HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A SIX-WINGED SERAPH?

May 26, 1991
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
John 3:1-8
Isaiah 6:1-8

"I saw the Lord...Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six
wings..." -Isaiah 6:1-2 (NSRV)

Have you ever seen anything like that? I haven't. I have never
seen a six-winged seraph. A former chaplain at Yale, John Vannorsdail,
confesses that he hasn't either in a fine little essay from which I
shamelessly took the title of this sermon. The essay is about the
awkwardness most of us experience when we try to describe our personal
experience of God - and the difficulty most of us have locating God in any
way we can talk about.

“Where now is the power of God in my life?" he asks.
“In the forty years of my ministry I have never found
the road to Damascus. I have never been blinded by
heavenly light or heard my name spoken by God. I have
never seen a burning bush, and where I have served the
walls of the church have trembled with age, but never
with the voice of God. I have never seen the six-
winged seraphim." [Weavings, “In All the Old Familiar

—

Places," March/April, 1990]

Nor have I seen anything like those seraphim, mysterious beasts with
the body of a serpent, or a lion, the head of a human being, with six
wings, mythical creatures of ancient mid-Eastern art depicted in attendance
at the throne of the gods. The Hebrew prophet Isaiah sees them one day
while taking part in a processional in the temple, which is filled with the
swirling smoke of incense; looks up and sees six-winged seraphim flying
around singing, antiphonally no less, "Holy, Holy, Holy!"

I've never seen anything like that and I sense that those of us who
have not, have not had an identifiable religious experience, have never
heard our name spoken by God, have never seen even a very small: burning
bush... I sense we feel deprived, or religiously anemic. There must be
something about us. - We're just not spiritual... Or we suspect somewhere
down deep inside that people who do see things like that either have very
creative imaginations or are enhancing their spirituality by smoking or
ingesting illegal substances. 7

Furthermore, because we have not seen the six-winged seraph or
anything like it, because we can't name the date and time when God spoke
to us directly, we have a difficult time talking about God at all in the
context of the real world. Our whole culture, in fact, has a similiar
problem with intelligent, public discourse about God, caught as it is
between the silliness of the televangelist who sees a 900-foot Jesus and
hears a voice telling him to build a hospital - which he does against the
advice of every doctor and banker in town ~- and now stands empty and
bankrupt, and on the other hand, the arid dryness of much respectable
religion which comes across with about as much passion and power as an IRS
1040 form. A friend of mine who is a teacher of preaching and who happens
to be black, says that Presbyterian worship reminds him of a corporate
meeting and the sermon is the chairman's report to the shareholders. So
public discussion about God is difficult at best and non-existent
throughout much of our culture.

The historic root of the great silence is the Enlightenment, that
period in Western history when people decided that the key to
understanding reality is the human mind - reason - rather than divine
revelation - church dogma. It was not an easy lesson to learn. The
church kept excommunicating people, throwing them in prison and burning
them at the stake for suggesting things like the earth is round not flat,
and the sun is at the center of the solar system and the earth revolves
around the sun, not vice versa.

The product of the transition from what historians cali "The Age of
Faith" to "The Age of Reason," and one of the reasons Western civilization
began to move rapidly was an increasing reliance on reason to determine the
truth and an increasing distrust of other modes of truth seeking -
religious revelation, emotion, imagination. It has served us well -
mostly. If you have romantic illusions about the good old days, Visit the
International College of Surgeons Museum on Lake Shore Drive some day and
see for yourself what it was like to be critically ill fifty years or a
hundred years ago. Modern medicine regularly cures disease which was
inevitably crippling or fatal little more than a generation ago. There is
a fraternity/sorority of people walking around with-artificial hips and
knees who, a generation ago and all the time before that, would have been
condemned to a lifetime of increasing pain, ultimate disability. There is
a Similar community of people walking around with artificial valves, by-
passes, transplants - who, until a few years ago, would simply not be here.
We can - see, hear, walk, run, live, move —- have being more fully and much
longer because Western civilization decided to go with reason instead of
revelation, the scientific method rather than meditation, orthopedic
surgery rather than faith~healing.

It has served us well ‘- mostiy. But since the beginning there has
been a suspicion, even among those who wished to see civilization become
more reasonable, that it may not make any more sense to allow reason to be
the only arbiter of truth than it did to allow revelation or religion
that absolute authority.

Pascal observed, "There are two equally dangerous extremes, to
shut reason out, and to Jet nothing else in." [Pensees]

5/26/91 2

There is a wisdom which is not scientific per se. And there is a
blindness which results when our devotion to rationality becomes absolute
and unquestioned. There is no question about the fact that modern
industrial capitalism, untouched by an older wisdom, unaffected by an older
love for the earth, has brought us to the brink of ecological disaster.

The smart bombs and the technology which allowed us to end the Gulf War
quickly and efficiently also lured us into it and isolated us behind our TV
screens from the appalling destruction of human life. And the same medical
technology which enhances and saves life, extends life into that ethical
minefield and excrutiatingly painful phase characterized by pumps and tubes
and needles and bottles which simultaneously extends some times and also
robs life of its final dignity and bankrupts the entire system.

There is, in fact, another way of comprehending reality, a more
balanced way which appreciates human reason but also appreciates mystery; a
way of seeking the truth which acknowledges that truth is always larger
than the answers our methods produce: A way of talking about ultimate
things, about God if you will, that acknowledges that God is always larger
than the religions which attempt to define and describe God.

There is, that is to say, mystery; and what you do with mystery is not
understand it, but stand before it with awe and wonder. Robert Farrar
Capon in a book on the language of theology says that “we are so impressed
by science that we feel we ought not to say the sunflower turns because it
knows where the sun is. We are much more comfortable with a large
vocabulary and when we are assured that the sunflower turns because it is
heliotropic. The trouble with that kind of talk is that it tempts us to
think we really know what this sunflower is up to. But we don't. The
sunflower is a mystery, much as every simple thing in the universe is."
{Hunting the Divine Fox, p. 10}

’ For several hundred years we have thought the task of education is to
reduce mystery, eliminate the unknown. Now we are having second thoughts
or perhaps education ought to teach appreciation for mystery, awe, maybe
even reverence, .

And Jewish philosopher Abraham Heschel taught that "modern men and
women fell into the trap of believing that everything can be explained,
tnat reality is a simple affair that only has to be organized in order to
be understood." [Walking on Water, Madeleine L' Engle, p. 131]

So we have trouble talking ahout God. Television and popular motion
pictures treat religion as background material only. There is an
occasional wedding or funeral, but the action is elsewhere and the
participants, particularly clergy, are almost always trivialized. "Mash"
used to deal regularly with questions of enormous complexity and
importance, But the chaplain never quite gets it. Forty percent of the
American people go to church or synagogue or mosque weekly, but you'd never
know that if television and movies were your only access to American
culture.

Norman Lear, whose programs in the past have addressed the major

issues confronting our culture with intelligence and sensitivity, is
producing a six-week series on CBS this summer on Sunday evenings called

5/26/91 3

“Sunday Dinner" in which one of the characters takes her religion
seriously, prays and means it. In a preview of the series, The New York
Times this morning called "spirituality" the last TV frontier. The network
has agreed to "give God a chance." James Wall, editor of The Christian
Century, quipped last week and Norman Lear himself said, and the Times
quoted, "We have got to be willing to talk about God in this country.

We've got to be willing to talk of awe, mystery, love." [The Christian
Century, May 15-22, 1991.]

The evidence of spiritual hunger, longing for honest religion, is all
about us. Motion pictures which hint at spirituality are widely popular
even though they would not be described as traditionally religious. "Field
of Dreams," for instance, is not only about baseball, but about mystery and

transcendence and a way of looking at reality which is open to wonder and
awe and faith.

Religion pops up in funny places. I had occasion to visit Yankee
Stadium two weeks ago and was shown the memorial garden in center field
where there are bronze plaques commemorating Yankee greats of the past -
Ruth, Gehrig, Stengel, Dimaggio, Mantle - and in the center, two plaques as
reminders of the transcendent, not of Yankee greats, not of Presidents of

the United States, not even George Steinbrenner, but Pope Pius XII and
John Paul Il.

How then to speak of God in a way that acknowledges what time it is -
1991; the post-industrial, high-tech society; a way that acknowledges
science and human reason, but which also knows about mystery?

The two passages of scripture which we read this morning are helpful.

The prophet Isaiah, was in the Temple, the place of worship,
participating in a religious ritual. He had a vision - a powerful
spiritual experience —- described artfully by those flying seraphim and the
shaking foundations and the voices, “Holy, Holy, Holy." The purpose of
the experience, however, is to prompt the man to do something, to go to the
people. That is, this prototype religious experience is not given for
his entertainment or edification or spiritual satisfaction. Rather,
experiences of. God are given in arder to prompt people to service. Note
also Isaiah's first response, a feeling of personal diminishment: "Woe is
me," he says. "I am a man of unclean lips." And there follows an

experience of cleansing, acceptance, forgiveness, reconciliation wholeness —
healing.

In the passage from the Gospel of John, Nicodemus, a representative
of the established religion of the day, comes to see Jesus at night to talk
about God. His religion has taught him to understand God and God's wiil in
terms of rules and regulations and rituals. Jesus is talking about a
bigger God than that. He tells Nicodemus: "the wind," another word for
which is spirit, "blows where it will." That is, God will not be contained
by your religion. There is about God that which is always unpredictable,
unrestrained, mysterious. —

That is what Scripture suggests about the personal experience of God.
God comes into individual lives for the purpose of transformation, not

5/26/91 4. .

entertainment. God comes to call people to service. God comes in ways we
may not always comprehend or recognize; and Gad comes to bring wholeness,
healing, forgiveness, health.

There is always an ultimate solitude about experiences of God. It is
not easy to describe to another person one's personal experience of God.

Like human sexual behavior, there is enough mystery to make it
difficult to communicate or describe or photograph. Unless treated with
respect photographed sexuality can become pornographic. <A similar dynamic
can happen when we try to hear and graphically describe spiritual
experience. _

Rudelf Otto wrote a scholarly book in the 192Gs which changed the way
people think about religion and religious experience. Otto thought that
all people have spiritual experiences but not all recognize them as the
presence of God. I've always loved his description. He calked it the
“Mysterium Tremendum" and he wrote, "the feeling of it may at times
come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood
of deepest worship. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of
the soul with spasms or convulsions. It has its wild and demonic forms...
it may become the hushed, trembling, speechless humility of the creature in
the presence of - whom or what? In the presence of that-which is a mystery
inexpressible..." [The Idea of the Holy, p. 12]

So part of it is recognizing and acknowledging the presence of
mystery in the middle of our lives - of surprising beauty and tenderness
and love. Pay attention to the times when you have a tear in your eye and
a lump in your throat, Fred Buechner advises. Don't be embarrassed when
you are deeply and personally moved. Pay attention and be grateful for
experiences of beauty and passion which are greater than you are and which
are given to you as gifts of grace.

Be grateful, and in the words of the Psalmist, for the voice of God
over the waters, in the crashing ocean surf or a misty still morning over
Lake_ Michigan, or flashes of lightning and mighty oak trees and in still
small moments of depth as you raise your eyes and spirit te the mystery of
a night sky.

You may never have seen a six-winged seraphim, but you have seen
and experienced miracles of healing and love and compassion and
reconciliation.

The God about whom Jesus talked is as unpredictable as the wind, but
can be counted on to be at work in the world and in your life - bringing
peace and wholeness and growth and hope.

When you see that, you have seen what Isaiah saw - the six-winged
Seraphim.

Peggy Shriver has published a new book of poems, many of them about
God's surprising intrusion in the midst of life's harshness. One of them
is about a homeless woman in a subway.

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"She lurched aboard,

sagged into a vacant seat,
Frail weight of her grey years
hunched with cold.

Numb fingers picked at rags

drawn close against raw misery,
Knuckles, cracked and swollen white,
clutched into a plea for warmth.

He, dark and lithe,
swing down the aisle,
taut jeans dancing
rhythmically.

With Latin grace
he, sidling past
her patient form,
in one smooth gesture

disappeared through subway doors
leaving in her lap

like folded dove wings,

his black leather gloves."
{Pinches of Sait]

The six-winged seraphim - the unfathomable mystery among us.
The job of the church is to keep alive the rumor of God.
And we, you and I, are invited to live with eyes and hearts and

spirits open to the beauty and giory of God to rest in the promise and love
of God who is among us in ways we can never fully understand.

“Come down, O Love divine,
Seek out this soui of mine
And visit it with Your
ardor glowing..."

Amen.

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