Just wait, till you see what’s next…just wait. We are connected in mystery and miracle. Just wait. You’ll see.
Coming soon. Coming now. Just wait.
Author Casey Gerald writes of a village…, somewhere in France, sometime in the seventeenth century. This village, he writes, became the site of frequent miracles, according to the peasants there, who were so awe-struck by symptoms of the supernatural…that they simply put down their plows and refused to work.
This of course did not please the local officials [and the landlords]. They tried to reason with the peasants, to quell this mass hysteria, but to no avail.
At last, the officials sought an intervention from the highest power in the land, who sent them back with a sign. [Yes] An actual sign, which was erected in the village square for all to see. it read:
THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE
BY ORDER OF THE KING
No miracles here. By order of the King.
Mystery is our spiritual theme for December. Not the Agatha Christy or Sherlock Holmes kind of mystery…not a mystery to be solved. This is not “who killed Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the candlestick?”
The mystery we’ll be reflecting on is that “mystery at the heart of things” you often hear me speak about.
Let me acknowledge at the top that “Mystery” challenges the rationalist…in all of us. Or at least it requires that we do some compartmentalization, holding both what we can explain and understand…while at the same time being present to the miracles and the mysteries that are also part of life…those truths that have yet to yield and may well never yield to rational analysis…or control…even by the king.
Mystery is our spiritual theme and Advent is this season in the Christian liturgical calendar. It is a time of waiting and preparation for the coming of a miracle…in the Christian story, the birth of Jesus…the incarnation…God becoming human and intervening in human history…in that infant whose birth we still celebrate on Christmas…that was the miracle.
Our religious ancestors took such exception to the Biblical miracle stories. William Ellery Channing…for whom the Channing Room at church is named…proclaimed Unitarianism to be a religion of reason. No miracles. No virgin birth. No water into wine.
Jesus was inspired and inspiring…a model, an exemplar to be sure…but for the Unitarians he was completely if perfectly human…not both human and God…no, no. That miracle could not be.
Unitarian Thomas Jefferson, one of our many complicated religious ancestors, when he was elected President, literally took a razor to the New Testament, carefully cutting out all of the miracle stories…anything that smacked of the miraculous…leaving a document long on ethics and morality and short on story. 46 pages of moral instruction.
It was later called The Jefferson Bible and a copy was given to every member of Congress until the 1950’s. The American Humanist Association renewed the practice in 2013, with Obama in the White House, but not since.
Perhaps they rightly figured that ethics and morality wouldn’t be much welcomed in the most recent years.
But though the early Unitarians rejected the miracles attributed to Jesus, they still recognized the mystery.
Channing himself complained “it has been the fault of all sects that they have been too anxious to define their religion. They have labored to circumscribe the infinite.” To put limits around the mystery.
The rational Unitarians believed that their world did need a miracle…though they didn’t use that language. But they knew that they did not want to live in a universe where God would damn most of us to eternal hellfire. They knew that notion held no hope…and it contradicted their high opinion of themselves to boot…the world needed a change of heart. The early Unitarians believed they were the ones to provide it.
The early Universalists, at least initially, were much more comfortable with miracles in general and the Christian miracles in particular. There is even a miracle in the origin story of American Universalism.
John Murray was a Methodist preacher in England who discovered an early form of Universalism and had a change of heart. At first he began preaching in his Methodist church in the morning and attending a Universalist meeting later in the day. But the Methodists noticed. And when he confessed his new belief that we would all be saved, he was excommunicated. What you believed was a serious matter…back then. Given the divisiveness and animosity in our country I wonder if we don’t take beliefs just as seriously today.
In any event, Murray was excommunicated. But it was the death of his infant child followed by the death of his wife that left him completely heartbroken. He lost his faith and pledged never to preach again. After a bankruptcy, he took ship for America, arriving in Philadelphia in 1770. Headed to New England, he boarded a ship sailing up the coast.
But the ship got stuck on a sandbar…in New Jersey…a place called Good Luck Point, of all things. Going ashore, Murray encountered a local man named Thomas Potter…they fell to talking about religion and Potter, to Murray’s astonishment, explained that he had built his own meeting house, his own chapel, which had been sitting empty, waiting for a preacher who would declare that all people were meant to be saved.
Sounds like he was waiting for a miracle…it seemed at least a mystery. Had Potter experienced some kind of direct revelation, a Damascus Road moment? Did he come up with universal salvation on his own?
Potter begged Murray to be that preacher and bring that Universalist Good News. Murray, still heart-broken, resisted. He had made a vow never to preach again.
But Potter was persistent and finally got Murray to agree that if the winds did not change and the ship remained stuck until Sunday, it would be a sign from God that Murray was meant to preach the Universalist message there in Potter’s meeting house.
Short version, they made a bet.
Come Sunday, the winds hadn’t shifted…and honoring his commitment, John Murray preached what is recognized as the first Universalist sermon in the United States. September 30, 1770.
The Universalist story in America begins with the mystery…or the miracle…depending on how you view it…of Thomas Potter’s wait for a Universalist preacher and John Murray’s chance(?) arrival.
It turns out that Universalism hadn’t been revealed to Thomas Potter in a blinding flash of revelation. The UU Historical Society has discovered that early forms of Universalism had already begun to spring up in the colonies among a group of German immigrants, called the Baptist Brethren, in Pennsylvania. They laid the foundation for Universalist success in the Middle Atlantic and later through much of the American south as they moved from one community to another, looking for a place where their heretical views would be welcome.
A branch of the Brethren had visited New Jersey and planted the notion of universal salvation in the mind and heart of Thomas Potter.
The mystery and the miracle, perhaps, is why Potter took their message seriously enough to build his meeting house and wait, patiently for a preacher to fill its pulpit.
Some miracles do turn out to have explanations.
Thomas Potter was waiting…for a preacher of the Good News.
What Good News do we yearn to hear? What are we waiting for?
Are we waiting for a vaccine to end these Covid days…to end the fear of human contact this pandemic has brought…to end the isolation and the suffering and all the deaths?
Are we waiting for a new Administration to bring us back to center…to end the lies and the graft…at least begin reversing the losses of these last years?
Do you know that more than 100 environmental rules have been eliminated in the last four years? That the Justice Department has essentially stopped enforcement of Civil Rights laws? Are we waiting for the US to rejoin the Paris Accord. Re-start the Iran nuclear negotiations. Re-store the CDC. Re-hire those public servants who have spoken up? Re-build our shattered economy so that all the wealth does not flow to the top…Build Back Better?
Is that the miracle we’re waiting for?
Or is what we’re waiting for better described in much simpler and more human terms?
Is it just the chance to embrace family and friends…to have coffee at a favorite coffee shop…to sit across a table without masks…trade in elbow bumps for handshakes and hugs…
To not have our human contact be at such a distance?
Are we waiting to return to the sanctuary…forget our zoom passwords…sing together…pray together…in person…embodied?
Is the miracle that we are waiting for a return to what we knew as normal?
Yes…I can’t wait and I know you can’t. Especially for those human touches.
But we also know the world is changing…always. And that we as well as the world are being changed by this pandemic in some ways that we can know now and some ways that will only become apparent with time.
And not only that. We also know how deeply flawed that normal was…how much inequity was built right into it for so many of us…and how many assumptions about wealth and power, about what a good life looked like…were built into that normal for all of us…
We all yearn for a return to normal but that normal is not the miracle we need.
At the Board’s meeting last Thursday, I asked them to reflect on our monthly theme of Mystery…
I asked them when they had encountered The Mystery in their own lives.
Several Board members spoke of being present at the birth of children and grandchildren. The Board includes a number of grandparents. One Grandmother spoke of “catching” her granddaughter and being present to the mystery that moves through generations.
Other Board members spoke of encountering The Mystery in the natural world…seeing the stars in the night sky and feeling how small but how connected we are…in mystery and in miracle…
And several spoke of moments of transcendence…moving beyond ego and well-boundaried self into a deeper experience of connectedness that brought a sense of wholeness and of peace…
They spoke of losing themselves while singing in a choir…
Feeling somehow elevated when the light shines just so…
Amazement at the blue of the sky…
Discovering unknown connections even with lifelong friends…
They spoke of being restored, grounded by that unexpected, but somehow familiar, somehow intimate presence of the mystery in which we live.
We are waiting for a lot. But each and every Board member seemed to call up times when they had known a transcendent mystery…and they called up those times easily and so happily. There were such smiles on their faces. Such satisfaction seemed to come just from the memories.
We have had, I believe, the mystery in which we live so obscured by the lies and the greed…by the graft and the mean-spiritedness…by the virus and the suffering…
It took George Floyd’s death to remind too many of us that this has to stop…we are going in the wrong direction on the wrong path…and have been for far too long.
We have somehow closed off too much of our heart…our caring for one another…and our connection to life itself.
We have all of us…to one extent or another…been willing to not know what a dangerous path we were following.
We have been in danger of losing ourselves.
We need a reset…not simply a return…
What we need is a do-over…
We need to forgive ourselves for allowing ourselves to come so close…to losing ourselves.
We need…a miracle. And it is a miracle of rebirth…for us. For each of us and for all of us.
And the wisdom that I discovered…that I remembered in listening to the Board members last week…is that the miracle we need is within us…it is already here…
The message that Jesus brought…so long ago…is that the Kingdom of God was already among us…already here…or that it could be here…in each of our hearts…if we would only open them…
As our reading said: Mary and Joseph waited in hope and fear, as parents do, for their child to find his place in the world. But Jesus went out into the world “seeing its [mystery] and its sorrow, and he urged those about him not to wait anymore.”
The Kingdom of God could be here. The Beloved Community could be now…could at least begin now.
Don’t wait anymore, Jesus preached. Because the miracle for which we yearn most is already within each of us and all of us…
That is the mystery that spoke to Thomas Potter and called him to build his chapel…
We don’t need a revelation. We simply need to begin living….as we know we want to live.
Rev. Thesesa Soto writes:
Bring your broken hallelujah here.
Bring the large one that is beyond
Repair. Bring the small one that’s
Too soft to share. Bring your broken
Hallelujah here. I know that people
Have told you that before you can give
You have to get yourself together. They
Overstated the value of perfection
By a lot. Or they forgot. You are the gift.
We all bring some broken things, songs
And dreams, and long lost hopes. But
Here, together, we reach within.
As a community we begin again. And
From the pieces we will build something new.
There is work that only you can do. We
Wait for you.
Bring your broken hallelujah here.
We wait for you.
Amen
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life and of Love. Great Mystery at the heart of things.
The mystery of life is not to be solved…
It is to be lived.
And within our search for greater wholeness
Behind the veil of time and place
In the deep center of our yearning
We encounter Mystery
And a path to healing
It is there within our search and in our yearning
The answer is present, as close as breath.
In this season of waiting
May we remember not only
The goal toward which we struggle
But the gifts which are ours to use.
And may we keep present the choice
We make each day…to use those gifts
To either bless or to curse the world.
May we find that we have clarity enough
And strength enough to choose blessing
And may we discover the miracle
That our own blessing
Flows from that choice.
May that be so.
And Amen.
Topics: Mystery