Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, December 8, 2019
Three weeks ago I was fly fishing in the Bahamas, and it was a wonderful respite from the dark and cold of these days. That kind of fishing is mostly done from a boat that’s poled along in shallow water by a guide who stands on a platform above the stern. You spend a lot of time watching and waiting, interrupted by moments of excitement, if not panic, when all of a sudden fish are coming and you get one chance to get a good cast off. No pressure! It’s kind of like Advent: waiting and watching and hoping, and then, a moment when you glimpse something moving beneath the surface, and if you’re lucky, you get to have an encounter with that mysterious and elusive presence!
Well one morning my buddy and I were out with the primo guide, his name is Frankie, and he owns the place where we were staying. He’s big and friendly, with a deep laugh. On that bright and beautiful morning. Frankie was quietly poling the boat around the flat, and we were intently watching the water, and having a sporadic conversation, getting to one another. My buddy mentioned that I was a pastor, and this caught Frankie’s interest. “What kind of church?,” he asked. I said Universalist, figuring Unitarian Universalist was too much of a mouthful, and too much to explain. Still, Frankie looked puzzled. So I said, “Universalism is the belief that God’s love is so big, that nobody is beyond it. We believe that, in the end, everyone is reconciled to God. Nobody left behind.”
This started an interesting theological conversation out there on the water. Frankie said, “You need to send me some information about this church.” He wanted to learn more about us. Because his wife is more traditionally religious, and the idea of a church that encourages people to trust their own hearts and minds, and their own experiences, well, that was appealing to him. We talked about how, too often, church people and clergy act as if they have cornered the market on God, as if the only place you find God is within the church and inside organized religion. And Frankie looked around, he cast his hand out over the water and toward the horizon, and he said, “Isn’t God all around? Isn’t all of this part of what God has made?”
Needless to say, this made me happy. It made glad to be with someone, who was an excellent fisherman, who wasn’t afraid to articulate his own earthy faith. It made me think that we UUs could relax a little, and enjoy this simple faith we have been given. Which asks us to put Love at the center, to seek signs of grace and ways to serve.
That was pretty much the extent of our theological conversation. Because we started catching fish. We caught plenty of them that day! Looking back on it now, we started off talking about God, and then just drifted into living in God, living in the Mystery, which was even better. Just being present to that day, keeping our eyes peeled for what might be revealed, doing the best we could to respond to those gifts, when they came, with accurate casts, and with humor when we messed up. “At play in the fields of the Lord,” as a book title by Peter Matthiessen puts it.
Today, as we continue our conversation about the Mystery that some of us call God, I want us to explore how we encounter that mystery, how we put ourselves in the presence of the Holy. Let’s start with some questions from the UU minister Burton Carley, who asks,
“Have you ever felt the Spirit? Felt it tingle your toes, run up your spine, water your eyes, race your heart, pull you down to your knees, take your breath away? Is it not Holy, this appreciative awareness of quality, this connection to what matters, the sparking of transcendence?”
He continues, “Central to biblical spirituality and our faith is religious experience. One area of religious experience is the encounter with the Holy. That experience manifests in times of awe, in times of encountering the Mystery that challenges the human ego boundaries. It breaks forth in visions of covenant and grace, and the urge to be in right relationship. It is discovered in expressions of hope, compassion and justice that draw us to stand with others in the struggle for human dignity.
“Now this is the question: why don’t we want to stay in the presence of the Holy Spirit? Why don’t we cry agony when it is absent? Why aren’t we doing everything in our power to catch it and keep it, to live in its glory, to be captured by it and to, yes, surrender to it?”
If you have had moments when you felt that you were in the presence of that Mystery, how did you respond? Did you want to bask in it? Or want to run away, because it frightened you? Maybe both?
We may be shy about discussing our spiritual encounters because they are hard to talk about. Words fail us. We may hold back from seeking more experiences like this because they can feel scary and beyond our control. And yet—I do long to be in that Presence. Do you?
It’s a paradox—if you go actively looking for the Spirit, it’s unlikely you’re going to find it. Like if you go out in the woods hoping to see a wild animal, and you walk along chanting, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” you’re not going to see much. But if you sit down and be quiet, if you spend some time out there, who knows what you might encounter.
Years ago I was talking with my spiritual director, whose name is Mary, about this, about how elusive God can be. So much that one can wonder, “Are you there? Do you exist?” We were talking about this, and Mary told me what a monk once said to her. He said, “In my experience, you have to apprehend God obliquely.” In other words, if you’re looking for God straight on, you’re not going to find God. You have to be still and wait for God to find you. You’re more likely to get a glimpse of God out of the corner of your eye, just on the edge of your vision.
Have you ever had the experience of seeing something in the periphery, and when you turn to look, there seems to be nothing there? That happens to me all the time around here. Our experiences of the Spirit can be like that. When we bring too much conscious attention to it, when we look for it straight on, it seems to hide. And sometimes that Spirit is hiding in plain sight. Like when you’re watching the sun slowly disappear over the horizon at the end of the day, or looking up at the stars in the night sky, or if you’re me, listening to Handel’s Messiah. It can take your breath away, you sense you aren’t alone, you have what Martin Luther King called “cosmic companionship.”
I think of a nondescript hallway in the hospital where my children were born. It was like many other institutional fluorescent corridors, but I could swear to you that, in the hours following each of their births, it was like there was a glow of yellow light, what we in our family call “God rays,” lighting up the end of that hall where the babies are born, a glow I remember to this day.
When we’re gathered here, you might rest your eyes on the light shining though our stained glass windows, or on the face of Jesus, or on our chalice flame. There’s plenty of beauty in here. And I wonder, have you ever glimpsed, out of the corner of your eye, someone wiping a tear, or caressing a child? Isn’t that an oblique sighting the Holy? And all those flickering candles that people have lit, representing their prayers and hopes—and if you sit here and wonder about those people, and those prayers, aren’t you having a quiet religious experience?
Since the beginning of time, people have created images of the divine. These images have reflected the perspectives and biases of their creators, and they have given us the false idea that the holy is something we can represent, that we can describe, that we can pin down. But anything that can fit inside the limits of our understanding is too small to be the Mystery some of us call God. The invitation is to open yourself to that Mystery, without trying to understand it or describe it. To just be, in its presence .
What if we made a practice of expecting the holy in our midst? What if we started looking for moments of grace and signs of wonder in the most unexpected places? Like in our daily lives, in our homes and workplaces, in our everyday encounters. Just over there, at the edge of our sight.
The invitation is to let go and let the Holy move in us. The Mystery is all around, my friends. The Spirit is very near you. Now and always,
Amen.