THE NYSTERY OF IT ALL John M. Buchanan
Luke 2:8~-20 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
December 24, 1978 Columbus, Ohio

I should like this morning to hold until last the best part of this sermon
which is the account, in Luke's Gospel, of what happened after Jesus’ birth. My
real text is something St. Paul wrote in the introduction to a letter to the early
Christian Thurch in Corinth.,."Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where
is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this age?"

There is no occasion in the year when the preacher feels that sentiment more in-
tensely than at Christmas. On other Sundays we may be consummately logical, using
our time in worship to explore, in the light of faith, the vexing concerns which
occupy our society. Other occasions are employed to probe the theological complexi-
ties of the Gospel. But today - and the preacher knows it better than anyone else -
everything goes out the window, the slate is wiped clean and we find ourselves con-
fronted with an illogical, almost mythic tableaux: a strange star appearing in the
East, and even stranger astrologer priests following it across the desert to Beth-
lehem: a choir of heavenly angels appearing out of nowhere on a hill just outside

of town, singing a magnificent gloria to Almighty God: a motely band of rough,
illiterate shepherds, scurrying across the quiet fields in holy terror and making
their way to a shed back of an Inn: and a very young Galilean girl, married - or
perhaps simply engaged to a Nazareth carpenter, - giving birth to a son right there
in the hay with barnyard animals as witnesses, and then placing the swaddled child
in a cow's feed box for his first nap. How in the world do you do anything with
that story except tell it?

I have been reading several books recently on the craft of preaching and I was
both comforted and distressed to discover this sharp paragraph by British theologian
Colin Morris: "The man who launches himself from a tall building, flapping plywood
wings, may be regarded by amused onlookers as a crank; in fact, his aim ~ to soar
like a bird without outside propulsion - is child's play compared with the goal set
for the preacher. There is more chance of splitting the atom with a feather duster
than preaching an adequate sermon. Why? Because preaching is the attempt to
communicate by the crude, inexact medium of words the essence of the ultimate
mystery - God." (The Word and the Words, p.27).

Not that we haven't tried. Every person here has probably read an article or
heard a sermon which tried to explain "what really happened": how Mary found herself
pregnant and had to tell Joseph something and surprised even herself when he be-
lieved it: or how the star was really just the Morning Star shining particularly
brightly, or a comet which appeared at about that time: or how the Masi read their
astrological charts and discovered that a king was to be born, which is no more or
less nonsense than you can find in the astrological column in today's newspaper, and
quite by accident stumbled onto a new born in a stable: or how the shepherds were
completely ignorant, totally unreliable, susceptible to the power of suggestion, and
probably drunk: or, finally, how the whole story was simply fabricated seventy-five
years after the fact by some very creative literary types who needed a proper intro-
duction to the saga of the man they had come to believe was the Son of God.

The trouble is, no matter how responsible the effort to locate historic fact in
the Christmas story, the result always leaves a bad taste in the mouth - like being
overwhelmed with the beauty of a symphony concert and then reading the review in the
morning paper and discovering that the second violins were sluggish and the oboe a
little sharp.

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We know exactly what David Read meant when he said one time that for the
same reason he didn't want stained glass windows removed in order to see
better in church, he really didn’t want anyone trying to shed light on the
Christmas story. He wrote: "I don't want someone to make the incarnation
sound Like the simplest and most natural thing in the world." (Curious
Christians, p. 128). Christmas presents us with a bit of a mystery and efforts.
to reduce the mystery by explaining what actually happened are singularly
unsatisfying.

Yet, we live in a world that does just that ail the time. Fart of the
process of growing up and maturing is, in fact, the moving of data from one
category called "mystery" to another category called "understanding'. It's a
good thing too: nao one wants to go through life thinking that storks bring
babies or that God cries when it rains. And yet, wistfully, we know that some-
thing very precious about us and human life, gets lost in that process. Little
children love A.A.Milne's ‘Winnie the Pooh", but discerning adults love the
stories even more, I think, because they are about wonder and mystery and
innocent astonishment, and gantle love and all sorts of absurdities.

What happens to it? Is it inevitable or even risht that we should lose
the sense of mystery as a mark of our maturity? I don't think so. In fact,
the more I think about it the more I'm ready to conclude that understanding aids
and abets mystery Instead of eliminating it. The existence cf a tree is a great
mystery to the botanist who knows the incredible and inexplicable processes of
photosynthesis. The more I think about it the more I am convinced that while
the first stage of maturing means moving a lot of data from the “mystery”
category over into "understanding", the second stage is to move it back into
‘mystery ~ uhere it belcngs.

Halford Lucecock wrote one time: "It is one of the strange paradoxes of our
time that a world full of wonders has lost the sense of wonder. The two are
quite different. We gape at a bewildering succession of marvelous machines,
but there is little of the deep amazement felt on the Judean hills so long ago;
"When I consider the heavens, the work of thy hands, the moon and stars which
thou has made: what is man that thou art mindful of him?’ One reason why
religion to so many becomes flat, stale and wearisome is that sheer wonder is
left out." (A Sprig of Holly, p. 16).

Interestingly, as theologians and philosophers ponder the meaning of the
Death of God phenomenon, during the last decade many concinde that what dfed
was not God but the human sense of mystery and the consequent ability to
experience wonder,

al

Tptellectually we are still living in the back waters of the ‘“niighrenment
that tremendous time in history, about the 1&th century, when the human mind
and spirit were finally released from the ignorance and superstition of the
Dark Ages. Human Reason emerged as the arbiter of truth: the selentific method
would guide human affairs: whether an idea was true or not would be decided on
the empirical basis of whether or not it made sense. Religion followed suit:
the mysteries of medieval Catholicism were countered by a coldly rational
Protestantism. Theology reached for the mind, net the heart; Biblical studies
attempted to explain the curious phenomena of the New Testament in reasonable
terms, discarding as myth anything that refused to be explained. Thomas

-~ 3 -

Jefferson, a prototype Enlightenment thinker, actually rewrote the New Testament,
leaving out everything he couldn't understand and retaining everything his reason

told him might be true.

Frankly, that appeals to us. We don't own up to it much, but there is a
lot about the Kible that assaults our common sense. We would like very much a
religion that is logical. But admirable as that instinct is, in every other area,
it conflicts with the very premise of religion; namely, that there is a God who
exists outside the boundaries of human intellect: that God, if He is God, has
created even the human mind: that He is essentially, and always will be, a mystery
which is not accessible to our powers of reason.

One of the most fascinating and refreshing intellectual currents of our day, however,
is coming from a new scientific sensitivity to mystery. As a matter of fact, scientists
have never been as arrogant or confident about the supremacy of human reason as we lay
people. We are the ones whe bought, lock, stock and barrel, the notion that progress
means the ultimate elimination of mystery. From their side of it, no less an authority
than Albert Einstein once said, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the
mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is
a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder, and stand wrapped in awe, is as good

, dead* his eyes are closed.”

And sociologist, Russell Gordon Smith - "The scientific mood does not hold that the
truths it enables men to discover are the only truths...The scientist knows too well
that behind the symbols of mathematics and the formulae cf chemistry...iie the unex-
plained mysteries of twilight and music, of autumn nights fringed with silence, of
human fortitude and idealism." (See Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas, p. 8).

The scientists, of all peopie, are leading us back to mystery. The New York Times
Book Review two weeks ago covered three new vublications which address the matter of
astronomy and basic philosophical or religious questions. The article suggested that
“astronomers have replaced priests as the official answerers of the great question,-—
‘Where did everything come from?'" and concludes that the scientist's answer turns out
curiously similar te the priest's. One of the authors, Professor Robert Jastrow, is
quoted: "The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and
Biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced
suddenly and sharply, at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.”

Now that, frankly, is incredible. Intellectuals, fifty years ago, simply would not
have believed that a scientist - an astronomer ~ could say such things. After several
centuries of apologizing for Genesis, we find ourselves told by astronomy that the
account is pretty good. After frantically trying to explain away miracies and reduce
the Gospel of Jesus Christ to good old Yankee common sense, here come the scientists
warning us not to go too far, suggesting that there is a whole lot more to reality -
to the world and the universe and the human spirit than the human mind is capable af
comprehending.

In a very difficult but very good essay, German theologian Karl Rahner suggests
that we know God when we come to terms with mystery. Listen to his words: ‘In the
midst of the commonsense everyday movement of life, we are constantly faced with the
mystery which is infinite...Nameless, always, everywhere, it prevails in our life..."
(Meditations on Hope and Love, p.67).

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In our own experience we know that at our best, aur most profound, our deepest, we

are always operating at some level other than cold, rational logic. Creative
genius is net often very reasonable: nor am I able to explain in logical terms why the
music of J, S. Bach or George Frederick Handel touches something inside me so intensely.
David Read asks, with tongue in cheek, if Robert Burns explained anything when he
wrote:

"oO my luve's like a red, red rose

That's newly sprung in June:

O my iuve's like the melodie

That's sweetly played in tune." (op cit p. 127}.

In December of 1956 Thomas Torrance, distinguished Professor of Theology at the
University of Edinburgh, and today one of the thinkers out on the edge of the new
overlap of science and religion, was driving his family to Somerset village, near Bath,
for Christmas. The Russians had just laumched Sputnik and so Torrance and his family
stopped at Jodrell Bank Observatory arid were welcomed by the scientists who knew
Professor Torrance'’s academic credentials. They were impressed with a new radio tele~
scope and with the enthusiasm of the astronomers who "felt they were in contact with
the very edge of the created universe..."

Then they proceeded to Somerset to celebrate Christmas. Listen to Dr. Torrance
reminisce, twenty-three years later: “I could not get Jodrell Bank out of my mind, and
the vast immensities of the cosmos it had opened up for me. Then it broke in on me,
with an excitement I have never lost, that in this infant Jesus, born of Mary, there
had come among us, none other than the creator of that immeasurable universe, before
whom the galaxies of stars were, so to speak, like specks of dust in the palm of his
hand, And it is here at Bethlehem, and not at Jodrell Bank in spite of the marvelous
discoveries they are making there still, in Jesus, that we really are in touch with the
secrets of the universe, not only of its origin, but of its ultimate meaning and
end..." (Presbyterian Outlook, 12/11/78).

And thus comes to an end my Christmas sermon, a very modest anthology on the topic
of mystery. Each of us, minister - laypeople, confront now something that cannot be
explained and should not be explained. A child was born in Bethlehem, a child who was
the incarnation of Godj;a birth which ignites hope fer us and for our world; a birth
which confirms our instinct that it is better to love and give: a birth which calls
out of us greater affection for one another and compassion for those less fortunate:
a birth which celebrates a love which surrounds each of us eternally: a birth - a
mystery - best expressed, not in scholarly sermons, but in poetry and music: So, let
us lift our voices and sing the music: "The Kingdom of this world is become the King-
dom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever. Hallelujah."
But first, listen again to the poetry...

“and in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping

watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to
them, and the glory of the Lord shone areund them, and they were filled
with fear. And the angel said to them, "Be not afraid; for behold, I bring
you good news of a great joy which will come to ali the people; for to you
is born this day in the city of David a Savior, whe 1s Christ the Lord.
And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling
cloths and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a
multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying: ‘Glory to God

in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased!'"

AMEN «