I don’t know about you and your journey with faith, but I know I’m not alone that there have been times when I have really wanted a full-blown experience of God. You know, a mystical revelation of the reality of the Divine. This is out of a yearning for God, and a yearning to know for certain, to experience it for myself, direct, that God is real.

There are plenty of stories of this, right? Stories that are told in scriptures of ours and other religions, stories that are told elsewhere. A word for this is theophany, meaning a manifestation, a self-disclosure of the Divine before a human being.

Today we look at two such stories from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. The first is the Prophet Isaiah’s account of a visionary experience of what he describes as the throne of YHWH (Isaiah 6:1-8). The second is Jesus’ disciples Peter, John, & James witnessing Jesus’ Transfiguration, or “metamorphosis” into Divine radiance while praying on a mountaintop (Luke 9:28-36). (This Transfiguration story is traditionally told this Sunday before Lent.)

Notice in both these stories the response of everyone who is not themselves divine to the experience of the theophany.

In Isaiah, the seraph angels who orbit the radiant Center and Source of Existence, singing “Holy, Holy, Holy” do so while keeping their eyes covered. Isaiah himself was terrified, and profoundly humbled. In the story of Jesus’ Transfiguration, his disciples at first weren’t even awake for it, they were asleep. When they did wake up, they were stupefied by what was happening before their eyes. And they started blathering without thinking about how to immediately memorialize the experience. At which point suddenly a thick fog surrounded them, a cloud glowing with a radiance that they can’t directly see.

The point is, in these stories, the Divine theophany is beyond people’s direct perception. It’s too much to handle, even for angelic beings.

There is a story from a medieval Rabbi about three people who had prayed and prayed to see God face-to-face. They yearned for God, devoted themselves to the pursuit of encounter with the Divine. And then, for each of them, it happened. All three were each given the opportunity to encounter the very countenance of the Holy One Beyond All Name.

The first person dropped dead.
The second person went insane.
The third person became wise, a great spiritual master, a gift to humanity.

Be careful what you pray for, right?

It’s important that we take a close look at our motivations in our seeking for God, in our spiritual quest or religious practice.

Why do we yearn for God (if we do)?

The first person in the rabbi’s parable, who died on the spot, you could imagine was like, you know the Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Indiana Jones movie? You remember the ending? It’s a famous cinematic moment. Indiana Jones is racing against the Nazis to find the Ark of the Covenant. The Nazis get their hands on it first. And they open it up and there’s this huge glorious eruption of light that just incinerates all of them.

This is the person who wants to encounter God for selfish reasons. The Nazis in the movie wanted to get the Ark of the Covenant so they can use its ancient mystical powers to conquer the world. They don’t truly honor God, they want to make gods of themselves. So, when the power of God dawns upon them, it obliterates their inflated egos and after that there isn’t anything left of them.

Alright, so let’s not be like the Nazis in Indiana Jones. Or like the Nazis in real life. It should go without saying, but these days we have to be clear about these things: don’t be like the Nazis.

Let’s not try to play god, in big ways or in small, seeking power over people’s lives and deaths, or striving to prove one’s superiority over others.

Or sometimes we can seek God like an extreme mountain climber seeks intense experiences or the accomplishment of being able to say “I conquered that mountain.”

Now, we may find it uncomfortable to talk about God annihilated people, right? I don’t think I’ve ever said those words before. In our progressive Christian circles, we rightly like to emphasize that “God is love.” This is good and this is true and it is important to the healing many people need from tyrannical images of God that create guilt and fear and shame, and that too often are used to excuse the bad behavior of powerful people.

God is love … and it is also true that God can’t be domesticated. God is a power beyond our puny comprehension. The tremendous transcendent power of the Sublime is a reality that petty little egos simply cannot survive. Reality can be harsh. Extreme mountain climbers have an extremely high death rate. And folks who play fast and loose with other people’s lives have a very high chance of getting some nasty comeuppance. In the words of the great Johnny Cash, if we run around playing god, we can “run on for a long time, but sooner or later God’ll cut you down.”

So, this is about encouraging humility, not about encouraging fear.  

Now, for the second person in the rabbi’s story who encounters the face of God, and ends up mentally broken, this is a sad outcome. This is someone who becomes lost in the heavenly realms and never really comes back to earth, even though they still are alive in this world. They become split. They’re no longer able to relate to regular people and everyday life.

The caution here is to take care that our attraction to the spiritual life is not driven by escapism. This can be hard, because life can be hard. I can be easy for our yearning for God to be motivated by the desire to escape from the realities of life that are painful or uncomfortable. But if it is, then any taste we may get of the sacred can drive us to addiction. We can get so caught up and obsessed with the bliss of transcendence that we lose touch with the rest of reality. I’ve seen and heard this playing out in so many ways. People who take so many hallucinogens they never come back to present time reality. Or I hear from folks I know who have been in monastic life – Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist – who were disillusioned to find that a lot of people there were running away to hide, and maybe they were too. (There are also people who are there for wise reasons, but escapism is a problem in monasticism.) Seeking escape from discomfort is also often the story of folks who get drawn into a religious cult.

There are millions of variations. And most have nothing to do with God – anything we get addicted to is something we seek out to try to escape from the discomfort of our present time reality.

It is true that if you’ve genuinely tasted something of the bliss that is possible through touches with Divine transcendence – and we can in this life – it can just be hard to come back to the so-called daily grind. Many people who have had near death experiences return to life with a wonderfully enriched sense of meaning and purpose, but many also struggle with life’s limitations, having gotten a glimpse of the wide and luminous reaches of the Beyond.

The practice, the challenge, the opportunity, is one of integration, of ethical integration of the transcendent experiences and the mundane stuff of everyday life in this messy world with other messy humans. Both dimensions are part of one big whole that can support us in growing in our capacity to live lives of love. God is love, after all, right?

With God’s help – and in particular with Christ’s help, this is part of the gift of Christ as the Divine Incarnation – we can enlarge our being to be open to whatever glimpses of the vast reaches of transcendence God may grant us, as well as the sanctity of the grit and gravel and nuts and bolts of most of our lives on earth.

There is a Zen saying, “After enlightenment, the laundry.”

It takes a real spiritual maturity to see how the sacred is alive in the “profane.”

It’s significant that every major transcendent experience in Jesus’ life is followed by his engagement with the needs of this world. After the Baptism, the Temptation. After the Transfiguration, the Crucifixion. After the Crucifixion, the Resurrection. After the Ascension, Pentecost. Jesus keeps on showing up for people, even when he’s given all these opportunities to float away or to get beamed up or to set himself apart. He keeps coming back and showing up out of love for the beautiful and broken world. In the process he is changed, and so are those who receive his love.

So, I for one have come to the place where what’s most important in religious life is not the mind-blowing, awe-inspiring spiritual experiences. Now, those kinds of experiences can happen, and they can be a gift to keep close and ponder in the heart. But it’s okay that in this life we are mostly seeing through a glass darkly, and we need the guidance of mediators, like Jesus.

Because the laundry needs to get done. And the seeds need to be planted, and the dead mourned. Because the world needs people willing to do to work it takes to make peace. It the humble work of love that is holy. 

This is the Way of Jesus.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, February 11, 2024 by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge

Image: Raphaelesque Head Exploding, by Salvador Dali, 1951