Spotting the Mystery--July 24, 2025

Spotting the Mystery--July 24, 2025

"I became [the church's] servant according to God's commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has not been revealed to his saints, to whom God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory." (Colossians 1:25-27)

One of my favorite jobs as a parent over the years has been getting to speak the sentence, "Hey, do you want to see something cool?" to my kids.  This is one of the lesser-known, under-advertised perks of raising small humans: you get to call their attention to things in the world around them that will amaze them, delight them, surprise them, and boggle their minds.  When my kids were little, it might have been running in the front door after a pop-up shower and saying, "Quick! Come outside--there's a double rainbow and you can catch it if you hurry!" and then staring up at the sky with them to see the colors ebbing and flowing in brightness.  Or when we found a praying mantis stalking some lunch in our back yard, I got to say it again: "Do you want to see something cool?"  These days with a teen and a tween, my best hope for catching their interest is a funny meme or a cool internet video, but it's the same question I get to ask: "Do you want to see something cool?"  And on the days they take me up on the offer, it's one of the best parts of the day.

I know we don't often think of it this way in church life, but I truly think that a large part of being a disciple of Jesus is being on both ends of that conversation.  We learn the faith from others who hold out something wonderful for us to notice--they tell us a story from the Scriptures that reveals a depth of God's love we never dared to imagine before, or they invite us to share in some moment of serving that becomes a memory of a lifetime, or we are welcomed into the sacred space of a hospital waiting room, a milestone of joy in their lives, or an ordinary conversation over coffee. And then as we grow in faith, we also get to be the ones who point out those amazing stories, the God-moments, the miracles in disguise, and the extraordinary sightings of Christ in ordinary places, so that others can spot them, too.  We grow up in the faith having others invite us, "Do you want to see something cool?" and we grow into the role of saying it to others and inviting them into the wonder, joy, and awe of grace.  Maybe all we ever do is see glimpses of God's goodness and love (in the Scriptures, in our daily lives, in the world around us) and then hold them up for others to see as well.   Maybe that really is what it means to be disciples--learning how to see the face of Christ where someone else has helped us learn to see him, and then helping others to see the face of Christ in all the unexpected places he shows up, as well.

For the apostle writing in the letter to the Colossians in these words many of us heard this past Sunday, the shorthand for that is "making known the mystery of Christ." That phrasing might seem odd to us, because we are used to hearing the word "mystery" like a puzzle to be solved, a riddle to be answered, or a whodunnit to be reasoned out like a detective sifting out the red herrings from the real evidence.  But in the New Testament's usage, the word "mystery" is not a game of Clue! awaiting the big reveal, "It was Professor Plum in the Drawing Room with the candlestick!" Rather, the Scriptures speak of mystery as the deep truth of God woven throughout all of creation that we might have overlooked before but now we can't miss once it's been pointed out.  It's like an open secret--it's not that God is hiding anything from us, but that we haven't paid attention to what was right before eyes, waiting to be recognized as it sat in plain sight.  Or, as a professor of mine used to say in college, "In the biblical sense, a mystery is something true that you would never have figured out on your own unless someone had shown it or told it to you."  It's the rainbow outside you would have missed because you were sitting inside watching TV. It's the mantis perched among the lavender plants, the sundog in the western sky, or the unexpected appearance of the Northern Lights above your back yard. Nobody was keeping any of those things secret, but they are easily missable unless someone calls your attention to them.  And yet once they do point these wonders out to you, you realize they were there waiting to be seen before you opened your eyes or looked in the right place.

And from the perspective of Colossians, there is really only one Mystery--it is the presence of God who chooses to be revealed in the ordinary earthiness of our existence, coming to be in relationship with us.  It is the face of the Divine in the welcome of the stranger.  It is the way the Lord of heaven and earth can yet be nearer to us than our own thoughts, our own breath, our own awareness. It is the way Love binds together all the fabric of creation, and how that Love wears nail scars from a particular point in time and space.  The Mystery is Christ; all we ever do is let ourselves be gobsmacked when someone points Christ out to us, and then learn to help others recognize that same Christ right under their noses so that they are moved to speechless joy as well. Our place in the grand scheme of things is allowing others help us see the Mystery and then helping new faces to see the Mystery as well in turn.  The question keeps coming back, first in our ears and then on our lips: "Do you want to see something cool?"

In one of his more thought-provoking books (and there are a good many of them), this one entitled, The Mystery of Christ... and why we don't get it, the late Robert Farrar Capon took a stab at opening our eyes. He points out that the "mystery of Christ" isn't just a finite set of Bible stories with Jesus as a main character, but something fundamental about how God constantly chooses to be present to us and all creation, and how God's unrelenting, unconditional, unabashed love for all the universe (including us stinkers) permeates not just every page of the Bible but every particle of existence.  The Mystery itself is the realization that God has always shown up in the ordinary, the earthy, the stranger, the outcast, the messiness of human life, and the commonness of creation.  We tend not to notice that presence because we have been taught to look for God only in respectable places--like Bible stories, church steeples, and people with a sufficient number of merit badges. The divine comedy is really that God has been present in every tuft of dandelion seed, every sketchy bar full of sinners, every stranger seeking refuge, every jellyfish, toadstool, and enemy, and God's presence in all of it is God's utter Yes of grace to the whole nine yards.  That Yes has been God's Word over all creation from even before "Let there be light" escaped the divine lips, and we Christians dare to believe that the same Word, the "Yes" of God, was embodied just as truly in the flesh of a homeless Jewish rabbi from the backwater of the first-century empire.  That's why we mean by Mystery.

You'd never have guessed it in a million years just with your own senses and smarts--the news sounds too preposterously good to be true.  But once someone points out to you the existence of this scandalous, prodigal love on every page of the Scriptures and in every corner of creation, you can't unsee it ever again.  You're in on the open secret. You've seen the double rainbow.  All you can do now is to run back into the darkened house and tell everybody inside to come out and see something cool.

That's the job for us disciples.  No more, and no less.

Who will you tell today?

Lord Jesus, open our eyes to behold the Mystery of your presence everywhere and for everyone, and then give us the courage to point out your presence for others who are waiting to see.