Seen and Unseen

Note: If you know the writings of C. S. Lewis, you will undoubtedly recognize my debt to his magnificent sermon "The Weight of Glory," preached on this same Sunday in 1941 and using the same lectionary texts.


Sermon preached at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on 7 June 2015
By Loren Crow

Scripture Readings:
1 Samuel 8:4-11, (12-15), 16-20, (11:14-15)
Psalm 138
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35


In the Nicene Creed that we’ll recite in a few minutes, we’ll affirm together our trust in the God who is the maker of “all things visible and invisible.” I’ve often wondered what, specifically, was meant by that expression. Is it that God is the creator of both the physical world and the spiritual world? If so, I can agree with that, although I’m not sure why it should be important to me. Is it simply a way of saying that God created both the things we know about and millions of things about which we have no knowledge? That’s undoubtedly true, and it’s important for us to admit that our knowledge of God’s universe is not in any way comprehensive.

But I suspect that we’re not mainly making statements either about the nature of the universe or about our knowledge of it. The Greek word that we translate “we believe” — πιστεύομεν — has more to do with trusting than with cognizing. When we say the Creed together, we’re not just making a claim about scientific or historical truth, we’re formally declaring our allegiance to the God whose character is stated in the Creed — a God revealed in the whole story of God’s people and especially in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That is the God we trust, the One who is the maker of all things, both what is seen and what is unseen.

Our epistle reading this morning makes me think of “seen and unseen” in a third way, a way more in line with saying πιστέυομεν in the sense of declaring our trust in the God whose character is thus. In Paul’s thought, we have two natures: an “outer person” who is “wasting away” and an “inner person” who is being renewed day by day (2 Cor 4:16). The “outer person” is the one we see, but the glorious “inner person” is being persistently built by God inside us, even though we hardly ever do more than catch glimpses of it. The same God who made the one is the God who is now making the other. To say “I believe in” the God who made all things is to be thankful for what is now, while also being hopeful for what shall be. God’s world is good, as are we God’s human creatures, but the goodness of both derives mainly from the shining creatures into which God is making us. Not everything is in fact good right now, of course, but trusting God means trusting God to make us good.

Now if I stopped right there, I think that might be enough. But the gospel reading and the Old Testament reading present a contrasting point that brings this idea into focus. The contrast is this: sometimes our minds get muddled by what we see. We forget that what we see is not the goal; it’s a waypoint along the path to the unseen future that God is making and that only God knows.

In the Old Testament story, we hear about the people of Israel deciding that they need a king. The reason they give is that the sons of Samuel were corrupt and failing to bring about justice, which we know to be true from earlier in the story. That’s actually the problem in a nutshell, right there. Even God’s holy prophet cannot foresee and prevent the corruption of his own line. What’s good in one generation isn’t necessarily what’s needed in the next. So the people appoint king Saul, with God’s blessing, despite knowing and accepting the drawbacks inherent in kingship. But of course that’s also doomed not to last. Saul famously also fails, so that God chooses David. But David and his line also fall short of the mark. The entire story of Israel is just this: God keeps choosing and calling human beings to be their best selves, and they consistently fail to achieve it. We have only to consider the history of Christianity, or our own lives, to realize that what’s true of Israel is also true of us. We think we understand so much, but later years always seem to reveal how little we actually perceive.

But there is God, at work behind the scenes, building in secret, preparing His next move, so that those human failures are transformed and redeemed. The half-hearted, rickety structures that we build become the very scaffolding under which God’s shining temple emerges, built not with human hands but a temple made by God. God is making us into creatures of such splendor as we could hardly dare to imagine now.

On the other hand, the gospel reading is a stern warning, a warning that just as we must not underestimate what God is doing in us, so also we must not underestimate what God is doing in our neighbors, especially if we don’t see any evidence of that work. When I was a child, I was obsessively afraid of what we heard today about “the unforgivable sin,” namely “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.” What if I’ve already committed that sin, I asked myself hundreds of times. And how could the God who forgave other sins not forgive that one?

One of the first things you encounter when you begin to listen to the gospels, especially Mark, is the fact that Jesus, to say the least, “marches to the beat of a different drummer.” Here is a man whom everyone, even his own family, regards as probably a lunatic. The reason is obvious: Jesus operates according to a completely different set of values than the ones accepted by everyone else. To illustrate this, here are a few things he does in the previous chapter in Mark. In the story about the healing of the paralytic, he wantonly forgives the man’s sins without requiring any kind of restitution or even repentance (2:5). He’s got a ready-made audience of scholars and professional people who are happy to engage him in lively and learned debate about important theological issues (2:6-13), but rather than doing that he walks around teaching the unwashed masses and associating with Roman collaborators (2:15-17). When everybody else is worshiping solemnly, he and his group are noisily living it up (2:18). He’s an unmarried itinerant preacher calls Himself “the Bridegroom” (2:19).

Now when you ask yourself, What’s so bad about those things? The answer is, Nothing. Yet how tempting it is to have the same reaction as the people of Jesus’ time who say His power is demonic. How tempting to see as “insane” someone like that who differs radically from us. We declare them insane, and then we don’t have to be confronted with the claim that our way of seeing is deeply untrue. The danger of “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” is the danger of misidentifying God’s excellent work and writing it off, simply because it’s different from what we expect. We see a thousand terrors in the world all around us and forget that God is in the middle of it, turning even our worst blunders into blessings. We see all the things that we think are wrong with ourselves and our neighbors, and we forget to trust the God who makes both the visible and the invisible. Who knows whether the very thing we despise now might be the means by which God is doing something marvelous. Who knows whether what now seems ugly might turn out to be the most beautiful thing of all. Who knows whether something as horrible as a cross might be the gateway to resurrection.