University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

A FEW LOOSE ENDS

I Corinthians 1:26-31

A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Reformation Sunday                   October 28, 2007

          Lord William Thomson Kelvin was one of the exalted leaders of the Western scientific world during the latter years of the nineteenth century; one recent writer referred to him as “the Carl Sagan of the Gay Nineties.” Lord Kelvin's contributions to the realm of physics were substantial, particularly in the area of thermodynamics and in the science of navigation.  He saw much discovered and accomplished in his lifetime, so much so that toward the end of the century he was moved to pontificate that “physics is now at last a largely completed science... all that is left is to gather up a few loose ends here and there.”

          It was a promising and encouraging comment for students of physics, but alas, it was just a tad premature...for during the thirty years following his words physicists went on to discover such things as x-rays, the theory of relativity, and the whole realm of quantum theory.  And within just a few decades all the classic dogmas of Lord Kelvin's physics had been knocked into a cocked hat.

          Writing about this remarkable chain of events, Dr. Louis Thomas once said something important not only for physicists, but for anyone working in almost any field.  He said, “We all need to pay more attention to our ignorance.  A good education ought to include the news, among other things, that we don't understand a flea, much less the making of a thought.”  Thomas then went on to lay out a whole assortment of mysteries about which the scientific community didn't have a clue, and he argued that we ought to think of science as the endless pursuit of mystery.[1]

          Now, Thomas was addressing the scientific community, but he might as well have been talking to us in the church, for we, too, are called to the unending pursuit of mystery – in our case, the mystery of God's love and redemption and presence in human life – and yet, we find ourselves surrounded by the forces of reductionism which seek to destroy or deplete that mystery.  I don't need to tell you that there are churches all around this land filled with folks who believe they already know everything they need to know about the nature of God, about Jesus Christ, about the church, about human nature… people who are saying, at least by their actions, that the Christian faith is a largely completed matter, with just a few loose ends to be gathered up.

          There is, among many people in many churches, a temptation to forget the central mystery around which we gather – the mystery of God's expansive love, which all the methods and systems and techniques of the fundamentalist right or the ideological left can never adequately define.  We need reminders of our own limitations in the face of mystery, reminders of the danger of moral  and spiritual pride which can result from thinking we have it all figured out.

          In part, at least, such pride was behind the divisions that racked the church in Corinth, to whom Paul wrote the words we read just a few moments ago.  The Corinthian church had been beset by cliques and clashes, by all manner of factions, each claiming to have a superior way and understanding.  Each faction claimed a different leader: Paul, Cephas, Apollos.  Each faction was highly egocentric.  Each thought it had discovered the way to be the Church, that it had all the right answers, that its understanding tied the faith together tightly, with little room for loose ends.

          To that fragmented congregation Paul wrote, seeking to counter the prevailing wisdom.  He invited the Corinthians to consider the humble circumstances in which they had first been called: when they were brought into the Christian community, he reminded them, not many of them were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, and few were nobly born.  Yet now, amid the divisiveness and partisan spirit, they each seemed to be claiming superiority.  Paul reminded them that God had chosen to shame the wisdom of the world by means of the folly of the cross, and he called them again to lives of cross-centered discipleship.  It was no anti-intellectual appeal; Paul told them that Christ had become their wisdom.  Theirs was a wisdom of the cross… a wisdom of humility and suffering.  And that is a mystery.

          When we in our day begin to think we have reached a point of superior understanding, when we begin to believe that our limited perspectives reflect final truth, when we find ourselves willing and ready to judge who the real Christians are in this world and to hell with the rest... then it is that we need this corrective word of Paul.

          It is, I believe, a word entirely appropriate for this Reformation Sunday, in which we celebrate the heritage we derive from a sixteenth-century German priest, who looked around him at a church which had stopped searching out the mystery, which seemed comfortable with its claim of ultimate truth and ultimate authority, which seemed to say that faith was a largely completed matter.  We look to Martin Luther, who said no, that the faith was ever more expansive than that, and who launched a life-restoring revolution in the church.  Since then saints in every generation have sought to be open to further exploration of the mysteries of God's grace and have launched subsequent reformations of their own.  Today we are the beneficiaries of their courage and insight, and of a Reformed tradition molded by its motto, Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, which I would paraphrase for our time to mean, “The Church reformed, always in need of reformation.”

          We need to remember the Reformation today because there are so many in our churches who are no longer persuaded by such a motto, who live their lives in pursuit of the “firm, technical certitude of our age”[2]...who believe everything can be defined in black-and-white terms...who thus turn the Bible into a collection of moral absolutes, with no room for mystery.  Fundamentalists have tried to confine God within several tightly-construed affirmations; others from different directions have made similarly rigid pronouncements about human behavior and language and thinking, ironically in the name of liberal thought.  The power of the Word is lost for such folks because of their specific prior agenda.  Mystery and wonder are lost commodities in such camps, for they allow so little room for significant questions, or for variant understandings...little room for loose ends...little room for reformation.

          But God, says the apostle Paul, has chosen to destroy the wisdom of the wise and the righteousness of the self-righteous, and has replaced them with the wisdom and righteousness of Christ and His cross.  As followers of the Christ, we are called to pursue the mystery of that cross.  And it is a mystery, isn't it?

          Can any one of us really claim to have some final word on why God chose weakness rather than power as the vehicle of reconciling the world to God's own self?  Or to have the final word on what that choice means for those of us who have to deal daily with the alluring temptation to choose power over vulnerability?

          Can any of us claim some comprehensive understanding of the mystery of God's continuing choice of a sometimes-faithful, sometimes-unfaithful minority of the earth's people to be bearers of God's news?  Or what that choice means for us, who are more comfortable with the mainstream majority?

          Can we begin to understand why God has regularly, systematically undermined the attempts of those who have sought to build fences around the church, and instead has cast the net of divine love ever wider?  Or how the expansive love and grace of God pushes us beyond our own comfort zones?

Can we fathom the motive of God's forgiveness when time and again we reject God's love and care? Or what it means to believe that the justice of God is always in tension with the wideness of God’s mercy?

          You cannot reduce such mysteries to a few fundamental principles or to simple ideology and then claim to have a lock on Christian wisdom and understanding.  The Christian faith is dynamic, not static...it is life, not principles… it is loved out in an open table fellowship, not a gated community.  To be a Christian is to be a person in touch with mystery, to be aware of the limits of our understanding.

          That is not to say we should not explore as far as those limits will allow.  The life of the mind in the service of God is a long-standing Reformed keystone. But we will discover that some of those explorations, rather than leading to greater clarity and certainty, will only deliver us deeper into the mystery.  I have to say, by way of an aside, that I cannot think of attempts to explain mystery without remembering Mark Twain's effort, in Innocents Abroad, to explain how oyster shells came to be found in the Turkish city of Smyrna, some five hundred feet above sea level.  With tongue firmly in cheek, he said at last:

I am reduced to one slender theory: that the oysters climbed up there of their own accord.  But what object could they have had in view?  What did they want to climb a hill for?  To climb a hill must necessarily be fatiguing and annoying exercise for an oyster.  The most natural conclusion would be that the oysters climbed up there to look at the scenery.  Yet when one comes to reflect upon the nature of an oyster, it seems plain that [it] does not care for scenery... [nor] take any interest in scenery. [It] scorns it.  [So] what have I arrived at now?  Simply at the point from which I started, namely...those oyster shells are there.[3]

Friends, mysteries should engage our minds, not idle them… even minor mysteries like oysters at Smyrna, but especially the Mystery before whom we bow and gather each week. And yet, there will be times when the only appropriate response will be sheer wonder and awe.

          Christian faith is anchored in a profound mystery: the mystery of God's relationship with humankind.  It is not a mystery that confronts us in the sense of a puzzle to be put together, or a problem to be solved, or a detective story which discloses the culprit on the final page.  This Mystery stands at the beginning and end of all Christian thought.  It represents the limit, the final reaches, of human wisdom and reason.  But in such limitation is joy, for it delivers us from any impulse to play God, and frees us to be fully and simply human, and invites us to explore the mystery.[4] If we want to honor the Reformation we celebrate today, it will not be by pious pronouncements or by arrogant spiritual pride, but by recommitment to the pursuit of mystery and wonder and awe.

          Some twenty-one summers ago now, I was with our daughter Leah in our backyard in Charleston.  Just three years old at the time, she had not yet developed her later aversion to bugs of any kind, and she became fascinated that day by a column of ants marching in single-file along the back edge of our patio.  For a long time she walked back and forth across the concrete, tracking a single ant until it disappeared into the grass, then returning to follow another across.  At one point, in a moment forever etched in my memory, she stopped, put her hands on her hips and said, “Dad, you should see this!  This is just amazing!”

          And it is amazing, really...how the mystery that often eludes us among the most obvious, taken-for-granted, and thus presumably well-known regions of our lives can startle us sometimes, and stir in us a deep sense of wonder.  For here, even a tiny creature like an ant, in Walt Whitman's terms, “is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.”[5] And if it's true of an ant, then what about the ever expansive grace of God?

          “Dad,” she said, “You should see this!  This is just amazing!”

          Of course, we were in our backyard, and she was just three years old.  But it got me to wondering, am I… are we still capable of such amazement in our lives?  Or is everything all neatly tied up, with no loose ends? Am I… are we too sophisticated for mystery?

          Well, they’re just questions ...for Reformation Sunday.