Mystery and Wholeness

Scriptures: Isaiah 53:1-9, Ephesians 3:1-13

One of the ways in which our modern, scientific world has tended to let us down is in the area of mystery.  A sense of awe, of wonder, of child-like joyful anticipation can all be casualties of our drive to know.  Our reaching out to the stars – as grand and glorious a gesture as that may be, even if our space program has been pretty much on hold since those early successes of the 60’s and 70’s – or our striving to create life in a laboratory – as hopeful a potentiality as that may be, even if it does tend to threaten our religious sensibilities – these and other scientific advances carry with them the seeds of forgetting who we are – that is, what the limits of human understanding are.

The word “understanding” in that last sentence is used quite deliberately, because our present age seems to make it clear that there are no limits to human knowledge.  Science-fiction movies like Avatar or (a few years back) Flatliners posit leaping ahead in the fields of human knowledge – even past the point of death.  And I believe that this is as it should be.  We should want all of the knowledge of what it means to be human and how to cope with our lives on this little planet that we can get.  In the past – even our fairly recent past – a sense of the mystery of God has been used by Christians to try to dampen enthusiasm for questing knowledge.  That which we did not know was seen as the province of God, upon which we – puny little human beings – should not deign to trespass, for what we did not know was in the realm of mystery and faith.  Few of us would want to use that approach today, for we have seen what advances in human knowledge have meant in terms of bettering the lives that each of us lead.  Not only through technology but also through theoretical science we are better human beings for raising and grappling with questions and answers which our present state of knowledge gives to us.

But knowledge is not the same as understanding.  In the midst of our scientific and technical efficiency and sufficiency we should not lose that joy which can come from looking at our knowledge with a sense of wonder.  It is hard, for example, to re-capture a young student’s awe-inspired reaction to the beauty of a flower after that student has examined, analyzed, and cataloged the petals, stamens, pistils, buds, seeds, and roots of the plant.  Now she or he has more knowledge about the plant, but is their understanding any more complete if their initial sense of wonder is gone forever?  Perhaps one of the most important functions of the religious impulse for our day is to help us formulate a self-understanding which includes the truth of mystery – in other words, to add to our technological knowledge what Lawrence Ferlinghetti has called “a re-birth of wonder”.

So, if one of religion’s tasks today is to help us reach an understanding of mystery, then a good place to begin is with the sacrament of communion.  The sacraments were originally intended as the ultimate expressions of divine mystery; in fact, the classical definition of a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”  In other words, the words we hear and the actions we perform in either baptism or communion are intended to signify much more than just what is on the surface.  The intention here is that something very deep in the life of the person confronted by the sacrament will be touched – something that corresponds to God’s grace in the life of that person.

The early church understood communion in such a mysterious way that there evolved the belief that the bread and the wine somehow mysteriously changed into the actual body and blood of Christ.  In the Reformation this understanding was challenged by Calvin, in particular, as well as others before him.  The Reformation in the church was taking place at the same time as the Age of Enlightenment on the world history stage, and the reformers were using enlightened thought to point out that our understanding of the mystery of communion does not have to include an acceptance of something so miraculous that it defies all rational thought.

So, as we come before this communion table today I doubt that any of us would want to re-capture a sense of wonder and mystery by returning to the thought that the bread and the juice actually change.  However, in rejecting this bit of magic the reformers were in danger of making this sacrament into a less significant mystery than it was intended to be by our Lord when he instituted it.  Again, our knowledge of what communion is supposed to be and mean is much greater than it was four centuries ago, but have we gained correspondingly in understanding?

The main point I want to make this morning is that this sense of awe-inspiring mystery which we have been talking about is most legitimately expressed when it leads to an increasing sense of wholeness on the part of the individual or the group.  If we increase in understanding, we are more likely to become whole people.  This, I believe, is what Paul is getting at (or the author who assumed Paul’s name in writing to the Ephesians) in this letter when he speaks of the mystery that was made known to him by revelation.  This “mystery of Christ” – this same mystery that we encounter in the communion service – can be understood, according to this author, by seeing that “the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise of Christ Jesus through the gospel.”

Wholeness can be understood in two ways.  There is the wholeness of a people who have been fragmented from one another along artificial dividing lines.  This is what the author of Ephesians is getting at in holding up before the community of Jewish Christians in Ephesus the reality that the Gentiles have also received this mystery and therefore the promise of God (“this grace was given to me,” the author says, “to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ”).  In this manner the wisdom of God brings forth a “rich variety”, which is “in accordance with the eternal purpose” that God “has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  For “the Gentiles” in our own day we might say Iraqis or Afghans or even members of Al Qaeda – those peoples with whom in the near or not-so-near past we as a people have found ourselves at war.  To recognize that we are all subsumed under that mystery as we prepare to receive communion is to understand ourselves as members of the human group – a group which includes those we would prefer to think of as our enemies.  Remember what we said last week as we read the 23^rd Psalm about what God does for us – “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies…..”  To recognize the mystery of Christ as clearly found in his communion in a true sense is to move toward wholeness as a group of worshippers under God.

But, secondly, there is also the psychological wholeness of each of us as individuals.  (These two senses of wholeness, incidentally, is another key reason why during communion we eat the bread as soon as we receive it and hold the cup until all have been served so we can drink together – thereby demonstrating by our actions both our whole individual selves before God and our wholeness as a community of faith before God.)  In order to see what this psychological wholeness might mean, let’s go back to our student with the flower.  Before beginning botanical studies this individual had only an aesthetic image – the flower meant little more (but no less!) to her or him than a pleasant impression on the senses – sight, smell, perhaps even feeling.  As the student’s class work brought him or her into the make-up of the flower in more detail, petal after petal was stripped off so that ultimately the student could almost look into the heart of the flower.  But something is missing, for a flower stripped of its petals is hardly a flower at all.  The student has increased in knowledge and in some forms of self-understanding, but that student is lacking wholeness without quite being sure how to fulfill that lack.  It would be ludicrous for religion – or anything else, for that matter – to try to bring back the naïve impression of the flower in the student’s pre-botanical days.  So, the significant thing that religion might do is to show the student how understanding can be added to knowledge – how looking at a flower as a whole as well as through a microscope aids in a search for self-understanding.

What religion – or Christianity, in particular – should be trying to do in a time of fragmentation, specialization, compartmentalization – a time when a person may be three different people on the job, at home, and in the church – is to hold out to each of us in our fragmented lives the hope of wholeness – a hope which can begin with a renewed sense of the mystery of God.  God does not have to be mysterious in the sense of unknowable, but if we are to find both individual and community wholeness God will need to become for us that which helps us to see the whole picture by reclaiming for us our sense of the wonder of it all.

Christ’s death – which here we remember in the mystery of this sacrament – is a way of holding out the ideal of wholeness before us.  When Isaiah spoke of the suffering servant – an image which Christ accepted for himself – the prophet noted not only that “he was wounded for our transgressions,” and that “(he was) crushed for our iniquities”, but also “upon him was the punishment that made us whole.”  Through our acceptance of this death, which took place so that we might be able to live more fully – a mystery in and of itself – we are enabled to move beyond just knowledge to self-understanding – the kind of understanding that helps us to see the mystery of God not in a fearful but in a loving light.

Christ’s death, which is sacramentally presented here for our acceptance, also brings us into communion not only with those here and now but also with all those, past and future, who have found the meaning of their lives to be focused in that love.  This is the mystery of oneness, which leads to our sense of wholeness.  It is most beautifully expressed in one of the last verses of Ralph Vaughn Williams’ marvelous memorial hymn, “For All the Saints”:

O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
Yet all are one in thee for all are thine.
Alleluia! Alleluia!

As we prepare now to receive this sacrament, may we perceive the mystery in it that can prepare us for our wholeness under God.

Amen

Dave Pomeroy