Basking in the Mystery of the Trinity - Trinity Sunday Sermon 2013

Back in June of 2003, I flew with a friend of mine to Germany where we met another friend of mine who was working for a year in Berlin. Now, we were only there for a week and we had to really plan how to travel around so we could see as much as we could in so short a time. Of course, in Europe, you have to travel by train. So we would take a train real early in the morning, and then head back to Berlin in the evening. On one of the trips back to Berlin, I was sitting and talking to my friend when we heard this commotion behind us. This guy, dressed as an attendant, came hurriedly through the train asking if there was a Catholic priest on board. Apparently, there wasn’t. A few minutes later, he came back through, this time asking for a lutheran pastor or even an anglican priest. Again, there didn’t appear to be. A few moments, later he came back through asking for a Jewish Rabbi. This time an elderly man towards the back of the car stood up and said, “Can I help you, friend. I am a Methodist minister.” At this the attendant sighed and said, of course not, you’re not going to be any help, I need a corkscrew.”

Today is the day that we celebrate the Holy Trinity. You know, that logically impossible, mathematically complicated thing that tells us that God is three distinct entities, each with its own purpose and yet, these three distinct entities are, in fact one and the same. 1+1+1=1. Plain as day. Or maybe not so much.

I preached on this topic, I think two years ago, and I looked over that sermon and came to the conclusion that I wanted to do something different, but I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what to say this morning. You see, while I don’t read a lot of mystery novels, I do enjoy them. Last week, Dan Brown came out with a new novel. I know his books are controversial, like the Da Vinci Code, and I can understand why, but at the end of the day, for me at least, it is a fictional novel and he is a good writer so I enjoy reading him. Now he only comes out with a book every few years or so and it had been awhile since his last one. When I new there was another one coming, I was counting off the days to when I could get it. I finished it this week, and I have to admit, I enjoyed it. The surprising thing is that as I got closer to the end of the book, I found myself getting upset, because I was enjoying the mystery so much, that I didn’t want to get to the end. Even though my mind was trained to sift through possibilities and find the facts, the reality is that I enjoy the mystery.

As I looked over the text I preached two years ago on this subject, I noticed that I spent a good deal of time trying to give a definition to the trinity that would give it some meaning. Because, in my mind a mystery lacks definition, by design. We can’t learn anything through a mystery. This morning, though, I realize that I may have been trying to explain a mystery thinking that clarity brings power in understanding. Yet, what if that isn’t the case. What if mystery has a power of its own that can even surpass the power that clarity can bring.

Let’s look at an example. The book of Genesis. Let me tell you two different accounts of creation and see if you can tell me which one is actually from the Bible. Option 1: man and woman are made on the same day at roughly the same time and at the end of the rest of creation. Option 2: man is made first, then God makes the rest of creation and towards the end, then finally makes woman as a companion to man.

Which one then, of these two different accounts of creation is actually the version that Genesis tells? The first version does indeed come from Genesis, specifically it comes from the very first chapter. The second version comes from the second chapter of Genesis. That is right, they both are from Genesis. They both tell of creation, and they both tell contradictory stories about how the earth was created. How can that be?

Throughout history, many people have weighed in on the issue. Some say there is no contradiction, that they are simply the same account but from a different point of view. Others say that one of them was a later addition. Still others say that it is simply a metaphorical attempt to put in words the actions God took on our behalf during creation. Even others point to this as proof that the Bible can’t be authoritative because of its contradictions. Any of these explanations could be true, but I personally don’t subscribe to any of them. And here is why.

Sometimes a mystery is ok. Sometimes accepting what we don’t know can help us to see the larger picture in a better way. There is an old story about Saint Augustine. One day Augustine was walking along the beach by the ocean and pondering the deep mystery of God the Holy Trinity. He met a boy there on the beach who had dug a hole in the sand and kept busy running back and forth from the hole to the ocean; collecting water and pouring it into the hole. Augustine was curious about this, so he asked the boy: “What are you doing?” The boy replied: “I am going to pour the entire ocean into this hole.” Augustine then said: “That is impossible, the whole ocean will not fit into your hole.” And the boy answered Augustine: “Neither can the infinite God the Holy Trinity fit into your finite mind.”

The Bible is full of many mysteries. From the contradictory accounts of creation, to the differences in the four Gospels, to the true meaning of the Book of Revelation, and of course to the concept of the Holy Trinity that we deal with today. Scripture, with all its answers and with all of the advice it gives us on how to live our lives, with all of that, it is still filled with mystery. And that is ok, because in mystery, we find ourselves opening our mind to possibilities that we may not have imagined if we simply were presented with facts. Maybe the mystery of the trinity is simply that, a mystery that was never meant to truly be understood but rather to simply be believed and lived in.

This mystery, in its complexity and in its simplicity, can help us understand God in a better way and it can also help us to grasp better what our own calling may be. Because in this three is one and one is three illogical structure we find that our lives are filled with small trinities. We find them all over. Our relationships. Our gardening. Our communities. Augustine, for example, explained the trinity as a diagram of relationship. He used the model, believe it or not, of a romantic relationship. The lover, the beloved and the love that they share. Each representing either the father, the son or the holy spirit. Others have compared it to a plant, with the seed, the roots, and the visible flower. And even in our communities we can see its presence. the church, the community and the mission work we do, for example.

All of this is what makes the doctrine of the Trinity a celebration of the triumph of the infinite hues of complexity over a monochromatic simplicity. It reminds us that the central metaphor for God for us Christians is a diversity, and within that diversity a unity. We see that biological diversity is nature’s way of preserving and propagating life. But when it comes to race or class or even sexual orientation, it can feel like a threat to our own values and lifestyles.

Sociologists tell us that in early American towns the richest person and the poorest person never lived more than 200 yards apart. They would have to walk by the other’s dwelling during the course of a typical day. They were part of the same community and they were connected in a way we can now only try to imagine.

How different is that from where we are now when we wall ourselves off from the community or gate ourselves inside. How different is it when we don’t share the same schools or even the same churches?

When we don’t experience diversity in our day to day, we begin to lost touch with one another and the social fabric that binds us together begins to slowly unravel.

Theological diversity works the same way, and maybe that is even more difficult because we are dealing with what we believe to be eternal and sacred, and when it comes to that we are not open to alternative approaches. We want our religious truths to be pure, immutable. We want to believe our particular corner on God has not other inhabitants.

Rev. Richard Bowers writes, “The fear and insecurity that draws people into rigid, propositional statements about god and creation blinds them to the reality that all theological reflection flows from particular histories and contexts that shape how we understand God and the divine work among us.

For Christians, the Trinity is the primary symbol of community that holds together by containing diversity within itself. The trinity is an attempt to express an ineffable truth using a symbol, a metaphor for the different aspects and activities of God’s personhood.

It might make for strange math. Yet, actually the Cappodocian Theologians (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa, all from the 4th and 5th centuries) viewed the number 1 as no number at all because it had no diversity. It possessed no discernable strength. Isn’t that interesting?

The number 2 was weak as well in that it was only a dualism. At best, it could only be two sides of the same coin.

The number 3 was considered the first real number because it had innate stability, a complexity; a diversity, which made it durable and strong.

And the Trinity is not the only symbol of diversity for Christians. All of the Bible with its two accounts of the creation, and its four gospels, is enriched by its strikingly different approach to telling the story of Jesus and his ministry. It symbolizes a unity that is anything but uniform. These multiple viewpoints of truth help us to begin to comprehend the complexity of Jesus and the Mystery of the Incarnate Christ. the Son of the living God can’t be verified by one, lone witness. It requires a diversity of witnesses, a host of people who see that story, who witness that truth through their own individual lenses.

No matter how  we choose to explain the trinity, the reality is that its mystery gives us an opportunity to venture into a deeper understanding of what it is and what it means. In some ways, then the Trinity is the first community, the model for how we are called to connect with one another, without prejudice, without inequality, without competition, and always with perfect love.

It is not that a Trinitarian God is too complicated to understand, but rather that a Trinitarian God is too complex to be managed or manipulated by all of us who think we know better than God.

We see all kinds of issues in black and white, but we live our lives in color. the complexity of the trinity means that Spirit and Flesh live inextricably bound to one another. It means that the human and the divine are connected in an eternal dance.

In fact, the early theologians used the Greek work perichorasis which means around the circle. As we dance together and with God, we all dance to the center of life where God resides and we all move closer to one another.

Today we also celebrate those who have served our country, many making the ultimate sacrifice. While we do that, we must remember one thing in particular. Despite the army’s motto of “an army of one”, few if any veterans that I know would say that battles are lost or one by a single person, they know that it is by working together that evil can be overcome. That speaks to our lives and our faith and our mission as well, so as we celebrate those who serve, let their example and the example of the trinity itself to remind us that it is together we are strong, it is in our unity that our mission is better accomplished.

Returning back to Augustine, as he wrote to students as he was writing “On The Trinity,” his famous treatise on this topic, he wrote the following. “Lest you become discouraged, know that when you love, you know more about who God is than you ever could know with your intellect.”

It is in loving that we find love. It is in giving that we receive. It is in serving that we are ultimately served.

The Holy Trinity, it is indeed a holy mystery. It is not an entity that mathematics or physics or calculus can explain. It is not a philosophical position that can be achieved by the use of logic or reason. It is a mystery. It is one that we may never really solve, but in that we find its strength. It is not something we must see in order to believe. Rather, it is something that truly needs to believed and lived in order to see the effects it has on our lives, on our community and on our mission and calling in this world, in God’s world, in God’s creation.

Maybe we haven’t answered any questions today, yet, even more important, maybe we have learned that we can find beauty and strength without finding answers and proof. That is the mystery of the trinity. That is the mystery of God. And it is in that mystery, that, when we accept it, we come to find the loving embrace of that God, That Father, that Son, and that Holy Spirit. Amen.

May 12, 2013

Seventh Sunday of Easter

Mother’s Day/Festival of the Christian Home

Ascension Sunday

Shortly after commencement, the young seminary graduate was being considered by a pulpit committee for his first pastorate. The committee chairman began the interview by asking the candidate, “Sir, how much do you know about the Bible?” To which the young man responded, “I am a seminary graduate. I know the Bible well; Old Testament, New Testament, I know it all.” The chairmen then said, “Since you are such a knowledgeable Bible student, why don’t you share a well known passage with us from memory; one with which we lay people are all familiar. Tell us the story of the Good Samaritan.”

The seminary graduate said, “Oh, yes, I know it well. There once was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus who went down to Jerusalem by night. But he fell upon the stony ground and the thorns choked him almost to death. He said, ‘What shall I do? I know. I will arise and go to my father’s house.’ So he arose and climbed a sycamore tree. The next day, Solomon and his wife Gomorrah came by and carried him down to Noah’s ark for Moses to take care of him. But as he was passing through the east gate of the ark, his hair became tangled in a tree limb and he hung there forty days and forty nights. He was afterwards hungry, and the ravens came and fed him. On the following day, the three wise men came and carried him down to Nineveh. When he arrived there, he found Delilah sitting on the wall. He cried out, ‘Who is on my side?’ and the seven sons of Sceva came forth. He said to them. ‘Throw her down boys!’, to which they answered, ‘How many times, till seven times?’ He said, ‘No, seventy times seven.’ So they threw her down four hundred and ninety times, and she burst asunder in their midst. Afterwards, they picked up twelve baskets of the fragments were were made.’

At this point, the seminary graduate took a long pause and looked intently around the room into each one’s eyes before confronting them with his application. ‘And in the resurrection, whose wife will she be?’

The chairman of the committee thanked the young man and dismissed him from the room while they discussed his candidacy. When the seminary graduate had departed the room, the chairman turned to the rest of the members and said, ‘I think we ought to call him. I know he is young, but my soul, he really knows his Bible.”

John 17:20-26 (NRSV)

(20) I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word,

(21) that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

(22) The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one,

(23)I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

(24) Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

(25) Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me.

(26) I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

The message in these words this morning is pretty intense. Yet, these are the words Christ prays right before he is arrested. They are words in prayer that are meant to be encouraging. Why else would they be written down? God didn’t need to know them, he already did. They were written down so that we would know them, so that we would hear them, so that we would understand them. Yet, we often forget these words and focus more on the parts of the gospel story that are easier to act upon, or so we think.

Every four years the United Methodist Church gathers together in one place and has what we call General Conference. The General Conference is the convening of the governing structure of the United Methodist Church throughout the world. Last year about this time the General Conference met in Tampa, Fl. At this meeting there are changes made to our Book of Discipline. Here is a copy. If you would like to borrow a copy let me know and I will lend you one. Then I will pray that you find something more constructive and enjoyable to do. This is not leisure reading. However, not too far in you get to what we call the social principles of the UMC. Yet, before it gets into detail it offers up a preamble. None of the social principles are binding, but rather together provide kind of a general consensus of the thoughts about how the church and society are related to each other and the importance of this relationship in societal development at a local, national and global level. I want to briefly read this preamble because I feel that it speaks to the message we hear in the Gospel this morning.

We, the people called United Methodists, affirm our faith in God our Creator and Father, in Jesus Christ our Savior, and in the Holy Spirit, our Guide and Guard.

We acknowledge our complete dependence upon God in birth, in life, in death, and in life eternal. Secure in God’s love, we affirm the goodness of life and confess our many sins against God’s will for us as we find it in Jesus Christ. We have not always been faithful stewards of all that has been committed to us by god the Creator. We have been reluctant followers of Jesus Christ in his mission to bring all persons into a community of love. Though called by the Holy Spirit to become new creatures in Christ, we have resisted the further call to become the people of God in our dealings with each other and the earth on which we live.

We affirm our unity in Jesus Christ while acknowledging differences in applying our faith in different cultural contexts as we live out the gospel.

Grateful for God’s forgiving love, in which we live and by which we are judged, and affirming our belief in the inestimable worth of each individual, we renew our commitment to become faithful witnesses to the gospel, not alone to the ends of the earth, but also to the depths of our common life and work.

We acknowledge that, because it is a living body of believers, gathered together by God from many diverse segments of the human community, unanimity of belief, opinion, practice has never been characteristic of the Church from the beginning to this day. From its earliest time, as evidenced in the letters of Paul, the witness of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and other New Testament texts, diversity of understanding and controversy with regard to many matters has been the reality. Therefore, whenever significant differences of opinion among faithful Christians occur, some of which continue to divide the church deeply today, neither surprise nor dismay should be allowed to separate members of the Body from one another; nor should those differences be covered over with false claims of consensus or unanimity. To the contrary, such conflict must be embraced with courage and perseverance as all together continue to seek to discern God’s will. In that understanding and commitment, we pledge ourselves to acknowledge and to embrace with courage, trust, and hope those controversies that arise among us, accepting them as evidence that God is not yet finished in sculpting us to be God’s people.

We commit ourselves to stand united in declaring our faith that God’s grace is available to all, that nothing can separate us from the love of God. In that confidence, we pledge to continue to be in respectful dialogue ;with those with whom we disagree, to explore the sources of our differences, to honor the sacred worth of all persons, and to tell the truth about our divisions as we continue to seek the mind of Christ and to do the will of God in all things.”

So, you may be asking what this preamble has to do with this morning’s Gospel lesson. Well, to get to the heart of it, no pun intended, it is all about true love. What do I mean by true love? I don’t mean the true love we think about near valentine’s day with cupid and arrows and sappy love songs and well worded cards, or boxes of chocolate. Although, chocolate doesn’t hurt. True love is not the feeling you get when you see that object of your desire. For instance, maybe you love the smell of fresh cut grass on a summer morning, or maybe you love the humm of a well-tuned engine on a brand new mustang or even a tin lizzie. Maybe you love that feeling when you are at a baseball game and its the bottom of the 9th, score is tied, your team is up to bat, there are two outs, and the count is 3-2 and the next pitch is pounded out of the park and you stand up screaming as the runner rounds home base, winning the game. Maybe you love one or all of these things. And, this feeling is a good one, but it isn’t true love.

But, don’t be discouraged, because true love does exist in our world. But if these things aren’t true love, then what is? We find an example in the reading from John’s gospel. We find it in the selfless love of Christ. Here he is, praying, shortly before his arrest. He knows what is coming. Yet here he is praying, likely for the opposite than what we would pray for in the same situation. He is praying for his disciples and for us. He is praying that we will come to know him. He was praying not for us in an individual sense, necessarily; but rather for us in a communal sense. He is praying for what will become the Church. This is a prayer of sacrificial love, of true love. The love that is true love in its purest form.

We, as the church, though, have often let the differences we have come between us and a true understanding of the love Jesus is praying for. There is an old poem that sheds light on how many of us think of our faith. It goes:

I can be a Christian by myself.

Leave my dusty Bible on the shelf.

I’ll sing a hymn and pray a bit.

God can do the rest of it.

My heart’s the church, my head’s the steeple.

Shut the door and I’m the people.

I can be a Christian by myself.

I can be a Christian by myself.

I’ll break some bread and drink some wine,

Have myself a holy time.

I’ll take the offering, then I’ll know

Where that money’s going to go.

Lord, please remember, when I die.

Give me my own cloud in the sky.

After this life with all its labors,

Don’t bug me with any needy neighbors.

I can be a Christian by myself.

This is truly the opposite of the love Jesus modeled for his disciples. Jesus did not promote a cult of the autonomous individual - a law unto himself. He was not self-centered, but God-centered. People who center themselves in God are able to get their egos out of the way so they can set their first concern for others. There really is no other way to do it. You're either full of yourself and despise others. Or you're full of God and live for others. So Jesus found himself praying on the night before he died not for himself, but for us. And one of the things he prayed for is that we might be one. "I ask," he prayed, "that they may be one even as we" (that is Jesus, the Son, and his Father) "are one, perfectly one."

This unity is achieved in love.

Many theologians have focused to some extent on the importance of an individual faith. Perhaps the most well known is Martin Luther. Now, this individual faith is not only relevant, but important. Yet, it is not the only aspect of faith that must be developed. In his treatise, Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, almost arguing against Luther says in response to a call to individual faith,

But the reverse is also true: Let him who is not in community beware of being alone. Into the community you were called, the call was not meant for you alone; in the community of the called you bear your cross, you struggle, you pray. You are not alone, even in death, and on the Last Day you will be only one member of the great congregation of Jesus Christ. If you scorn the fellowship of the brethren, you reject the call of Jesus Christ, and thus your solitude can only be hurtful to you. “If I die, then I am not alone in death; if I suffer the fellowships suffers with me.”

This morning then, we see this self-sacrificial love that Christ models for us, becomes the glue that holds together the whole church. Right before he is arrested and executed, knowing what is to come, Jesus prays for the unity of all of us. Jesus calls us to a collective understanding of what it means to live in community and to love sacrificially, to be in love with true love.

This morning, we gather together in the presence of the risen Christ, and we come to learn to model that kind of love to our friends and our neighbors. We come to learn to model that kind of love to the strangers and even our enemies, some of which might be in the walls of the sanctuary and no doubt many more are outside these walls. Yet, the love we are called to is a difficult love to live out. Sometimes it can even seem impossible. Impossible, kind of like kneeling down and praying to God for the unity of those that will make you suffer, that will secure your own death. That is true love.

However, this morning we also gather together to give thanks for the many models of this type of love in our midst. Even though it might seem that love this strong is rare, the reverse is actually true. We see it today in the eyes of so many women in our congregation today. There are millions of examples. Let me give you a few. The women here whose children have at some point decided to serve their country either in peacetime at a base in the states or in war time in dangerous places throughout the world. We see this love in the act of these mothers who, despite their fears, have supported and prayed for their children. This is one example of this selfless love. We see it in the acts of mothers who struggle with children who have become addicted to drugs or alcohol. Those mothers who worry and who pray every day that their children will come home. Those mothers who know what is inside the soul of their children even when the rest of the world can’t or won’t see it. That is an act of selfless love. We see it in the acts of mothers who have sat at the bedside of their ill child, fearful and hopeful at the same time. The mothers who have begged God to take their life instead of the life of their child. This is an act of selfless love.

This morning, we gather to celebrate the mother’s in our midst, for the acts of selfless love they commit every single day. We gather to celebrate the spirits of those mothers who are with us only in spirit, but whose lives gave us example after example of this selfless love that enabled us to grow and love in the same way. We gather to celebrate all women and men and boys and girls and grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles who without question, will sacrifice for another, modeling the selfless love of their lord, Jesus Christ.

And we come together this morning in the hope that we can see and learn to fulfill that last line of the prayer Jesus prayed. That in this love that we show, others witness and come to believe as well. This is the love we are called to live.