In a "Mother Goose and Grimm" cartoon strip from a couple of years ago two hand puppets faced each other. With a bewildered expression, one says to the other, "Sometimes I don't even think there is a hand."

We don't have to turn to the cartoons though, in order to see the irony that many of us employ in our understandings of the grander view. Upon entering the Lincoln Tunnel, for example, how many of us consider that the chaotic bottleneck of traffic, the compression of ten lanes down to two or three, is the result of some master plan to move traffic in and out of the city. Even though it may be difficult to imagine that any planning went into the design at all, we might still recognize that what we have is the manifestation of an urgency to get in and out of New York. We may not like how it's turned out, but we're willing to accept this cause and effect relationship-the need and the fulfillment of that need-as the reason we have our rather daunting approach to the Lincoln Tunnel.

And yet, we are often willing to look at this incredible world around us, and muse to ourselves that these amazingly functional and complex systems that support life are merely a coincidence. Somehow we don't seem to recognize them as, perhaps the manifestation of an even greater urgency. And if we do see it, often times we don't seem to care.

Rest assured I'm not encouraging anyone toward becoming a rabid creationist. I'm not assuming that any particular forms of life might have been preordained; that's not the point. Darwin probably had it nearly right. I am suggesting though, that perhaps life itself exists out of an enormous urgency, perhaps a universal need to be.

Like the phenomenon of the Lincoln Tunnel, this universal urgency may have no history of intelligence at all. In fact, my own observation is that intelligence is rarely related to cause. And so it seems almost hypocritical, or at least irrelevant then, when we deny the possibility of, or the potential for this great unsolved and probably unsolvable mystery at the center of the universe, simply because we can't ascribe to it any discernable intelligence.

I suspect our own intelligence of getting in the way, if we think that in order for there to be a universal cause of being, it too would need to be intelligent. It wouldn't at all. Just as there is a cause for something as relatively simple as the Lincoln Tunnel, there must be some cause for something as grand as the universe. If not intelligence, two characteristics we might want to ascribe to that cause include first, mystery-unfathomable and unsolvable mystery; and second, power-the incredible power to maintain the tension between rotating electrons and protons and neurons giving this universe substance and shape and movement and life.

I for one can't believe that simply just happened. I have to believe that there was and is a great desire in the universe to be. In ancient Jewish scripture that primal urge was given a human voice and it called itself, "I am who I am," or we might call it, I am what it is to be. Somehow, over the centuries, we've gotten all tangled up in the human voice and the human face that humans attributed to this center of things in the first place. Perhaps we have outgrown these early attempts at approaching the mystery; perhaps we no longer need the metaphors of a bygone age. It is good to leave them behind. I fear though, at times we mistakenly assume that we have outgrown the mystery itself. And I fear that within that assumption, we have lost some, if not much, of the orientation that gives our lives purpose and meaning.

Of great importance to us from a religious perspective is the way we relate to that center, and the way-even though we may have no intellectual access to it-the way we allow it to inform the direction of our lives.

This morning I want to look with you at the hub of the wheel and the rest of the measure. I want to look beyond our human doings, and into our human being. I want to approach, with you, the mystery that's at the center of that wheel; the mystery that's in the silence that's between the sounds.

It's not irrelevant to our being here ­ both here in the church and here on the planet. It has to do with the cause of our being, and if we pay close enough attention to it ­ not to this sermon but to the mystery itself ­ if we pay close enough attention to this cause of our being, perhaps it can then better guide us as a cause for our doing. And in the end, perhaps we'll have the faith and the courage, as Phillip Booth wrote to, "lie gently and wide to the light-year stars, lie back and [take faith that] the sea will hold [us]."

Many years ago Rosa Parks was asked how the people back in Montgomery had been able to sustain themselves during the long and difficult bus boycott. Folks walked several miles to their jobs; worked a full day and then made the long trek home. "How did we sustain ourselves? We were so tired that all we could do at night was eat supper and go to our churches to worship and to sing."

I would suggest that worship and singing were the way in which those freedom fighters approached the mystery; in order to get close to it; in order to feel its presence in their lives; in order to be fed by it, and nourished and strengthened for the struggle.

None of us is without our struggles, and our struggles, too, are labors for freedom. Maybe they are efforts to gain freedom from oppression as well, but maybe they are to gain freedom from addictions or from loneliness, or abuse or dysfunctional relationships. You can name your own fight for freedom better than I.

But I would suggest that, in order to sustain our fight, in order for us to reign victorious, we might do well to follow the lead of the people from Montgomery. We, too, might better sustain our struggles for freedom by drawing our strength from that something that is larger than ourselves. And that something larger is ultimately the largest thing that we cannot know.

It may be called the Tao, or the Way of the Universe, or God, or the great mystery. It doesn't matter what we call it, and it doesn't really matter what we don't call it. It matters that we know our connection in it, because in it we each have the source of our being. And because by finding ourselves in it, we are also able to find one another, to see ourselves and each other in the midst of our inherent worth and dignity that flows through each of us from that source. We come from the same source; we share the same birthrights.

We live in an age of instant access to almost anything in the world. In such an age as this few things last for very long because there is always something coming along to take the place of what's there now. It sometimes seems that we're in a raging flood that carries on its surface all the debris that it's picked up along the way, debris that now smashes and shatters whatever might lie in its path.

We live in an age of desperate need for some deeper waters. We live in an age in need of connections that cannot be so easily washed away. We need to find our way through the transient to something that's more permanent, through the surface to that which is transcendent.

Day in and day out, I hear from people everywhere that it's all just moving too fast. There are so many places to go. There's so much work to be done, so much information to be absorbed, so much information to be delivered back out.

We mistakenly confuse the transmission of information for communication. Communication has the same root as the word communion, which means a coming together. Coming together means that we are fully present enough to be with someone else-not to download and upload-but to have and have with.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "That only which we have within, can we see without. If we meet no god, it is because we harbor none. If there is grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and (in) sweeps. He is only rightly immortal to whom all things are immortal."

If we are going to find the mystery that is the cause for being throughout the universe, if we are going to experience it within ourselves and with one another, we will need to explore the space at the center of the wheel: we will need to hear the silence of the rest in the measure. And we will need to approach that mystery as it exists within us. We won't find it in the parts of ourselves that are busy or loud or easily touched. We will only find the mystery in our deepest recesses.

There is an old Zen story that tells of a young professor who went to visit a Zen master and asked to receive enlightenment. The master offered the young professor a cup of tea. So the master began to pour the tea into an empty cup. He continued pouring even after the teacup was full. The tea spilled over the edge and filled the saucer. The master kept right on pouring. The tea ran out onto the table. The Zen master still continued pouring.
As the tea began dribbling onto the floor, the young professor was no longer able to contain himself. "Stop!" he shouted. "It can't hold any more."
"Exactly like you," the Zen master replied. "How can you be open to receive enlightenment when you are already so full of yourself?"
Simone Weil wrote, "Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void." We are here to find the hub of the wheel and the rest in the measure. And we are here to find what meaning that might have in our lives.

By now, I can only imagine that some of you have begun to wonder, "Where is the meat in this sermon? Where is the nugget we can take with us that might make a difference as we go about living our lives this next week?" The truth of the matter is there is no nugget in this sermon. The nugget is in you!
In her composition, "The Summer Day" poet, Mary Oliver asks what you are doing with that nugget.

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

We are not here to provide one another with the answers to life's mysteries. We are here to face those mysteries, and to be in the questions with one another. We are here to find our place, not spinning endlessly around the periphery of the wheel of life, but in the hub of the wheel. We are not here simply to learn to endure the unabating din of a thechno-age, but to rest together in the measure.

So that perhaps we might be able to face the demons in our paths and not run away. So that we might be filled up once again. So that our roots might indeed grow deeper. So that we might find balance in the calm, and not be so easily scattered by the winds of distraction. So that we might find that we can lie gently and wide to the light-year stars, lie back in-faith that the universe will hold us-here where we belong.

We are going to take an extra couple of moments of quiet this morning in an effort to leave some space, so that you might have the opportunity to find the space that is within you. Before we pause though, I'd like to leave you with these words of Henri Amiel:

Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guest, an altar for the unknown God. Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to take it. If you are conscious of something new--thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being--do not be in [to big] a hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten, hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness; let it take shape and grow.