The wiser parts of ourselves are the parts of ourselves that remain open to

feeling awe,

feeling wonder,

feeling gratitude,

feeling love,

feeling humility

feeling a greater sense of belonging,

feeling a greater sense of our dependence and interdependence,

a greater sense of purpose and meaning,

a greater sense of grace

a greater sense of creative and moral possibility …

We could probably name some more qualities of those parts of ourselves that are connected to a deeper wisdom, our deeper soul-self, where we are most in touch with God and the Holy Spirit, and most responsive to the invitations of Jesus. These wiser parts of ourselves, our souls, exist, and continue to exist by the grace of God, even when we forget them or neglect them, even despite those other parts of ourselves that are constricted by sin to being fearful, or closed off, or mean, or petty, or vicious, judgmental, obsessed with concerns that are ultimately much, much less than God. This constriction happens to some degree to all of us, and it is by God’s grace that each our souls has a wiser part of itself that can survive and can be revived by the redemptive power of God’s love.

Awe, wonder, gratitude, love, humility, belonging, dependence & interdependence, purpose, grace, creative and moral possibility … these are postures of being that can lead us into relationship with the greater Mystery and Power of God. So whenever you feel this, be sure to honor it, and turn it into a prayer, and let it expand out to the Mystery of God who is infinitely beyond us and yet intimately present to us.

Say we’re sitting by a creek in the woods and taking in the sound of the water running over the rocks, and the light dappling through the leaves and shimmering off the stream, and we just suddenly become awestruck by the beauty of it all. If we stay with that experience of awe, be with it in a prayerful way, we can find that it opens into a wider horizon of tremendous Mystery. We have awe for all the elements of the living, shining world around us … and that awe opens to something even more. We can feel ourselves to be glimpsing a sense of the Holy power behind all creation, the Sacred Source of all Being. This can be a God moment.

This is true of whenever we feel genuine gratitude. This is true of when we feel love. And so on. It can lead us to singing out in praise of God, singing out like the seraphs in Isaiah’s vision of the Holy One Beyond Name: “Holy, holy, holy …”

Those special souls who have shared their stories about more direct encounters with the glory of God, all say the experience left them feeling awe, wonder, gratitude, love, humility, belonging, dependence & interdependence, purpose, meaning, grace, creative and moral possibility. They all say that words and images really cannot convey the experience. Because the reality is that the reality of God is a tremendous mystery far, far beyond our understanding. The power of God is a power far, far beyond any puny human power. The Being of God is a Source of Being deeper than being itself, far deeper than any of our fragile and dependent beings. The glory of God, the grace of God, the awareness of God, the love of God … all are far, far beyond the scope of what we can know and can be.

God is. God is the Source and sustenance of all that is, and was, and ever shall be. Glory be to God.

In our lives of faith, our practices, at their heart, are practices that help us return to these postures of being that can open us to deeper relationship with the great and holy Mystery of the Living God: awe, wonder, gratitude, love, humility, belonging, dependence & interdependence, purpose, meaning, grace, creative and moral possibility.

This is when our religious practices are healthy, rooted in the reality of God beyond human powers.

When our religious practices are not healthy … they become about something other than God, they become about merely ourselves and our mere human powers, merely about one group of humans and their mere interests over and against all the other humans and even all the other beings of creation. It’s easy to slip into this – we all are susceptible to making God into our own image or saying things about God that are convenient for us, rather than actually true about God.

It’s not easy to always be aware of the fact that whatever you think you know about God, God is always more. God is always beyond our understanding. That’s very humbling, especially for those of us who really enjoy how smart we are or how special we are, or how righteous.

At the same time, it’s very easy to realize that there’s power in getting people to believe certain things about God, regardless of whether they’re actually true or not. Religion is a powerful way to move people and inspire devotion – for good and for ill.

Our Biblical tradition is a tradition that wrestles with the ways that human beings can worship idols of our own making, while revelations of the True God Beyond Name offer us the possibility to evolve in our understanding of the nature of God, the possibilities and purposes of our human lives when lived in greater faithfulness to the awesome reality of God.

We inherit a mixed legacy in that wrestling between revelation and idolatry.

One of the most common forms of idolatry throughout history is making the king into a deity, or saying that the ruler of the day has a special connection with the deity or is specially blessed in a way that justifies everything they do. This often is tied to saying that one group of people is especially blessed and justified by the deity in everything they do. Therefore, we can exercise godlike powers to take life and control life and seek to make the world into our own image.

God, then is worshipped as a great and mighty king who sanctions the greatness and might of the human king who is “His” representative on earth.

The testimonies of our faith, however, destroy these kinds of idolatries. The various prophets in the Bible chart the evolution of revelation that the One True God is beyond merely a tribal deity, but is in fact the universal, beyond the boundaries of human attachments:

Psalm 146

Praise the Holy One Beyond Name!
Praise the Holy One, O my soul!
I will praise the Holy One as long as I live;
    I will sing praises to my God all my life long.

Do not put your trust in princes,
    in mortals, in whom there is no help.
When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
    on that very day their plans perish.

 Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
    whose hope is in the Lord their God,
who made heaven and earth,
    the sea, and all that is in them;
who keeps faith forever;

     who executes justice for the oppressed;
    who gives food to the hungry.

The Holy One sets the prisoners free;

    the Holy One opens the eyes of the blind.
The Holy One lifts up those who are bowed down;
    the Holy One loves the righteous.
 The Holy One watches over the strangers;
    he upholds the orphan and the widow,
    but the way of the wicked God brings to ruin.

The Holy One will reign forever,
    your God, O Zion, for all generations.
Praise the Holy One!

Jesus himself shows that God is not some petty tyrant, or even a mighty tyrant, but is rather a God of universal love, who uplifts the lowly and humbles the mighty. The Apostles of Jesus then went out to further show how God moves us to embrace others beyond the boundaries of ethnic, tribal, or national identity.

Of course, God is greater than we are. Of course, God is greater than our rivalries and competing interests and our petty displays of power. Of course, God is greater than our puny human imaginations can even conceive. Any idea we have about God that is less than universal is less than God.

As a former congregant of mine once put it: “God is ineffable. So I try not to ‘eff’ with God.”

When we glimpse even a glimmer of the truly tremendous and holy Mystery of the Creator of all the Cosmos, what can we do but fall on our knees in awe and gratitude and humility and praise, and be inspired by such universal creative power and gracious love to live our lives with deeper purpose and possibility, trust and faith.

Thanks be to God.

You can watch video of this sermon here:

Delivered Sunday, July 6, 2025 by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.