|
Have you ever been astonished by the behavior of someone you know really well? Have you found yourself asking, “how could he do that?” or “what was she thinking?” Perhaps this experience happens more often with a member of our family, because we have the illusion that we know who raised that person, what their life circumstances have been, and therefore, that we have their whole story. At some point, most of us face the reality that we can never know another human being completely~~not even a spouse with whom we have lived for decades. Each person has a specific history, a distinct personality, and a unique set of thoughts and feelings. Each person has a subconscious, which also influences our behavior. And so each of us is, in part, a mystery to everyone else. At the same time, God has planted within us, a deep desire to know and to understand. We put together all the information we have, our perceptions and our memories, to construct a picture of the personalities of our family members, and our friends. When some person whom we know well, does something unexpected, something that doesn’t fit our picture, we are disturbed. We may choose to ignore that disturbing behavior, or, we may integrate it into our picture, or in extreme cases, we may end the relationship altogether. I propose to you that a similar thing happens in our relationships with God. In the Bible, it appears that we have the whole history of God, going back to the beginning. Certainly we know all the important events in that history, and we have read what the psalmists and the prophets have said by divine inspiration, about God. For the Jewish people of the first century, the teaching and the actions of Jesus certainly were unexpected, and challenged their picture of God. Many of them ignored this disturbing behavior, a few integrated it into their picture, and perhaps a few quietly retired from belief in God. You and I have inherited the new things Jesus revealed, as well as Paul’s interpretation of the cross and the resurrection, which the early church put together into a somewhat different picture of God. Out of that deep desire to know and understand, Christians over the centuries have studied and meditated and discussed exactly how Jesus is God, and who the Holy Spirit is, and in what way each one is related to God the Creator. Today we are celebrating our picture of who God is: Trinity Sunday is the only major feast of the church which is not based on an event. Trinity Sunday is about our doctrine that we worship one God, who is three persons, yet at the same time, one God. This doctrine, expressed in the Nicene Creed, and in two later creeds printed near the end of the Prayerbook in a 9 point font, attempts to answer the questions of the 4th and 5th centuries about the picture of God which the church was presenting to the world. The first thing I want to say about the Trinity, is that our effort to create a word-picture of God is a deeply human effort, which is terribly misguided. If we can never fully comprehend another human being, whom we can see, hear, and question, how can we possibly say anything definitive about God? Either our picture of God will be too small--too close to the old man with the white beard on a throne--or it will be so abstract that it conveys nothing. One of those abstract sentences in the Athanasian creed is, “there are not three incomprehensibles, but one incomprehensible”. Let us instead, be honest about our pictures of God, and acknowledge that they are all limited by our culture, our life experience and the particular passages of the Bible that are important to us. Then we can say the Nicene Creed as a 4th century statement, which does not address our questions, but did address the questions that Christians of a much earlier age had. The second thing I want to say, is that the moments in our lives when we experience the holy, are probably much more important than any creed. Last Wednesday evening, about 15 of us met in the library to tell some stories about how we have searched for God, and been found by God. One person told of driving down a familiar road, into a glorious sunset, and becoming aware of the presence of the holy. Another person told of writing in her journal in the mornings, and discovering that the writing had become a conversation with God. Yet another told of many very simple everyday experiences which she finally realized were short messages--like postcards, from God. I remember the first time I was aware of the presence of Jesus in another person: I was talking with a parent about starting a youth group, and suddenly I felt His presence in her. And I’ve told you before about the first time I was aware that the Holy Spirit gave me guidance: it was on Easter Sunday in 1986, during the reading of the first lesson, at which time the Spirit told me to do a children’s sermon. I believe that God adapts Godself to each person’s needs, speaking to one person through nature, meeting another as the Risen Christ, and to those most resistant, finally giving them a dramatic experience, as he did with Peter, and Paul. The third thing I want to say about the Trinity, is that in some mysterious way, it is a community of love. The three-ness is a sign or symbol that there is room for others. If there is only one, there is no diversity, and if there are only two, they are in a balanced union. The three-ness of God symbolically makes room for the differentness of humans from the divine, at the same time as it includes us in the circle, the community of love. The Gospel readings we’ve had recently in which Jesus says, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” are about that community of love. I think St. John put those words of Jesus into the Last supper so that we would pay attention to how love works through death. That is, Jesus gave himself up to the worst humanity could do, in order to demonstrate that the circle of love is stronger than death. On the cross, Jesus “gave up his Spirit”, and three days later, the Father gave the Spirit back to him in the resurrection. And then, at Pentecost, the Father and the Son gave that same Spirit to the disciples in the upper room. So we who are baptized in the name of the Trinity, are included in that community of love. This circle or community of love is the context for all those statements, of which there are about 15, which say that whatever we ask, we will receive. Obviously these statements are not literally true, because we have all prayed for people to be healed, and positions to be offered, which did not happen. What these statements may mean, is that the community of love will flow out into any person or situation that will receive it. This does not mean, however, that dying people will live, because the community of love is stronger than death, and the Trinity will receive the spirit of that person. Ask and you will receive, is not a way to manipulate God; rather it is a participation in the community of love. The answer you receive may be more loving, than the answer you asked for. The fourth and final thing I want to say about the Trinity, concerns that first sentence in our Gospel reading, where Jesus said, “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (16:12). In other words, there is more to be revealed, much more, and Jesus will reveal those things as we are able to bear them. This ought to be a banner over the church warning us not to try to limit God to what God has done in the past. That which we call God is mysterious, incomprehensible, and far beyond what we can imagine or grasp. Now and then we get little glimpses of the holy; we must resist the impulse to treat each glimpse as if it were a puzzle piece, and try to fit it into the arrangement of pieces we already have. Perhaps you are aware of how often I say, “I don’t know”, and “this MAY mean”. The more I read the Bible and study the ways of God, the more complex it is, and the less certain I have become, that I can say anything definite about God. So I say, perhaps, and, it might be, as a way of signaling my awareness of how little I really know, and of how mysterious God is. These thoughts are expressed in a more amusing way by the 14th century Dominican, Meister Eckhart. Here is what he has to say:
“. . . no one can know or articulate anything about God. . . .So be silent, and do not flap your gums about God, for to that extent
. . . you lie. With this business of knowing about God, you run into a complete lack of knowledge, and through this you fall into a
beastlike state of existence . . . so if you do not want to be a beast, know nothing about that God who is inexpressible in words.
And if you ask, “how can I keep myself from doing this?” then I advise you to let your own “being you” sink into and flow away
into God’s “being God” . . . then you will eternally know with him, his changeless existence and his nameless nothingness”.
(Sermon 12, quoted in
This is a challenging thought for someone who stands up to preach every Sunday. Nevertheless, I read it often to remind myself
that everything I say about God is only “hints and guesses”. T.S. Eliot says it this way:
|