“Mystery”

Rev. Marion Millin - 17/05/2020

Reading - Acts 17:22-31

I have here a photo which I took on my walk on the afternoon after Perth’s recent big storm hit. I had just been sheltering under a tree waiting for a windy shower to pass when I turned around and noticed a beautiful rainbow arcing through the sky, seemingly pointing to the end of the path. 

And I immediately saw in this scene a metaphor for what we are currently enduring within this great storm of a pandemic. Here was a classic symbol of hope, and a double rainbow to boot, spanning the dark clouds. And I thought of a phrase I’d heard somewhere the week before which had also resonated with me – “hope is the next chapter” in your life’s story. 

And then I started to think about signs of hope within this crisis and that maybe this Covid virus isn’t all a bad thing. It’s certainly been a great leveller, with wealth and power providing no special privilege or protection. A Prime Minister nearly died. The homeless have been housed in hotels. And many in our society are now wondering why we can’t find accommodation for these vulnerable humans in ‘normal’ times too? No longer are the unemployed to be despised as ‘dolebludgers’ – they are our loved ones and friends. And who would have thought we would get back to a valuing of those who serve, such as in the caring and teaching professions and food provisioning?

The great god of capitalism has certainly taken a hard hit but I think that this challenge will lead to a much needed shift in our value systems both social and material, and perhaps our spiritual understandings too. Where is our Christian sense of God in all this anyway? I can see some treading a divine judgement path. But to what extent does a heavenly Father figure still hold meaning? And just how do we witness to the divine mystery that we call ‘God’ in difficult times? 

This was the very same struggle facing the early Christian community. In Jesus they had caught a glimpse of God very different to common understanding and they wanted to share that. Which is why I have chosen to focus on the passage from Acts today because in my mind it too represents the start of a radical shift in understanding.

In it we hear of the apostle Paul standing as a stranger before the people of Athens on the open air court below the Parthenon,witnessing to his experience of a creative force that caringly permeates the universe, even among us humans on earth. This was very different from existing Greek or Jewish understanding. In Paul’s first century world, concepts of the divine tended to be about power, domination and control with capricious gods and goddesses needing to be cajoled or a remote, judgemental God needing to be appeased. We should also remember that the Roman world was an exceedingly hierarchical society – only free men were valued as worthy humans, women had few rights, and 80% of the population were slaves. 

Worship, in both Judaism and the Greek Roman world, involved ritual and sacrifices with the intention of getting the divine world to treat you favourably. Put simplistically - if you were well-fed, housed and clothed then you must be doing things right - and if you were disabled or experiencing suffering through ill-health or ill-fortune then you must be in some sort of divine disfavour even to being despised or ostracised. 

But Jesus says ‘nonsense’. He despises such thinking, alienating as it is for those who are experiencing pain and suffering and for those who are less fortunate on the margins of society. In valuing the worth-ness of the least among us, Jesus is actually turning hierarchical social structures upside down.

I suspect we have lost touch with just how radical his teaching was for society. And it’s all based on his sense of mutual relationship with God, which he images metaphorically as a loving Father caring deeply for allhuman offspring regardless of their experiences and behaviour. This was very different from the powerful disciplinarian father heading up heaven or a patriarchal household. 

Instead he holds up a God-image who not only understands suffering but also cares about the suffering ones – and this in turn is embodied by their priority treatment in Jesus’ sense of inclusive ministry as found in his Kingdom of God ethics and his table fellowship with sinners (which incidentally meant ‘social outcasts’ rather than ‘moral deviants’). 

And when Jesus wants to ground this, he upholds the servant role, called diakonosin Greek - that’s where our term ‘deacon’ and ‘minister’ comes from. It was the serving one, sometimes the servant but usually the woman of the house, who had responsibility for the well-being of stranger and guest alike.

It was then in coming into contact with early followers of this Jesus Way, that Paul radically shifted his own understanding. He abandoned towing the Torah absolutes of laws and doctrines to trust engaging with the mystery of the unknown god. But even Paul struggles to express his experience in words, though for me the phrase“in him we live and move and have our being” sums it up pretty well. 

Unfortunately, ever since then, institutions and theologies have tried to define and confine that mystery we call “God” (with a capital G). But how can you define something that can only be feltor experienced in your life?  And then again how do you share such experience with others? 

Some may well find meaning in a loving father figure but it’s not the only divine metaphor by a long way. A sense of comforting presence for me has more likely come from being in creation with all its beauty and metaphors for life, like how that rainbow touched me a week or so ago. But that could be my Celtic genes!

I wonder what you might recall if you were asked to share a time when you felt a divine touching of your soul, or a deep spiritual connection to the ‘within’ or the ‘beyond’, which made a difference to your life? Maybe it involved an act of kindness, a song or piece of music, a moment of pure joy, a sacred church occasion. We have certainly seen a valuing of those experiences in this pandemic lockdown time; and as TV news segments of stockmarket shares took on an air of illusion, what is of real value has taken on greater meaning. 

So many people have been giving of themselves using their gifts and skills in whatever way they could in working for the greater good. Who would have thought that a frail old man choosing to raise money by walking towards his 100th birthday could have touched the hearts of so many around the world becoming an icon himself, a window to divine caring? At the other end of the spectrum perhaps in our human experience nothing sums up the mystery of God like a new baby coming into the world eliciting such great love and joy. And I was reminded of that last Saturday evening when news of the birth of my nephew’s son came onto my phone. 

Then coincidentally, on Monday when I was trying to pull this reflection together, my daughter-in-law happened to put on Facebook a beautiful photo of the sea touching land overlaid by this quote from Wayne Dyer “Our present moment is a mystery that we are part of. Here and now is where all the wonder of life lies.” And I would add the struggles and the pain, but that’s OK too. 

And so I finish with the words of one of my favourite blessing written by New Zealander Joy Cowley 

May the mystery of God enfold us,
may the wisdom of God uphold us,
may the fragrance of God be around us,
may the brightness of God surround us,
may the wonder of God renew us,
may the loving of God flow through us,
may the peace of God deeply move us,
may the moving of God bring us peace.        

Amen to that.

Acts 17:22-31
17:22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus, and said, "Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, 'To an unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.

The God who made the world and everything in it. He who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands,nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.

From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live,so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him--though indeed he is not far from each one of us.

For 'In him we live and move and have our being'; as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we too are his offspring.'Since we are God's offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.

While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent,because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead."