What Does It Mean ‘Revelation Is Not Sealed’?
Early on in my ministry in South Bend, Indiana, the pastor of a quite conservative, local, independent church invited me to be a guest at an adult Christian education class. In my experience ministers accept such invitations from time to time, if not always, for a number of perhaps overlapping purposes, such as to build relationships within the local faith community, to maybe spread our word to an unlikely audience, and/or to keep tabs on the competition, so to speak. So off I went.
Now, the pastor had told me he was extending such invitations to different clergy from time to time, in order that his people might learn about different faiths. But it was soon obvious, as we took up the topic for the evening–what happens after death–that my real purpose in being there that evening was to provide all the wrong answers about what happens after death, so he could reinforce the right answers. Before the evening was out, I was wondering if I had fallen squarely into Opposite Day.
The host pastor, representing a religious tradition that believes in the virgin birth and the resurrection, and any number of other miracles, was insistent that all we will ever know of life after death, namely heaven and hell, has already been set down for all time, in writing, in what he would call the Christian Bible, and I would call the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures. No more will be revealed or discovered or understood about the matter.
Meanwhile I, the Unitarian Universalist minister, representative of a tradition that embraces reason, that considers the birth and death of Jesus the least important parts of the story, whose denomination’s press has published the Jefferson Bible (a version of the Christian scriptures with all the miracles excised from it), I was arguing with increasing fervor that the revelation of all matters, great and small, including what happens at death, is ongoing. I insisted that God, even now, every day, reveals more and more of Godself to us. That is to say, revelations (some might say discoveries) about origins of creation, and the nature of the universe and everything within it didn’t cease with the end of some long ago age of miracles and wonders.
That pastor believed (or at least he taught his people) that all God has to say about Creation and the workings of the universe and the nature of humanity and our relationship to the Divine is done and dusted, sealed up in the inerrant, complete, and final word of God in the scriptures he would call the Old Testament and the New Testament. Several years before that evening a divinity school friend, a conservative Missouri synod Lutheran, asked me a question that gets at that belief from another angle: “What do you Unitarians (he dropped the second half of our name as outsiders so often do)–what do you Unitarians do,” he asked, “just pick any book off the the shelf and preach on it?”
My answer, of course, was yes, though that is not strictly true. There are some/many books I’d never preach on. But the point is, or rather, the points are: A. In our tradition, there are no books placed off limits by some higher church authority. And B. In our tradition, there is no one book that we consider the definitive and complete source of wisdom and knowledge. Thus, yes, one never knows what book or movie or song lyric or podcast a Unitarian Universalist minister might take as their text for a sermon on any given Sunday. This is because we believe the idea that of the sum of all knowledge of Creation or the Universe was known nearly two thousand years ago and then set down in a single text is, well, foolish. How could such vastness be confined in so small a container, and so flawed-because-it-is-human a container? How could there not be discoveries still being made and still to be made?
With each passing year of ministry, I believe less in the exceptionalism of Unitarian Universalism. In this context, that means I don’t understand us to be the only religious tradition that believes the secrets of Creation are still being revealed unto us. I’ve encountered too many clergy and lay folks from other religions who embrace science and exploration and rigorous thought, finding them not at all at odds with their faith. Nevertheless we are one religious tradition that revelation is not sealed, and that is significant. In fact, we believe it so strongly, that we have codified our internal invitation to seek truth and meaning beyond any sealed text and outside of any bookended time period. For thirty years, up until this past June, Article Two of our UUA by-laws listed six sources wisdom from which our living tradition draws inspiration, here in abbreviated form:
"Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures…
Words and deeds of prophetic people …
Wisdom from the world's religions …
Jewish and Christian teachings …
Humanist teachings …
Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions …"
In the new Article II, passed at the June 2024 General Assembly, Inspirations comprise Section C-2.3, which reads:
"Direct experiences of transcending mystery and wonder are primary sources of Unitarian Universalist inspiration. These experiences open our hearts, renew our spirits, and transform our lives. We draw upon, and are inspired by, sacred, secular, and scientific understandings that help us make meaning and live into our values. These sources ground us and sustain us in ordinary, difficult, and joyous times. We respect the histories, contexts, and cultures in which these sources were created and are currently practiced. Grateful for the experiences that move us, aware of the religious ancestries we inherit, and enlivened by the diversity which enriches our faith, we are called to ever deepen and expand our wisdom." (Article II Section C.2.3)
When we Unitarian Universalists say ‘revelation is not sealed’ we mean (at least) two things: that there wasn’t a long ago age of miracles and wonders that has been since sealed off and beyond which the there are no more secrets of Creation or meaning of life to be discovered; and that there is no single text in which all knowledge of such things is cataloged in story form.
I was introduced to the story of The Blind Men and the Elephant in the UU church of my childhood, and I went looking this week specifically for a picture book version to read here this morning. I wanted the story to illustrate my point about the foolishness of believing that Truth can be sealed into a single text or a single long ago age, and the double foolishness of believing both in the face of the immensity of the Universe and its intricacies. I wanted to be able to say, “See, the part of the Truth or the Universe or Creation that anyone one of us encounters is only a small, incomplete part. In order to get closer to the whole Truth, we need to put our pieces together with the stories and the knowledge that others gained from the small part they encountered. Only then will we get a description of the entire elephant” When I found The Elephant in the Dark (that’s the real name; I told the kids it was A Creature in the Dark because I wanted to preserve the mystery)–when I found this book, I found more than I was looking for!
For one thing, setting the elephant in a dark barn eliminates the inherent ableism of older versions. That alone was worth the fifteen minutes I spent driving around the mall parking lot trying to find the Oglethorpe Mall Library! Beyond that, the whimsical illustrations are boldly colored and evocative of the nuance of each person’s tactile encounter with the creature. And the author’s and illustrator’s notes widen the lesson of the story beyond the meaning I usually make of it.
This version of the classic tale ends with all of the characters, save Merchant Ahmad, still in the dark about the true nature of the beast/elephant. Ahmad leads the elephant out of the barn, right past the arguing villagers, to the sunlit river.
"But everyone was still too busy fighting to notice the large gray elephant. And no one noticed that they each knew only a small piece of the truth."
As I mentioned just now, I’ve always thought of this story as a lesson about none of us holding all of the Truth or all there is to know about any big subject. I think this version of the story does offer that lesson. But author Mina Javaherbin’s final lines both encapsulate and transmit what she and illustrator Eugene Yelchin find of greatest significance in the story as they learned it from a poem by Jalal al-Din Rumi. Not that each person, in their limited life experience and from their unique perspective, holds only a small piece of the Truth. Not even that to get closer to the whole of the Truth we need everyone’s life experience and perspective. But rather that our fighting about our pieces of the Truth (or wisdom or knowledge of the origins and workings of the universe) prevents us from getting closer to the entirety of Truth or wisdom or what can be known about the origins and workings of the universe.
In contrast, the way renown Unitarian religious educator, Sophia Lyon Fahs, told the story, in her collection From Long Ago and Many Lands, a group of men argues about “very hard questions, such as… ‘Does a person live again after he dies?’ or ‘What is God like?’ Unable to come to agreement, they turn to the Buddha to mediate their disagreement. The Buddha tells them the story of the blind men and the elephant, and in the end, the men realize the futility of their argument. Fahs’ version ends with this passage:
"So the quarreling and the wrangling stopped. Yet the men still kept on wondering and talking over their thoughts. They realized that they were asking questions that no one has ever fully answered."
That version of the story (aside from the ableism), is fine as far as it goes, except for suggesting that as soon as the folly of argument is pointed out, arguing will cease. That’s not generally the default human tendency! The ending of The Elephant in the Dark, with the arguing still continuing, is more realistic and therefore more powerful.
Clinging too fervently to what we know or understand or believe can prevent us from recognizing the limitations of our knowledge, our understanding, our beliefs. Now, to be clear, that we only know part of the Truth or whatever, doesn’t make what we know wrong, only incomplete and perhaps therefore skewed or deceptive. Arguing over the pieces we know and the pieces others know compounds these problems by keeping us (and others) from combining our knowledge into fuller and less distorted understandings.
By insisting that revelation is not sealed, our Unitarian Universalism invites us into a pursuit of religious knowledge that sweeps across time and delves into science and poetry, legend and art, and wisdom literature from secular traditions and faiths both little known and ubiquitous. We say we each must find our way along life’s spiritual path, toward the answers to our big questions. We even say that we gather in congregations because we know that asking the questions and looking for the answers is best done alongside and in the company of others asking similar questions. Further, we even acknowledge the reality that arguing (or worse, waging war) over religious differences or concepts of God or purity or the nature of humanity’s place in the universe, doesn’t get us closer to clarity about any of those things.
Thus it is tempting to think that we’ve learned the Buddha’s lesson. That our churches and congregations and our Association as a whole have reached a point where the quarreling and the wrangling [have] stopped. [Even as we] still [keep] on wondering and talking over [our] thoughts [about] questions that no one has ever fully answered. Alas, as we all know, that isn’t so.
Whether because our positions are too entrenched, or because the questions and therefore the answers are too vital to our sense of identity and well-being, or because the languages we use even when we think we’re all speaking English are too difficult to translate, or because, too often, we simply like arguing and playing devil’s advocate, the quarreling and the wrangling have not stopped among Unitarian Universalists. Perhaps it never should–not completely.
But revelation is not sealed. The Truth is out there–as bold and as beautiful as an elephant sitting in a river. The Truth about the Universe and its workings and humanity’s place within it. The Truth about God and our relationship with God. The Truth about the fragility of Life and the resilience of interconnectedness. The Truth about how to live so that the question of death is less fraught, less urgent. The Truth about the holy residing in every child born, every person ever alive, now living, and yet to be. None of this or anything else is sealed up in a text or an earlier era now gone. It’s all revealing Itself to us every moment. May we stop arguing long enough to gaze upon each revelation with wonder, with curiosity about what will be revealed next, and with gratitude bordering on disbelief that we are witness to it all. Amen.
