Trinity Sunday 2021

 

Trinity Sunday

May 31, 2021 Monroe, NC

Introduction

It is said that more heresy preached on this day than on any other. I don't know about that, but the saying itself gives a clue about this day -- Trinity Sunday -- that the church observes on the first Sunday following Pentecost.

I viewed last week's Morning Prayer on Youtube ® and I have to tell you that I was really impressed. Between Jo's reading and Charlotte's preaching I thought, "Whoa, I'm not sure it's a good idea to follow on that!"

I was a little intimidated. I guess I've felt that way just about every Trinity sermon I've ever preached.

When I was young I was genuinely concerned about heresy and orthodoxy and I knew enough to know that indeed the concept of the Trinity was one of the basic test-cases about whether one was orthodox or not.

At some point I had come to a simplified definition of heresy as an over-emphasis on one of the three persons of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, or the Spirit. I wanted to be careful, then, not to over-empasize one over the other.

But as the years compounded, and year after year I was confronted with the possibility that I might be preaching heresy, I became a little less intimidated. It seemed more and more that the words "heresy" and "orthodoxy" were more about deciding Who is in and who is out and less about what was really important. I mean really as in "in the light of eternity" -- as in what God is doing with us and with everything.

In an effort to try to focus words today less on the less important and more on the more important, I asked folks the last 2 weeks: "What does the Trinity mean to you?" It was actually kind of fun as we were having conversations with family members in Indiana and Ohio, I looked for just the right moment to shift the conversation. You know, like in the middle of "whether or not men's basketball was better than women's basketball" I just plopped down the question: "What do you think about the Trinity?"

My Research seemed to give me:

• Irrelevant
• a mystery
• reflected in Genesis? and other places in the Bible? (That in response to my statement that it doesn't appear anywhere in the Bible)
• So many killed over the centuries in the name of ...
• Mystery – paradox, —> quantum mechanics

Several of the folks for whom I have a great deal of respect, not least for the seriousness and faithfulness of their faith, were sensitive to the criticism of some that the Trinity can be seen as a threat to the belief in One God. I heard the phrase, "Of course Christianity is Monotheism, but the Trinity is a mystery".

I resonate with the concept of mystery. Like paradox it's not easy to point at mystery and say, "That's it." As soon as you do that it's gone.

I associate several things myself with "The Trinity". They include:

• It's about relationship and not about "things"
• It's not something that's very easy to talk about after you move past the surface level "it's 3 but it's 1"

So, as in with many things for me, I am much more focused on asking the questions than on getting the right answers.

It's about relationships

You heard me say last year that I took a course on the Trinity when I was a graduate student at Notre Dame. I admitted then, that it was the most difficult class I ever took.

The teacher was a woman, Catherine Mowry LaCugna, who in her all-too-short lifetime became one of the world's most influential teachers on the Trinity.

It was she, I think, who gave me the first beginnings of my sense today that the Trinity is more about relationships that it is about distinct persons.

Her Wikipedia page says of her that, "[her] passion was to make the doctrine of the Trinity relevant to the everyday life of modern Christians." And that "She rejected modern individualist notions of personhood and emphasised the self-communication of God."

I'm not even going to try to unpack those brief quotations from Wikipedia and even less the seriousness of her theology. But it does seem clear to me that the idea of God -- the God of the universe and of the history of history and of time itself -- that God trying to communicate with us, with me and you, is one of the important things.

One of the things it seems to me that God is communicating to us is that it's all about relationships, the energy between the various parts of the creation. e=mc2.

(github)

That equation may remind us of a simple-minded equation for the Trinity: 3=1. But the meaning of e=mc2 is that everything is a form of energy. Everything we see and measure in all of creation is but a form of energy. That sounds to me like a variation of the statement that "everything is God" or "everything comes from God."

The doctrine, the mystery, the paradox of the Trinity, then, is not a mathematical concept but a journey in uncovering a relationship with God.

Perhaps the most basic element of the journey is that we are not alone in this world of divine energy.

MEDITATION XVII Devotions upon Emergent Occasions John Donne

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

For me, the last year has been a poignant and powerful lesson in how interrelated we are. An imposed isolation has the opposite effect of emphasizing our connectedness.

When I say, "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit", making the sign of the cross over it all, I'm putting myself into that set of relationships.

Father related in love to the Son. Father and Son bound together in Love. God in relation to the creation. God loving an individual person like myself.

Quantum physics

Our history as Christians, indeed as human beings, demonstrates that it is all-too-easy to focus on the less important and miss the most important.

There is a widely circulated quotation that gets at that tendency. "Calculators only give answers." Looking up the history of the quote I learned that it apparently originated with several artists, Picasso, a poet named Zukofsky. background of quote The lesson is for all of us, learned and not-so-learned, old and young, ... since we are all in this together. If the focus is discrete things (or persons) we miss the big picture.

The Trinity is not about 3 things. It is about the divine web that weaves together the whole world, the whole cosmos. It's not about the answers that we can now "google" from our phones, it's about the relationships we can enter into with a simple gesture or the words, "I love you."

One of the great ironies for me in the current political environment that distrusts "science", is that the current state of science is in fact more like religious spirituality than anything that can easily be "googled."

If you "google" "Zen and Quantum Physics" you will get quite a long list. You might want to try it.¹

A quick illustration of how Zen and Quantum mechanics bear similarities, consider this parable: ²

Two monks are arguing. One says, “The flag is moving.”

The other says, “No, the wind is moving.”

A master, passing by, admonishes them both: “The flag is not moving; the wind is not moving. Your mind is moving.” citation

One writer said this about modern science and quantum physics in particular: ³

Our comfortable ideas of a universe made up of solid little bits of matter behaving in logical ways have been exploded. A particle is not a separate entity but a set of relationships. The world is an interconnected tissue of events, a dynamic unbroken whole.

To me that sounds very much like what Catherine Lacugna said about the Trinity. When we are comfortable with the Trinity as an equation of entities, a mystery we can apprehend with a breath or two, we are in danger of missing the divine relationship that is at the beating heart of the universe.

Closing

The Trinity, for which we give thanks today, points not so much to a doctrine as to the sacred reality that binds us all together.

It's not for dividing between orthodoxy and heresy -- though it has been used that way through almost 2 millenia, but it is lighthouse on a promontory, looking out over the ocean of God's creation. It calls us to a safe harbor.

The Trinity is our proclamation that we are all one. We are not a museum of separate individuals, competing for scarce nutrients, but an intricate mosaic, made up of broken pieces that combined create a beautiful image for all to wonder at.

There is an old Jewish saying that goes:

God made all humans from just one man so that no man can claim, "My father is better than your father."

The Trinity has nothing to do with, "My God is better than your God." It has more to do with, "Praise God for the sacred which binds us all together."

Today, let us give thanks, together, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

♱

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1. For a sceptical take on my claim cf. also latimes and realitysandwich.↩

2. The following is excerpted from The Everything Answer Book: How Quantum Science Explains Love, Death, and the Meaning of Life by Amit Goswami PhD, published by Hampton Roads Publishing.↩

3. Gary Zukov, The Dancing Wu-Li Masters.↩

Easter 7, 2021

Sunday after Ascension

#easter7

lectionary page 

Community event

Interesting time

I remember from long ago I first heard the response of someone that we live in “interesting” times. Probably none of us here would disagree with that. But interesting is a – well, it’s an “interesting” term. It’s an ordinary word and we think we know what it means. But to say that of the times we live in isn’t simple at all. It’s complicated.

• critical times?

• challenging times?

• special times? or maybe unexpectedly “ordinary” times?

I want to suggest another term to describe the time we live in.

We live in a “liminal” time. It’s a fancy word – I apologize. But it seems useful because it signals to us that, “Wait. Maybe we should pay attention.”

35 years ago this month, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. I realized this past week that pretty close to 40 days later I heard his voice for the last time. In addition to facing the grief of my father’s death, I had had a ton of personal loss on my plate. I was living alone and in the kitchen eating area of the apartment. And our of nowhere I clearly heard a voice. It was unmistakably my father’s voice. It said approximately, “Don’t worry. I am ok.”

I felt strangely calm. I felt reassured. Though nothing was solved.

One way in retrospect I came to describe the time was an in-between time.

We are not where we were and we are not yet where we will be.

• a surreal time,

• an emptiness.

I saw it particularly in my step-mother’s face, as she was unable to express herself – until we asked her to describe the things she loved about her husband.

We face choices. Choices that may not feel like choices.

• We can try to avoid the emptiness or we can fill our time with busy-ness.
• We need the presence of others while we may feel the urge to be alone.

Fr. Jim

The death of Fr. Jim this week has sent each of us and this community into such an in-between time.

We have lost a beloved part of our community. We’ve lost a huge presence even as the memories are still very fresh.

One of the things I have said many times over the years, “Death in whatever form it comes, catches us by surprise.”

It’s always when we don’t expect it. It always seems to be the wrong time, or at least an inconvenient time.

Ascension-tide

It is in such times that the church was born. “Interesting time,” “liminal time,” a “time in-between.”

Acts 1:1-11

In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs,** appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father**. “This,” he said, “is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

This past Thursday was 40 days after Easter. From ancient times it was observed as Ascension Day. On the 50th day – Pentecost – the church observes the promised gift of the Spirit.

For the disciples it was a Time of waiting. Their Sense of loss was palpable. Thomas had touched those wounds on Jesus’ hands and his feet. And now Jesus was gone. He told them to wait. Waiting is among the most difficult of human activities.

They asked themselves, “How do we go forward?” They were not where they were but they are not yet where they were going.

Pregnant times

Such times are “pregnant.” They are full of promise, but promise that can not yet be seen.

When I was a youth my best friends went to something called “Outward Bound.” The culminating event was to spend an overnight in the mountains of Colorado with nothing but what was in a small pack. I was envious and disappointed for many years that I had not be able to go on my own “Outward Bound” experience.

I did later experience similar kinds of time-outs. In Cursillo weekends. In silent retreats. In a summer in Europe alone and with little money. In those weeks following my father’s death.

Such times are all around us if we can but have eyes to see them.

Where is our hope?

The in-between times are infused with Grace. They are at the same time both inexpressible loss at what once was but also indescribable joy anticipating what shall be. We are not what we were and not yet what we shall be. It is then that the Spirit becomes palpable.

But in such times our tendency is not to see it, feel it, hear it.

A year ago the sermon I preached on the 7th Sunday of Easter was broadcast in the context of a mushrooming response to the Covid pandemic. We were new to it then. It seemed over-whelming. It seemed to have utterly changed the world we live in. The church was empty.

As I look out today, our church has gathered again. And our sacred space is open to the grass, the sounds, the smells, the vastness of our blossoming spring.

It’s so much easier today to sense the presence of God around us. But God was with us no less then than now. A year ago we couldn’t see today, but we had hope.

The loss around us today is different but the presence of the living God is the same.

As Jesus left his disciples he said, “Wait for the promise of the Father.”

Waiting

When I was in my 20’s I spent a lot of time taking the bus. There were short rides between Denver and Colorado Springs. And there were longer ones. Between Colorado and Wisconsin. Once I was on a bus for 3 days after I was in a train wreck in Montana.

I don’t know how it happened or why, but I came to find great satisfaction in waiting in bus stations, waiting for the slow unfolding of the journey. What I did was I would try to look closely at each person in the station. There were just an amazing array of people taking the bus in those days. Young and old, rich and poor. And with each person I would try to imagine their life-story. And for a few moments, at least, I would fall in love with that person. I could find love because of the richness of their life-story that seemed to surround them.

Today the same sort of thing occurs in airports, but everything is so much faster, so rushed, there doesn’t seem enough time for the same kind of thing to happen.

Waiting takes time. The Father promised. But we have to wait.

Conclusion

In John 17 we heard Jesus today express the Father’s promise. He prayed:

All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.

He was leaving. An absence. But the Father’s promise was that the absence would become a more sustaining presence, life itself. The gift of the Spirit.

The Spirit cannot be squashed. As one song puts it, “You can pour cement over it but the blade of grass will break through.”

What feels like a “goodbye” will become a greater joy. It is all around us. Wait and See.

Simone Weil, the author of a book titled Waiting on God wrote:

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” ― Simone Weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology

As we wait in this time between, pay attention with faith and love. Pay attention to the strands that connect us. Pay attention with silence that wonders with awe. Pay attention with words of kindness. Pay attention as we wait, with hope and love, for the Father’s promise.

Easter 5 2021 -- Monroe

May 2, 2021

Fifth Sunday of Easter
St. Paul’s, Monroe

Lectionary

Spring

It’s Spring all around us. There are signs of green happening everywhere all around us. Almost as we speak, the boundaries and limits that have been imposed to deal with the pandemic, are being relaxed. The Easter season, running for a week of weeks from Easter Day to Pentecost, is more than half through.

Theophany through surprise and unexpected

I made a decision a long time ago, when I was in my 20’s, that there were 2 things really important to me. One was the result of having experienced a variety of things that today I would call “theophanies” or “epiphanies.” I experienced – I didn’t read about or think about – I experienced – a breaking in of the sacred. The divine.

The particulars of my experiences don’t really matter here. They were peculiar to me – although probably similar to the kinds of things that you also have experienced. But it’s the 2nd thing that I decided that I want to focus on for a minute here.

At that point in my life I thought that it was likely that this holiness or sacred or divine stuff that I had experienced was accessible from many different religious perspectives. I had been exposed to enough different cultural and religious approaches that it seemed probable to me that any number of them might put one in touch with the sacred.

But I decided that what I would do is to pursue the tradition that I was raised with, that was most familiar to me – namely being a Christian.

I guess I’ve spent the next 50 years trying to do that.

Amazing: positive and negative

It didn’t take long in that journey for me to be surprised by the things I encountered among Christians. Really – people who are trying to know God, to experience God’s work, through Christ, do amazing things.

It’s amazing in lots of different ways. Mother Teresa dedicated her entire life to try to serve absolutely the least likely people in Calcutta. Her dedication, her devotion, her determination – in love – was amazing. I’ve known several people in my life who lived and worked with her for a time. And they were transformed. One of them started a free health clinic in Michigan City and she was a member of my congregation.

But sometimes Christians do other kinds of amazing things. When I taught religion at Iolani School in Honolulu, I would ask my students in an informal survey what kinds of things they thought of when they thought of Christianity. The majority of these students were not Christian, but came from a variety of different Asian traditions. The things they reported most prominently were things like: judgmental, intolerant, reluctant to share, and so on. {Link to an example} I suspect you know what I’m talking about.

One of the things I’ve wrestled with these 50 years is that this Christian path is filled with – as the jargon has it – “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” When I was first ordained, the priest I worked for explained why he had forbidden his congregation to sing the then quite popular “They will know we are Christians by our love.” He said he didn’t want his congregation to be known for hypocrisy and until Christians actually were known by their love he didn’t want to sing it. I didn’t agree with him, but I got his point.

“Beloved, let us love one another” (1 John)

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.

We hear today from this short excerpt from the 1st Letter of John.

Long ago I heard those words to at least point to what I had originally responded to as a 20 something year ago. Love is what reveals the sacred. Love outstrips all our divisions. Love overcomes what separates us.

By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.

It seemed as if the writer of these words had experienced something like what had experienced years ago. He was trying to mine this “Christian thing” for all it was worth. And for him, mining this Christian thing meant everything. I recognized my decision to be something along the lines of deciding to abide in Jesus, Son of God.

Abide here meaning to “live with, to explore, to cultivate, to discover” the many avenues to the manifestation of the sacred.

John’s Gospel

The same tradition that gave us the letters of John gave us the gospel of John. There we encounter the same kind of language, similar comparisons, common focus. This week’s reading focuses on a vineyard, vines, gardening,

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. … Abide in me as I abide in you.

(following last week’s I am the Good Shepherd)

There aren’t any complicated words here. We understand them – basically. Take the word, abide. I understand the word. It has to do with where I live. But in fact that’s not how we use the word. A dictionary gives 2 basic ways that we actually use the word.

1. to accept or act in accordance with (a rule, decision, or recommendation). “I said I would abide by their decision”¹
2. informal to be unable to tolerate (someone or something). “if there is one thing I cannot abide it is a lack of discipline”

Now neither of those meanings for the word abide is the way it is used in our scripture readings today. For that reason a number of recent translations of the text use a different word. “Remain in me” or “Stay with me.”

What is of particular interest to me, is the way in which our normal approach to listening for God’s word to us, or looking for what God is doing in our lives, is to expect what we are used to. For most of us, the biblical passages are familiar to us. Many of us have heard sermons or read edifying studies about the text. We figure we know what this is about.

Yet as I have sought over these 50+ years to mine the Christian faith for the manifestation of God and the sacred, I have consistently found that it is the unexpected that characterizes God’s approach to us.

When it is familiar to us, we figure we know what that’s all about, we are much less likely to encounter God stepping into our life.

New eyes and ears

The way I often think about it is to use language that Jesus himself used, that we need to listen with new ears, we need to look with new eyes, we need to understand with new hearts. To let the sacred or the holy in we need to open ourselves in new ways.

I had a lesson in this week before last. We were in a small bible study with college students. The text was last week’s gospel about the “good shepherd.” Most of the observations that we made were familiar and what I would have expected. But towards the end one of the students described what God seemed to be telling her from the passage. She said that God needs everyone, especially the least of us. She said all of us fall short and are inadequate in some way or another, but the Good Shepherd needs everyone and especially the least likely.

And I was stunned. I smiled inside and I gave thanks, because while I believed with all my heart what that student said, I had never heard it through that text. And I thought, “There you are again, God. Speaking through what I wasn’t expecting.”

The lesson for me this week has been trying to open up to a new way of hearing that word “abide.” I have been so accustomed to hearing this passage about what I need to do, how I need to live my life, that the pruning I feel in my life is for my own good. These are all things that I have heard and read before.

But today I hear it in a new way. I look at the new life springing up around us. I see familiar faces around me that I haven’t seen in a year of covid restrictions. And what I hear in the word “abide” is that we together are the vineyard. That the new life of Resurrection is not aimed at me – it is aimed at all of us. Together we are the Resurrection and the Life.

My decision so many years ago to pursue Christianity, to cultivate it for the sacred and the holy, that Was a decision to “abide” in the vinekeeper. It was a decision to allow the vinekeeper, the gardener, to mold and shape me into the whole vineyard.

It’s been a long season at St. Paul’s and indeed many churches across the globe. It has been an extended season of winter. But winter has ended. The hard ground begins to break apart with the tender green new growth doing the work. Though our voices are yet still weak, we are nevertheless alive. And our message is: Alleluia! Christ is Risen! May we abide in that Alleluia as the Lord of Life abides in us.

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1. Similar: comply with, obey, observe, follow, keep to, hold to, conform to, adhere to, stick to, stand by, act in accordance with, uphold, heed, pay attention to, agree to/with, consent to, accede to, accept, acquiesce in, go along with, acknowledge, respect, defer to Opposite: flout, reject↩︎