There is a poem which begins: “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform”. There was a time in history when people were quite comfortable with that idea. After all, for pre-scientific people, the mysterious, the unexplainable was a part of everyday life. There was so much that they could not understand that they put it all in the general category of “mystery”, and they accounted for that by pointing to God. If they couldn’t understand it, they simply said, “God did it!”

They couldn’t begin to explain night and day, the coming of the seasons, why a seed when placed in the earth will germinate, sprout, and grow to a full plant when the process begins again. They couldn’t understand why rain falls, why winds blow, what makes the tides of the ocean. Human birth was a mystery, of course. I could go on and on. There was so much about life that they could not explain. But they cooperated with the processes of life. They used even that which they could not understand. And they simply said about all of that, “God does it!”

Then came the education explosion. The printing press was invented and the common people began to read. More and more people went to school. The scientific revolution came. Science began to explain more and more of the things that had been unexplainable. The horizons of human knowledge were expanded again and again. Today, we can understand so much about life, that many people assume that we can understand everything. For many of our contemporaries there is no longer any room for mystery, not even any room for God.

I.

We are living at a time in history when great emphasis is placed upon the rational. We have great confidence in the ability of the human mind to understand life and the world in which we live. And, I am proud to say, the Christian Church has had a major role in the development of human knowledge. The first great universities in this country were founded by the Christian Church. We Christians have long proclaimed that God gave us minds and He expects us to use them. We have understood that a major part of our purpose in life is to search for the truth, wherever that truth is to be found, because all truth is God’s truth, and wherever you find truth, you find God. I believe that. I believe that deeply! So, hear me loud and clear: there is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. The failure to develop our minds is poor stewardship of a God given gift.

In the Christian tradition in which I was raised, there was a two-fold emphasis: the warm heart and the enlightened mind. I am proud of that. I am proud to be a part of a Church that does not ask you to park your brain before coming to worship. I am sure that God expects us to use our minds to their fullest capacity!

But there is a two-fold problem. First, there are Christians who wrongly think that God is pleased the more irrational things we can believe in the name of faith. No, God is not honored by a mind numbing, irrational picture of the gospel. We cannot affirm that. And, second, there are those who are overly impressed with what our minds can do. They believe that, given time, there is nothing we cannot understand, categorize, and quantify. Everything in life that does not fit established rational categories is simply dismissed. So, instead of using our minds to enlarge our experience of life, for such people life itself is reduced to the size of our minds. Tragically, many people have become convinced that if we can’t touch it, it isn’t real, and if we can’t understand it, it isn’t important. Clearly, a person with this picture of life has no room in his world for wonder, or awe, or reverence. There is no room for mystery.

Now, all of this is particularly difficult at Christmas. Because when we read the Christmas story, we read about guiding stars, angelic choirs, virgin births, and a baby in a manger splitting history in two. The temptation for us moderns is to dismiss it all as some kind of fairy tale because we have no rational category in which to place it all. But, if we yield to that temptation, and try to make Christmas something which is totally rational and understandable…if we remove the mystery, and reduce the incarnation to the size of our minds, we will have lost something essential.

II.

And here’s why: there is more to life than the rational dimension. In all life, and certainly in all authentic religion, there is a mystery which goes beyond reason. Now, please understand that when I use the term, “mystery”, I am not talking about something which is irrational, contrary to reason, but something which is supra-rational, going beyond reason. I have no respect for that kind of religion which seems to say that the more irrational things you can believe, the more favor you gain with God. No, not that. We want to be guided by reason as far as sound reason can take us. But there is a dimension to life which goes beyond reason. There are ways of understanding life which are not purely rational.

Throughout history, the greatest thinkers were humbled by the realization of how little they really knew. The more they learned, the more they discovered they did not know. So, they tended to approach life with a sense of reverence and wonder. Albert Einstein, no small intellect, possessed a kind of reverent humility. He once said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious, the sense of wonder in the presence of something partly known and partly hidden. The one to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer stand wrapped in awe and wonder, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle.” I am impressed with the fact that this brilliant scientist, who understood so much, still made room in his life for mystery.

The ancient Hebrews had a real sense of the mysterious. For example, they would not even pronounce the name, “Yahweh”, because that was God’s name, and it was holy. In the center of the Temple was the “Holy of holies”, the dwelling place of God. No one entered there except for the High Priest, and that only once each year. For them, God was the “other”, the holy, the mysterious. They probably carried that a bit too far. But they were nearer right than those of us who no longer have room for mystery.

I like to think of myself as a well-educated, intelligent, rational person. Whatever is, I want to know about it and to understand it. And, for someone, even for me, to suggest that there are parts of life I will never fully understand makes me very uncomfortable. I have been programmed to believe that talk of mystery, things beyond our understanding, is really an intellectual cop-out. I recoil when I hear people say too quickly, “Well, there are just some things we’re not supposed to understand”. That’s one reason I am preaching this sermon. Periodically I need to wrestle with those things that make me uncomfortable so that I can grow. So, this sermon is for me. I am saying some things that I need to hear. And, if you like, I’ll let you listen in to what I am saying to me.

What I am pleading for is a balance to life. We must ask and answer as many questions as we can. We must never stop searching for the truth. But, once we have reached the end of our mind’s leash, we must acknowledge that there is more to life than what we understand. As God has said, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.” After we have wrestled with the great issues of life, there will always be an appropriate time to kneel in reverence and humility before that which is mystery.

H.G. Wells dealt with it in his story, “The Soul of a Bishop”. In the story, there is a conversation between the Bishop and an angel. The angel is telling him that all religions are trying to express a truth which they don’t clearly know, a mystical something that eludes the mind as water escapes the hand. The Bishop said, hoping for an exclusive revelation, “But, the truth, you can tell me the truth.” The angel smiled, cupped his hand over the Bishop’s bald spot, stroked it affectionately, and then held his head firmly in his hands while he said, “Truth! Yes, I could tell you. But could this hold it? Not this little box of brains. You haven’t things to hold it with inside this.” It’s true, isn’t it? There is much in life that we can understand. But there is much that we can’t. Mystery.

Isn’t it true that at the deepest levels of our human experience we are always out of the reach of satisfactory explanations? We can’t explain how we are moved to tears by a great play or a magnificent piece of music. When a great artist produces a painting, he doesn’t attempt to explain it – it is to be experienced, not explained. How can we account for the goose bumps when we look up into a starry sky, or when we watch the sun go down in glory behind the mountains? How can you explain the sense of wonder when your life is touched by God? And what about the overwhelming experiences of human love? Can we really put those into words, or explain them in any satisfactory way?

Robert Burns once wrote, “O my love’s like a red, red rose, that’s newly sprung in June”. Now, as a factual statement, that’s ridiculous. There is a great deal of difference between a rose and a human being. But Burns was not trying to make a statement of objective fact. He was trying to share an experience. By means of a poetic picture, he was attempting to get at a mystery…the mystery of love.

I am convinced that the deepest levels of human experience are dealt with best not by analysts…not by detached, objective, rational reporters, but by people who get inside of an experience, and seek to share that experience, even though they know they cannot adequately explain it. The deepest things in life cannot be fully described…they can only be hinted at. They cannot be looked at directly, but obliquely. That’s why it takes artists, and poets, and musicians to deal with the deep things of life, because they have the sensitivity necessary to deal with mystery.

I suppose that’s why I have never seen a totally satisfying movie about Jesus. Whenever I have seen Jesus depicted on the screen, usually he has come across to me as just another human being – a rather nice human being, with a bag of tricks perhaps, but just another human being. You look at him that directly and you miss the experience of the divine that was at work in him. You miss the mystery. That’s why the oblique look is required. I experience Jesus much more authentically in Handel’s “Messiah” than in any movie I have ever seen. Maybe…maybe that’s why the Bible is much more closely akin to poetry than to biography. The Bible probes the depths of life, while making room for transcendence and mystery.

You can understand, then, why guiding stars and angelic choirs are essential parts of the Christmas story. How can you express that which is inexpressible, that which is supra-rational, unless you talk of such things?

There will always be mystery involved in authentic religion. If there is a God at all, He will always be beyond our understanding. That’s why you have heard me say, “We can never say completely what God is…we can only say what God is at least.” For that God to express Himself uniquely in a baby born in a manger boggles the mind. And for there to be a power at work in that baby that has touched millions of lives and made them new is something I cannot fully understand. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to make the Incarnation sound like the simplest and most natural thing in the world. I don’t want to reduce the Christian gospel to something so innocuous that no leap of faith is required to believe it. The Apostle Paul insisted that the gospel is a scandal, a folly, a stumbling block to the “worldly wise”. No matter how you slice it, there is a mystery to the gospel which does not rest easily on our minds! Mystery!

Listen now, because I’m about to say something important: increasingly, I am becoming more comfortable with mystery. I’m becoming more comfortable saying that there is much in the Christian gospel I do not fully understand. And the reason for that is this: I deeply believe that God is like Jesus. The way we know about God’s presence and about God’s action is to ask, “Does it look and sound like Jesus?” Because I believe that is true, I also believe that the part of God and the part of life that I do not fully understand is not unlike that which I do understand. That means it is like Jesus…and that means, finally, it is good.

There will always be mystery in authentic religion. But I don’t apologize for that, I glory in it. Because if I could fully understand the Christian faith, if I could fully understand God with my little box of brains, there would be nothing about the gospel big enough or powerful enough to do what I need!

Down deep, don’t we all sense the truth of that? In the depths of our lives, don’t we all long for some experience of that which is beyond our comprehension? Don’t we all long for an experience of the transcendent God, who “moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform”?

III.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could recover our lost sense of wonder? Wouldn’t it be great if we could look at life with the eyes of the spirit and see the hand of God at work everywhere? If we could experience life like that we would want to break into poetry or into song…or at the very least to stand in silent reverence before the magnificent and mysterious works of God.

Jesus said that before we can do that, we must become like children. Have you ever noticed that for little children nothing is commonplace? Nothing is dull and routine. Everything has a freshness and excitement about it. Jesus said that’s the way to do it. We must approach life with a gleam in our eye, with a look of wonder on our face, and we’ve got to experience it all with unrestrained excitement.

Well, isn’t that the feeling you get when you hear the Christmas story? Something was happening…something so significant that angelic choirs sang about it and a star moved across the sky to point to where it was happening. The shepherds did not fully understand what was happening, but they knew it was important, and they responded by kneeling before the manger in reverence and wonder.

Note those words: reverence and wonder. Is that the way you would respond? I fear that many of us would be content to snap pictures, take notes, and try to understand it all. The shepherds simply knelt before the manger in reverence and wonder. And if we have become so sophisticated that we have lost our capacity for that, we have lost something essential.

Listen! The good news of the gospel is that “the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth”. I don’t fully understand that. I try, but I really don’t. But that’s okay, because I have experienced that. And believe me, the experience of it is far better than the understanding. A poet said it like this:

“I know not how that Bethlehem’s Babe could in the God-head be;
I only know the manger child has brought God’s life to me.
I know not how that Calvary’s cross a world from sin could free;
I only know its matchless love has brought God’s love to me.”

I’ve experienced that.

O, if you are intellectually curious, and I hope you are, you are welcome to investigate the records. Christianity is an historic religion and there is much factual data. I’ll be happy to discuss the faith with you at length. We can intellectualize for hours. I’ll go with you as far as reason can take us. We ought to do that, because it’s important.

I want to live in that kind of rational world. I want to do my intellectual homework. But I hope you will understand when I say that I also want to live in a spiritual and emotional world in which I can hear angelic choirs and see stars pointing me to Christ. I want to open my mind. But I also want to open my heart and my imagination to the mystery all around me, so that when you look for me at Christmas, you will find me with the shepherds, kneeling before the manger in reverence and wonder.

There is mystery in life, you know. I can’t fully understand it, but I can name it. The name of it is God.

A prayer by Ernest Campbell:

Lord, we know the words,
Teach us now the music of our faith.
We know the forms of celebration,
Give us now the fire, the passion, and the joy.
Break through the curtain of our dark,
And help us to receive You unashamed,
With the abandon of a little child.
In the Savior’s name we pray. Amen.