April 3

Lent 4 – Be: Mystery

April 3, 2011

Exodus 33:18-23

Moses said, ‘Show me your glory, I pray.’ And he said, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, “The Lord”; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But’, he said, ‘you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.’ And the Lord continued, ‘See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.’

We started this series by entertaining uncertainty, then we talked (with that uncertainty) about who Jesus is for us. Last week we tackled (hah!) the topic of violence. This week we face the Mystery. The Mystery is not a puzzle to be solved; instead it is the vast unknown that is what we name God.

Moses, arguably the person in the Bible who knew God best (other than Jesus, I guess), still never saw God face to face. The closest he ever got was seeing God after the divine presence had passed by. Moses saw god in retrospect, and so often so do we. Our human minds are incapable of grasping God’s true essence. Our souls, though, maybe because that is the part of us that reflects the divine presence, can feel when God is near. Facing the Mystery is not demanding all the answers; it is standing on the edge of the abyss and drinking in the vastness. It is standing before God honestly, finitely, open and waiting to be filled.

“BE” means to love with the soul. John O’Donohue says that we are not souls contained within bodies, but being that exist within souls.

In this week’s video clip Megan McKenna, teacher, storyteller, and mystic talks about how much we do not know.  The not knowing leads to the “what if…” Admitting that we do not know opens us up to possibilities we cannot even imagine. This is greater than uncertainty; this is mystery with a big M. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bhHP1Hwf8Y

It is not just that we do not know. We cannot know it all. It is falling silent in the presence of grandeur: standing at the Grand Canyon, climbing a mountain, listening to the surf, facing a Rothko painting is all entertaining Mystery. Mystery is that God shows up. Mystery is that God shows up even sometimes when the preaching is awful, the music is crappy and the theology atrocious.  But it is also the Mystery that beckons us to ask the deepest questions.

To help us hone in on our direction, I want to introduce a couple of tools to add to our kit. I was taught that all Christian worship is Good News (even when it is sometimes difficult news – remember that gospel literally means good news). Worship begins when we discern the good news from within the scripture text we are opening. So I will propose the good news I see.

Next is Direction. What direction does that good news point us to as we try to put it in the context of our lives and our world? What specifically does this text speak to in our experience?

Finally, an Anchor. The anchor is a root metaphor through which we might explore this good news and direction, the image we tie our worship to.

All this I hope will help get a handle on our experiential field.

1. GOOD NEWS: The vastness of God is approachable in human experience. God is not totally other.

2. DIRECTION: When God passes near, new possibilities open in us and our world.

3. ANCHOR: Swimming in a sea of holiness.

EXPERIENTIAL FIELD: When we love God with all our soul we experience God’s nearness.