Paradox Tolerance

Message for worship on the 25th day of the 1st month, 2026 given by Elizabeth Terney.

Scripture: Exodus 3:12-15

"The Burning Bush" photo by Earsaregood

Hope sometimes feels lost. I believe hope can be rediscovered in connection with God. I pray this sermon today provides us with an experience of centering down to find that hope in God’s faithfulness.

Once, I was attending the Friends General Conference Annual Gathering, and I met a woman who proclaimed to be a nontheist. She said to me, “I just don’t believe in an old bearded man in the sky.” Surprised, I said, “neither do I.” The woman went on to repeat that she didn’t believe in an old man in the sky multiple times, unable to hear that there was another option for God than that old man she’d pictured as a child.

I grew up not knowing God and not necessarily believing in God – just uncertain. Then, one day in 1997, at a Meeting for Worship at Stout Meetinghouse, I met God, or perhaps God met me there. I felt a profound sense of Love and the deepest belonging I’d ever known. My body felt different: still, loud, distant, full. I knew I had experienced something I would never fully be able to describe or comprehend. Now, many years later, I have learned to reach out to “hear” God with my body, mind, and soul.

This ability to connect with God, this closeness of God, close as our breath seems to contradict the massiveness of the universe, God’s Creation. God’s transcendence. Some believe God is outside time, yet God seems to understand the consequences of actions and seems to guide us toward wholeness.

Since we’re on Zoom today, I want to share some images that, I hope, give a glimpse into the awe-inspiring truth of the contradiction between our seeming insignificance and the God who knew us before we were formed in the womb.

This image is from the Webb telescope of a tiny portion of the sky. Nearly every light you see in this image is another galaxy. There are billions of other galaxies in the observable universe. We can only see the universe for 46.5 billion light-years in all directions, while beyond this boundary, there may lie regions forever hidden from us. The entire universe could be vastly larger—possibly infinite.

Let’s take a look at our own galaxy, the Milky Way, named for its appearance in the night sky. This image was taken last year from the International Space Station.

Here is a rendering of what we think the galaxy looks like and where we are located inside it.

We fling through space in a perhaps infinite universe, one solar system in a galaxy filled with a billion suns, surrounded by billions of other galaxies.

In addition, the time of human existence has been limited. If you compress the age of our solar system, 4.5 billion years, into a year, it formed on Jan 1^st. Humans arrived at 11:35 PM on December 31, and Stonehenge, from 1600 years before Christ, was built 30 seconds before midnight.

We seem to be minuscule, insignificant creatures.

However, we know that God loves us because Jesus came to share that love with us. We know that God loves us because God is willing to guide us in our smallest steps.

God is an idea – a reference to something that transcends all thinking. Something beyond the rational mind. God is a Holy Mystery – above, around, within. God is a Sacred Force that is not separate from us – we have that of God within each of us.

Thoughtfully believing in God requires the tolerance of paradox and mystery. We can come to the Holy Paradox not grasping for certainty but seeking to make our home in mystery. We can let go of the either/or and embrace the both/and.

We can see the mystery in the passage from Exodus that David read. Moses asks what name he can give to God, and God says, “I AM WHO I AM.” The phrase in Hebrew can also be translated as “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” To me, this mysterious phrase indicates that God is beyond our capability to understand as human beings. Our minds cannot expand enough to comprehend the entirety of God. This is impressive because the human mind has an incredible imagination. If one look at the poetry, stories, plays, movies, music, sermons, and art that the human mind has produced about God and yet realizes that not one of them captures the fullness of God, it’s awe-inspiring. Perhaps some are expansive enough to describe one facet of God on the million-faceted gemstone that is God, but we are still left with immeasurable parts that are unknown.

One of those poems comes from Hadewijch, an early 13th-century Beguine. Beguines were single women who dedicated themselves to God and the service of others, without joining a convent.

Hadewijch, when talking about her experience of God in prayer, says,

All things

Are too small

To hold me

I am so vast

In the infinite

I reach

For the uncreated

I have touched it

It undoes me

Wider than wide

Everything else

Is too narrow

You know this well

Who also live there.

- Hadewijch

While she describes her interaction with God differently than I would mine, her words describing touching the uncreated God resonate.

God is revealed and yet hidden. God has provided us with many glimpses: the voice in the burning bush, the small voice heard by Elijah, the presence of Jesus in our midst, the sending of the Holy Spirit, and any guidance we receive when engaging in spiritual discernment.

Part of what is unknown is how we are connected to God. We, as Quakers, believe that there is that of God within each of us.

At the beginning of Thomas Kelly’s A Testament of Devotion, he writes, “Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return… It is a Light Within which illuminates the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the face of men. It is a seed stirring to life if we do not choke it. It is the Shekinah of the soul, the Presence in the midst. Here is the Slumbering Christ, stirring to be awakened, to become the soul we clothe in earthly form and action. And He is within us all.”

Indeed, Jesus’s teaching contains mystery and paradox. The first shall be last. Power is made perfect in weakness. Life comes through death. His existence is also a mystery. The Word made flesh. Born of a virgin. Divine but human. Things that should cancel each other out but instead intertwine like vines thriving in places where nothing should grow. God is a mystery present in all things – unexpected, interwoven, and always defying the limits we try to place on the divine presence.

Perhaps these mysteries are not meant to be solved. Perhaps we’re invited to hold in our hearts what we cannot fully grasp with our minds. Perhaps tension does not need to be reconciled.

I hope as we center down today for open worship, you will reach out to the Uncreated with your heart, mind, and soul. Find the divine center. Wait, listen, feel, experience, expand, hear, breathe.