On being profoundly profoundly deep

"And Jesus said unto a group of theologians, 'Who do you say that I am?'

And they replied, 'You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being,

the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our interpersonal relationship.'

And Jesus said: 'What'?"

I love that story. Possibly because it is borderline inappropriate – after all no one likes their Jesus looking like he’s a little slow to catch on. But I like it because it reminds us not to over-egg the pudding with the gospel.

There is a strong argument for keeping things simple.

A number of years ago, when I was a young minister in this church, I remember being quite beguiled by one of the ministers who had a widely celebrated command of the English language and was seen by some as being a bit of a spiritual guru.

He had this knack of saying something with all the angst of the point of his message visibly displayed - he would bend over slightly, curl his hands and his body into himself, much like I would imagine someone imitating ‘pain of new birth’ in an interpretive dance routine. And his points were often full of angst, so he was often in this position and he used words that were difficult to define, hard to pin down – words that left me back in Grade Five wanting to put up my hand to ask, ‘What on earth do you mean?” but feeling like the village idiot in doing so, yet holding to this gnawing suspicion that perhaps I’m not the only one who carried on straight when the speaker took a left turn. So while mid-fold, in an agonising last ditch attempt to get this Herculean point across, he exclaimed, ‘”This is meaningfully, meaningfully deep.” Another minister, close to retirement age himself and thus less beguiled by the wisdom of the elder, who to him was simply a peer – Guru? Please! He’s just Jimmy from back in Seminary, we almost failed Greek together! He would’ve if he hadn’t copied my notes… – and someone very close to me, let out an harrumph and repeated that phrase ‘meaningfully, meaningfully deep’ with such disdain I half suspected that he might just spit it out on the floor next to him.

 

That got me thinking: what is the difference between ‘meaningfully, meaningfully deep’ and say, ‘deeply, deeply meaningful’ or, ‘meaningfully meaningful’ and ‘deeply deep’? I mean, when is it appropriate for the language police to haul your sorry butt off to a holding cell for citing deliberate obfuscation of a fairly simple point or rampant abuse of an innocent, unsuspecting adverb? (And should I be hauled off for using ‘obfuscation’ when say ‘confusion’ would do?)

Because sometimes we as ministers do this, we make things unnecessarily confusing. I once quoted Homer in a sermon, which was not that unusual considering Classical Civilisations was my major at University, but it was met with some confusion. After the service one congregant remarked that he had heard of Homer and Bart, heck even Marge, but was not aware any of them had contributed to some kind of epic story called The Odyssey or The Iliad. And come to think of it, if I was quoting Homer, why wasn’t my quote, you know, funnier? (In this same sermon I meandered through an illustration about Alexander the Great leading my father to remark, ‘Well son, good point, but did it need to be six minutes long?’ leading to a frustrated, ‘Well dad, if people are going to get to the crux of the point, they need a working knowledge of the reasons leading to the Siege of Halicarnassus. Duh.’) The sermon just after this I felt compelled to use the words omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent all in the same prayer – not completely sure, at that time, what any of those words really meant; yip, I’m a slow learner.

And maybe this too is a lesson to any preacher, actually any leader: just because it is interesting to you, does not make it interesting to everybody.

I think there is a balance here. On one hand the gospel is very simple, its truth a glistening, honest, beautiful thing whose simplicity and earthy truthfulness sparkles so enticingly that anyone, even a child, can get a grip on it. But then your journey begins and questions come and simple things segue into more complex things and answers become more questions, and black and white fade to grey; and importantly language is stretched and pulled to breaking point, and words are sent around swirling to give some form to this mystery.

For God is mystery and sometimes words fail us entirely.

I have this habit of remembering things other ministers say; well not everything they say as ministers are by-and-large a rather talkative lot - but insightful things, things that are offered sometimes off-the-cuff and hit me as so profoundly (profoundly?) true that immediately my cerebellum fuses and those words stick in my brain like gum to the bottom of a primary school desk, immovable.

One minister said, “You know, I don’t care for simplicity on this side of complexity that is nothing to me, but simplicity on the other side of complexity, that is a remarkable thing.” A remarkable thing indeed; only I’m not one hundred percent sure what he means.

So I’ll give a shot at what I think it means: I think you can sit with questions. I think you can wonder through the existential maze and sit with a book that insists you open the Dictionary.com window to help you navigate your way through, yet you can still hold to a faith that is beautiful and true, joyous and adventurous, illuminating and inspiring, and by all accounts, quite simple.

That faith that anyone can hold to, even a child.

In some ways I am nowhere near where I used to be. In other ways I love Jesus just as much as I always have, and for exactly the same reasons: Jesus gives my life meaning, Jesus has always given my life meaning, is just that my definition of what meaning is has changed.

This is probably a warning; I see it in religious people. I see it in myself. Sometimes our words, our theology, our immense learning, these can become red herrings, making ourselves seem more important than we are or constructing a purpose beyond what is necessary. So much of what we read in academic circles really falls into the category: who cares? You will find that category after: what do you mean? And right before: who thinks this stuff up? These are all sub-categories under the broader major category: Huh?

I speak this as a lover of learning and one deeply committed to furthering tertiary studies, but you can ask any student, one of our greatest fears nibbling at the back of our minds is that nobody will read this advanced thinking beyond ourselves and maybe some ageing professor in a backwater college with an egg stain from the forties on his tie and sporting a wicked comb-over. And of course, our Supervisor who is paid to read it.

Of course all this learning does have its use – academia makes us better thinkers and we are perilously short of those; it is fruitful. Of course. But just find application for it and simplicity beyond it.

At another retreat, as ministers were sharing, one minister spoke of that particular frustration any preacher feels; he had spent the whole week analysing, praying through and preparing a text for Sunday. Never before had a text been excavated to such depth. He stood to preach believing he had unearthed this wonderful truth only to look up and find one guy sitting in the front pew, as fast asleep as a child after a bed-time reading – snoring lightly, pleasant look on his face; so sound asleep was he that, had he been laid on his side, he could have been cut- and-pasted into a mattress commercial. Ask any preacher - that is about as soul-destroying as it can get.

And so it goes.

So, the next time you are sitting in church and the preacher (possibly me) is boring you to death and you’re losing the will to live and you’re on a very dry descent into Dullsville please just remember one thing: you worship a God who is wonderfully, wonderfully loving and who calls you in turn to be lovingly, lovingly wonderful.