Sermon — May 14, 2023
In a 2006 study, a psychologist at Leeds University asked 92 volunteers to sit down and write out the common English word “door” on a piece of paper 30 times in 60 seconds. You might be able to imagine what happened next. You may even have experienced the phenomenon yourself. If I stand here and start doing it (“Door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door…” I won’t go for thirty) I suddenly start to feel very strange. “Door” feels odd in my mouth. Is ”door” really a word? Is it really spelled that way? What a strange combination of sounds! Have you ever felt this way, maybe while writing out identical thank-you notes or invitations? You’re writing and writing and suddenly, ordinary English words start to seem strange?
If you have, you’re experiencing what the psychologist who ran this study came to call jamais vu, in French, “never seen,” the cleverly-named opposite of déja vu, French for “already seen.” It’s an example of what researchers call “semantic satiation,” in which your brain becomes so oversaturated with the meaning of a word that it suddenly seems to become meaningless.
It’s a paradox of familiarity. As the word becomes more and more and more familiar, it suddenly flips to being completely strange. Your mind no longer needs to think about the meaning of the wor,d and instead you start thinking about the very strange process occurring beneath the surface, about the fact that my tongue, and lips, and lungs, and vocal chords are all flapping wildly in an incredible display of choreography simply to produce these very sounds.
It’s a good metaphor, I think, for spiritual life.
God is, after all, both deeply familiar to us, and profoundly strange. God is the one, as Paul the Apostle says this morning, who “gives to all mortals life and breath and all things,” the one “in whom we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 2:23, 2:28) God is, as the theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “the Ground of Being Itself.” With every breath we take, God flows through us. With every move we make, God moves with us. Every step you take, every single day, God is watching you. (Okay, no. That’s Sting.)
Jesus tells his disciples, “You know [the Spirit], because he abides with you, and he will be in you.” He tells them that this Spirit, this divine Breath, this Advocate and Comforter, abides with them, literally lives within them; that God’s Holy Spirit is united with their spirits. When they, when we, feel hope or joy, peace or love, it’s a sign of God’s presence; it’s the Holy Spirit who dwells in our hearts, helping us to grow in love.
So the Holy Spirit of God is deeply familiar to all of us. It lives in us and breathes in us, and we live and move and have our being in it. God knows us better than we know ourselves.
And yet, like that word you repeat over and over and over again, God is so familiar to us that God becomes completely strange.
If it’s true that God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being, then we’re like the proverbial fish, who can’t tell you what water is until you take them out of it. And I think that’s probably true for most of us in this room. It certainly is for me. Even as a priest, I don’t spend most of the day prayerfully reflecting on the presence of God all around me. I spend most of the day trying to figure out what to cook for dinner that a five year old will actually eat, and wondering why the printer isn’t working, and trying to find someone new to work in the nursery after Miss Laurel graduates. I’m like a fish swimming in water, only occasionally noticing it’s wet.
And I think that’s why Paul so emphasizes the words those Athenians had carved onto one of their altars, dedicating it “To an unknown god.” (Acts 2:23) They had built altars to Zeus and Athena and Hera and then they built a spare, and marked it as such, to make sure none of the gods were offended when it turned out that they’d been left out. Paul sees this and says, “Aha! You’re waiting for an unknown God? Well, let me tell you about the God I know!”
But I think there’s a deeper spiritual truth in this dedication “to an unknown god.” Because God is always, and will always be, both known and unknown; both familiar and strange. In fact, the greatest mystics of the Christian tradition have always taught that the best way to come to know God is actually to un-know God, to strip away all the things we think we know and understand about the one whom we call God, to become so familiar with God that we realize how strange God really is; to slowly realize that none of what we think of God is true, because nothing we small human beings say in our small human way could ever capture God’s full reality, and yet God has given us life and breath and all things “so that,” as one translation says, “we would seek God, and perhaps feel our way toward him and find him.” (Acts 17:27) And we spend our whole lives, whether we know we’re doing it or not, slowly feeling our ways toward this unknown and unknowable God who knows us and abides with us and loves us.
Sometimes we have help. In other words, sometimes there are things in this world that help us feel our way toward God. Sometimes this help comes from art or music, which draw us deeper into the presence of God through their beauty. Sometimes our help comes from nature, which reminds us of God’s presence with us through the changing seasons of our lives, and strikes us with its own sublime strangeness. We very often have help from one another, from what we call the communion of saints, living and departed: the community of people who love us and care for us and inspire us to be the best versions of ourselves, and who forgive us and comfort us when we fall short.
And sometimes our help comes from all three of these at the same time. Many of you are here this morning to celebrate the installation of our newly-restored stained-glass window, and the dedication of the newly-created Beech Tree Medallion, which was given by Marie Hubbard’s daughters Sue and Judy in her memory. The medallion is based on the beloved Beech Tree that stands in our Garden, which Marie in turn had presented to the church in honor of her own parents, Marie and Kelso Isom. The beautiful restoration of the rest of the window was funded in part by funeral and memorial donations made in honors of many members of their extended family tree over decades, as well as by donations made by the whole church during the recent capital campaign.
All of which is to say that that window is more than just a pretty piece of glass. Through the beauty of its artwork, through the way it evokes nature, and perhaps most importantly of all, through its connection with the communion of ordinary saints, of blessed and beloved people who’ve gone before us, that window will guide each one of us and generations yet to come as we continue to feel our way toward God. It’s an incredible blessing for me to get to see it, from where I stand, right here, every Sunday, a living testament to a person and to the people who’ve made this church the amazing place it is. We look at a window, or we look at a tree, or we think of a person, and we know them all so well; but then suddenly we think, “Oh, my God; what an incredible thing.” And suddenly the grace of God shines through the people or places or pictures we know so well. And we are struck by their beauty and inspired by their love.
In a few minutes, I’ll say a formal prayer of blessing and dedication for the new window. But I want to add an informal dedication, as well, a subscript that we put on every beautiful thing in this place, a dedication “to an unknown God”; that in its beauty and in the memories it holds, we might be led every day, one step closer to the one in whom we live and move and have our being.
Amen.