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a note: this sermon was preached to a clergy conference. I assumed a knowledge of the bible and of spirituality that I wouldn't assume in a parish sermon. I took some liberties both with the text and with the congregation. But I was above all preaching at a eucharist and aiming to prepare the congregation for communion.

Sermon, Wednesday 11th May 1994

Clergy Conference at Bishopthorpe. Eucharist in the Chapel.

“What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”

We are however, in a different situation to Paul. This “babbler” had something interesting to say. The philosophers wanted to hear him and to debate. He was a novelty and intriguing. But today, today perhaps we are proclaiming something old and tired. A god that is too well known. Has the church created an idol in its words and its structures?
Today, too many people know our God and they don’t want to know.
Ros knows our God. Her parents are Christian people who couldn’t provide the home she needed.
Graeme still knows our God, but do we know Graeme? He left his church over 30 years ago and his mother hasn’t spoken to him since. Graeme won’t trust another church very easily.
Elizabeth is hungry for the unknown god. She turned her back on the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church and cannot return. Every new guru and new age idea intrigues and is grasped at but still is not enough.
Elizabeth knows her church history too well to want to know the God that we know.

Ros I met at a Youth Refuge, Graeme is a neighbour, Elizabeth my best friend.
How do we proclaim God to our neighbours and our friends?
Have we, with our words, made God into an idol made with human hands? Have we taken away the mystery?
Do we dare to proclaim the unknown God?

We have the promise of the Spirit of Truth guiding us into all truth.
But truth is not something that can be put into a box.
Isn’t that our guard against heresy? If it’s too easy and too clear then there is something wrong. If there is no ambiguity and no mystery then somehow we have gone astray.
Remember something else about the Spirit. (1Cor2:10) The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
The Spirit searches even the depths of God.
We do worship an unknown God.
We cannot put God in a box. A God in a box can be killed, must be killed.
Bishop Spong entreats us.... any God which can be killed should be killed.
We risk much. We risk our comfort and security. We risk our church, our family, our community.
We risk much.

Annie Dillard asks:

“Why do we wear straw hats to church?
We should all be wearing crash helmets...
wearing life jackets,
We are like children
playing on the floor with their chemistry sets,
mixing up a batch of TNT
to kill a Sunday morning....”
For
“The sleeping God may wake some day and take offense
or
the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.”
[Dillard: Teaching a Stone to Talk, p40]


God doesn’t offer to dot the “i”s and cross the “t”s.
God simply offers LIFE in all its multicoloured, vulnerable, reality.
God’s own self is offered in all God’s brokenness and agony; in all mystery and unknowns.
The spiritual becomes material and confronts us with our ordinariness, our profound and celebratory ordinariness.
God comes to us in Ros, in Graeme and in Elizabeth. God help us, but God comes to them in us.
And God comes to us in bread and in wine. Don’t ask me the old, tired question of how the material becomes for us the spiritual.
Let us instead come and be confronted by our unknown God; come and eat bread and drink wine and know that the spiritual becomes, for us, the material.
Know this God who becomes ordinary. Profoundly, wonderfully ordinary. A little baby, a broken man, a cup of wine, a bite of bread.
Dare to approach.
And as we come, let us pray for a world that yearns to know the unknown God.
Let us pray for ourselves.