Mysteries

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
August 23, 2009

Mysteries
John 7:37-39

The man was arrogant, condescending, patronizing,
way too sure of himself.
He was selfish,
cold,
manipulative.
His every word to everyone
was insulting, hurtful.
All he cared about was himself.

It was only a matter of time,
that was obvious.
And then it happened:
In the garden, just off the terrace.
He was basking in the warmth of the late afternoon sun,
breathing in the fresh country air
scented sweetly with lavender,
when, Bang!
The man crumpled to the ground,
the victim in yet another
Agatha Christie murder mystery.

This was a wonderful performance of Christie’s play
“The Hollow” which we saw two weeks ago
at the Playhouse in Dorset Vermont.
The actor playing the arrogant, callous victim
was wonderfully contemptuous
of everyone around him.

Of course, that made every other character in the play
a possible suspect in his murder.
No one liked him; everyone hated him;
everyone had a motive for pulling the trigger.
This is the formula in many Agatha Christie mysteries
and what makes her stories and plays so riveting
as you try to figure out “who dunnit”.
Was it the long-suffering wife?
the cast-off girlfiend?
the beaten-down rival?
the wealthy but eccentric hostess?
And of course, we have to ask: did the butler do it?

We love mysteries, don’t we?
We love to be faced with riddles
and then try to figure them out.
But of course we insist on an ending,
a logical, sensible ending,
a conclusion neatly tied up.
We don’t like to be left hanging,
without an answer.
In the play we got our answer,
but only after the playwright had led us down
more blind alleys than we could count.
Agatha Christie is skilled at diverting attention
from the real culprit,
the character who finally admits his or her guilt
in the very last scene,
the last person anyone would have expected to be led off
in handcuffs by the plodding police inspector
as the final curtain falls.

The Bible is no Agatha Christie novel,
but it is a book filled with mysteries,
a book filled with conundrums,
a book filled with enigmas,
a book that seems to raise two questions
for every one answer it provides.

When we read through a passage, a story,
even a simple sentence,
that sounds confusing, even a little mysterious,
we find ourselves eager to figure it out,
eager to make sense of it.
We want certainty.
We want light, a clear path ahead.
We want a nice, neat conclusion
so we know what to do.
And yet, how often does the Bible leave us wondering?

We talked a few weeks back about
what to make of Jesus telling his disciples,
“unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man
and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
(John 6:53)
Do you remember how the disciples responded to Jesus’ words?
“this teaching is difficult”, they said,
as understated a response
as we could possibly imagine.

We talked about how different churches
approach the Lord’s Supper:
Some see it as simply a way to remember Jesus’ life and teachings.
Others believe they are indeed eating Jesus’ body
and drinking his blood.

Even as John Calvin developed the theology of the Lord’s Supper
that we follow in the Presbyterian Church,
that the bread and the juice are transformed
by the power of the Holy Spirit into food
to nourish and feed us spiritually,
he himself called it a “high mystery”
(Institutes, 4.17.1),
that was ultimately, “inexplicable”.

After writing in such detail developing his theological approach,
Calvin concluded,
“nothing remains but to break forth in wonder at this mystery,
which plainly neither the mind is able to conceive
nor the tongue to express”
(Institutes, 4.17.6)
And that’s just a simple meal of bread and wine,
taken in community.

The text we heard in our lesson
is another of many enigmatic, mysterious passages
we find in the gospel of John.
What does Jesus mean when he says,
“Let anyone who is thirsty come to me,
let the one who believes in me drink.
As the scripture has said,
‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow
rivers of living water”?

If a person is thirsty on a hot summer’s day
his or her first thought would probably be
of cold glass of water,
and not of Jesus Christ.

And what Jesus says is scriptural, isn’t,
at least as far as we can find in the Old Testament
the way Jesus said it.
And to make matters even more confusing,
the translators have changed the meaning
when they say,
out of the heart of the one who believes;
the original Greek doesn’t say “out of the heart”;
it says “out of the belly”.

Scholars have debated the meaning of these verses
for centuries.
They have not even agreed on the proper way
to translate the verses;
or where to put the punctuation,
where to end one clause or sentence
and start another.

We know that there are times when Jesus speaks to us metaphorically;
when he uses images and illusions.
In other places he speaks with a fierce certainty,
where there seems to be no room for
differences in interpretation.
But, after 2,000 years
we have only to look at how we differ across denominations,
and even within denominations
to know that we find the Word of the Lord
subject to different interpretations,
different understandings,
often simply mysterious.

We try to interpret passages conclusively,
definitively.
We don’t like uncertainty.
We pursue a theological variant on “who dunnit”.
And yet, as often as not,
God is calling us through his Word
to enter the mystery,
to embrace the mystery,
rather than trying to resolve it.
For it is in embracing the mystery
that we learn how to live on faith,
that we learn how to live in faith,
that we learn how to live by faith.

It is in living in the mystery
that we learn to trust God more completely,
that we open ourselves more fully
to being led by the Spirit.

In her new book, “The Case for God”
Karen Armstrong calls us to be willing to,
“enter into the cloud of unknowing.”
(Armstrong, 267)
By entering the cloud of unknowing,
we turn from literalism, proof, certainty,
and learn what Paul meant when he wrote
to the Corinthians that “we walk by faith.”
(2 Cor. 5:7)

We learn that there are many things in life that we can prove,
but that much of God cannot be proved in the same way
that we can prove the fingerprints on the gun
were the butler’s.
How can we prove beauty?
How can we prove the fragrance of lavender?
How can we prove grace?
How can we prove love?

Embracing the mystery is to embrace the holy,
it is to embrace the spiritual;
Embracing the mystery is to turn from
what Paul calls the life of the flesh
to the life of the Spirit.
Embracing the mystery helps us to turn from the
world as it is
to the world as it ought to be,
the kingdom of God:
the kingdom built on the love given us in Jesus Christ.

We ought, after all, to love our neighbors as ourselves,
but we still live in a world of violence, bigotry and hatred;
we ought to beat swords in plowshares
but we still think war can bring peace;
we ought to feed our enemies,
and quench their thirst,
but we live in fear of them,
preferring to live behind fences and locked gates.
We ought to assure that no one is hungry,
no one is without a roof over their heads,
the sick are taken care of,
the elderly not alone;
but we say we are doing as much as we can;
we can do no more.

Embrace the mystery,
live in the holy that is the “ought”
and we begin to understand
what Jesus is talking about when he says,
‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow
rivers of living water”.

If I could sum up all I have learned in all my schooling,
all my reading,
all my theological knowledge,
it would be this:
I will never have all the answers,
I will never know all the answers,
I will never find all the answers,
and that’s okay.
I agree with Armstrong when she writes
that religion’s task isn’t to provide us with answers;
it is to help us live confidently, even joyfully
in the mysteries of life.
(The Case for God, 305)

The Year of the Bible group has just begun reading
from the Book of Job.
For thirty-seven chapters Job pleads to God,
even demands from God that he wants an answer
to why he has been forced to suffer.
Chapter after chapter Job endures silence.
But then in chapter 38, God’s voice thunders from the heavens
and he hurls question after question at Job,
his voice rolling over the countryside.

But read carefully and what do we find:
God does not provide Job with an answer.
God leaves Job in the mystery.
And by the final chapter of the book,
Job understands that there are things
he will never understand,
that he will have to accept:
“I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me,
which I did not know.” (Job 42:2)

Job had always been a man who had walked with God,
but for the first time in his life,
Job learned how to live in faith,
to live by faith,
abiding faith,
trusting faith,
fall-back-into-God’s-arms faith,
because he learned to live in the mystery.

Saint Denis, the Bishop of Paris
in the third century, believed,
“the most goodly knowing of God,
is that which is known by unknowing”
(as quoted in, The Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 70)
that which comes from embracing the mysteries of God,
embracing the Spirit of God.

Now this does not mean we stop learning,
stop reading, stop studying.
It is through our reading and learning
that we find understanding
and learn what questions to ask.

It is through our reading and studying
that we learn about the “ought”,
the path we are called to follow.
We learn what it means to be a disciple of Christ,
how to live as Christ taught us.
We learn to separate truth from untruth,
myth from reality.
Paul’s letters reflect a constant concern
that the new followers of Christ
were too willing to listen to the wrong voices
because they had not learned enough to allow them
to separate truth from lie.
Knowledge and learning helps us to discern
truth,
lie,
myth and mystery.

Armstrong defines a mystery as “something in which
we find ourselves caught up,
and whose essence is not before us in its entirety.”
(The Case for God, 274)

That’s also not a bad definition of faith,
not a bad definition of our life
as disciples of Jesus Christ.
We are caught up,
even if we do not fully understand.
As the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote,
“God keeps his holy mysteries
just on the outside of man’s dream.”
just beyond our reach…
(“Human Life’s Mystery”)

Embrace the mystery,
embrace the wonder,
for in doing so you will embrace the holy,
the spiritual,
the godly.
In embracing the mystery,
you more fully embrace the life
to which you’ve been called,
called most certainly by our Lord Jesus Christ.
AMEN