Into the Mystic
June 07, 2009
June 7, 2009
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 6:1-8; John 3:1-17
I’m sure many of us have had the experience of watching a football game on TV, and as the cameras pan the crowd, someone – usually in the endzone – holds up a sign that says “John 3:16”. As I reflected on the lectionary, and particularly on my understanding of the Trinity, I was struck by the irony of holding up that sign at a football game – it’s like the ultimate in disengaged religion. In the middle of a spectator event (and I mean no disrespect to football here), but in the middle of a spectator event, someone holds up a sign! The irony of this is staggering, because the doctrine of the Trinity is, at its essence, about Christianity as a way of fully engaging with life and fully engaging in God. It is no spectator proposition.
The Sunday after Pentecost each year is Trinity Sunday, a week for ministers to explain the doctrine of the Trinity. I have to say – this is the one Sunday when I wish I could preach twice as long. I find the Trinity utterly fascinating, completely compelling, and a mystery in the best sense of the word. What I mean by mystery here is that there is more to the Trinity, more truth, more depth, more meaning, than can be gotten at through analysis – we can only begin to “get” the Trinity by experience.
Mysticism comes from the same root as the word mystery, and is the word we use for the experience of God – there are mystics in many faiths – Jewish mysticism is called Kabbalah, Islamic mystics are Sufis, some Christian mystics are contemplatives, and there are mystics who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”. I myself don’t understand non-mysticism, I don’t understand when people say that they don’t believe it is possible to experience God, I don’t understand why anyone would ever come to church, why anyone would ever pray, why anyone would ever bother with religion if they didn’t think it was possible to experience God.
And the Trinity is the theology that describes a God who can be experienced. A few years ago, I began to find the Trinity to be an essential part of my understanding of God, so let me try to share with you my sense of the Trinity.
The Trinity is, at its simplest, a description of the ways that we understand God – God as the Creator, the Being that brings Being into Being (to use Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s words), God as the source of life, God as Being itself. This is the dimension of God that we describe as Father, Creator, the Almighty.
We also know God as Jesus, “fully human, fully divine” – my own sense of Jesus is that Jesus is God among us, not so much to show us what God is like, but to show us what fully human looks like. We describe Jesus as the second person of the Trinity – God in human form.
And we know God as the Holy Spirit – this is the dimension of God that I think of as the experiential dimension – the Holy Spirit is God in our own experience. The Quakers described the Spirit as “that of God in every person” or “the inner light”. The Greeks used one word, pneuma, for wind, breath, and spirit. The Hebrews used one word, ruach, for wind, breath and Spirit. And one of my favorite verses in all of Scripture is in today’s reading: The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. This, to me, is a wonderful reminder of the Holy Spirit – perhaps it is like wind, which we can feel, and see the effect of, but we can’t really see the wind.
And the Spirit is the dimension of God that most invites us to engagement, for it is the way we describe our own experience of God. So that in this Trinitarian God we experience God the Creator as transcendent, larger than us, beyond us, that which is deeper and more in life and yet intrinsic to life. And we experience God as Jesus, who shows us that the fullest experience of human living is in relationship with people and with God. And we experience God as the Holy Spirit, immanent, within and woven through our life, the energy that inspires us, the whisper that challenges us, the nudge that makes us restless, the presence that comforts us.
So we can understand Trinity as simply as a way of trying to describe the ways we experience God: God beyond us, God among us, God within us. But when we think about God as Trinity, we have to understand that most of all, the Trinitarian understanding is a relational God, a God that is not apart from us, but a God that is fully engaged with us, and a God that simply cannot be understood in the abstract, apart from engagement.
For some of you this is not a problem – your primary experience of God is in relationship. Your faith is in a God who loves you, who is part of your life, and is woven through creation. Your faith looks like trust, and you find yourself experiencing strength and comfort from God, or sometimes zest and challenge.
For others of you, this is a huge problem, because you don’t really think of God as something that people can experience. You think that people who describe such experiences are just misunderstanding their own emotions, or their own ideas, or even their own migraines.
What I can say simply is that Christianity just doesn’t make sense until you begin to engage, to experience, to think of God as a source of love and a reason to love. The Trinitarian understanding of God is a God who lies within experience and beyond explanation. The more I try to explain God, the less I do justice to God – I think sometimes we get at the truth of God much more by reading the poetry of the great mystics, who describe the joy, the love, the delight, the fullness of the life lived in God. Daniel Ladinsky, who has translated poetry of many mystics including Sufi mystics Hafiz and Rumi, and Christian mystics Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas and Teresa of Avila, speaks about the skepticism in our age about experiencing God:
“It has been said that just as every river is winding its way to the sea so every soul is returning to a glorious reunion with our source, God. Faith in the Ocean may be difficult at times and union may seem a fantasy, but I think the real fantasy is separateness from That which is Everywhere. ‘The fish in the water that is thirsty needs serious professional counseling,’ says Kabir [a medieval Indian mystic]…The water being God, the Omnipresent, and we the fish living within Him. To dismiss the possibility that the divine can speak through women and men is to limit God. As soon as we limit God’s ability to communicate with us, are we not then just reinforcing some unhealthy religious prejudice, superstition, neurosis, and fear that fragments society and the individual, and undermines and divides us rather than empowers and unites?”
I’ve tried to think about other experiences that can’t be adequately described but can only be known in experiencing them, and I come up with things like tasting chocolate, or swimming underwater- the joy of feeling the water supporting you, even as you delight in the caress of the water on your skin – I can’t describe this experience in a way that makes it real to anyone who has not played in the water. And chocolate can only be known by the experience of it – I could talk about the sweetness, or the richness, but all my talk would fail to share what is essential about chocolate.
Similarly, there is no way to convince people about experiencing God. What I can say is that when you open yourself to the possibility of experiencing God, to the possibility that there is a dimension of existence that lies deeper than and yet within ordinary being, when you begin to understand that we are truly, substantively connected to one another, to the natural world, and to the pulse that moves through all life, then concepts like prayer, like the Holy Spirit, like communion and abundant living begin to take on more immediacy, more reality, more sense.
There is no way to understand God in the abstract… for engagement, relationship, experience are all integral to God. I can’t explain the contemplative experience in a sermon, but I can invite you to let go of pure reason, and let yourself begin to open to the idea of experiencing God. It is interesting that the contemplatives speak frequently of the unity of life, the connections between all beings that they experience – they also describe their experience of God as bringing them more fully into life, not as a way to escape reality. The English write, Evelyn Underhill, writes in her small book, Practical Mysticism, that “Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment.”
Marcus Borg describes Jesus as a mystic, and in the passage we read this morning, Jesus is trying to get Nicodemus to understand that the heart of life in God is in being open to a new fullness of life in God, which he calls being born from above. It’s important to understand that in the Gospel of John, when he talks about eternal life, he is not necessarily talking about an endless life but a fuller dimension of life in the present moment – the intersection of our experience with eternity. It is what Jesus describes later as “abundant life.”
Now, after all this talk of mysticism, I want to acknowledge that there are other ways of experiencing the abundance, the unity, the depth and connection with all life that the contemplatives speak of, and one way is through compassion. We do well to remember that for many of the saints throughout history, their experience of God is one of deep longing more than fulfillment. An experience of God cannot be summoned. The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. Nonetheless, the characterization of Christian faith and practice as a life of engagement still holds. Jesus told us that the two primary commands were to love God, and to love one another. Some people experience that deep union and transcendence not in direct experiences of God, but through living out deep compassion with other people. Mother Teresa is an example of this – she longed for direct experiences of God most of her life, having had one or two. But although these experiences lay beyond her, others experienced God through her love, through her deep communion with other people. Still others may experience this transcendence in union with the created world. And still others find themselves experiencing God through their own suffering. If there is some commonality to all these experiences it is that they come when we move beyond our own understanding, and our own capabilities to a place beyond where our reason can take us. And the other commonality is that these experiences come with deep engagement – with God, with others, with the natural world or with our own helplessness.
Going back to the sign in the endzone at the football game – do you now understand why I see this as totally contrary to the reality of God? To stand as a spectator, offering a slogan rather than being in relationship, to be in judgment rather than solidarity, to be instructing rather than delighting – this has nothing to do with the reality of God.
Sister Joan Chittister tells the story of an elder who wanted to teach a group of disciples the meaning of risk. Once upon a time, he told them, a crew of Chinese laborers was flown regularly into Burma to do road work there. The flights were long and boring, and the work was very difficult, so the men took to playing cards. Since they had no money to play with, however, they decided to bet themselves. The one who lost, it was decided, was to jump out of the plane without a parachute. The listening disciples were shocked.
"That's horrible," they said. "Well, maybe," said the master. "But it certainly made the game more exciting. The truth is," the master taught, "you never live so fully as when you gamble with your lives."
We will never understand swimming as long as we are standing on the shore. We never will have a full experience of God through intellectualizing – God is a God of engagement, and it is only through leaving control behind for full engagement with God, with other people, with the world that we will ever experience the heart of what the Trinity is about.
There is a proverb that says, “Those who risk nothing risk much more.” By standing apart from the mystery of God instead of entering into the mystery, we risk missing the life we were made for and just skimming the surface. Most of us can’t relate to Isaiah’s experience of the cherubim and seraphim in today’s reading, but we can relate to his reluctance. And we can make the choice he did, too. We can say, “Here I am,” and say yes to engaging with life in God, yes to engaging with others, and so engage with the heart of life itself. “Here I am, send me.” Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 6:1-8; John 3:1-17
I’m sure many of us have had the experience of watching a football game on TV, and as the cameras pan the crowd, someone – usually in the endzone – holds up a sign that says “John 3:16”. As I reflected on the lectionary, and particularly on my understanding of the Trinity, I was struck by the irony of holding up that sign at a football game – it’s like the ultimate in disengaged religion. In the middle of a spectator event (and I mean no disrespect to football here), but in the middle of a spectator event, someone holds up a sign! The irony of this is staggering, because the doctrine of the Trinity is, at its essence, about Christianity as a way of fully engaging with life and fully engaging in God. It is no spectator proposition.
The Sunday after Pentecost each year is Trinity Sunday, a week for ministers to explain the doctrine of the Trinity. I have to say – this is the one Sunday when I wish I could preach twice as long. I find the Trinity utterly fascinating, completely compelling, and a mystery in the best sense of the word. What I mean by mystery here is that there is more to the Trinity, more truth, more depth, more meaning, than can be gotten at through analysis – we can only begin to “get” the Trinity by experience.
Mysticism comes from the same root as the word mystery, and is the word we use for the experience of God – there are mystics in many faiths – Jewish mysticism is called Kabbalah, Islamic mystics are Sufis, some Christian mystics are contemplatives, and there are mystics who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”. I myself don’t understand non-mysticism, I don’t understand when people say that they don’t believe it is possible to experience God, I don’t understand why anyone would ever come to church, why anyone would ever pray, why anyone would ever bother with religion if they didn’t think it was possible to experience God.
And the Trinity is the theology that describes a God who can be experienced. A few years ago, I began to find the Trinity to be an essential part of my understanding of God, so let me try to share with you my sense of the Trinity.
The Trinity is, at its simplest, a description of the ways that we understand God – God as the Creator, the Being that brings Being into Being (to use Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s words), God as the source of life, God as Being itself. This is the dimension of God that we describe as Father, Creator, the Almighty.
We also know God as Jesus, “fully human, fully divine” – my own sense of Jesus is that Jesus is God among us, not so much to show us what God is like, but to show us what fully human looks like. We describe Jesus as the second person of the Trinity – God in human form.
And we know God as the Holy Spirit – this is the dimension of God that I think of as the experiential dimension – the Holy Spirit is God in our own experience. The Quakers described the Spirit as “that of God in every person” or “the inner light”. The Greeks used one word, pneuma, for wind, breath, and spirit. The Hebrews used one word, ruach, for wind, breath and Spirit. And one of my favorite verses in all of Scripture is in today’s reading: The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. This, to me, is a wonderful reminder of the Holy Spirit – perhaps it is like wind, which we can feel, and see the effect of, but we can’t really see the wind.
And the Spirit is the dimension of God that most invites us to engagement, for it is the way we describe our own experience of God. So that in this Trinitarian God we experience God the Creator as transcendent, larger than us, beyond us, that which is deeper and more in life and yet intrinsic to life. And we experience God as Jesus, who shows us that the fullest experience of human living is in relationship with people and with God. And we experience God as the Holy Spirit, immanent, within and woven through our life, the energy that inspires us, the whisper that challenges us, the nudge that makes us restless, the presence that comforts us.
So we can understand Trinity as simply as a way of trying to describe the ways we experience God: God beyond us, God among us, God within us. But when we think about God as Trinity, we have to understand that most of all, the Trinitarian understanding is a relational God, a God that is not apart from us, but a God that is fully engaged with us, and a God that simply cannot be understood in the abstract, apart from engagement.
For some of you this is not a problem – your primary experience of God is in relationship. Your faith is in a God who loves you, who is part of your life, and is woven through creation. Your faith looks like trust, and you find yourself experiencing strength and comfort from God, or sometimes zest and challenge.
For others of you, this is a huge problem, because you don’t really think of God as something that people can experience. You think that people who describe such experiences are just misunderstanding their own emotions, or their own ideas, or even their own migraines.
What I can say simply is that Christianity just doesn’t make sense until you begin to engage, to experience, to think of God as a source of love and a reason to love. The Trinitarian understanding of God is a God who lies within experience and beyond explanation. The more I try to explain God, the less I do justice to God – I think sometimes we get at the truth of God much more by reading the poetry of the great mystics, who describe the joy, the love, the delight, the fullness of the life lived in God. Daniel Ladinsky, who has translated poetry of many mystics including Sufi mystics Hafiz and Rumi, and Christian mystics Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas and Teresa of Avila, speaks about the skepticism in our age about experiencing God:
“It has been said that just as every river is winding its way to the sea so every soul is returning to a glorious reunion with our source, God. Faith in the Ocean may be difficult at times and union may seem a fantasy, but I think the real fantasy is separateness from That which is Everywhere. ‘The fish in the water that is thirsty needs serious professional counseling,’ says Kabir [a medieval Indian mystic]…The water being God, the Omnipresent, and we the fish living within Him. To dismiss the possibility that the divine can speak through women and men is to limit God. As soon as we limit God’s ability to communicate with us, are we not then just reinforcing some unhealthy religious prejudice, superstition, neurosis, and fear that fragments society and the individual, and undermines and divides us rather than empowers and unites?”
I’ve tried to think about other experiences that can’t be adequately described but can only be known in experiencing them, and I come up with things like tasting chocolate, or swimming underwater- the joy of feeling the water supporting you, even as you delight in the caress of the water on your skin – I can’t describe this experience in a way that makes it real to anyone who has not played in the water. And chocolate can only be known by the experience of it – I could talk about the sweetness, or the richness, but all my talk would fail to share what is essential about chocolate.
Similarly, there is no way to convince people about experiencing God. What I can say is that when you open yourself to the possibility of experiencing God, to the possibility that there is a dimension of existence that lies deeper than and yet within ordinary being, when you begin to understand that we are truly, substantively connected to one another, to the natural world, and to the pulse that moves through all life, then concepts like prayer, like the Holy Spirit, like communion and abundant living begin to take on more immediacy, more reality, more sense.
There is no way to understand God in the abstract… for engagement, relationship, experience are all integral to God. I can’t explain the contemplative experience in a sermon, but I can invite you to let go of pure reason, and let yourself begin to open to the idea of experiencing God. It is interesting that the contemplatives speak frequently of the unity of life, the connections between all beings that they experience – they also describe their experience of God as bringing them more fully into life, not as a way to escape reality. The English write, Evelyn Underhill, writes in her small book, Practical Mysticism, that “Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment.”
Marcus Borg describes Jesus as a mystic, and in the passage we read this morning, Jesus is trying to get Nicodemus to understand that the heart of life in God is in being open to a new fullness of life in God, which he calls being born from above. It’s important to understand that in the Gospel of John, when he talks about eternal life, he is not necessarily talking about an endless life but a fuller dimension of life in the present moment – the intersection of our experience with eternity. It is what Jesus describes later as “abundant life.”
Now, after all this talk of mysticism, I want to acknowledge that there are other ways of experiencing the abundance, the unity, the depth and connection with all life that the contemplatives speak of, and one way is through compassion. We do well to remember that for many of the saints throughout history, their experience of God is one of deep longing more than fulfillment. An experience of God cannot be summoned. The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. Nonetheless, the characterization of Christian faith and practice as a life of engagement still holds. Jesus told us that the two primary commands were to love God, and to love one another. Some people experience that deep union and transcendence not in direct experiences of God, but through living out deep compassion with other people. Mother Teresa is an example of this – she longed for direct experiences of God most of her life, having had one or two. But although these experiences lay beyond her, others experienced God through her love, through her deep communion with other people. Still others may experience this transcendence in union with the created world. And still others find themselves experiencing God through their own suffering. If there is some commonality to all these experiences it is that they come when we move beyond our own understanding, and our own capabilities to a place beyond where our reason can take us. And the other commonality is that these experiences come with deep engagement – with God, with others, with the natural world or with our own helplessness.
Going back to the sign in the endzone at the football game – do you now understand why I see this as totally contrary to the reality of God? To stand as a spectator, offering a slogan rather than being in relationship, to be in judgment rather than solidarity, to be instructing rather than delighting – this has nothing to do with the reality of God.
Sister Joan Chittister tells the story of an elder who wanted to teach a group of disciples the meaning of risk. Once upon a time, he told them, a crew of Chinese laborers was flown regularly into Burma to do road work there. The flights were long and boring, and the work was very difficult, so the men took to playing cards. Since they had no money to play with, however, they decided to bet themselves. The one who lost, it was decided, was to jump out of the plane without a parachute. The listening disciples were shocked.
"That's horrible," they said. "Well, maybe," said the master. "But it certainly made the game more exciting. The truth is," the master taught, "you never live so fully as when you gamble with your lives."
We will never understand swimming as long as we are standing on the shore. We never will have a full experience of God through intellectualizing – God is a God of engagement, and it is only through leaving control behind for full engagement with God, with other people, with the world that we will ever experience the heart of what the Trinity is about.
There is a proverb that says, “Those who risk nothing risk much more.” By standing apart from the mystery of God instead of entering into the mystery, we risk missing the life we were made for and just skimming the surface. Most of us can’t relate to Isaiah’s experience of the cherubim and seraphim in today’s reading, but we can relate to his reluctance. And we can make the choice he did, too. We can say, “Here I am,” and say yes to engaging with life in God, yes to engaging with others, and so engage with the heart of life itself. “Here I am, send me.” Amen.