Grasping at Stars
A Reading from the Wisdom of Solomon:
For who can learn the counsel of God?
Or who can discern what the Lord wills?
For the reasoning of mortals is worthless,
and our designs are likely to fail,
for a perishable body weighs down the soul,
and this earthy tent burdens the thoughtful mind.
We can hardly guess at what is on earth,
and what is at hand we find with labor,
but who has traced out what is in the heavens?
Who has learned your counsel
unless you have given wisdom
and sent your holy spirit from on high?
And thus the paths of those on earth were set right,
and people were taught what pleases you
and were saved by wisdom.
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Imagine two people walking together at night beneath the expanse of the starry-decked heavens.
The first looks up and says, “You know, even a single lightyear is so great a distance as to be practically incomprehensible. The space from us to the nearest star might as well be infinite. That’s why I don’t pay much attention to the sky.” And he goes about his business never looking up again.
The second person gazes heavenward, sees the same stars—and reaches for them. Now you tell me which one of them is right.
Recently someone said to me, “You know, pastor, since religion is a mystery, God is a mystery, doesn’t it just make sense to be agnostic? We don’t really know anything, do we? Convince me otherwise.” And I confess I didn’t have a witty and ready response at hand, because religion for me has always been a nuanced, thoughtful thing. Slogans and soundbites fall flat.
Moreover, there is a certain truth in what she had to say. “It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question,” wrote Kallistos Ware, “but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.” Beware, then, the man who claims to know all there is of God. As soon as we think we have God in a box, we are clearly worshipping idols.
God is infinite, eternal, and transcendent. He cannot fit in our heads any more than the ocean can fit in a thimble. No matter what we think or say of Him, God will always be greater, wilder, better, truer, and more beautiful than we could begin to express. He is beyond words, beyond thoughts, beyond the human mind. So—can we say anything at all? Can we believe anything at all? Or is God so very alien that He might as well be dead?
See, the thing about a mystery is that it invites us to come in. Right? A mystery isn’t just some weird brute fact devoid of explanation; that way lies madness. Rather, a good mystery welcomes us to participate in it, welcomes us into a dance, leading us ever deeper into wonder, ever deeper into truth. A mystery isn’t simply something that we cannot hope to know, but something we can only begin to understand as we participate in it.
Otherwise no-one would be reading Agatha Christie. She wouldn’t be any fun.
When we come to talk about God, we find two paths before us: the apophatic and the cataphatic. Now, don’t let the terminology throw you. One is the way of affirmation, and the other the way of negation. Here’s what I mean.
We can say true things of God. We can know God, through intuition, reason, philosophy, spiritual experience, and the traditions of revelation within our community. The vast majority of humankind throughout the whole of history have had religious experiences, spiritual experiences. God never goes away. And you’d be surprised on what all we agree: that God is the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; Consciousness, Being, and Bliss; infinite, eternal, transcendent; omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipresent.
We all affirm this: Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, classical pagans, and everyone in between. It’s called classical theism, and it affirms what we can know of God. When we speak of God in this manner, we are being cataphatic, taking the way of affirmation. Obviously we can know God because we keep running into Him.
But remember what I said: whatever we say of God, He will always be more. Our words cannot contain Him. We say that God is love, for example, but does He love as we do? Lord, no. Our love is but a shadow, a distant echo, of the love that is God. We can say what God is not: He is not wicked, is not shallow, is not cruel, is not petty. He is not limited in any of the ways that we are. And when we speak of Him like this, we are being apophatic, taking the way of negation, what God’s not.
It has to be both, you see. They have to balance out. When speaking of God honestly, humbly, we must take seriously both what we can say of God and what we can’t. And the point in between, the balance betwixt the poles, is analogy. We can speak analogously of God. So that, yes, when we say that God is love, we must admit that He is beyond our concept of love. Yet at the same time, He is not so far beyond it, so much unlike it, that the word ceases to have any meaning.
Is God some cruel tyrant bent on destruction? No, because God is love. And while His love is beyond all imagining, it is still real love; indeed, the only real love. And that means something. His love is always more than our love, but never less. Is this making any sense? Admitting the mystery of God shouldn’t mean that we walk away and never look up again. It means that we should reach for those stars, enter that wonder, participate in the mystery. That’s why Solomon prays for Wisdom.
There will always be more to God. And our response to this should be gratitude, ecstasy, joy—not a shrug, not apathy. To say we cannot have it all is not to settle for none. This is the very thing religion alone can offer: a wide-open world without limits; no limit to goodness, no limit to beauty, no limit to truth. For God is love without limit.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Comments
Post a Comment