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according to exodus, a thick cloud enshrouded Mount Sinai and when God spoke it was with all manner of thunder and lightning and the blast of the celestial trumpet Gabriel blowing his eternal horn. It was enough to

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make the whole holy host of them tremble like aspen leaves in a mountain breeze. So the people of Israel hunkered down in their tents and from behind their tightly drawn tent flaps, they cried out to moses

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. You speak to us and we will listen but let God not speak to us lest we die. And then from a safe distance, they watched while moses climbed the mountain into the dense darkness where God

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was hiding while the echoes of divine thunder faded in their ears. This semester, as you are by now, doubtless aware, the faculty has accepted the assignment to preach on the theme. Hotelier Gods.

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Today we are challenged to answer the question where and in what ways do we see God at work in the world of the present? And my answer is I haven't got a clue. Yeah, I wish

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I did. Honestly. I'm a little embarrassed. I mean, I've listened to my colleagues week after Riikka sent into this pulpit and talk about their sense of God's presence in this or that aspect of the

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world. I have been moved by their passion and eloquence and truthfulness and all of that makes it Tripoli more difficult for me to tell you. I just don't know what God is up to in the world

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. I haven't got a clue. Most of the things know. Almost all the things that have looked for most of my life like God now seem to be more like shabby idols of my own manufacturer and

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the things that I once trusted as the voice of God now sound a lot more like the tinkling wind chimes of my own will and wants. I am left to wonder if God has absconded up into the

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cloud atop the metaphorical mountain and left me clutching at my tent flaps as the divine thunder dissolves into the silence of the world. Annie Dillard. You've heard me talk about her once mused about the Silence of

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the world in an essay entitled Teaching a stone to talk one of the great titles in the universe. Here is a part of what she said. Nature's silence is, it's one remark, and every flake

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of the world is a chip off that old, mute and immutable block. The Chinese say that we live in the world of the 10,000 things. Each of the 10,000 things cries out to us precisely.

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Nothing. God used to rage at the Israelites for frequenting sacred groves. I wish I could find one . Martin Buber says, The crisis of primitive mankind comes with the discovery of that which is fundamentally not

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wholly the A sacramental which with stands the methods and which has no our a province that steadily enlarges itself . There it is friends, the mailing address of the modern world. We live at the intersection of

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silence and the a sacramental in a house that has no room for the Holy. I read an essay recently by Rachel Minis, a Chicago based poet and teacher of poetry in which she advocates for what she

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calls a poetics of bewilderment. She yearns to teach her students. She says how not to understand the poem and to embrace that not everything in a poem can ever be understood even by its author. I

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suspect that many is is pointing to the same reality that english romantic poet john Keats, 200 years ago called negative capability, Keats said it is the capacity of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any

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irritable reaching after fact or reason. Buy whatever your name, name you call it. Such a poetic begins with the acknowledgment that in poetry at least it is more important to wonder than to understand. I

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think I want to develop a hermeneutics of bewilderment. Its central principle would be a willingness to wonder without any of kate's irritable, reaching after fact or reason . It would be a posture of all before the

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truth that not everything is available to be understood. Hermeneutic of bewilderment emerges from its tent and stands staring into the cloud at the foot of the mountain, straining its ear to hear the last dying rumbles of

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divine thunder in the ever increasing silence. Now bewilderment , whether poetic or hermeneutic is a hard thing. It's not native to us. We like to understand we moderns are as a species, largely terrified of

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the holy of the not understood anything. We cannot manipulate to our own ends. We want to control our environment. And when we are confronted with anything we can't control. Our immediate reaction is to duck

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behind our tent flaps, put our fingers in our ears, la la la la. Let God not talk to us. We cry lest we find that we are in fact not in charge here. Dillard

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continues. It's hard to desecrate a sacred grove and change your mind. The very Holy Mountains are keeping Mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it. We are lighting matches in vain, under

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every green tree. Did the wind used to cry , and the hills shout forth praise. Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of the earth , and living things say very little to very few

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. Oh! Birds make crank out sweet gibberish and monkeys howl, horses neigh and pigs say, as you will recall. Oink! Oink! But so do cobbles rumble when a wave recedes and thunders break

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the air. Enlightening storms. I call these noises silence! The silence is all there is we are here to witness. I have been reading apathetic theology lately. Can you tell That's the line of thought

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that runs from clement of alexandria, one of the early bishops of Rome, through Augustine of Hippo and 1/5 century pseudonymous author who goes by the name at least in our scholarship of Dionysius, the area propagate

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to 1/14 century english mystic whose name we do not know, and whose only book is the classic of medieval spirituality. The cloud of unknowing the common thread that runs through all of apathetic thought is that we

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have to be cautious about even suspicious of all human language and thought about God. Okay, a warning here. This is the part where it gets a little tricky. You see all language about God is

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metaphorical language. If for no other reason than that finite human language cannot contain the infinite reality of God . The best we can do is to approximate it to assimilate. And that means metaphors and all metaphors

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operate in the tension between similarity and dissimilarity. So everything we say about God, every theological metaphor which pretty much includes our entire vocabulary must carry with it both similarity and dissimilarity to God. Here's an example

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, if I borrow the psalmist metaphor, God is the rock of my salvation. Then what I am saying is that something about a rock? Perhaps its steadfastness, it's in move, a bility is similar

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to God, but at the same moment, God is also dissimilar to Iraq. God is not unchanging or immovable. Indeed, God transcends the limited human categories like change or motion. So God neither changes

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nor remains the same because God holds all possibilities at all times. God neither moves nor does not move because God holds all places at all times. Thus , God is both and both rock and not rock

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. If I affirm the metaphor, God is rock , I must also acknowledge that it stands intention with the not rock nous of God. This tension, if you apply it to all our theological metaphors,

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ultimately collapses all our human language about God, all our metaphors break. All are words crack and fall apart. Better, say the apple fanatics, to forget what you think, you know about God,

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to recognize that like moses and the Israelites, there is between us and God, a dense dark cloud , before which we can only stand mute in wonder and awe. The the author of the Cloud of

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UNknowing says it this way. So set yourself to rest in this darkness, as long as you can always crying out after him, whom you love for . If you are to experience him, or to

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see him at all. In so far as it is possible here, it must always be in this cloud and in this darkness. I find that language strangely satisfying amid all the certitudes ringing through our rhetoric

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and pulpits like this, and elsewhere amid all of the certitudes, echoing in the ether on social media , certitudes about God and what God is like God's will, for America, for the Church, for

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justice, for moral righteousness, and for God's sake , who you should vote for. I find myself yearning for the darkness and silence of unknowing. I find myself open to eager for bewilderment. I no

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longer think I am here to understand. I am here to witness in the middle of john's apocalypse, At the culmination of the vision of the seven seals that bind the lamb's book of life. There is

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an extraordinary moment in the passage, just prior to what Alison read a moment ago, after the opening of the Sixth Seal, all the angels of Heaven and all the elders of the Church triumphant, gathered

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together and sing the great chorus celebrating the honor and power and wisdom of God. And then we turn the page and there is this. When the lamb opened the 7th seal, there was silence in Heaven

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for about half an hour! Silence in Heaven for about half an hour! What an extraordinary image amid all the theatrics of the apocalypse, trumpets trumpeting and choruses, chorus, sing quite abruptly. All the

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action grinds to a halt, and God takes a breather for a half hour. Okay, Before the apocalyptic drama climaxes and God's victory is unveiled and the curtain falls on Satan and all his minions. For

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30 minutes, all the actors freeze in place and the heavenly stage falls thunderously silent. And that makes me think, what if silence and darkness and bewilderment and unknowing are at the start of at the heart

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of what God is up to in the world? What if the most faithful way to act is not always to act, but rather to wait on that darkened stage to be still while heaven is silent and

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to wonder at all, we do not know. Here's a poem about darkness and silence and not knowing it's entitled worship the knights as silent as the shrouded dead. We mime our parts in place, We

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did not right stars, applaud the empty stage. Instead, the curtain falls, we bid you all ! Goodnight! We mime our parts in plays. We did not write the cast bows low and utters

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, not a sound as the curtain falls. We bid you all! Goodnight! Ushers passed the offering plates around. The cast bows low. They utter not a sound in praise or parody of their feeble

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play. While the ushers passed the offering plates around . You are the words No one will say if praise or parody. Our feeble interplay is all the rage in fashionable conversation, but you are the words

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. How can one say what's written on the day before creation? And so we rage in fashionable conversation , but still no match for Chaos Storm and spark . What's written on the day before Creation? We

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meet no gods a waiting in the dark. We are no match for Chaos Storm or spark! The stars applaud, But on the empty stage instead we meet no gods waiting in the dark. The nights

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are silent as the shrouded Dead. I do not mean to equate bewilderment with deliberate ignorance. Do not mean to equate silence with callous indifference. I do not mean that the faithful soul may ever give up

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its brave quest to live out. Micah's call to do justice, love mercy walk humbly with God. But I do mean taking my cue from Micah to encourage a healthy dose of humility in that walk and

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a bewilderment caused by the inadequacy and inevitable collapse of our knowledge about God. I do mean to emphasize the provision al itty of every conclusion we draw about God's nature or God's intent. I do mean to

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suggest that while full throated soliloquies about God's presence here or God's justice, there may be the last words we hear in the scene. Those words are always followed by silence as the curtain falls, there will

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be those who say that humility and bewilderment make a poor foundation for ethics, a weak response to the cries for justice, from those to whom justice has for too long been denied in such a time as

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ours. They claim there is an acute need for a faithful defense of the faith, of the Defenseless . I do not disagree. Bewilderment, and humility may never be allowed to degenerate into accommodation with evil

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. There will also be those who want to remind me that silence is not God's last word, that God speaks, Another word, one with a capital W. I do so confess still. It is

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no small source of wonder to me that this word was born in the starlet stillness of a christmas stable died amid the thunder and darkness of good friday and rose in eternal silence on Easter morning. Perhaps the

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wonder is that no matter how God speaks, the message always seems to come wrapped in cloud and silence , and that is why in answer to the question , where do I see God at work? I

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offer you not aware, but a how not a place, but a posture. I offer a holy bewilderment and a cautious humility, and I place them respectfully alongside the passionate certainties of our day as a

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reminder that not all things are available to be understood . There are moments in the life of faith when the most faithful way to live is in wordless wonder , resting in the cloud of unknowing, listening to

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the silence in Heaven. Who knows? Perhaps this is one of them, Annie Dillard one Last Time . The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is the face

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of God brooding over the waters. It is the blended note of the 10,000 things. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence , even to address the prayer to world distinctions blur