Do you remember the board-game Clue? As a child, Clue was one of the those guilty pleasures, along with Monopoly, Risk, Life and a host of other games, that kept my friends and I entertained for hours at a time. We would move our multi-colored pieces around the board -- which came in the form of an idealized English Tudor Mansion -- complete with a conservatory and a billiard room, while our alter-egos tried to solve the heinous murder that had taken place there. There were only so many potential suspects and murder weapons, and so eventually it would be discovered that Colonel Mustard had offed the hapless victim with candlestick in the Dining Room. We kids would giggle with glee and the process would begin again. Mystery solved.
Clue is terribly English, a fact you can discern that just from the setting, and it pays homage to a long literary tradition buoyed by names like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Like the game Clue, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot will always solve the case. There’s no question that the inspector’s powers of deduction will break-through the complex and overbearing motives of the murderer -- and usually, on a dark and stormy night the inspector will lock the potential suspects in room and reveal, step-by-step, the fruits of his investigation. Elementary My Dear Watson, case-closed, there’s no questions about the verdict and we’re all home in time for supper.
That’s one kind of mystery. It has a clear beginning, middle and end. It’s amendable to logic and deduction -- there’s never any question that a clever mind will discern the answer. And so by definition Christie and Doyle and Clue are logic problems and not real mysteries.
Real mysteries are made up of things that, by definition, do not have solutions or tidy answers. The further we probe into them the further they recede into shadow. A few months ago I met a man being released to hospice care and in his last days he wanted to do nothing but talk about death. What would happen, he asked, when the time finally came? Would he remain in some state of awareness? Would his conscious mind be annihilated forever as his pulse failed and his lungs finally gave up their last breath? What would happen to his soul, assuming that such a thing exists and we are not deluding ourselves with fairy tales about its immortality.
He asked me these questions in the shadow of hundreds of millions of dollars of state of the art medical equipment and doctors with decades of experience. But they could not answer his questions. Of course, I couldn't either, other than to offer him the hope of eternal life in Christ that our faith is grounded on. But Death, the reality of death, is a true mystery. It is a human universal and yet we know less about it than we know about the surface of the moon. In fact, “By all outward appearances, our life is a bright spark of light between one eternal darkness and another.”
This is one example of real mystery, one that we can relate to I think, but it is only a building block. We can say that death is a mystery, that the workings of our souls are a mystery, that the human condition itself is a mystery -- but all these things are merely component elements of a greater mystery still, the ineffable mystery of the transcendent divine, the mystery of God.
“How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable his ways!” says Paul in Romans today. “For from him and through him and to him are all things.” Or, in Job’s mouth, the litany of God’s greatness ends with an appeal to God’s radical otherness: “These are indeed but the outskirts of his ways;” says Job “and how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand.”
“How small a whisper to we hear of him?” How frustrating is that truth? How many nights have you lain in bed, wide-awake, sleep just out of reach because the biggest questions keep us fidgeting in anxiety: some of us wondering if this silly “ordination process” business is really the right thing to do with your life, others mourning the death of a loved one or fearful about a relationship or trying to decide if you really believe in God after all. And what does God give you in return? A resounding chorus of angels -- a mystical light of glory? Let’s be honest with one another, we receive whispers if we’re lucky, and even then they come faintly, as if lost in a chasm of silence.
And so you thought you came to seminary to learn about God? You’ll learn many things here, valuable and important and critical things for engaging in mission and ministry, but to be honest with you, coming to seminary to learn about God is a lot like going into psychiatry to learn about love. There are some overlapping concepts, but they’re not really the same thing. And you may not find the answers you’re looking for in the places that you expect.
And if its frustrating to us, just imagine how theologians feel! Richard Hooker, decades into his career, writing a tome of theology that can nearly break a shelf, and he would preface the whole thing with one sentence that still makes my hairs stand on end when I hear it. “Our safest eloquence concerning God,” he said, “is our silence.”
That one sentence sums up, in the most succinct possible way, why I’m an Anglican. We are a church that allows God to remain clothed in mystery, a church that remains always suspicious of strong dogmatism and fanaticism, a church that embraces and often even deliberately fosters ambiguity, such as during the Elizabethan Compromise. The great product of the English Reformation, born as much out of political pragmatism as deliberate theology, was to create a form of church that stressed the issue of how we pray far more intently than the substance of what we believe.
At first, this might sound a little wishy-washy. Like we don’t really know what we stand for and we have no principles to keep us grounded. If the Godhead is shrouded in eternal mystery, it can be tempting to throw up our hands in despair because we become frustrated with a God who it seems is more notable in absence than in presence. What I mean is that I have known and worked with Pentecostal colleagues who could pronounce healing in God’s name, who could tell me exactly what scripture said about some particular issue with a guarantee that God meant literally that, if He didn’t literally write it with His own divine hand when the prophets were looking the other way.
But in my life, I’ve become convinced that such total certainty, such radical conviction, such passionate orthodoxy, while admirable in some ways, actually leaves very little room for faith. By its very definition faith is not something that you can prove and measure and keep under a microscope. That’s a place for physicists, not mystics. “Blessed are those who have not seen,” says Jesus” and yet believe.” There’s something about the mystery of God that allows our faith to flourish in new and different ways -- to work out our salvation with “fear and trembling” as Paul advises, to handle our certainty with kid gloves.
In the 16th Century, while all the while the Reformed churches on the Continent and the re-energized Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation were cranking out ever lengthier creeds and heavier and more substantial dogmatic statements, the Church of England was held to a more moderate path. But in retrospect, that moderation and due-diligence have left us with an incredible legacy: humility in the stead of certainty and a firm conviction about the centrality of prayer and worship to Christian life. When asked “What does the Church believe” any Anglican worth their salt will grab the prayerbook, because it’s there, in the pages of that wonderful Common Prayer, where the church celebrates the lived theology of worship and penitence and reconciliation and sacrifice.
Anglicanism produces liturgists by the score but few theologians. In one sense this is a legacy of a church that is "neither hot nor cold," a church that sacrifices principle on the altar of pragmatism. Yet at the same time our emphasis on prayer and worship, our invitation to doubt instead of dogmatize, witnesses to the humility of the our hearts in the shadow of the awe-inspiring mystery of God. Our very comfort with ambiguity is what makes Anglicanism such a powerful witness in a post-modern world.
And that, my friends, is the real heart of the matter. Because this church, our church, has a great destiny in the 21st century. We have been stewards of a flame, long derided, often forgotten, that burns ever more brightly where the spiritual thirst of the people is greatest. Our forms of liturgy, our forms of prayer, our legacy of service to the least of this fallen world, provide an invitation to those searching for an authentic faith, grounded in the mystery of God and willing to engage humbly with the discipline of Christian discipleship.
It will not be easy work. It never was. But I firmly believe that the accident of history and politics and custom that created this funny creature we call Anglicanism, beset on every side, dwindling in numbers and in spirit, divided and depressed, will be one of the greatest tools of evangelization and Christian renewal in the 21st century. Yes, you just heard me say that. Our churches and communities have preserved the very idea of God’s mystery with care and perseverance and are now willing to give witness to a shockingly Post-Modern way of being church -- being caught up in the life of Christ -- his way of love and service -- and at the same time offering up to a Transcendent and Mysterious God, ourselves, as a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.
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