Hello,
Friends.
This is Mark Ludman,
Also known as Brother Frederick James,
Your friendly neighborhood monk in docks.
Welcome back to day two of our series,
God is.
Let's begin just by settling ourselves and becoming fully present to the moment we're in.
Taking a nice deep breath in.
And out.
We ask God to open our ears to hear,
Our minds to be open.
Our hearts to receive today.
Perhaps just in this moment you might be sitting with the thought from yesterday that God is not a thing.
That the Father God might be the ground of all beings.
And as we sit in this moment,
While we may not understand it,
We open ourselves up to the possibility that we are in God and God is in us.
Which leads me to.
.
.
To today's God is,
God is mystery.
And while that's the statement I'd like to sit with today,
We can make it mean almost anything,
So I want to be careful as well.
When we say something's a mystery,
We often mean that we don't know the answer yet.
There's a mystery at the beginning of a detective story.
Something happened.
We don't know who did it.
We get the clues and eventually someone solves the mystery.
Case closed,
But that's not quite what we mean when we call God mystery.
We don't mean that God's a puzzle.
That we need to solve.
God's mystery because God can never be exhausted by our understanding.
So I'd like you to think about someone you love.
You probably know them well.
You know their habits and their stories and their favorite things.
You know the expressions on their faces,
The ones that tell you when they're worried,
The ones that tell you that they're happy.
You know them better than almost anyone else.
And I hedge a bet,
Though,
That you would never say that you completely have understood this person.
And that's because a person is not a problem that's meant to be solved.
The more deeply you know someone,
The more you discover that there's always more to know.
Love increases.
The mystery.
And I think the same is true,
And infinitely more so,
Of God.
We can know But there's no way we can contain in our knowledge everything there is to know about God.
We can talk faithfully and truthfully about God.
But we also accept that our words don't capture.
God.
We can't put God in a box and say there,
Now I've got God all figured out.
And I suppose this is what it means when we say,
Let God be.
Be God.
I think the human tendency.
Is to feel that we have to have God explain.
And I think we do that because there's something comforting about a God that we can explain if we can define God precisely.
Then I know where I stand.
I know what God wants.
I know what God will do.
I know who God approves of and doesn't approve of.
I know how God works.
I know how to get God's attention.
And I know what happens when I do the right things.
And when we have all this sorted out,
God becomes.
Manageable.
And let's be honest,
A manageable God?
Is very useful because.
.
.
If we can use God to reinforce our worldview and justify our politics.
Well,
Isn't that a good thing?
You know,
We can use God to tell other people that they're wrong.
Or make ourselves feel safe,
We can even use God to avoid God.
But what we call certainty.
About God is really certainty that we have God under control.
Mystery.
Mystery disrupts all of that because mystery says you don't own God and you don't possess God.
Mystery reminds us that despite everything we can know about God now,
Or everything that we may ever learn about God in the future,
We don't have the final word about God.
And even the scriptures know this.
One of the things I love about scripture is how often it refuses to give us a neat picture of God.
In that story of Moses,
Where Moses asks God for a name and God gives him one of the weirdest answers imaginable.
Translated,
It's something like,
I am who I am,
Or I will be what I will be.
It's almost as though Moses asks,
Tell me exactly who you are,
And God says,
Sorry Moses,
You don't get to reduce me to a definition.
And then there's Joe.
In the story of Job,
Job wants an explanation.
He wants God to account for the suffering that he's experienced.
Eventually God does speak in the story,
But God doesn't give Job the neat theological answer he wants.
Instead.
.
.
God gives him questions.
He asked things like,
Where were you when the foundations of the earth were laid?
Can you comprehend the vastness of creation?
Can you explain the creatures of the deep?
And while Job doesn't even get close to an explanation,
What he does receive is an encounter with God and Job's world suddenly becomes bigger.
And the Christian mystical tradition took this very seriously.
There's an ancient practice of prayer sometimes described as the cloud of unknowing.
And the idea.
Isn't that we stop thinking or say that,
You know,
Thinking about God doesn't matter.
So it's not anti-intellectual,
But it's got much more of a beautiful nuance.
It says that at some point.
.
.
Every concept we have about God.
Has to become transparent to the God it is trying to describe.
So you can think about God,
Study scripture,
Read theology,
Debate doctrine,
Pray,
Meditate and learn.
And all of that matters.
But eventually.
.
.
You reach the end of language.
And beyond that edge where we tend to think is nothing.
There is God.
The silence,
You could say,
Is just too full for our words to describe.
And this is where things can become a bit uncomfortable.
Sometimes we have to let go of false images of God and sometimes we have to let go of truth.
Images of God.
God is love?
Yes.
God is creator?
Yes.
God is Trinity?
Yes.
God is present?
Yes.
And yet God is infinitely more than any of those statements.
And this is why Christian theology has always had two movements.
We speak and then we also unspeak.
We say God is love,
But then we realize that whatever we mean by love God's love is infinitely more than our experience of love.
We say God is light.
And then we discover that God's light has no comparison to physical brightness.
Every image points.
But none of them contains and that is so important.
Let me say it again.
Every image points and the pointing is fine.
But none of them seeks to contain God.
And this matters enormously for faith because if God is mystery.
.
.
Then faith can't mean that we have to have all the answers.
And this should be so freeing,
My friend.
Instead,
Faith becomes a willingness to trust the one that we can't fully comprehend.
And that's a different kind of faith,
Because it's a faith that leaves room for questions and doubts.
It's got room in it for silence and growth.
And it's even got room in it for changing our mind.
How freeing is that?
From some of the things that some of us may have grown up or even are in today.
So growing spiritually.
Is not about becoming more certain,
But about becoming more spacious,
Becoming more capable of holding paradox,
More willing to say,
I don't know.
And yet,
Even when we don't know,
We still pray.
That we're more willing to say,
I don't understand,
And yet we still love.
More willing to say,
I can't explain this,
And yet we stay here in it.
And faith like this is not and can not.
Be weak.
Faith like this is mature.
Strong faith.
And then we come back to Jesus,
Because if God is mystery,
Then Jesus doesn't eliminate the mystery,
But reveals it.
And I'm not just playing with semantics here,
This is really important.
Jesus doesn't turn God into something that we can finally comprehend.
Jesus gives the mystery a human face.
And the closer we look,
The stranger it becomes,
The God revealed in Jesus.
Is found among the poor.
At a table,
Touching lepers,
Talking with outsiders,
This Jesus washes feet,
Weeps at tombs,
Refuses to answer certain questions.
Goes into silence,
Gives themselves away,
Dies,
And somehow.
.
.
Christians say here,
Here is God.
Has the mystery gone away?
No way,
But the mystery has.
Come close.
So mystery is not the opposite of intimacy.
I think sometimes we think that if we can't fully understand God,
Then we can't really know God.
I want to suggest to you that the opposite is true.
The mystery.
.
.
Of God.
Isn't distance but it's depth,
The ocean.
Is no less real because we can't see its bottom.
A person is no less knowable because we can never exhaust that knowing.
Love is no less real because it can't be reduced to a formula,
And God is no less present because God exceeds our understanding.
God is mysterious because God is infinitely more than we're capable of imagining.
So we need to resist trying to solve God or define God and instead let our favorite descriptions of God become a doorway.
A doorway that opens up into another room.
Rather than a destination when we can say hey.
Have made it.
God is love,
God is grace,
God is presence,
God is light.
Whatever word you choose,
Stay with it.
And then,
After a while,
Say,
And more.
And so today.
I encourage you to do that.
Sit for a while and perhaps even write down.
All the things that you would have after that term God is,
And sit with them,
Your favourite ones.
And then after you've sat with it a while,
Just say,
And more,
God is love.
And more.
God is grace.
And more.
God is light.
And more.
God is mystery.
And more.
Deep faith,
Friends,
Does not require you to know exactly who God is.
But to be able to say,
I know enough to trust.
And enough to wonder.
And may grace,
Peace,
And love be with you as you open yourself up to this mystery of the God who is more.
Today and always.
Have a great day friends,
Sitting quietly in the presence of the God who is always gloriously Until tomorrow.
Bye for now.
