Hilton Head Island, SC – June 30, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 6:1-8; Acts 9:1-9
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Now as he journeyed he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed about him. – Acts 9:3 (RSV)
I have just returned from a twelve-day car trip to Kansas and Texas, and then back home again. Originally Lois and I were going to take this trip together. She was not looking forward to the long drive, but she was looking forward to seeing family members and friends along the way. However, because our house is on the market, and we, along with Loie’s mother, will soon be moving to The Seabrook, we jointly decided I would make the long drive by myself.
The primary purpose of this journey was to be in Fort Scott, Kansas on June 21. I had agreed with my sister-in-law to officiate at the committal service for my brother at the Fort Scott National Cemetery. Bob died a year ago, but his wife wanted to hold the service at a time which would be convenient for relatives. As it turned out, all six children of my second brother, who died almost fifty years ago, attended the service, with their families, so I’m very glad I went.
I tell you all this by way of saying that our family lived in Fort Scott, Kansas from 1947 to 1950, when I was 8 to 11. There is a national cemetery in Fort Scott, and my brother and sister-in-law had long ago agreed they would both be buried in the town in which they were born. And it was also in Fort Scott where I had the only mystical experience of my life, and I am quite certain it shall be my only such experience. I have no idea why it happened, but I also have no doubt that it did happen, in its own unique, low-key way.
I was walking with some friends through a wooded area south of town in the late spring or early summer. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the light was shining through the trees with a warm brilliance I had never seen before, nor have I seen or felt it in exactly that way ever since.
There was nothing about this that was like Isaiah in the temple or Paul on the way to Damascus. I didn’t hear or see God or Jesus or anything similar. But I had a feeling of unsurpassed inner peace which swept over me. Life is indescribably beautiful, I concluded, as a result of this singular emotional sensation. I didn’t tell Donny Pargen or Terry Barton; they would likely have thought me daft. And nothing like that ever happened again, as I said earlier. The inner tranquility didn’t last long --- a few minutes at most, as I recall. I hadn’t thought very much about all this through the last 65 years until knowing I was going to be back in Fort Scott, and that afterward I would be delivering a sermon on Our Ambivalence About Mysticism, which I had to write before going to Fort Scott, or otherwise we wouldn’t have a sermon at all this morning. It wasn’t Magnificent Mysticism or Mysterious Mysticism; rather it was Miller Mysticism, nothing too flashy or spectacular, just a small splash, and never to be repeated.
According to my good friend Noah Webster, and his associates, mysticism is defined as: “1: the experience of mystical union or direct communication with ultimate reality reported by mystics 2a: religion based on mystical communion b: a theory of mystical knowledge 3a: obscure or irrational speculation b: a theory of postulating the possibility of direct and intuitive acquisition of ineffable knowledge or power.”
Well there you have it. It is the “obscure or irrational speculation” part that I want mainly to address today, and to try to refute that notion in your mind, if it has taken root there. Linguistically, the word “mysticism” is related to the word “mystery.” Years ago certain kinds of novelists wrote what were called “mystery stories.” Now such writers write what we call “thrillers.” But in fact most mystery stories are not mysteries at all. In the end, it all comes clear who did what, and why. Thus the mystery is solved, and thus there is no longer a mystery.
Not so with mysticism. In a truly mystical experience, there is no way of properly explaining what happens to the person who has the mystical experience. He can’t really describe it; she can’t adequately tell others what it was like so that they can see it or hear it or feel it for themselves. It’s like trying to describe why you prefer butter pecan ice cream over all other flavors; you know why you like it, but no one else can feel exactly what you feel, or taste what you taste, either to your satisfaction or to theirs.
After having read many poets and poems throughout my life, I have concluded that some poets are essentially mystics. Among poets, mystics are a decided minority, I presume, but still, there have been quite a few over the past five thousand years or so. And one of them is my all-time favorite poet, the Belle of Amherst, Emily herself. You couldn’t write some of the things she wrote solely on the basis of a fanciful poetic imagination. She saw and heard and felt things most of us never experience, and she wrote them down in her uniquely powerful and passionate way: “I heard a fly buzz when I died; To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee; Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul; Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me; I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea; We never know how high we are, until we have to rise.” And then that most mystical musing of all:
There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.
None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair, —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 'tis like the distance
On the look of death.
What the divine Miss Dickinson on that winter afternoon saw is exponentially and indescribably greater than what that pedestrian and mundane Miller boy saw on that summer afternoon in a woodlot in southeast Kansas 65 years ago, and I am the first to admit it. Further, I will readily confess I am not the type to have many if any truly serious mystical experiences. I am far too rational and linear in my thinking, too much a head-person and too little a heart-person.
Or consider William Blake, the late 18th and early 19th century English poet.
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
I don’t know exactly what that means, but I deduce one thing it means is that William Blake was a genuine mystic. He saw what you and I don’t see, and he didn’t see it because he was sniffing poppy dust or smoking cannabis leaves either. It was Blake who gave England the great national hymn Jerusalem, based on the age-old tradition of the Britons that Jesus came to England with Joseph of Arimathea on a trading voyage when Jesus was a boy: “And did those Feet in ancient time/ Walk upon England’s mountains green?/ And was the Holy Lamb of God/ On England’s pleasant pastures seen?” Almost no one would ever see or think or feel that, but William Blake did, and it has enhanced the cultural and religious life of the British Isles ever since. Even to recall Jerusalem being sung makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
The Bible also records scores of mystical accounts of mysterious events and sights and sounds. I chose two of the best-known of these events as our scripture passages for this morning.
The first is described in the 6th chapter of Isaiah. Isaiah tells us he was in the temple in such-and-such a year, in order specifically to date his experience. It was in the year when King Uzziah died. Standing there in the beautiful building which Solomon had constructed two centuries earlier, Isaiah saw God, “high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple.” Above God were the seraphim, who are a particular kind of angel. (Don’t ask me about angels; I personally know nothing about them, other than what I have read. I wouldn’t recognize one if I tripped over him/her/it.) In Isaiah’s mystical vision, the angels sang, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” (And don’t ask me if the title of the Whole Earth Catalogue came from Isaiah 6, because I don’t know that either.)
Well, when Isaiah perceived this vision, however specifically it was he perceived it, he exclaimed, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips!” When you see God, when in the mysticism of the moment you actually see God, which is the only way He can be seen on this side of the metaphorical Jordan River, if He is to be seen at all, you feel diminished and daunted and defeated.
But the God who is God, whom I believe without doubt did appear to the greatest of the prophets “on that great-getting-up-morning; fare-thee-well, fare-thee-well” 2800 years ago: that God will not allow us to remain catatonic in our feelings of vast inferiority when we encounter Him. If He appears to us, which I think He doesn’t to very many of us, He has something in mind by His appearance, which was certainly the case with Isaiah. One of the angels came and touched Isaiah’s lips with a hot coal, and the angel announced, “This has touched you; your guilt is taken away, and your sin is forgiven.” Then Isaiah heard God say, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” (“Us” presumably means God and the heavenly host of angels, but don’t quiz me on that either.) Then, and only then, did the stricken prophet hesitantly or half-heartedly or perhaps even very confidently say, “Here am I; send me.”
It is very rare, especially for the kind of people who attend The Chapel Without Walls, to have mystical experiences of God. But were it to happen, literally for God’s sake, do whatever God asks. For heaven’s sake, don’t dither. Isaiah didn’t, and he became a prophet who changed the world. Nobody was like Isaiah: not Elijah, or Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, or Daniel, or anybody else. The man born with a silver spoon in his mouth became unsurpassed in prophetic power.
I don’t know why God came to Isaiah as He did. Or why He came to Paul as He did. That particular episode is probably better known to you. It is universally known as “the Damascus Road Experience.” The persecutor of Christians was on his way to the capital city of Syria, intending to attack more Christians, when he was confronted by the resurrected Jesus. He clearly heard Jesus say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (As yet he was still Saul of Tarsus; his name had not been changed to Paul.) Paul/Saul inquired, not surprisingly, “Who are you, Lord?” He figured this was a mystical episode, and he figured it was not God speaking to him, but someone else. But who? “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting, but rise and enter the city, and you will be told what to do.” The narrative says that the men traveling with Paul heard the voice, but they did not see Jesus, as Paul did. In other words, it was moderately mystical for them, hearing the voice, but not a full-blown mystical experience. When Paul rose from the ground, he discovered that was completely, if only temporarily, blind.
Meanwhile, in Damascus, a Christian named Ananias also had an inexplicable mystical vision. He too saw “the Lord,” which, from the context, again means Jesus. Jesus told Ananias to go to a certain place to find Saul, and to restore his sight to him. Ananias probably said, “Oy veh, Lord, I’ve heard Saul is a dangerous hombre. Are you sure about this?” And Jesus said, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel” (Acts 9:15). So Ananias did as he was told, and it all eventually turned out as Jesus said it would. When, in the mystery of the mystical, God or Jesus tell us to do something, we must do it; we must. Not to do so is to negate that unique means of divine communication which only a very few of us are able to sense.
In almost half a century as an ordained minister, I have had perhaps half a dozen or a dozen people tell me they had direct experiences of God. By Webster’s definition, that can only mean a mystical experience. I remember the first instance the best, perhaps because it was the first. I was a young assistant minister in Chicago, and I went to visit a lady who had suffered from multiple sclerosis for years. Up until Jesus appeared before her, she said, the MS had been very bad, and it was getting steadily worse. Afterward, it was better, she said. When I first visited her, and I did many times afterward, she was doing pretty well. But never before had any parishioners told me they had been visited by God or Jesus. I had no reason, other than that mysticism seems and is unreasonable (you could ask Mr. Webster), to deny what she said. However, she was not unreasonable. She was not at all given to excessive religious zeal. She was as understated in her religiosity as I am, except that she had a serious mystical experience, and I only had a mild one with a certain slant of summer light when I was nine or ten years old.
In the long history of religion, either the three Western monotheistic religions or the polytheistic religions of the East, there have always been a few mystics to spice up the religious stew, people like St. John of the Cross or St. Bonaventure or Julian of Norwich or Meister Eckhart or Thomas a’ Kempis. They never make a big splash, because mysticism is so out of the ordinary, which is to say, so extraordinary, that it gets shunted aside by those who insist that if something isn’t totally rational, it is totally suspect.
However, because you or I don’t have mystical experiences doesn’t mean nobody has them. Up until the last quarter of a century, almost nobody got to be 7’4”, but now, with a taller gene pool and better diet, it occasionally happens. Don’t discount the extraordinary, Christian people. And don’t discount the mystics. They exist. Their visions are real. I have said before in a sermon that my oldest brother could see the eyes of a quail under a bush at fifty yards, when the rest of us couldn’t even see the quail, let alone its eyes. Different people have different gifts.
If you’re going to be serious about Christianity, you must employ more than mere reason in your pursuit of higher things. God gave us a brain so that we might use more than our mere brains. So, whether it is in the temple in the year that Uzziah died or on the road to Damascus or in a sun-dappled wood with a thousand shades of different-colored light, we should neither deny the reality nor expect similar experiences every other day. God uses all kinds of people with all kinds of gifts to do His work in His world. Allow Him, and them, to have at it.