I wasn’t at the Baptist meeting when they called on Jack to pray at the end, but my pastor was there and he told me about it. The meeting was typical; they began with food, did a little business, listened to a long sermon, took an offering and were about to call it a night.
The moderator of the meeting thanked everyone for coming then said, “Brother Jack, would you please close us in prayer.”
Jack, a retired but insatiably curious dairy farmer who was more likely to be reading Scientific American than Dairy Farming Today, nodded and bowed his head. What followed was a long, uncomfortable pause. Usually the person who prays at the end of a Baptist meeting gets right after it because everybody wants to get right home. But Jack was silent. My pastor, who normally maintains the appropriate prayer posture of bowed head and closed eyes was overwhelmed by an insatiable curiosity of his own. He looked up, opened one eye, and trained it on Jack. Jack inhaled deeply, and finally spoke, solemnly, loudly, clearly, in his deep, warm voice.
“O Holy Mystery,” he said.
My pastor said almost every head in the place popped up, startled, abandoning the appropriate prayer posture and gawking at the retired dairy farmer. It wasn’t that Jack said anything wrong; what he said was unusual. Jack had abandoned the normal prayer introductions that affirm what we know about God — “Our Heavenly Father” or “Dear Jesus.”
Instead, he reminded the good people gathered there that this God was a lot bigger than they could get their minds wrapped around, and even harder to nail down. God generously reveals himself through Jesus Christ who is himself revealed through the Bible. At the same time, I don’t need to read much of the Bible before I get the feeling that there is a lot more to this God than I can see or begin to understand. A little humility is wise, since we, like Moses, catch only a glimpse of God. Like God told Moses, “My face must not be seen.”
However, maybe Jack wasn’t marveling at what we don’t know about God, but voicing his wonder at what we do know. The scriptures declare that this big, complex, creator God knows every selfish, sinful thing we’ve ever thought or done and loves us anyway. Perhaps it dawned on Jack after sitting through that long Baptist meeting and joining in the group’s effort to look pious, that they were (and we are) all scoundrels in one way or another, but God still loved them. Now that’s mysterious. But that’s God for you. O Holy Mystery, indeed.
