I was in a tiny beach town on the coast of Oregon called Manzanita, where tremendous towers of volcanic basalt meet the Pacific Ocean, and ancient forests overlook expanses of sandy shore. It was there in that little beach town that I discovered the best bumper sticker I’ve ever seen. 

It was on an old Volvo, of course. A bright yellow sticker with black letters:

“Keep Honking! I’m Listening to Alice Coltrane’s 1971 Meteoric Sensation ‘Universal Consciousness.’”

I just had to laugh, it was funny and smart and weird, and it was a merciful relief from the “Keep Honking! I’m reloading,” bumper stickers I’d seen more than one on the drive over.

Now, I’d listened to enough Alice Coltrane to know I really liked her music – as a matter of fact, my spouse Rachel gave me one of her albums once as a gift. Alice Coltrane was a pianist, organist, and harpist, who was a central force behind what’s known as “spiritual jazz.” Her music, as she put it was about, “growing closer to God through sound.” 

You know I’m all about that. 

But I hadn’t listened to her album “Universal Consciousness” despite it being her “1971 Meteoric Sensation.” And, of course, that sounded appealing to me – this jazz genius expressing her experience of universal consciousness, giving us a musical taste perhaps of something of the mind of God … and here is a testimony that it’s an antidote to road rage … sign me up. 

It wasn’t until a couple of years later after moving here and finding myself in a lot more traffic with a lot more honking that I finally managed to get the album. I put it on for the first time, in the car one Sunday as I drove home from church, on our beloved Schuylkill Expressway. 

There as I drove with the traffic along the river flowing through the ancient metamorphic schist with its mica glittering in the sun, what met my ears from that meteoric sensation was chaos. A swarm of shrill sounds darting in and out, in an unrelenting frenzy – free Jazz unleashed into realms of what felt to me to be pain and agitation. 

Whoa, Madame Coltrane, this isn’t the inner peace I’m looking for right now. 

I turned off the album and switched to the radio and landed right in the middle of a news report about Ukrainians unearthing mass graves and evidence of war crimes in territory regained in the war against Russian invasion. I felt pain and agitation and anger and helplessness. 

And it hits me, there, driving in traffic along the Schuylkill River: “Oh right, Universal Consciousness. Be careful what you ask for.” 

Who could bear to know all that God knows. Just imagine: the total awareness of the Divine that, as Christians, we know to be a loving witness as intimate as it is infinite. Just imagine a fraction of what God is aware of every moment: every event, every experience of every sentient being and bit and mote and molecule of this beloved creation. Just imagine that awareness, of everything that’s happening among every here in this room, and among those at home on Zoom, and outward to the neighborhood and across this land and around the globe and through the solar system and entire universe. There is so much happening this very moment that our puny little minds and hearts couldn’t bear to let in. 

How fully do we even let ourselves experience our own experiences, how fully do we feel our joy and feel our pain, how fully do we let ourselves witness the experiences of our loved ones and neighbors, bear witness to their suffering, bear witness to their joy and delight. How fully to we allow ourselves to bear witness to the full dignity and humanity of those near us? Let alone the guy who’s trying to pass on the shoulder and honking as if you owe him something for his rudeness. What’s it like to glimpse what God knows of his suffering, his joy, his broken belovedness?

Plenty of people like to strut around and play God. But who could bear to actually be God? Look what it did to Jesus. “That which you do to the least of these you do to me.” 

Yet, our calling, our challenge, as people of the Way of Jesus is “to let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” The same universal consciousnesses, the same global heart awareness. 

We don’t need to do it alone, we can’t do it alone. And the good news is that we have lots and lots of help. When we call on God, when we call on Jesus, our help arrives along with our healing, and our growth towards a freedom and a peace that surpasses understanding.  

When I managed to give another go at listening to Alice Coltrane’s 1971 meteoric sensation, this time not in the car, I was better prepared, and I hung on through my initial discomfort. I started to hear the patterns that emerged in what seemed at first to be chaos. And then, as the tracks progressed, there was a steady clearing in the music, a purification you could say, emerging into a clarity, into an exquisite, open-hearted, direct expression of devotion to the Holy One whose transcendence is truly a universal embrace. This was a great musical journey of the cost and joy of devotion to the Love Supreme. 

This is also the musical journey of another great piece of spiritual jazz “Creator Has A Master Plan,” by Pharaoh Sanders, a saxophonist who died last week as one of the last surviving elders of the creative movement he shared with Alice Coltrane and others. This is my sermonic tribute. Pharoah Sander’s piece, “Creator Has A Master Plan” begins the way I expected “Universal Consciousness” to begin, with a pure-hearted song of praise. The music evolves and propels into a sung hymn: “The Creator has a master plan/ peace and happiness for every man/ The Creator has but one demand/ peace and happiness throughout the land.” But then as the improvisation on the theme develops the voice of Sanders’ saxophone ventures into chaotic waters, and plunges in. His horn begins to howl and we enter a realm, an outer darkness, with cries of agony, lashing storms of pain, weeping and gnashing of teeth. The chaos grows unbearable … until he breaks out of it, and clears, purified, clarified, into the light of day. The music dances again, rejoicing, under the full sky of God’s promise to humanity. The refrain returns, “The Creator has a master plan, Peace and happiness throughout the land.”

This Sunday in our sacred calendar is World Communion Sunday. This is a day to remember, to re-awaken to our essential unity with the communal body of Christ as it embraces not only the 2.2 billion Christians around the world, but all of humanity. The spiritual revolution Jesus set in motion was – and is – radical in sharing the full light of God’s promise with all of humanity across alldifference – the love of God’s universal consciousness, the master plan the Creator is for all of creation.

Jesus prayed that we may be one, as he is one with God, and one with us, so we “may be complete in union.” “In Christ there is neither man or woman, slave or free, Jew or Greek.” We are one in Christ, as Christ is one with God, and God is one with us. 

We can’t underestimate the power of this through history, how revolutionary it is, that it’s even think-able that there is an essential global unity, across all our differences, differences which so often can be so bitter and bruised, so chaotic and confused. Along with tasting this reality comes the pain of the awareness of how far we are in living it out. But that is not ours to bear alone. Through the human incarnation of our Creator, in Christ, God bears the ruptures of our brokenness at a depth we can’t even imagine, and gives of Their essential nature to embrace and feed us all. 

What this global communion means is that we have to be aware and we have to care about the well-being of all beings. Christ-consciousness is universal consciousness; the master plan includes all of everything. This is impossible for us to live into without heartbreak; and it is impossible without great joy.

We “weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those who rejoice,” and through it all we give praise and glory to our God, from whom we find the peace the surpasses understanding. 

So, keep honking, because I’ve got Jesus, and Jesus’ loves you too. 

For the tasting and sharing of universal Christ-consciousness around the globe, for our world communion I give thanks to God. 

(Delivered Sunday, October 2, 2022, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg)