Sermon for Sunday, March 15, 2009

“Prayed Up”    

Rev. Christopher Fazel

Scripture: First Corinthians 1:18-25

              Have you ever noticed that at various times, certain things that you’re dealing with kind of crop up all around you in different ways, like the universe is trying to tell you something?  That has been happening to me lately.  First, we start this Lenten series on the relationship between science and religion.  Then, a church member hands me a book that turns out to be a tour-de-force arguing the supremacy of scientific intellect over religious superstition.  Then, at home, we come upon this educational television show that traces the human understanding of the universe – evolving from primitive religious ideas to advanced scientific ones.  It’s like, I feel the universe calling on me to defend the very existence of religious life in the face of exploding scientific and intellectual prowess.         Carl Jung, that Swiss pioneer of psychological sciences put a name to this phenomenon of meaningful coincidences.  He calls it synchronicity.  Jung's best-known account of a synchronistic experience concerns a young woman patient whose excellent but excessive intellectuality made her 'psychologically inaccessible', closed off from a 'more human understanding'. Unable to make headway in the analysis, Jung reports that he had to confine himself to 'the hope that something unexpected would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort [bubble] into which she had sealed herself'. He continues:  “Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab – a costly piece of jewelry. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the windowpane in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, 'Here is your scarab.' This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”

After relating other similar accounts, Jung writes, “As a psychiatrist and psychotherapist I have often come up against the phenomena in question and could convince myself how much these inner experiences meant to my patients. In most cases they were things which people do not talk about for fear of exposing themselves to thoughtless ridicule. I was amazed to see how many people have had experiences of this kind and how carefully the secret was guarded.”

Now, most of us are familiar, I imagine, with the term synchronicity and Jung’s study of the phenomenon.  However, I would bet that hardly any of us know that Jung collaborated in this study with a highly respected Austrian theoretical physicist named Wolfgang Ernst Pauli.  Pauli was highly respected by Albert Einstein and is credited with having predicted the existence of the nutrino.  Both these men – Jung and Pauli – had a passionate interest in both science and religion and devoted much of their lives seeking the common ground from which both spring.  As Pauli said, “The central order is part of the subjective as well as the objective realm, and this strikes me as being a far better starting point."

Now, I have a confession to make.  I love this stuff.  I love exploring the mysteries of the universe and I love exploring the mysteries of the inner realm.   For me, it brings me closer to the Author and Finisher of it all.  Studies into the mysteries of the unknown help to protect me from growing callous and cynical; reducing all sense of wonder to a flat “know-it-all” attitude.  Both Jung and Pauli warned against the dangers of an intellectual arrogance.  Let us never forget that the philosophical foundation for Nazi Germany was the philosophy of  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche who declared God was dead and irrelevent to the master intellect.  Jung warned that to deny the unseen forces that operate in and through us is to leave us vulnerable to ego inflation and ultimately to insanity – which was exactly Nietzsche’s fate.  Our Scripture offers the same warning in the Genesis story of the Tower of Bable.  To deny the higher powers and to build towers of self-exhaultation always ends in ruin. 

              Last Tuesday Sharon and I had lunch with other UCC Clergy in our area.  We do it every month.  And we love these times.  We spent a coulple of hours, just eating and visiting.  And we’re good visiters, we can wax philosophical touching on Jung and Paul and William James.  We shared personal stories and favorite jokes.  But at one point we opened our hearts and explored a central concern of our profession as clergy.  How do we cope with all of the pain and brokenness and suffering of mind, body and spirit that we are called on to share daily in the lives and struggles of our brothers and sisters in faith?  That was our question, and the answer wasn’t complicated or speculative.  We all agreed that the only way to face the winds was to keep ourselves “prayed-up.”     Because prayer isn’t just asking for things you want.  Prayer is turning to embrace the raw power that feeds the soul as from on high.  It is feeding on the bread, drinking from the well, washing in the blood that brings us life.  I have heard so many stories – many from among you, that prayer and faith have been the bedrock foundation that has gotten you through illness, disappointment and separation even unto death. 

Have we scienced away God?  I can no more deny the God Force than I can deny food or air or light.  “If is ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.  If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.”

Thanks be to God.  Let us pray.

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