Scripture can be found here (Isaiah 55:6-11) and here (Mark 6:30-34. 53-56)…
So, a pop quiz, which I found online this week. Which of the following quotes is not in scripture?
“To thine own self be true.”
“God helps those who help themselves.”
“The truth will set you free.”
“God works in mysterious ways.”
Well, you know at least one for sure, because it’s already been a part of this sermon series. But would it surprise you to know that only one of these is in scripture? “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Gospel of John, chapter 8, verse 32. None of the rest of these can be found in the Bible.
Except… well, you can actually find lots of places in scripture where it says something very like, God moves in mysterious ways. From God’s snippy rejoinder to Job in chapter 38,
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding…” (v. 4)…
…to Paul in his letter to the Romans,
“For who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been [God’s] counselor?” (11:34).
The letter to the Ephesians alone uses the work “mystery” six times, all the while the author is trying to explain.
Our passage from the prophet Isaiah is a good example. In a message meant to comfort God’s people in exile, the prophet urges those who feel alienated, removed from God, who feel unworthy… to seek the Lord, who is still to be found. To call upon God who, it turns out, is very, very near—right here, actually.
These are words to people who just aren’t sure they know how to connect with God anymore. They’ve lost their ways of worship with the destruction of the Temple. They’ve lost everything they thought they knew about how God worked, except their certainty that God must be very, very angry with them.
But God’s ways are mysterious, Isaiah reminds them.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. ~Isaiah 55:8-9
We tend to measure God’s ways according to our own ways, ways that include sudden anger, saying things we don’t think we can go back on, and staying mad. I mean, Olympian-level marathons of mad, that go on for years until we can’t even remember why we were mad in the first place.
That’s not God. God’s ways are not our ways. There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea. God moves in some mysterious ways, and those ways always seem to be about our healing, our acceptance, and our welcome back into the fold that God never really kicked us out of in the first place.
Now, there are some ways of God that are not so mysterious. These fall under the categories explored in our passage from Mark’s gospel, categories along the lines of “seek and you will find.” Jesus and his disciples seek to find some rest—which is a good and holy thing, and something everyone needs and deserves—but, when the people’s need is too great, Jesus puts aside rest for a while. They are like sheep without a shepherd, Jesus can see, and therefore his instincts lead him back to the work of teaching, and feeding, and healing.
Which is to say, those who seek will find; those who ask will receive; to those who knock, the door will be opened. But these ideas are both straightforward and mysterious at the same time. Seek where? Ask how? Knock, what?
These images all lead us to the possibility of prayer, which is also straightforward and mysterious at the same time. To pray, we adopt an attitude—a stance of openness, of desire for connection, of praise and petition, but also of listening. Sometimes we come away from prayer feeling the connection, having experienced God’s presence in some way… and sometimes, we don’t. Sometimes our prayer takes us where we absolutely did not expect, and some entirely new thing is opened to us.
Straightforward and mysterious. The geniuses of prayer are those who simply plod away at it—sitting down to pray whether they’re feeling it or not, putting daily prayer in the same category as brushing their teeth, on the logic that, feeling it or no, they still need it. I aspire to this. At times I even achieve it for a time. I am currently plodding away at plodding away.
But I don’t want to offer prayer as a cure for mystery. I don’t want to cure mystery at all: we have to leave room for it. I recently learned that, in some circles, the recognition of mystery is a spiritual practice, just as prayer, reading scripture, and giving. I noticed as we moved through this sermon series together that several of the sayings people tend to think are in the bible fall under the category of “tidy and logical systems,” sayings that reassure us that everything is, ultimately, comprehensible, knowable. On their “Spirituality and Practice” website, educators Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat offer the spiritual practice of mystery to help us to balance out the urge to find a comforting explanation for everything. They write,
To be spiritual is to have an abiding respect for the great mysteries of life — the profound distinctiveness of other souls, the strange beauty of nature and the animal world, the ineffable complexity of our inner selves, the unfathomable depths of the Inexplicable One. The wisdom traditions challenge us to live within a cloud of unknowing.
The first step in the practice of mystery is to cherish the baffling, curious, hidden, and inscrutable dimensions of your existence and the world around you. Live with paradoxes. Give up the idea that you can always "get it." Be suspicious of all the "ologies" that try to explain everything — from astrology to psychology to theology. Whenever you are honestly stumped by the existence of evil, injustice, or suffering, resist the temptation to ask "Why?" And never be afraid to admit "I don't know." [i]
Just as there are different ways to pray, there are many ways to approach mystery as a spiritual practice. The Brussats recommend finding cues for ourselves, or reminders of ordinary events that will give us opportunities throughout the day to take a moment to embrace the mystery that lies at the heart of things. One possibly cue might be sorting clothes and wondering what happened those other socks. Another might be passing a funeral parlor or a cemetery, and taking that as a reminder to ponder the mysteries of life and death.[ii]
Here is your surprise ending for our sermon series: The Lord does indeed move in mysterious ways, even as scripture tells us we might recognize the hand of the Lord in the events of our lives that shape us, that affirm our goodness, that reveal love and caring and acceptance at the heart of that mystery.
Blessed is the Creator of the Universe who lurks in mystery. May we learn to rest in that mystery, and find peace, even in the cloud of unknowing.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, “X-The Mystery,” Spiritual Practices in the Alphabet of Spiritual Literacy, Spirituality and Practice: Resources for the Spiritual Journey website, https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/practices/alphabet/view/36/x-the-mystery.
[ii] Ibid.