Through Glass
This sermon considers the human inclination to gravitate towards a location of familiarity. In examining the Holy Spirit through the lens of Paul’s teachings to the Athenians in Acts, it questions how our mental confinement of Biblical understanding affects the potential of our relationship with God.
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Transcript
As a child, I had a small collection of glass marbles. There were seven or eight in number, each perfectly transparent save a single red or yellow swirl in the center. I kept them in a black velvet bag, cinched tight and stored in the left half of the cabinet space at the base of my bookshelf. I used to take them out from time to time to dump them on my carpet floor. In examining today’s readings, I was immediately drawn to a particular phrase within the first reading, the inscription on an altar which Paul read: “To an unknown God”. The reading as a whole centers on Paul’s journey to Athens where he has traveled to spread the word of God and present his argument for the Christian faith to the Greeks. Yet today, I do not wish to delve into the intricacies of a history (though I have nothing against the general premise). Instead, I find that in a strange way I am able to relate to the Athenians – their pagan appreciations and praises to a power that they mark as not completely understood, and the ways that they attempt to capture this spirit, ground it, feel strikingly familiar.
When I would play with the marbles, I didn’t use them for any organized purpose. I was a stranger to the rules of competitive games like the “Ring Game” in which marbles are traditionally used. I did not question the mystery of their creation or the placement of the streak of color held within. I probably didn’t even associate the material of my spheres with that which made up my two Westward-facing windows.
Athenian convert or not, I do not think it is a singular experience to feel a bit uncertain within our journeys of faith, in a sense not unlike the marbles of my youth. In an establishment where our Holy Book is nearly twice the length of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, it is easy to lack a depth of understanding, perhaps cling to a superficial outline of the parables and analogies which best uphold the regular rhythm of our lives – a set of rules that are purported to lead us to a pious conclusion. Paul critiques the Athenians for idolatry, yes, but he also critiques the confinement of God, the Athenians’ notions that they can create material renditions of a higher power and therefore comprehend it.
Often, as day’s golden hour neared, I would hold the marbles up to my window in the afternoon sky, so that the sun would shine through them, illuminating the central swirl as a wisp of flame caught within a crystalline embalmment. This blaze captured my curiosity – I didn’t need to fully understand the makings of the marble to appreciate this beautiful result. Order would have only blinded me to it – so lost would I have been in the strategy of a trivial game. I suppose it is this light, so often visualized in flames of red, that is the subject of the Gospel text today, as Jesus prepares to leave us to the Earth, he opens our eyes to the Holy Spirit which seeps into the crevices of these Earthen projections. Still, to completely comprehend what this Holy Spirit is seems quite a daunting task, something which many a scholar has spent many a year piecing through countless fragments of literature to uncover. But I worry if this endless search is truly fruitful, if a quest for understanding is strictly necessary – I think that had I tried to break the marble to hold the flame inside, the colored fragments too would have been broken in the affair. Yet, whether it be the Holy Spirit or some other aspect of God’s grace, we seem compelled to try to assure ourselves by some means that we do hold an understanding of this mystery, and through our comprehension are justified in faith.
In a few months time, I will depart for Atlanta to begin my ‘life’s next phase’, and, while I certainly look forward to catching games this Fall in Bobby Dodd, what excites me most of this coming stage is that College also represents a new opportunity for me to embrace my childhood naivety – another chance for a first hello, first stroll to a street corner or campus park. And while I myself am at a particularly unique point in my life’s journey, I think that there’s something in the idea of leading ourselves back to a place of spiritual unknown which is quite universal – finding a secluded meadow, a quirky book club where we, for a time, are able to stop trying to understand God in order to appreciate Him, able to reject our preconceived confinements of this power in order to compose odes to this God still shrouded unknown.
John Muir, famed naturalist and chief advocate of Yosemite, had a strong distaste for hiking. He claimed that the feeling of the word evoked much too strict a notion, preferring instead to ‘saunter’, a phrase he proposed to be derived from the reverent awe of pilgrims in the “Sainte Terre”, the Holy Land. The industrialist ‘hike’ somehow fails to capture the spirit, reducing a flowering field to a momentary reprieve from tough terrain, stark mountain views to a 0.8-mile scramble with 12% grade. We like to feel accomplished in the statistics of our eight-mile, three-and-a-half hour journey just as we are comforted by the mask of spiritual contentment and Biblical comprehension, but this temptation to simply sprint through and ‘check the boxes’ threatens to starve us of deeper beauty, stunting growth. By removing a conceited veil, I find I can discover. Perhaps I can even find peace once again come golden hour. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten my marbles out of that velvet bag, and – I do admit – there are times when I miss the flash of color in the sun.