. When we combine Paul’s own lack of timeline with other parts of the Bible, we can have a confusing landscape of expectations. Hebrews talks about the cloud of witnesses who are cheering us on in our race. Revelation talks both about the saints who are already around the throne and the judgment that is to come. Part of understanding what Scripture says about the life of the world to come is to consider who is writing about it and what their purposes are. The separate books and authors that make up the Bible are working together with Spirit to assure us, regardless of details, that our life begun in God remains in God forever. But the mechanics of what happens after what we know for sure are a mystery.
            This is part of the ministry of reconciliation that Paul talks about and to which we are called. The love of Christ urges on to this work- to loving and serving our neighbors, not to insure our future, but because we trust that it has been insured by work that is not our own.
            That’s the heart of the parable from Mark that Jesus spoke to his disciples. The sowing, the growth, the harvest is not ours. We’ve been called into the work, but the success of the kingdom is God’s work and God’s secret work. What we are called to do is obvious. What God does is mysterious. We have to learn to live with the mystery, the parable, and to let it go enough so that we can do the obvious to which we are called. If we refrain from feeding, from visiting, from healing, from teaching, from companioning until we understand everything… nothing will ever get done. The tasks we have from Jesus are plain; everything else is a mystery.
            This mystery is most certainly true about the life that is to come. I had a professor in seminary whose his first wife died of cancer when they were both young. When I talked with him about grief I was experiencing, he was very helpful. He also emphasized what we know and what we don’t. He talked about how he wished both of his wives knew each other, though he knew that was not possible right now. He also talked about wanting to know that his first wife was happy for him. He noted, to me, that he did not know that she wasn’t.
 All of my grandparents are dead. I wish that they could see Daniel, my son, and know what he’s like and how he’s growing. But I don’t know that they don’t know. I hear them speak to me sometimes. Maybe it’s that I really want to. Maybe it’s because they are encouraging me or advising me.
I have no idea what comes next. All I know is what I believe is true and I believe what Jesus says is true, not because I want immortality, but  because of what I have experienced and encountered through reason and Scripture through the Spirit. That God sees all people through the eyes of Christ and that we am called to do this too. That this is the life in which I am in now, and you too, and whatever comes next is beyond my control (and yours). That I have body that’s not what it once was, but is also not what it will be. That there is a new creation since the resurrection- a creation of reconciliation, healing, and hope unlike any other.
And in the mystery that is the new creation, we all (even the pastor) walk by faith, and not by sight.
Now, but not forever.
And we do not walk alone.
Amen.
           
            

Unexpected, Mysterious and Fun

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I’ve been trying to think of what to say about this article from the New York Times, in which the author calls himself a “None”- meaning no religious affiliation. It’s not this designation that bothers me. I’m also not too upset when he goes on to comment on how many such Nones get turned off religion by religious people. Been there, seen that, had it happen to me.

Here’s the thing that gets me:

We are more religiously polarized than ever. In my secular, urban and urbane world, God is rarely spoken of, except in mocking, derisive tones. It is acceptable to cite the latest academic study on, say, happiness or, even better, whip out a brain scan, but God? He is for suckers, and Republicans.I used to be that way, too, until a health scare and the onset of middle age created a crisis of faith, and I ventured to the other side. I quickly discovered that I didn’t fit there, either. I am not a True Believer. I am a rationalist. I believe the Enlightenment was a very good thing, and don’t wish to return to an age of raw superstition.We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt.Nones don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.” (We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”)By that measure, there is very little “good religion” out there. Put bluntly: God is not a lot of fun these days. Many of us don’t view religion so generously. All we see is an angry God. He is constantly judging and smiting, and so are his followers. No wonder so many Americans are enamored of the Dalai Lama. He laughs, often and well.

This gets my dander up in a variety of ways. First, and you may read however much defensiveness you wish into this because I can’t stop you, I appreciate reason and science and I don’t check my understanding of either at the church door. I don’t expect anyone else too.

But I take my reason and science right in there with me and somehow, someway, somewhere… they encounter mystery. It’s not hocus-pocus or woo-woo, it’s something intangible, indescribable and desirable.  Mystery is not automatically irrational, it’s just inexplicable.

Truth isn’t what works. What’s true is true, regardless of our ability to believe it. All of which means that I could be wrong in what I believe. I could be a little wrong (this life could be all there is). I could be a lot wrong (see: Reformation, the). I could be going to hell (does that really need parenthetical explanation?).

When Eric Weiner says that God is not a lot of fun these days, I think he might be talking to the wrong people or listening to them. The loudest voices don’t speak for God. They speak for themselves or whoever is paying them. They don’t speak for me. Speaking for myself, I have a darn good time.

Being religious, for me, is full of surprises, moving moments, laughter, questions and
discussion. And I see lots of people around me having a good time as well. I saw people laughing together tonight as they distributed food. I heard clergy laughing today as they pieced together sermon ideas for this week. I heard children giggling through the Christmas story and I heard adults chuckling about how to tackle serious issues related to healthcare.

I’ve said the wrong words during church, choked on what I was singing when a spider jumped on music, forgotten major points of what I was going to say and even skipped elements of the service. Nothing happened. To me that’s not because there is no God, but because God isn’t worried about that.

I don’t think God’s worked up about perfect worship. Solemn faces. Pristine on-key singing. Regimented liturgical actions.

For me, my life of faith is on the edge, pushing the envelope, and skidding right up to the altar rail and thinking, “The Spirit led me back again! All right! We must be okay! Grace wins again!” Because I believe in a God of fullness, a fleshed out God who lives and breathes in all creation. The God who made me laughs, because I laugh and I am made in God’s image.

I believe this. I believe it is true, but my faith doesn’t make it true. It either is true or it isn’t. And I am living, whole-heartedly, like it is.

Which brings me back to mystery. Just because you can’t pick apart and explain every detail doesn’t make something unreal, dishonest or untrue. In age of science and reason, I think it’s good for all of us to know that there are things we cannot explain, we cannot fully grasp, we cannot totally control. That’s right. We’re not totally in control and it SUCKS to admit it.

Some things are mysterious. The pull and push of certain sounds, sights and smells can be unraveled and unraveled, yet still remain, in part, unexplained. And here’s where I think some Nones (not necessarily the author) and certain religious fundamentalists are singing from the same page. Everything has to have an explanation. Either it’s God or science. Having an explanation is about control.

Mystery. Learn to live with it. Learn to embrace it. Roll in it and let it wash over you. Babies in hay, stirring songs, sunrise, sunset, quiet nights, bustling cities, bread and wine and thou, fire, flower buds, blue skies, water, first words, last words, kisses, and amazing coincidences.

There will be some things you will never explain. This is most certainly true.

And you just have to laugh about that.