Sacred Secret

Sacred Secret:

(Hidden in Plain Sight)

“The mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations . . .

how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery,

which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

(Colossians 1:26-27)

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, July 11, 2010

Volume 5 Number 3

First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6^th, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

For the last twelve weeks we’ve saddled ourselves beside the Apostle Paul, riding with God’s Emissary to the Gentiles on missionary journeys curling back and forth across itself on a spaghetti path through the Mediterranean world, in city after city Paul proclaiming that a prophet from the Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, the One crucified in Jerusalem, had in fact risen from the dead and was the promised Messiah.

My approach has been to offer, in sample plate style, excerpts from his letters. This morning we’ve read from Colossians, Paul’s letter to believers in Colosse, which is today an uninhabited tel, an almost entirely unexcavated mound in southwestern Turkey, but in close proximity to two other major archaeological sites. In his concluding comments to the Colossians (4:12-13) Paul mentions those other two cities, Laodicea and Hierapolis. Paul tells the Colossians (4:16), “after this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans.” At least through letters, Paul was ministering to this tri-city area 100 miles east of Ephesus on the Aegean Sea.

My first trip to that region was two years ago, extending our Journeys of Paul cruise with a five day trip into the interior, an area important to the early history of the church. I recall very well going to Laodicea, which was the largest and most prosperous of this triad – a Roman city of wealth in Paul’s day along this Lychus River Valley that was a major Asian trade route. We know of Laodicea, not from a letter of Paul (this notation is his only mention of it), but from a letter of Jesus which John records in Revelation (3:14-22). Jesus’ letter to the church of Laodicea has some of the most famous words of the New Testament, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door I will come in and dine with him, and he with me.”

To the church of Laodicea Jesus sent other well-known words, “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you from my mouth.” This thrice repeated reference to water temperature, a contrast of cold and hot, was something that a trip to this area helped me understand as to why it might be so vivid to the Laodiceans of the 1^st century. As we visited the impressive ruins of Laodicea, in the distance I could see a hill whose side was covered in white. It appeared cold, like ski slopes, snow blanketing high mountains, but it wasn’t nearly high enough to be covered by snow – a hill only, not a mountain, nor so far in the distance – only six miles.

Since it was my first time in that region, I had no way of knowing the magical sight in store for us. We would soon discover as we drew closer that the white mountainside which appeared so cold were carbonate mineral deposits from the 17 hot water springs. Mineral deposits formed white, terraced pools that had the appearance of cascading ice – an exquisite ice sculpture. It’s one of nature’s illusions. Far from cold, this is a place where visitors for thousands of years have bathed in the hot vapors. Today it is a World Heritage Site. It appears visitors are freezing on the side of an ice-covered mountain, yet they are relaxing in swimsuits.   So I can understand that these mental images conjured in the Laodiceans by Jesus’ letter might be vivid indeed.

The site is today known as Pamukkale, a Turkish word meaning Cotton Castle. In Paul’s time the city of Hierapolis (Sacred City) sat on top of that hill, its edges running right up to where the snow-white terraces begin their cascade downward. So it’s no wonder Paul mentions Hierapolis along with Laodicea in his letter to Colosse. Click on this website to see a one minute video taken at Pamukkale, Turkey’s Cotton Castle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDMbmzur0f8 and this site to see photos and a more detailed, six minute video: www.kusadasi.biz/pamukkale

Those white terraces are truly a magical site, and for me, as I viewed it from several miles away, it was a wonder Hidden in Plain Sight. We’ve read Colossians 1 this morning and noted Paul’s use of the Greek word mystery (Greek = musterion). In our liturgical Call to Worship you’ve repeated one of the many Pauline references to the mystery (Colossians 1:26), “The mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations, but has now been revealed to his saints.”   I’ve called it in the title of this sermon, Sacred Secret: Hidden in Plain Sight.

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons are cognitive neuroscientists at Harvard. Ten years ago they created a one minute video in which young people simply pass a basketball back and forth. There are 3 kids in white shirts with a basketball, and 3 in black shirts with a second basketball. In shell-game fashion the kids slowly weave back and forth, passing the basketball only to those wearing their color shirt.

The viewer is asked to count the number of passes between the white-shirted players. With eyes focused on the white shirts, blocking out the rest, viewers intently count the passes. And so it goes for a full minute, except for the fact that, about halfway through, an actor in a gorilla suit saunters into the midst of the players, pausing right in the middle to look into the camera and pound his chest, and then continue walking off camera. The total screen time for the gorilla is nine seconds.

You’d think you couldn’t miss a gorilla, but when the film is shown, as it was to me two years ago in a leadership seminar, about half reported not having seen the gorilla!. I was one of those who, when I first saw it, totally missed the gorilla. I was proud of the inconsequential. I knew I had counted the passes correctly, and the narrator affirmed my count. But the important thing in this cognitive experiment, the gorilla, was, for me, Hidden in Plain Sight. (By the way, I showed the clip to one of our Wednesday evening groups last year and, sure enough, about half of those who had never seen the clip failed to observe the gorilla.) Click here to see the film: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

Chabris and Simons recently published, “The Invisible Gorilla: and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us.” Having read a review, I wanted to deal with it in a sermon, so I called up a You-tube variant to see it again. Honestly, I had hoped to make myself miss the gorilla again, but once aware, you can’t not see the gorilla. Still, when the announcer came on at the end he said, “Now, you who knew a gorilla was there saw it, didn’t you? But did you notice that one of the black-shirted players left the stage and that the background curtains changed colors, from red to gold?”

“No way,” I thought. In other words, I was so focused on what I expected to happen that, sure enough, they slipped something else in! My eyes were blind to the change.   I had been so intent on my agenda that I missed the changes.

Now, there’s a sermon. We can get so intent on our agenda that we miss the significant happenings occurring all around us. This is true of individuals, of businesses struggling to keep up with the culture in order to remain relevant and profitable and, of course, of churches and denominations. I suppose there’s always the danger of so busying ourselves “counting the passes” we’ve always thought vital to defining us that our eyes not only might, but are conditioned to miss much.

A state of illusion seems to be part of our neurological make-up, causing us profoundly to underestimate our capacity to be fooled. Every magician/illusionist knows this, gaining fame based on how well they can misdirect the audience’s attention. The more focused they can make us on the inconsequential thing, the more we open ourselves to miss the obvious, the thing Hidden in Plain Sight.

Here’s Paul in another letters (2 Corinthians 4), “If our gospel is hidden, it is hidden to those who are perishing . . . the god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ . . . it is God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We have this treasure in clay jars . . . so we do not lose heart . . . even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day . . . we look not at what can be seen, but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary, and what cannot be seen is eternal.”

I think when Paul says we have this “Treasure in clay jars” he is talking about something within us Hidden in Plain Sight, a graphic way of expressing what he told the Colossians, that this mystery Hidden in Plain Sight is “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

How is possible for us to miss the most significant thing about us? How could our “hope of glory” be Hidden in Plain Sight? At the beginning of this third millennium, I wonder that the human race seems in the process of forgetting the most glorious thing about us. In our day, the Scientific Way of Knowing has benefited humankind in astounding ways, and that undeniably. So undeniable, in fact, that the Scientific Way of Knowing ourselves and relating to the universe in which we live has replaced that Way of Knowing centered in the Spirit and Faith, a Way of Knowing acknowledging what cannot be seen, that in Faith believes we are more than the sum of the atoms comprising our bodies.

The Scientific Way of Knowing is good, extremely good, at focusing their attention to the counting of things. Important things. Interesting things. Powerful things. Beneficial things. But at last, one wonders if Science hasn’t focused our eyes on what is ultimately inconsequential, that while we busy ourselves counting things, we are in danger of forgetting the most obvious, the most glorious, thing about us, something Hidden in Plain Sight? It is by faith that we understand the glory of our humanness to go beyond the wonder of the vast statistical improbability of a random evolutionary quirk, the right concoction forming so that life might spring forth from the primordial soup. The wonder of our humanness beckons our spirit higher. Rather than slouching downward to the dust from which we sprang, and to which our bodies will return, our gaze is heavenward, recognizing that we are more than what we have become.

To the extent we allow Science to become our only Way of Knowing, we increasingly don’t know who we are, what we are, nor what we’re supposed to be doing here, losing sight of the obvious as the cosmos becomes little more than a screen upon which we are instructed to count the random movements and passes of the universe’s infinite particles.

While the Scientific Way of Knowing has mastered the Clay Jar of our bodies, it has little way to fathom the Treasure within, though that treasure, that glory of our humanness, be Hidden in Plain Sight. It is that Treasure which makes life valuable in the face of eternity. Without a Spiritual Way of Knowing, it’s impossible to have a scale of values rooted in eternity.

We all, somehow, know this, feel it in our inmost spirit. But we can’t encompass it, we can’t define the scale of what we’ve lost, because we’re busy counting what we’ve gained. To what extend have we focused on the inconsequential thing while missing the obvious, even though Hidden in Plain Sight? “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

Sources and notes:

The initial inspiration for this sermon was a Wall Street Journal review of Chablis’ and Simons’ book, The Invisible Gorilla. The review, written by David A. Shaywitz, was titled “The Future of Our Illusions” (June 11, 2010).

Page 4 of this sermon, describing humanity’s philosophical challenges as we enter the third millennium, rely a great deal on an essay by Charles Upton, “Heaven and Earth Shall Pass Away” (PARABOLA, “The Way Ahead,” Winter 2009).