speechless

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN

FEAST OF THE TRANSFIGURATION (August 6^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Exodus 24: 12-18

Psalm 97

2 Peter 1: 16-21

Luke 9: 28-36

 

 

I want to talk about poetry.

Of course I speak as one who wandered around a university campus in undergraduate days, knowing only too well that as a literature student and a male I was hopelessly outnumbered by women. That of course may have been an incentive for undertaking humanities, but that is another story. I was nevertheless surrounded by men, including one of my flatmates, who rolled their eyes at the thought of poetry.

When I went on to theological college several years later it was men who struggled with the abstract moments in the biblical record. They had, it seems, three choices. They could analyse every surreal moment in the biblical text as if absolutely historically provable, concrete, rational. They could walk away from faith altogether because of its movements into the emotions and the imagination.

Or, and of course I’m biased, they could wrestle with the text on its own terms.

Perhaps it was ever thus, but as Christianity reached out with its gospel through space and time these dilemmas never diminished. Despite that, the leaders and thinkers of the church clung to and continued to celebrate the moments that reach beyond the merely rational. So readers of the Bible, too, held on to and (thank God) celebrated the poetic moments. Moments like the transfiguration, or the high end holy moments of Jewish mythology, and above all for Christians the moments of Resurrection, Pentecost, Parousia (future coming), and Judgement, despite the fact that they are way beyond our understanding.

Yesterday I read in the paper that astronomers have found a remarkable item in a distant constellation. It resembles a giant cosmic question mark. Scientists are of course not particularly interested in this celestial coincidence as if it were some sort of profound message from the cosmos: it is a quirk of form with no hidden text. Extraterrestrials billions of miles away don’t necessarily use European punctuation.

But it reminds us that the human imagination likes to play. As the great author of Ecclesiastes didn’t say, there’s a time for play and a time for work, there’s a time for meh and a time for awe, a time for science and a time for poetry.

Poets and playwrights and novelists spend lifetimes taking moments that we all recognize as beyond words and trying to find words for them. Peak human experience like a sunset or a surging wave or sexual or emotional, or grief: these do not adequately translate into words, despite the event being utterly, utterly real. Somewhere in the universe there’s an exploding ball of matter that we can only describe as looking like a fiery question mark. Somewhere in your life and mine there have been experiences beyond words. 

Somewhere in the lives of those attuned to the limitless possibilities of a God, and those who dared to journey with the beyond-words magnificence of the life and death and something else of Jesus of Nazareth, there were and are experiences that utterly out-pass the power of human telling, as fourteenth century mystic Bianco da Siena put it in a hymn we sometimes sing, “Come Down O Love Divine.”

Today we just touch one of those moments, and I have no idea what its about, but I know that peak moments of human experience are beyond words, and I suspect the moments in which we experience the utter mystery and magnificence of God are all the more so.