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| In The Spirit of Mystery Acts 11:1-13 Recently, at my friend’s home, I’ve been watching a mysterious art object that they have hanging by a wire in a tree. Through the open panels of windows I saw it there, orange and ivory colored. It’s a little like a mobile. It turns out that it is made from 12 tubes or sticks, stuck together like joints, you could say, all akimbo. Well, it’s a Star of David, the traditional six pointed geometric icon for the Jewish people and also the state of Israel.> Many older Christian churches also have this symbol, often in stained glass windows. That surprises people, but like the 10 Commandments, the Burning Bush, and other Hebrew symbols, Christians have a right to build on the Hebrew Bible and its world. But once when I looked out at the tree where this object was it seemed as if it was not there. That was a little shocking. One’s brain temporarily wakes up, it’s disturbed, does a double take. “I thought there was a Star of David in the tree,” it says. The mind, clumsy tool that it is, always visually scans for what it knows, not for what it doesn’t know. The mind’s eye is constantly trying to figure the familiar. That’s why it’s hard to learn something new, because the eye initially only registers what the brain has already imprinted. So I, at first, didn’t even see it when the orange and ivory thing was just a straight line in the tree. My mind drew a blank “Where’s that Star of David?” it said. Later, I saw an orange and ivory box with little points sticking out the side, but no star and no straight line. When I saw this contraption sway in the breeze I realized that it was turning and turning and that all its angles were in three dimensions, and only from one view, one plane, one temporary stillness, was it a Star of David. The rest of the time it is almost a Star of David seen from a side angle, and sometimes it was just an odd box, or a straight line. Of course my mind says, “That thing is a Star of David”. That’s because I’ve put together one version of it into something I already know. But, if I were from a mountain hut in Tibet and had never seen the six pointed Jewish Star I would not call it that, nor would I “believe” that that is really what it was. Why would I? It’s only that shape as briefly as many others. So obviously I’m talking here about the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.
So as the prayer said this morning....our fleeting experience, experience of God’s presence, fleeting to us, eternal to God. Like the twisting star we can know a slice of God, we can even decide which angled slice is our favorite. But it’s not all of God. God is as present as that Star of David but is made visible, manifest, in a shifting variety of images some of which would never even register to some people as the Star of David. For better and for worse we live in that kind of a world where our representations of God can not be set in stone and only seen one way. Each of our 5 senses can sense something of God. To taste honey is to taste God’s sweetness. Our 6th sense too, intuitions and even trance like experiences and dreams can reveal God. But the mystery of God, the mystery of who God is, of the presence of Christ, of the actions of the Holy Spirit, all that is more mystery than we can make sense of. +++ There was a wise cartoon in the paper this week showing in the first square a person receiving the terrible news of the shootings at Virginia Tech. And then each succeeding cartoon box showed a person interpreting that terrible news into some kind of proof of their previously held world view. Each box pictured a person making a protest placard with their favorite slogan and cause. As if the reality of that horror were nothing more than a truth, already known, and now just simply proven again. There were placards about gun control, about immigration, about ethnic stereotypes, about gender, about mental illness. All were pictured in this cartoon as mere post-its proving pre-existing perceptions. What I thought was so wise about the cartoon was that it left it’s insight to “go off” in you. It wasn’t a cartoon trying to show its own “real and correct” view – as if it could be saying: “So the real truth about this horror is, blah, blah, blah.” Rather it left it up to you to feel, not just to think, but also to feel, “Maybe all of those causes are true, but maybe none of them is the truth, and that took me to feel the edge of mystery: “Do any of us really know what that event was, what it means, why it happened?” Does it prove anything and would it really satisfy
us to know what we are supposed to think about such chaos and tragedy?
I don’t think we really do know, or believe we really can know, what really, really, really happened in any such thing, including 9/11. I think sometimes we people stay glued to TV news as a way of trying to get the crack in the universe all stuck and pasted back together, all closed up by some detail, some collection of details and some opinion by some expert – often by a psychologist, sometimes by a politician, sometimes a clergy person. Mostly, those first-to-last-word explanations serve only to let us move on into a world where what just happened has been explained away. Our human need to know is admirable, but it’s the Bible’s view that we cannot know it all. Mystery is our constant companion, the common denominator to all our calculated changes. Mystery is the unfixable crack in our brain. It is also, as Leonardo Cohen sings, “How the light gets in.” It is when our universe cracks that our brains stop and God’s light and love come through and into us. This is the slight shift in awareness that Buddhism calls enlightenment. Christianity knows it as the grace awakening the heart, of life lived in the Holy Spirit. ++++++ All our Scriptures today wildly celebrate this life in the Spirit. Look at our story of Peter. Peter used to be an awkward, big fisherman with an impulse disorder. He had very little self awareness of just what a big, overly self confident, inflated, guy he was. Mystery had yet to humble him. When his universe cracked, when Jesus died, and before the Spirit came into Peter, he just quit everything, went back to Galilee to return to his old predictable knowable non-mysterious life as a fisherman. In fact, at the end of the gospel of John we see Peter being grilled and challenged by Jesus – “Do you love me Peter?” says Jesus 3 times. Peter is irritated and distracted and besides saying “yes, yes, yes” he counts his fish. In fact he is so much “not into” mystery that we know that he had just caught “a full catch”, that there were” big fish” and in fact that there were 153 of them – He was that mystery-less! Peter didn’t seem to do any better at the last breakfast Jesus had prepared for him, and James, and John, than he did at the Last Supper. Read the last chapter of the gospel of John for the picturesque details of Jesus and his charcoal fire and their last breakfast together. And the upshot of all this is a new source of awareness, a new social ethnic and a new way to live with people who are different. It was a trance and a dream not diversity training that transformed Peter, who boldly tells his alternative consciousness story as a way of saying to his fellow Jews: We can eat and sit with unclean strangers , God’s Spirit, mysteriously given, is in them too. What is beginning to happen here is what we learn in the Book of Revelations – that a new heaven and a new earth are coming. But by the time we meet Peter again in the Book
of Acts (which is really chapter two of Luke’s Gospel) Peter
is having trances, he’s dreaming dreams that teach him God’s
new will and way of life – not reading the Torah, mind you,
not scripture, but dream – like visions. He’s meeting
people by seeming coincidental magic, what we call synchronicity We have a mystery here today. We have communion here today. In bread and wine in communion, the world is touched by God’s sacramental presence. This bread and wine are God’s sacramental presence. In the ancient words of the church, “The word made flesh transforms bread into flesh by his own word! Wine becomes the blood of Christ! And though our senses fail, faith alone suffices, and strengthens the pure in heart. Let us bow down to this great sacrament...Let faith provide affirmation, when feeble human senses fail. Praise to the Father! Praise to the Son! Praise the Spirit in jubilation.” Amen.
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God
Is Still Speaking www.stillspeaking.com |
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