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Sixth SenseFebruary 06, 2005 Transfiguration of the Lord My earliest memory of church dates from when I was around 4 years old. During Sunday worship, I remember sitting on the edge of my pew waiting for God to appear. I had my eyes glued on the elaborately carved altarpiece at the back of the chancel, fully expecting God’s looming presence to emerge from the shadows behind. Imagine being 4 years old in this sanctuary, believing that God would physically appear from behind our golden altar screen – as hard as that might be, since our unholy choir normally occupies that space. But, for arguments sake, picture God arising above those wonderfully carved angels shrouded in wisps of smoky haze. Imagine a child’s imagination running to wild extreme, eyes wide, mouth open in expectation. Not surprisingly, God did not appear that day. I don’t remember great disappointment so much as some confusion. I suppose I’ve had my eyes fixed on that spot ever since, waiting expectantly, hopefully, for God to make his grand entrance. I think that’s why I still have the memory. Childhood visions, of course, wash away with adult realities. The innate spiritual imagination succumbs to the onslaught of the demands of secular education and the seductions of the tangible, sensual, and material. The five physical senses overwhelm that more elusive, spiritual sense. Spiritual yearning slips back into the foggy distance. I’ve heard many of you tell me your version of this transition when you’ve shared your histories with me. How somewhere along the way, you lost that sense of mystery and wonder, and then began to suspect it had been replaced with only a vast emptiness. Interestingly, I’ve been in churches where this vast emptiness seems all there is, despite the religious trappings. Adult religion is often stripped of a sense of the transcendent. When this happens to a large enough percentage of a congregation, a church becomes effectively de-spiritualized. Some might even secretly congratulate themselves on successfully ridding their religion of God. They wouldn’t say so out loud of course, but, when that happens, inevitably some variation of themselves becomes enshrined and worshiped instead. God becomes more of a semi-interesting idea than a present reality. In such an environment, the forms of prayer can seem anachronistic, certainly nothing that really amounts to much now, now that we’ve grown out of our infantile fantasies and superstitions. And, true enough, there are plenty of superstitions we ought to leave behind. There is a lot of bad religion our there, neurotic religion, narcissistic religion, destructive religion. We know something about these variations...some know about them quite well personally. You know people who are persuaded that all religion is bad, or, at best, irrelevant. For them, adulthood includes leaving behind in the toy box what they might refer to as the crutch, or the delusion, of God. For me, that would be like leaving my heart behind in the toy box, or my soul – a precious aspect of my essential identity. I’ve never understood why so many people don’t see this the way I do, that is, don’t see God lurking everywhere behind creation and sense God mixed up in the air of every breath they take. This is a great conundrum to me: that what I know to be the deepest truth would be for others a curious improbability. You can tell the designers of this space understood what I’m talking about. We can surmise by the results of their obvious effort and investment that they thought God could, or maybe even would, somehow be seen and heard here. If not, this was a horribly expensive folly, wasn’t it? There are plenty of people who think that, of course. They think that the purpose for which this place was built was complete bunk, although they like that it sits here on the corner, as opposed to, say, yet one more high rise condominium. They may like that they live in a city with useless, but very attractive, cultural artifacts. When you make your way into a place like this on a Sunday morning in New York City, you are behaving counter-culturally, notwithstanding the polls telling us about the religious nature of the American population. You know that many, if not most, of your friends and business associates did not go to a religious observance this weekend. And, they’re not entirely certain what to make of those who do. From their vantage point, it’s a bit strange that people gather in extremely decorative buildings at eleven o’clock on an otherwise perfectly fine Sunday morning, sing songs about and pray to someone whose first name is Jesus and whose last name is Christ, working their way through rituals with people wearing purple robes. Sometimes even I am startled by the goings on in here. But then, some of us have been captured by stories like the one read from Exodus and the other from Matthew. We don’t really know what happened at Mt. Sinai as Moses led the Hebrew people from their captivity in Egypt, but we do know this: “that [whatever happened on that mountaintop] released a torrent of spiritual energy which transformed Israel into a people of priests and prophets, bringing enlightenment to humanity,” and establishing a course of human civilization to the present day.[1] The passage from Matthew recalls that older Sinai experience. Again, the holy moment occurs on a mountaintop. It’s called the transfiguration because the disciples see a startling vision of something that is beyond the normal range of their five senses. They see something, but its unlike any seeing they’ve experienced before. It’s almost as if, before walking up the mountain, they’ve been handed special glasses to see a thing that has always been true, but, until that moment, was hidden, obscured by flesh and bone. That sixth sense was awakened, and, in the retelling here, now, there’s a chance that our sixth sense will be awakened as well. Clearly, that’s the purpose of this place: holy encounter. Spiritual enlightenment. We use creative means and materials to hook all of our other senses so that the spiritual one might be tweaked into action. That’s the point to singing Mozart, whose spiritual sense was clearly well activated. It’s all set up so that someone just might hear, or even see, God. Walking out after the service one Sunday, the middle-aged man said he wanted to speak with me. He had been profoundly shaken. Monday, my phone rang, and we met that afternoon. He wasn’t sure what had happened, he said. He even felt a bit childish. But, something had turned him upside down and inside out. Something said in the sermon sliced like a knife into a deep part of him. He added that, oddly, he didn’t even think that, as a whole, the sermon was all that good. Nevertheless, it was during the music following that he felt the deep incision that seemed to pierce his very core. He couldn’t stand following the offering. His knees were wobbly when he rose for the final hymn. He was a successful corporate officer, Harvard MBA. He traveled all over the world. He’d been loosely associated with church off and on for a good part of his life. But it had never felt like this. This was different. He was embarrassed by his own words. He was like a kid in Sunday School. He had encountered God, he said, or maybe it was more like God had encountered him. And I swear to you I thought to myself, What do you know, God showed up. ______________ Previous sermon: Sweet Smell of Success • Next sermon: Pilgrimage All past sermons |
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