© 1991 Merlyn Cox
© 1991 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
Sermon by Rev. Merlyn Cox, 5/26/91
Scripture: John 3: 12
Is it really possible to know God in ways we have read of men and women of ages past? Were the seers and prophets and apostles of the Old and New Testaments such extraordinary people that we ought not expect to see their likes again? Or could it be that the assumptions of the modern world have so dulled our sensitivities that we are no longer able to respond to the deep things of the Spirit? Is it that God no longer speaks in such a fashion, or is it that fewer listen?
As a young person I remember being struck by the story of the vision of Isaiah in the Temple. I was instinctively drawn to it and wondered what it must have been like, what he really experienced: “In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord high and lifted up, and his robe filled the whole temple. Seraphim attended him and constantly called to one another, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ And as each called, the threshold shook to its foundations at the sound, and the whole house began to fill with clouds of smoke.”
Had we been there, what would we have seen? I doubt if we would have seen with the visible eye what he describes, but would we deny the reality of what what he saw with the inner eye? How is it possible for some to have such a grand vision of the holiness of God, and others seemingly little or nothing? If it’s possible for some, why not for all?
The Old Testament is filled with stories of men and women who had such visions, who encountered the divine and whose lives were forever changed, and through them the lives of countless others who came after them, including you and I.
Some years ago a book was written by Rudolph Otto that became a religious classic. It was entitled, “The Idea of the Holy.” It is an exploration of what he believed is the non-rational experience that is at the very core of religion. It is marked by what he called the mysterium tremendum-a sense of great awe and mystery. It is the sense of being in the presence of a “wholly other,” an overwhelming power and majesty and presence that leaves one filled with wonder and astonishment, and feeling very small in comparison. Isaiah felt compelled to say in response to his vision of the Holy, “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the presence of a people of unclean lips.”
Do people really have that kind of experience any more? Well, apparently some do. Surveys have shown that many people have had what they would classify as a significant religious experience of this nature at some time in their life-an experience of the mysterious tremendum, the holy. It doesn’t always come in temple or church, although it sometimes still does.
Not long ago I was sitting in the chapel at Oklahoma City University where I attended a symposium on science and religion. It is a large sanctuary shaped like a diamond. Its massive brick walls support a high ceiling that points upwards and seems to carry you with it. In each of the four walls were huge stain glass windows, each shaped the same, with panels of many colors. Someone suggested that they looked like a large bird in flight. The clear outline of the cross was, at least to me, also clearly visible.
We attended sessions there throughout the day. In the morning the sun came through the east window, radiating a soft glow of red and gold upon all of us, like a morning blessing. In the afternoon, as the sun shown through the south window, the colors changed and the room brightened. Then in the evening, just before sunset, it would flood through the west windows behind us, and play upon the huge walnut encased organ pipes and down upon the worship center below, giving to everything it touched a kind of graceful benediction. The speakers, I could not help but notice, were somehow dwarfed by this spectacle of beauty and color. It was truly awesome-even a touch of the holy.
It was designed to be that way, of course, to elicit just those feelings, and it succeeded in a way I have rarely experienced. It was meant to do what the great cathedrals of the past were meant to do: to stretch our minds and spirits beyond the confines of earth and connect us to the “wholly other,” to the numinous, the mysterium tremendum that surrounds us and transcends us.
If you spend time sitting in the great cathedrals of Europe you’ll get some of that same feeling, albeit, perhaps, not quite as warmly. The wood and brick of a modern cathedral speak differently than the massive stone of earlier times. It speaks of a presence more intimate and knowable, a voice more gentle, but none the less, still infinitely majestic and holy.
We use our stone and wood and glass, the things of the earth, as pointers to what is holy and wholly beyond us. It fascinates us, draws us to it, and somehow sanctifies our common life.
The early cave men of Europe are called such, not just because they used caves to live in, but because these were also their cathedrals. They traveled far back into the bowels of the earth, as it were, far beyond the needs of reasonable safety, and turned large rooms into cathedrals, sacred places where they painted stories of life and death, places where they expected to come to terms with the mysterious and awesome power underlying all of life.
Long before Moses met God on top of a mountain and took his shoes off in response to his encounter with the Divine, Jacob met him on lower ground. After Jacob had stolen his father’s blessing from Esau, he set out to find wives among his fellow tribesmen. Along the way he came upon a certain shrine. It doesn’t say who made it or to whom it was dedicated. It was just another shrine, the nomads equivalent of a cathedral in the midst of the wilderness. It was, no doubt, just a pile of rocks; but everyone who passed by would know it’s purpose — to identify a place dedicated to the worship of the holy.
Since it was late in the evening, Jacob rested there for the night. He took one of the stones from the shrine and used it as a pillow. And during the night he had his now famous dream (the one we all sang about as children). In the dream he saw a great ladder. The bottom rested on the ground, but the top reached all the way to heaven, and on it he could see the angels of God ascending and descending from heaven.
When Jacob arose in the morning he said, “Truly the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” The New English version says, “He was awestruck and said, 'How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; it is the gateway to heaven.” He took the stone he had used as a pillow, and anointed it with oil, and set it up as a sacred pillar. And he called the place “Bethel,” which means the “house of God.”
We still use stone and brick and wood and mortar to mark the places of divine encounters, or at least the places where we hope for, if not anticipate, some kind of holy meeting.
Do people today still hunger for such a thing? I do indeed think so. If not in the church or temple, then in nature, in science, in meditation, in music, in all kinds of ways and places. I would call it a pervasive hunger for the holy. It is as fundamental as anything in our nature, although we often seem intent on ignoring it, at the suggestion of a secular society that pretends to have outgrown it. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to see the day in which our spiritual needs are as naturally acknowledged by society as a whole as are our physical needs, but without the superstitions of the past so often attached.
Jacob’s rock was no different from the one in our back yard. Jacob’s encounter didn’t change his “science,” but neither does our science change the reality of the Almighty, or the way we are made. Jacob’s vision is no less real. In order to be whole, we need to have all of our needs acknowledged and addressed, including our need to be in touch with the holy.
Are there any signs that such a thing could happen, that there will ever have more than an embarrassed acknowledgment of spiritual realities in the public domain? Perhaps. It’s interesting to note that there will soon be a show on television that tries to do just that. It comes from a quarter that might surprise you. The leading television producer of our time, Norman Lear, will soon air a program entitled “Sunday Dinner.” It is a sitcom, but don’t let that fool you. He is quite serious. When asked why he was doing the series, he replied, “We have got to be willing to talk about God in this country. We’ve got to be willing to talk of awe, mystery, love.”
His purpose, he says, is to “provoke conversation about our deep hunger and our deep need for truth.” He says that “after so many years of moving in a totally secular direction, there’s a hunger in America resulting from our neglect of the spirit.” In a recent address to a National Education Association, he identified the spiritual as the most important area in this country that needs to be addressed. He has said, in fact, “I don’t want to talk about anything else ever again.”
To what degree he will succeed, I don’t know. I don’t know if such a thing can be done. I’ve often wondered. But I have no doubt that he is very serious about trying it. It is already controversial and being condemned by those who suspect it to be irreligious.
I do hope for its success. I am so tired of the caricatures of religiosity, of the media’s condescending wink to what is assumed to be the province of only the desperate and ignorant, with no hint as to the depth of hunger in the human soul of the common man and woman, or the depth of experience of the spirit in so many of the same. It is like a great secret few are willing to talk about in the open, so we carry the hunger and the pain and the glory alone, or in private enclaves called the church, where such talk is sanctioned, at least by the preacher. We are a nation desperately hungering for more than the riches we enjoy. We need more than a softer pillow, we need a vision of the holy that makes all of life holy. We need some glimpse of a connection that reaches all the way to heaven.
We are not the first age to hunger for spiritual truth and not know where to look for answers — or to not accept them when they are available. Jesus’ day was one of tremendous ferment in religious matters. People all over the known world were searching and longing for something deeper and more hopeful than the old religions could provide. The old gods of the Romans and Greeks were no longer taken seriously. Mystery cults and new movements were springing up everywhere.
It is not surprising that the Greeks and gentiles were gladly hearing Jesus gracious words of a heavenly kingdom, encompassing, but far surpassing the things of earth. What is surprising is that the Jews, who of all the people on earth should have been the first to understand and accept the message of heavenly realities, were rejecting it. It is precisely because they had Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses and the prophets that they should have understood; but instead, they said, in effect, “Since we are the children of Abraham and Moses, we need nothing more.”
This is illustrated in part, I think, by the story of Nicodemus we heard earlier. Nicodemus was a wealthy and influential man, a member of the Sanhedrin, the governing body of the Jews. He apparently was also a well known teacher. He came to Jesus during the night, probably to avoid the embarrassment of being seen asking Jesus questions in public.
He was drawn to Jesus’ teachings concerning the kingdom of God and came to ask more about them. “I know you are a teacher sent from God,” he said, “for no one could do the things you do if God were not with him.” Jesus replied, “No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of the Spirit. Flesh gives birth only to flesh and spirit gives birth to spirit.”
“But how is that possible?” asked Nicodemus. “Can an old man enter again into his mother’s womb?” “How is it that you, a teacher of Israel,” Jesus replied, “can be ignorant of such things? …If you don’t believe me when I talk to you about earthly things, how are you to believe if I should talk about the things of heaven?”
I used to feel a bit of disdain for Nicodemus, or at least superior, because he seemed so dull. But I have since come to believe that there is a great deal of Nicodemus is all of us, a great deal of the time-more than we would like to acknowledge. We listen to the teachings of Jesus and nod approval, but remain mystified as to what they might really mean. Can we really take seriously all this talk about spiritual realities? Do we not wonder sometimes if this man who spoke so knowingly of heavenly things was actually quite beside himself, as many accused him of being? We are drawn to his gracious words, but reluctant to let them hold sway in our lives. We wouldn’t want to be embarrassed if such idealistic notions proved false.
Jesus said if our eyes were anointed we would indeed be able to see the angels ascending and descending from heaven. Could Reality possibly be that gracious and divine? Are we really a part of something far larger and more holy than just this life suggests?
We need not see angels in order to know the truth of what Jesus says. We need only listen to his words and allow them to find a home in our hearts — and his message will find a home in the hearts of those who truly desire the truth.
We hunger for spiritual truth because it is written into the nature of our beings. To ignore it or deny it is to ignore and deny the greatest truth we can possibly know.
We are indeed living in an age that hungers for truth, but still largely seeks it under the cover of darkness. What a glorious new age it would indeed be to see it acknowledged in the open and brought again to the Sunday dinner table.
We are so like Nicodemus: proud, materialistic, cautious. May we also in the end be found as he was found. For as you may recall, following the crucifixion, when even Jesus’ own disciples ran away in fear, two wealthy and well known men proclaimed their faith by stepping forward to claim the body, and therefore also the disdain and hatred of the world around them. One was Joseph of Arimathea- and the other was Nicodemus.
The birthing of our lives in the Spirit may take time, but we have a teacher sent from God who will show us the way: if we let him… if we let him.