Gracious Lord, help us to see all things in the light of your love. Amen.
“You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Or “Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” These are phrases that are commonly used and often misunderstood. For example, pulling ourselves up by own bootstraps is a phrase usually meant to convey initiative, resilience, and determination. But that’s not, at all, what the phrase actually means – to find the true meaning of those words, when you get home, lie down on the floor and try to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, or shoelaces if you don’t have bootstraps. You’ll soon discover that the phrase is meant to describe an absurd and impossible task.
There are phrases that we all use without really understanding them. Hopefully, we never use them in such a way that it becomes embarrassingly obvious that we don’t actually know what we’re saying, but I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t happened to me on more than one occasion. This is a sermon about a phrase that I’ve used thousands of times in my life and just a few months ago, realized that I had misunderstood the whole time.
Every Sunday, we say the Nicene Creed – an ancient statement of faith that symbolizes our unity and connection to the Communion of Saints across space and time. It begins, “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” All these years, I thought I knew what “seen and unseen” meant – but I had missed it.
Sure, there’s the historical context of the Council of Nicaea to consider – the theologians there were trying to combat gnostic and materialistic tendencies and wanted to make it clear that boundaries of God’s creative energy were not limited by our senses or knowledge. And I hope I can get a pass for thinking “seen and unseen” meant that God created not only things like mountains, stars, and amphibians, but also things like gravity, love, and angels.
That interpretation isn’t wrong so much as it’s incomplete. The phrase is so much richer and deeper than I had realized. I was at a conference a few months ago and one of the speakers writes for a website called “Seen & Unseen.” She opened her talk by telling the story of having an acquaintance ask her what the love of God feels like. In part, she said, “I trust it completely, even though I understand it barely.” She went on to describe why she, along with several other scholars, refer to our current time as an “Age of Unknowing.”
Our world is complicated and confusing, and many people, particularly younger generations, are finding insufficient answers to the deep questions of meaning and purpose in all the usual places. It’s why things like crystals, astrology, and tarot cards are all surging in popularity – because people don’t want to be in charge of knowing what they are to do, they want to told by the Force, the Universe, or whatever you want to call it, what to do. They are more comfortable unknowing than being expected to know.
The speaker pointed out that unknowing isn’t the same thing as ignorance. Ignorance is “not knowing” whereas unknowing is about going beyond the illusion of knowing. Unknowing is the awareness that there are truths that our minds can glimpse but never understand. If knowing is about mastery, measuring, calculating, and proving, then unknowing is about curiosity, wonder, and beholding the otherness of a thing without trying to control it. It’s as Gandalf says in The Lord of the Rings, “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
Please don’t hear this as anti-science or anti-intellectual. When I cross a bridge, I’m glad engineers did the calculations. But the bridge itself begs the question, “Why do we desire to get from here to there.” That question is one of unknowing – of awe and exploration.
Reid Wiseman was the commander of the recent Artemis II mission that did a flyby of the Moon. In an interview upon returning to Earth, Wiseman noted that he’s not a religious person, but was struggling to process their journey, so he called for a chaplain on the Navy ship after they had been extracted from the splash landing. He said that as soon as he saw the chaplain, he broke down into tears. Here is a person who had exhausted the limits of knowing and was overwhelmed by the grace of unknowing. He had been encountered by something beyond all categories of knowledge. Wiseman went on to say that as he glimpsed the Sun eclipsing behind the Moon, he turned to another astronaut and said, “I don’t think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we are looking at.” He had come to unsee that which he had spent his entire life seeing.
And so, at that conference, hearing this speaker talk about knowing and unknowing, and hearing the name of the website that she writes for, “Seen & Unseen,” I had an epiphany. I had come to unsee, or unhear, the Creed that I had said so many times before. “Seen and unseen” does not merely mean that God is the Creator of things visible and invisible, which is, of course, true. “Seen and unseen” conveys that God is behind both the things that we are confident about – goodness, mercy, and love – but also the things that we are uncertain about – doubts, despair, and disappointments. God is with us in the moments when we are confident, but also in those moments in which we are utterly lost. In God, we both see and see anew. I will never again be able to say the phrase “seen and unseen” without a sense of wondering what God is calling me to unsee.
This morning’s reading from Genesis is one of the clearest examples in all of Scripture of someone who unsees their life and has their blindness turned to clarity. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been hearing the saga of Jacob – the son of Isaac and Rebekah who conned his elder brother into selling his birthright as the firstborn for a bowl of soup. Once Esau got over being hangry, he came for revenge and so Jacob, even with the birthright being his, fled into exile. That’s where today’s reading picks up. He’s on the run and settles down for the night when he has a dream. As a quick aside – pay attention to your dreams, that’s one of God’s favorite ways to help us unsee the things that we think we’ve fully seen.
When he wakes, Jacob proclaims “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.” That is one of the truest statements that any of us can ever say and one that we should practice saying on a daily basis – that God is with us even when we don’t see it. This week’s Collect prays that God would minister to us even when, in our blindness, we don’t know what to ask for.
A lot of prayer treats God like a vending machine – I want B7, so I put in a dollar bill, push a button, and God should give me what I’m looking for in terms of an answer, a healing, or a bit of good luck. But Jacob’s declaration of unseeing reminds us that we so often don’t even know what we really need, which is why Jesus taught us how to pray the better prayer of “Thy will be done.” And as St. Paul wrote in the bit of Romans we heard this morning, “Hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?” In other words, hope is unseeing things –hope is when we come to see our lives in light of God’s wisdom and love instead of our limited blindness.
This past week, I took Communion to someone who has been going through more medical issues that most people would deal with two lifetimes, and this person is younger than me. I had begun some of my sermon preparation before the visit, and we talked some about all of this. Given all of the medical issues and complications she was facing, what was seen, what was visible, was a lot of reason to despair and feel abandoned by God. It would have been easy to assume that a tragically early death was on the horizon. But as one poet reminds us, “A horizon is nothing except the limits of our sight.”
She was gifted with the ability to unsee that horizon, and she told me that was her saving grace. She said that the lack of definitiveness about things saved her. It was her inability to see that gave her courage and peace. Trust me, I’m at the front of the line when it comes to wanting to see all things and be in control of the outcomes of my life – but there is so much salvation in unseeing, and trusting that our Good Shepherd is leading us towards green pastures and still waters, even when we are stumbling through the dark valley.
The ancient song that we recited this morning, Psalm 139, is a great illustration of unseeing. Verse 11 says, “Darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day; darkness and light to you are both alike.” Another translation has that last line as “the dark and the light will be one.” Often, the darkness helps us to unsee things. And, beloved, there are things we need to unsee. There are lies that need to be unbelieved, stories about our lives that can be untold, boundaries that can be undrawn. Because of Jesus, we can hope for war to be unseen as inevitable. We can unsee our mistakes, quirks, and failings to be the most significant parts of our identity. We can unsee our fears of scarcity in light of God’s abundance. We can unsee and unlearn false images of God that are vindictive, exclusionary, and exacting – images that look nothing like Jesus. We can unsee the false horizons that we’ve built up because, to God, the night is as bright as the day.
One of the blessings that is standard at the end of the Eucharist begins, “The peace of God which passes all understanding…” In the fullest sense of the word – that is a blessing. It is asking for God give us that peace that allows us to see that sin does not get the last word, that the grave is not final, that darkness and light are being made into one, and that, somehow, despite the limits of our sights and imaginations, all things are being made well in Jesus Christ.
That line in the Creed – it’s an assertion that God is the Creator of all things, and it would be a mistake to think that all of God’s creative activity happened in the past. Continually, God creates new wonders for us both to see and unsee.
