Video: https://vimeo.com/391926665
In the beginning was mystery. What am I? Why does the earth shake? Why does the rain fall sometimes, and not at other times? What happens when the body is no more? So the amazing fearful creative bipedal primate with opposable thumbs made up stories, projecting on to the universe the map of its own mind, stories of magical forces and gods that looked and acted like things they knew, mostly like themselves, though sometimes they would stretch, posit gods who were other, better, beyond.
This premodern world of stories gave meaning and structure to their lives, and they had discovered that structure was necessary, that the efficiencies of civilization, mutuality, led to thriving. The stories were not perfect, but neither were they.
This premodern way of interacting with the world would not disappear as new ways developed. It would simply become one dimension, one axis, and we still inhabit that space. We trivialize story, call it entertainment, but the great stories still speak of ultimate truth and mystery, of the power of love, of the struggle between good and evil, Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen, Hamlet and Krishna, our other selves, working out the wheres and whats of the world.
But human knowledge mostly adds rather than replaces, and as we came to understand more, to record more, to build a critical mass of learned and recorded knowledge, we started to see natural patterns. We convinced ourselves that with careful observation that we could understand everything, absolutely everything, and so the great Enlightenment project, modernity, was born. We test and measure and dissect, answered many of those great questions asked by our ancestors, the whats and whys of earlier ages. Meteorologists explain the flood and drought, the surging seas and raging fires, even if the rapacious powers deny what has been discovered, documented.
This modern way of interacting with the world did not disappear when new ways of seeing the world developed. It became another axis, and while many place science over story, there is no test tube of love, no elixir of life, not for the alchemists of old, not for the scientists of today.
And then science and reason reached a zenith about a century ago. All that knowledge and technology had not changed the nature of the human, as poison gas blew through the trenches and machine guns mowed down a generation. Scientists discovered a second set of rules operating in the universe, attaching names like relativity, weirdness and entanglement, uncertainty and incompleteness to what we had confidently approached with our instruments and labels. It was not just scientists, for we started to ask about the ordering of society, asking why some voices were missing, challenging the ability of language itself to capture and define. This postmodern axis brought us right back to mystery.
We are all located somewhere in this multi-dimensional space of story, of knowledge, of mystery. Some are positioned at birth, always staying where they started, the product of a culture, of a geography. Others journey, shoved about by circumstance or wanderlust. Some want to be fixed, some long for freedom, some strap on a headlamp and head into the unknown, though if we are honest, the big questions asked millennia ago are still unanswered. The atheist declares with certainty what they cannot prove just as the theist declares with certainty what they cannot prove. Why am I? What am I? Will I still be when I am no more?
Even if we reduce soul to nothing more than meat with electricity, we have not cracked the black box of our brains, and every discovery seems to just blur the edges a bit more. If I believed in the sort of God who was shaped like and acted like a human, I’d think she was laughing, for every answer gives us five new questions. Take, for example, the recent discovery that changes in your gut bacteria can impact your mood, can lead to depression. What am I? Meat with electricity and millions of bacteria manipulating my consciousness to their own ends. I hope they are benevolent.
It would be easy to say, given the known unknowns and the unknown knowns, that we are not responsible for our place, our location, not responsible for anything. From Perry Mason to over a thousand episodes in the Law & Order franchise the question comes up again and again. When are we responsible? Was it the fault of nature or nurture? When are we making real choices? Was there a guilty mind?, mens rea in the vestigial Latin of the legal world.
At some point we have to pick a spot and say, to borrow words from Martin Luther, “Here I stand.” Here is my location in the space of story and knowledge and mystery. I claim some form of agency, some ability to act within the framework of my world.
Wisdom literature, like today’s reading from a lesser known text in the Hebrew apocrypha, is meant to influence those actions, to lead us to better decisions that lead to mutuality and thriving. “Before each person are life and death, and whichever one chooses will be given.”
Story and knowledge and mystery and the question, the great question. Not “Who am I?” but “Who do I choose to be? What path will I take? Love or fear?” For the opposite of love is not hatred. It is fear, has always been fear, is the failure of imagination in face of mystery.
Here, here is this story, this story that stretches back so far.
The story where I find mysef isn’t exactly the story I was born into. That story had a manipulative egotistical God-man in the sky, the pseudo-patriotism of the Lost Cause, a false White religion invented to paper over the sins of slavery, of greed and racism and fear of the other. That story was never going to fit me.
I found this story, the story of a creating, growing, justice-oriented God and a creative, growing and justice-making people, the Hope Church story, sure, the story of this particular time and place, but also the story of congregations around the nation, the story of a people that feed the hungry and register voters and practice a radical hospitality that makes room for gay and non-binary and those recovering from abusive religion and abusive people, a place where you are welcome no matter where you are on life’s journey.
And here you are, your story intersecting mine, and each of us at times facing the choice, the way of death or the way of life, the way of creation or the way of destruction, the way of love or the way of fear, just as Jesus son of Sirach counseled in ancient text, just as echoed in our United Church of Christ Statement of Faith, affirmed by the by-laws of this church, not as a test or as a weapon but as a story where we can locate ourselves before mystery, a story where we connect with one another, with sisters and brothers and gender-queer folks in churches around the country. It is a story, our way, that also affirms the sister who worships Krishna, the brother who faces Mecca, our non-binary sibling who sits Zen.
It is a good story, a living story, a story we help to write, weaving together myth and aspiration, science and weirdness. We are here, most of us, precisely because we live examined and engaged lives and have agency and will and curiosity. You chose this story, for whatever reason. Or maybe in some mysterious way, this story chose you.
God, Mystery and Source, creating all, and you, little decisions, big decisions, aimlessness and sin or love and action, passivity or engagement, the way of life and the way of death. The great questions are still unanswered, but I choose to believe, choose a good story.
Let others have their stories of judgment, their stories of despair. I choose the way of life, the challenge of love. Seems like a good bet to me.
In the three dimensional space of story, knowledge, and mystery, I move out, beyond myself into the unknown, expanding, like this universe, for as long as I can. May it be so until the last breath leaves this body, and the next mystery begins. Amen.