Click to hear this sermon  sermon090830

Today concludes a series of sermons entitled 'First Questions for God.'

First Questions for God: What is Your Mystery? - Romans 8: 12-21 - August 30, 2009 - Cicero United Methodist Church - Everett J. Bassett

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

            Today concludes a series of sermons entitled 'First Questions for God.' I've been asking questions of God that we might use to get acquainted with somebody. The first three are questions we might hear in any get-acquainted conversation. The first is 'What is your name?' For God, the answer was given to Moses in the book of Exodus: the name God chose was Yahweh, which translates, roughly, "I am that I am." And God's sharing of His name was an indication that God wants not to be a distant or impersonal force or spirit. God is a Person who wants to be in an intimate relationship with us.

            The second question was "What do you do?" And there, the answer was provided by the very first words of the Bible - 'In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth ... ' God's primary occupation is creation. Later, people called God Savior, but that simply means that God saves what He creates. God is the Source, the Artist, the Maker of all that is; and continues to create beautiful and miraculous things today.

            The third question was, "Where do you live?" And there, we realized what the Hebrew people realized as they wandered homeless through the wilderness - that God isn't a localized deity tied down to one place. God is present everywhere, and, most importantly, God can live in our hearts as a source of grace and love if we invite Him.

            Then we said that after we ask someone these three initial questions, and we go out on the second date, or resolve to get to know someone on a deeper level, we start to ask deeper questions. Chances are, we don't put these questions into words, but we ask them silently, and observe a person over time. The first of these questions is, "Who are you really?" And for that one, we discovered with Moses that God is Love - not a harsh judging God; or a vindictive and cruel God, but a loving and caring God.

            And then last week the question was, "What is your passion?" And here we found that the holy passion of the biblical God is the dignity and blessing of all His people, especially the forgotten and downtrodden ones. We humans try to legalize God's passion - to say that God is ultimately passionate about rules and traditions and holy practices, as important as some of them might be. But the prophet Micah helped us see that the Lord requires kindness, and mercy, and justice. God is passionate about how we treat each other, and that everybody has dignity and opportunity.

            So that leaves us with one more question to go, and 1 thought long and hard about this one, and never quite came up with the wording I wanted. Finally, I wrote down, "What is your mystery?" which, of course is an awkward question that we would never ask anybody. But what I mean to say is that people ultimately are mysterious. And no matter how many questions you ask them, no matter what a good detective you are, and no matter how long you are with someone, and how well you think you know them - you don't. Not completely. There is a mystery to people that can't be pinned down in five questions. People are full of surprises, endlessly evolving, endlessly mysterious.

            In a long relationship, including some of those wonderful marriages of fifty or sixty years, you might think you get to know everything about a person. But there are still surprises. I saw a couple on TV. They were in a restaurant, and she was in the rest room, and he was ordering at the table. "I'll have a glass of your Lambrusco," he said, "And my wife will just have water with no ice." "No ice?" said the waiter. "That's right, no ice." "Do you want me to wait and ask her when she comes back?" asked the waiter. "Look," said the man, "After 47 years of marriage, I know my wife. She won't want ice." The woman comes back to the table, the waiter brings the drinks, and the woman immediately says, "No ice?" And the waiter very diplomatically says, "Oh, I'm sorry ma'am. My mistake." I think there was a big tip waiting at that table. That's a small thing - but big or small, we never really solve the mystery of another human being. In fact, we can't even predict our own moods and desires. "What is your mystery?" is a question we can't answer about ourselves or somebody else in twenty lifetimes.

            And if that is true of our fellow human beings, imagine how it is with God, who by definition is on another plane from anything humans could hope to fully understand. That's why we have some of those fancy theological words that have been applied to God through the centuries: unfathomable, omnipotent, transcendent, invisible, immortal.  God is simply beyond human understanding.

            But that's okay. Because one of the things that we shouldn't overlook in this series of sermons, is that the answer to every question we've asked has been Good News. In fact, the more we get to know God, the better the news gets: a God who shares His name, who creates and saves, who lives everywhere, including our hearts, who is full of compassion, and delights in the dignity and hope of all people. That's all amazing news for the world.

            And God's mystery is Good News as well. In fact, some may call it the best news of all. Albert Einstein once wrote, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." And what a dismal world it would be if, indeed, there were no mystery - if we did have it all figured out - and if what we know now is all there is. That would be a sad thing, because we humans reach for beauty, and for goodness, and for hope. But, we fall far short. These lofty goals exceed our grasp in so many ways. Our only hope is that they exist in the mystery that is not yet revealed to us. Einstein, the greatest scientist of our era, understood this.

            So did the apostle Paul, perhaps more than any other writer in the Bible. Paul was surely a realist - he was firmly planted in this world. He had to be, because every time he opened his mouth to proclaim his faith, reality was waiting for him - he was arrested, beaten, threatened in every way, thrown into prison for long periods of time. Paul could not ignore the realities of cruel, hard facts.

            But he knew it didn't end there. He wrote constantly about the mysterious realm of God behind what we could know on this earth. In I Corinthians 13, he wrote that now we see through a dim glass, but one day we will see face to face. In I Corinthians 15, Paul wrote, "Behold, I tell you a mystery," and then talked about the victory beyond death. And in today's scripture lesson he brings us these beautiful words: "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed to us." That's Paul's image of mystery - it is glory, and one day we'll see it! And it shines victorious next to the sufferings we endure in this life, and Paul had more than most. And we get glimpses of that glory, but there is so much more that God will show us. That is the Good News of knowing and serving and loving a God of mystery.

            And yet, we are so uncomfortable with that idea. We see it in the way people tend to move toward churches and leaders that promise easy answers - that claim to know it all.  For example, some churches teach that the Bible will answer every question, and that they know just how to interpret it. As much as I love scripture, I find that it leaves more in mystery than it gives quick answers to our questions. Other churches say that the pronouncements of the church leadership will answer every question we might have about faith. Again, as much as I respect many of the teachings of our Christian tradition, I see more mystery than certainty. Some preachers or teachers claim to have found the answers to the spiritual search. Many of them are valuable guides, and their promise of easy answers is enticing, but none of them have solved the mystery of God. One of the best of them, Saint Augustine in the 4th century wrote this: "If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God." God is beyond our understanding. We search to know and understand and pin God down, and God remains far greater than our search.

            We don't even know what to call God. All the while I have been talking about God in this series of sermons I have been limiting God by referring to God as he, or him, as if God is male. I follow Jesus in this, who referred to God as his heavenly Father - and Paul, again from this morning's scripture, referring to God as Abba, or Father. That masculine, fatherly image works for me, mainly because my earthly father is one of my heroes, and was a kind and strong man. Calling God Father is a happy image for me. But I've met many people over the years who had abusive fathers, or neglectful fathers, or demanding fathers, or no fathers. And for them, the association of fatherhood with God is dreadful. For them, Mother may be more meaningful, like the mother bear in the Bible, or some of the other feminine images for God there. For some, shepherd is the most meaningful image, or king, or nursemaid, or dove. The thing is, no earthly image captures God. God remains in mystery. But that's okay, because we do, too. People are mysterious and unpredictable. That's why relationships are adventures, full of surprises, ever unfolding. We get to know a person over time, enough to trust a person, to love a person, to take the hand of the person. But we never fully solve the mystery of a person.

            So it is in our relationship with God. We set out in these sermons to get to know God better. We discovered that there are some beautiful things to know - God created the world; God shared his name; God spoke through prophets; God made holy covenants with his people; God showed his passion for love and justice; and then, most supremely, God sent His Son for us. And God desires to take your hand, to journey with you. There is more than enough evidence to let you see the love and grace that reaches out to you. The rest is mysterious. But the testimony of the ages is that when we resolve to journey in trust and humility before God, we have started down the road to our deepest joy. We won't see it all until that great day far beyond. But we've seen enough to believe. Could there be any other way to travel this earth than firmly rooted in the God of the ages?