(Preached on Sunday, February 07, 2010)
In the year that King Uzziah died, I had a vision of the LORD. -Isaiah 6:1
Talking about God is difficult. One scholar of religion has described that task in the following way: (Huston Smith, The Religions of Man)
“Man is forever trying to lay hold of Reality with words, only in the end to find mystery rebuking his speech and his symbols swallowed by silence. The problem is not that our minds are not bright enough. The problem lies deeper. Our minds, taken in their conscious, surface sense, are the wrong kind of instrument for the undertaking. The effect, as a result, is like trying to ladle the ocean with a net or lasso the wind with rope. The awe-inspiring prayer of Shankara, the St. Thomas Aquinas of Hinduism, begins with the invocation, “O Thou, before whom all words recoil.”” The scholar could have added that Thomas Aquinas himself said at the end of his life, after he had experienced his own vision of God, that all his writings, his mighty books and careful words, now seemed like so much straw.
Words carry the risk of idolatry, of limiting God. They form an image for us and we forget that God is not only “greater than our heart,” as the apostle John declares, but greater than our words. The problem grows when we invest too much meaning and faith in our words about God instead of in God. We begin to view our words about God as expressing or containing the truth about God, instead of remembering that they are attempts at expressing our experience of God, or our ideas about God – not God’s own self. This becomes idolatry when we invest sacredness into the very words themselves and become willing to fight over the words and images of God we hold onto, even to die for those words and images.
Yet words are the means by which human beings communicate our thoughts, emotions and actions. Words are the way in which we communicate and share our experiences, even religious and mystical experiences.
According to research conducted by the Pew Forum, 49 percent of the U.S. population claims to have had a religious or mystical experience, which is defined as a “moment of sudden religious insight or awakening.” While this might sound like good news for the Church, a growing number of people today define themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Many people, including regular church attendees, believe that the last place they might encounter the holy in a dramatic way is at church.
Isaiah had such an experience and he had it in “church.” In a turbulent and unsettled time, when the nation was mourning the death of the King of Israel, Isaiah retreats to the temple to try and recover a sense of perspective and peace of mind. But that is not what he finds, at least not in a way he probably expected. Instead he experiences an encounter with the Holy One. He sees God’s presence rock the temple and turn his whole world upside down. He catches a glimpse of the deepest reality: “The whole earth is full of God’s glory.”
Through this experience Isaiah discovers that God is more than he imagined. It is an experience of mystery which evokes awe, wonder and fascination in him. It also evokes a response. Actually, it evokes a couple of responses. The first response is a confession of his inadequacy before God. It is not a matter of behavior or morality, but of awe and wonder before the overwhelming power above, behind, under and all around life. As the psalmist declarers in Psalm 8: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”
True mystical experiences of the power and reality of God move us to a state of humility. In the presence of God we become fully aware of the limits of our language, our imagery, or very ability to capture and express the full scope and power and majesty of God. Isaiah demonstrates this through his attempt to relate his experience. As he describes what he saw it is clearly very vivid and clear in his mind. He paints a powerful picture of what happens in the Temple, of the setting, of the winged creatures, and of his interaction with his vision. The detail is precise and colorful. Isaiah describes everything he sees, except – and notice – the vision of the One on the uplifted throne.
This difficulty in talking about God has become even more pronounced for us in the 21st century. Due to the advances of science – from space exploration, to decoding the human genome, to the increasing power of microscopic exploration and the unraveling of the amazing workings of our own bodies – we have become even more awestruck by the universe, and even more lost in our ability to imagine and speak of God. Our biblical ancestors imagined and described their experiences of God in very human ways: as a father, a king, a mighty warrior. But their understanding of the world was more limited: completely focused and centered on the land where they lived and a vision of the sky above providing a protective dome between them and heaven.
At the same time, as concrete as they were they also used imagery and metaphor to describe what they clearly experienced as indescribable. And so, even though much of the language speaking of God in the Bible is masculine, it is not exclusively so. They also speak of God with feminine imagery as well: describing God as a woman in labor, as a mother who quiets her child at her breast, as a mother hen who gathers her chicks under the protection of her wings at night. They speak of acts of creation as issuing from the “womb” of God. Part of the brilliance of the Hebrew vision of God was the fact that in a world surrounded by people who worshiped galleries of gods, some male and some female, the Jews worshiped one God who was beyond sex, while at the same time encapsulating both sexes. The first creation story in Genesis describes God deciding to create humankind with these words: “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness; …male and female … (God) created them.”
Perhaps people no longer expect mystical, spiritual experiences of God in church because we have become limited in our use of language and imagery to speak of God. After all, in a universe which is expanding, where the earth is a globe, one planet of several orbiting our sun, does it make any sense to speak of “God being in the heavens, all is right with the world”? Where is heaven? Where is up? Add to this reality a world which has shrunk so that a wide variety of religious, spiritual and mystical experiences of people now bump up against one another. In such a world, perhaps evangelism isn’t about convincing others of our truth or getting them to accept our beliefs, but instead it is the practice of sharing and living our story, as well as listening to their experiences of the divine and mystical power in the universe with an openness to learning more about this God who is so much larger and grander than we can even begin to comprehend.
Mystical experiences still happen. Author and educator Tom Tozer recently described one he experienced on a solo vacation. While sitting on a porch in the Smokey Mountains soaking in the vista of mountains, sky and mist he was contemplating about heaven and wondering why, if such a place existed, that someone there couldn’t give him a signal so that he’d know for sure. He thought about his father who died two years earlier at the age of 98; of Marjorie, a dear friend and fellow writer, whose son had written to inform him of her death. And he thought of Deacon, his friend of 30 years who had died. He thought, surely one of them could rap on the table beside him or whisper in his ear and let him know. Wouldn’t these loved ones do that for him? Almost at the same moment, as he sat there alone, rocking, sipping coffee and balancing the Bible on his crossed leg, suddenly he was confronted by a hummingbird suspended before him, hovering just briefly in place, before darting away. It happened two more times within the next minute, before disappearing for good. Three appearances, that was all. And then it hit him… Dad, Marjorie, and Deacon. He thought long and hard about that for the next hour or so. He waited for yet another winged visit. It did not happen again. Nor did it happen the next morning or the next. It only happened that morning when he longed for a sign – a sign from one of the three dearest people in his life. Professor Tozer admits he really doesn’t know what to make of this. He is a believer, but he is also a seeker and a struggler and he has had his doubts most of his 62 years. Yet, when he thinks about the existence of God and heaven and whether or not these are simply concoctions of humankind’s fears and insecurities, he thinks of those humming emissaries. And for him, it leaves the door open for the sunlight. He still does not know if God speaks to us, but he remains mystified at those timely visits from the darting hummingbird.
There is an ancient Zen saying which states: “The finger points to the moon and woe is the one who confuses the finger with the moon!” Let us remember that God-talk should not be confused with the reality of God. Let us remember that all language about God is metaphor and let us not confuse the metaphor with the reality itself. Let us remain open to new language, new imagery, new metaphors, and we will discover ourselves open to new experiences and visions of God and we too, will find our faith deepened, our lives enriched, and our hearts transformed.