Hilton Head Island, SC – January 13, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 9:28-36; Luke 24:28-42
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Texts – And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight…. They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he ate it before them. (Luke 24:31,41-42) RSV)
I remember this sermon illustration as though I heard it yesterday, but I actually heard it fifty or more years ago. Dr. Elam Davies was the pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago. He was preaching about something or other (and I don’t recall what it was. I have subsequently used this illustration myself, but I don’t recall what I was trying to illustrate, either.) Elam Davies used this made-up story to undergird whatever it was he was saying.
He referred to the first time a particular man gazed down into the Grand Canyon. In his magnificent Welsh descriptive style, he said that the man was completely dumbstruck by the sight. For several minutes he could not utter a single word. He stood by the railing, peering down into the five-thousand-foot deep gorge. Rising up from it on both sides were the multitudes of layers of sedimentary rock, representing multi-millions of years of geological time. The newest layer, on the top, is merely two hundred million years old. The oldest layer, at the bottom, where the Colorado River keeps gnawing its way downward, was formed over two billion years ago.
Far away on the other side was the North Rim, five to ten miles in the distance, only a dim line in the desert air. Finally, when the man regained his voice, he slowly and quietly observed, with an awe he had never before experienced, “Something … happened … here.”
Certain events leave an indelible impression on us, and we cannot find words which sufficiently describe what we experience. Seeing the Grand Canyon is always like that for me. Seeing a newborn baby the first time, especially one’s own child or grandchild, may create a similar awe-stricken moment.
What is a “light year?” A light year is the distance it would take for a ray of light to travel in space at 186,000 miles per second. So how much is a light-year in miles? The answer is: A number that words cannot adequately express. It is a long, long, long distance, a span so great that no language can fully explain it so that we can grasp what it means. And there are billions of galaxies in space that are billions of light-years away. Space is really big, but language is far too limited to declare how big it is.
The seventeenth century in England was an enormously troublesome century. In the middle of it there were a series of various monarchs who tried to impose either Roman Catholicism or English (and thus Anglican) Protestantism upon British subjects. A civil war went on for twenty years in the 1640s and ‘50s. Charles I was beheaded; Oliver Cromwell established a Calvinist republic; the monarchy was restored with Charles II on the throne (until he too had his crown [but not his head] removed.) The same fate awaited James II in 1688 under the Glorious Revolution. The Stuart kings were finally overthrown for good, which no doubt was beneficial for everyone, except the Stuarts. (I feel free to say that, because it is reported in our family we are related.)
In the midst of this constant upheaval, a Protestant named John Bunyan was thrown into the Bedforshire prison for being a Protestant. He wrote what some call the first English novel, but it was actually a very fanciful allegory of a mythical journey by a mythical man with the simple name (or description?) of Christian. Pilgrim’s Progress was Bunyan’s attempt to put into words the unspeakable horrors which were visited upon England in dark years of the seventeenth century. Bunyan did not tell what was happening politically, because he might have ended up at the executioner’s block. Instead he told within the limits of language barely made available to him how hard it was to be a Protestant in Catholic-dominated England. (Had he been a Catholic, and he had written his allegory twenty years before or after he wrote it, he might had told a very similar tale from a polar-opposite position.) But he never talked about Catholics, Protestants, or politics. His imagery and place-names became immortal.
Every evening on television we hear words which try to explain what is happening in the world, but they can’t truly depict the chaotic nature of what surrounds us.
In 1794, sixteen years after Bunyan published Pilgrim’s Progress, William Blake wrote a poem in a group of poems called Songs of Innocence. “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright/ In the forests of the night/ What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” If you don’t know the circumstances under which Blake his poem, when Great Britain at last was emerging from its chaos, that famous poem might simply sound like a meaningless bit of doggerel. But Blake paired that poem with another of his Songs of Innocence, called The Lamb. The fifth stanza of Tyger, Tyger says this: “When the stars threw down their spears/ And water’d heaven with their tears/ Did he smile their works to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” The Lamb is the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, and Jesus represents hope for a religiously-crazed world intent on killing itself instead of serving him whom God sent into the world as the Prince of Peace.
William Blake was a brilliant, strange, permanently influential poet. I am a confirmed Britophile who has a fairly well-stocked mental storehouse of innumerable British blunders through the ages. Nevertheless, I think the following words, which became one of the best-known British national hymns, come very close to expressing the inexpressible, something between Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. They tell of the ancient English legend of the teenage Jesus going with Joseph of Arimathea on a voyage to the south of England to collect ore for tin. “And did those feet in ancient time/ Walk upon England’s mountains green?/ And was the holy Lamb of God/ On England’s pleasant pastures seen?/ And did the countenance divine/ Shine forth upon these clouded hills?/ And was Jerusalem builded here/ Among these dark satanic mills?// Bring me my bow of burning gold!/ Bring me my arrows of desire!/ Bring me my spear/ O clouds, unfold!/ Bring me my chariots of fire!/ I will not cease from mental fight/ Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand/ Till we have built Jerusalem/ In England’s green and pleasant land.”
Things were not really good when Blake wrote the hymn which Brits call Jerusalem. But they were better than they had been, by a great deal. The eighteenth century was far better for Great Britain than the seventeenth, and stellar thinkers like John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith made it so. The nineteenth century was a time of immense expansion for the British Empire, but two wars in the early and mid-twentieth century snuffed out that Empire.
Sometimes language almost captures what cannot be expressed in words. Poets and prophets are the best equipped to make the attempt, but even they cannot accomplish the un-accomplishable. I shall never forget that hymn sung for the first time in my hearing in the Glenburn Parish Church in Paisley, Scotland. I was transported with the congregation in the singing of it, knowing that in the end, order can follow chaos, and good can triumph over evil. It was sung again in the movie Chariots of Fire at the funeral for the Olympic track star Harold Abrahams in the London church St. Martin’s in the Fields. Just to recall it sends chills up my spine.
* * * *
A few months before the crucifixion, Jesus took Peter, James, and John, and they went to the top of a mountain. Mark describes it as “a high mountain apart.” Many scholars and local northern Israeli Christians say that must mean it was Mt. Tabor. Tabor is an ancient volcano, with its top rounded off by eons of erosion. It looks like a gargantuan half-grapefruit neatly placed on the eastern end of the Valley of Jezreel, ten miles or so southeast of Nazareth.
All three Synoptic Gospels say that while Jesus and the disciples were praying, Jesus was suddenly transfigured before they eyes. And just as suddenly Moses and Elijah were with Jesus. None of the three Gospels uses the word “transfiguration,” and nobody has ever been able fully to explain what that word means. If Jesus was transformed in the sight of the three disciples, however, and if Jesus became a celestial trio with Moses and Elijah, and the disciples knew who the other two were without having to ask, something really big happened. However, language is too limited to explain exactly what it was. Whatever it was, it apparently convinced the three disciples that Jesus should be considered the equal to or greater than two of the all-time greats of the Hebrew Bible.
The transfiguration may be considered a mystical experience. A mystical experience, by its very nature, cannot truly be related in mere words. If words cannot convey the meaning, it doesn’t mean the event didn’t happen. Instead it means that words can’t capture its essence.
If you want to be a Christian, you’re going to have to put up with some inevitably fuzzy realities, because words cannot negate the fuzziness.
An example of this is the most central event in Christianity, namely, the resurrection of Jesus from the tomb. The resurrection is an unavoidably fuzzy conviction, because no words which were written in the Gospels or in the remainder of the New Testament do the resurrection justice. None of the billions of words written or spoken about it since clarify the irrefutable opaqueness which has always characterized Jesus emerging from death.
Let us look at two incidents reported in the Gospel of Luke. Only Luke tells us about two men meeting the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus. Luke is very careful to point out that they did not recognize Jesus, even though, from the context, we learn that they had been committed followers of Jesus. Only when he prayed and then broke bread with them at dinner did they recognize Jesus. And at that moment, says Luke, “he vanished from their sight.” Jesus was there, and then, in an instant, he wasn’t there. Therefore the resurrection couldn’t be physical – - - could it? It had to be spiritual - - - didn’t it?
Luke then says the two men of Emmaus immediately went back into Jerusalem to tell the apostles what had happened. Soon thereafter, says Luke, Jesus suddenly appeared to everyone. “They were startled and frightened,” he says, “and supposed that they saw a spirit.” But then, according to Luke, Jesus asked them, “Do you have anything here to eat?” Apparently the resurrected Jesus was hungry. Then these astounding words: “They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it before them” (24:28-43; selected).
The next time your deceased mother or father or sister or brother appears to you in a dream, offer them a cup of coffee and an Oreo cookie. See how far it gets you, either in your dream or if they appear to you in a conscious but altered state from the state in which you normally exist. Get into either of those situations and then try to explain it to somebody. They will think you have taken leave of senses, or more likely, that you have lost your mind.
Every resurrection appearance in every Gospel is an attempt in words to describe the indescribable. But words cannot describe the indescribable! Language cannot convey the “inconveyable”! Christianity, along with every other religion, is based on certain linguistic constructs, but the words so carefully and religiously put together cannot do justice to that which they so narrowly or broadly try to define!
The content of religion is larger than the words employed to circumscribe religion. The meaning of religion is infinitely larger than whatever the religion decrees about its meaning.
When words cannot say what needs to be said, we need to accept that inevitable deficiency, and then move on beyond the inability of words to convince us of that which we need to accept. The Bible is filled with mystical experiences. We can argue forever about whether such experiences are “real.” They are the most real of realities for those who had or who have them, but I suspect that only a small percentage of people do have them. A conviction that Easter was real was the central factor in the establishment of Christianity, but too many people take the attitude of the disciple named Thomas; “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.” But then, a few days later, when Thomas saw the risen Christ, he exclaimed, “My Lord and my God!” Were that to happen to me, I am fairly sure I would never express it that way, but I hope I would have the humility to express divinely-prompted astonishment nonetheless. In any case, there is no report that Thomas actually touched either the wounds of Jesus or the Jesus who was raised from the death caused by the wounds.
However, I am not talking only about the mystical here. For example, what words can we use adequately to describe God? The Hebrews called Him El Shaddai, God Almighty, which alternately is translated as God of the Mountains, the High God, the Highest of Gods, the only God. But that title and those linguistic descriptions do not do God justice. They called Him Adonoy Sabaoth, Lord of Hosts, or in other words, Lord of Armies, but surely that is a bad idea, as well intended as it may have been. If being a warrior is the essence of God, we are all in very deep trouble, because he has good reason to go to war with all of us.
Whatever words we use to describe God, or to mean “God,” God is infinitely greater than all those words put together. If we are religious, or even if we aren’t “religious,” we may want to grasp God and to be grasped by God. In the end, however, we have no choice other than to do the best we can when words can convey what only the heart and spirit can discern. We must give in to “The Ineffable,” a word which is defined as “incapable of being expressed.” The mind cannot contain a truly complete meaning of who God is. In the end, only a leap faith or trust or belief can accomplish that, except that even they cannot do it.
If we want historical proof to back up what we believe, we shall ultimately delude ourselves if we think we can possess it. Much of the foundation of biblical religion is historical, but much is also supra-historical. That’s just the way it is.
So - - - Is that the way it is for you? Or do you keep resisting the Irresistible? Might you continue to imagine that you can describe the Indescribable? Do you insist on defining the Indefinable?
If any or all of those accurately portray where you are in your spiritual journey, how far would you say your efforts have taken you?