Tag Archives: Holy Trinity

On the journey – Wow

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A family came back to have their second baby baptized. The older brother was about four and he got very serious through the whole thing. In fact, he cried in the car all the way home, even after having the cake and everything. His father asked him three times what was wrong. The boy was inconsolable. Finally, choking back the tears, the boy answered, “The pastor said that in baptism we now belonged to the Christian family.”

“What’s wrong with that?” his mother asked.

“Well, I wanted to stay with you guys.”

In Confirmation, you affirm God’s promise of belonging to the Christian — that is, God’s — family forever. But as a teenager you may not feel as the four year old in the story. Maybe you are getting excited about where life can lead you and starting to get ready to spread your wings, so to speak. In short, you are appreciating the ‘wow’ factor of life. And this is good.

The ‘wow’ factor is about getting excited, dreaming the dreams, reaching for the stars, seeing the possibilities, celebrating life. Confirmation, in our tradition, is about young people affirming their baptism and calling in life. You are on a journey. And today is a milestone on that journey of faith and life.

Today is Holy Trinity Sunday. Christians believe in the Trinity: one God in three persons. So, let’s draw three circles, reminding us of the Trinity, on this pad of paper here, and ask the questions: “What should I do to get through life that is largely before me?” “Is the Dream possible, on the journey of life?”
Each of us is given the gift of life on this planet. How, then can you travel well on the journey of life?

We draw these three circles inside of each other. The first, largest circle encompasses the other two. This first, large one, is the ‘wow’ circle. The next circle, a little smaller within the largest is called the ‘how’ circle. And the smallest circle at the centre of the other two is the ‘now’ circle.

The creation is ‘wow’. It’s the biggest one. It’s the starting point. It’s what it’s all about. Just look outside at this time of year to notice the bursting greens and thriving life coming from the earth. Or, whether you climb mountains or dive in the sea — or see the earth from space as Commander Chris Hatfield did — what God created is Wow!
Relish it! Experience it! It is beautiful!

And so are you. Each of us is created by God and is a remarkable human being, complete with unique gifts and talents and abilities and personalities. Wow.

This attitude of ‘wow’ accompanies us when we choose a vocation, undertake a new project, or make a major decision that you believe is a good one. In this initial stage we are in the ‘wow’ place — we see the possibilities, the goal, the big picture. It is the purview of visionaries, embodying the hope and potential of who we are in creation. It is the idealistic part of any undertaking.

It’s the proverbial honeymoon stage. It’s the best part of the dream.

And admittedly the one that gets short shrift so often. We don’t spend enough time visiting and revisiting this part of it in life, especially as we grow older. We so quickly gravitate to the ‘how’. And working through the ‘how’, without spending enough time in the ‘wow’, can often snuff out the spirit of whatever the undertaking.

Understandable to a degree. Because so often in life once we start that new thing, whether a relationship or a job, there are naturally disappointments that come along. Life is not all ‘wow’. And that’s the truth.

At the other extreme, failing to tap into and access the ‘wow’ in life, even in the midst of challenging times, can lead to living a chronically unhappy, unfulfilled life. We can become so fearful, jaded and cynical, that the joy has been sapped completely out of life.

Regardless the circumstance, we have to find a way of keeping the ‘wow’ going …..

Thanks to a couple of Anglican friends, the Revs. Peter John Hobbs and Monique Stone who introduced to a gathering at a local clergy day in Ottawa the concept of “Wow, How, Now” — on which I have extrapolated in this 3-part post.

Being Together AND Separate – Holy Trinity B

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My father was getting frustrated with me. And I was getting frustrated with my father. We were trying to explain to each other how to drive stick shift. I was sixteen and just got my license. I wanted to learn how to drive a standard transmission because my Dad had a cool, sporty looking VW sitting in the driveway.

The mutual explanations were literally driving us crazy. The words, interpretations, hand and foot demonstrations were getting us to a bad place in our relationship.

Finally, I had enough. I stomped out to the car, somehow managed to get it on the street in front of our house, and just did it. The only way I was going to learn was to do it. To try. To make mistakes, for sure. But experiencing the manual transmission what with the clutch-work and shifting was the only way I was going to learn. Not by talking about it till we were red in the face.

Living with my parents most days now as we wait to sell our house in Petawawa brings back many memories of growing up and learning new things in my youth.

Today is Trinity Sunday. I congratulate you for having the courage to come to church on Trinity Sunday. Because preachers are usually anxious about what to teach about the Holy Trinity; this is not an easy topic to explain.

Boiled down: We worship a God who self-discloses as three persons in one God. Beyond saying this, I believe we would be lost and get frustrated if all we did was acknowledge the Trinity as we do each time we confess our faith using the words of one of the traditional Creeds of Christianity. If left only to doctrinal abstractions and statements of belief, we would go in circles and play mind games with one another. Our questions could keep us perpetually stuck.

At some point the only thing left to do is just experience God. The Trinity exposes if anything the nature and function of our relational God. In other words the only way to learn about God is to enter into a relationship with God. To quote Henri Nouwen, “life [and God, I would add] is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be entered into.” (From his book Seeds of Hope in the chapter on “Presence and Absence”)

And what do we learn about this God we experience? Well, let’s begin by characterizing the way God self-relates and by implication how Christians are called upon to relate with one another.

For starters: We are not God and God is not us. There is this basic differentiation. I think life experiences teach us that no matter how hard we try or how far we progress or how good our technology or knowledge increases – we are not nor never can be God. There is a limit to our humanity. There are boundaries to be respected. To deny this is foolish. God is quite simply, beyond anything we humans on earth can ever be or imagine.

While the distinction is firm, that does not mean God is not in us, with us, around us in the fabric of creation. Using hefty theological language: God is immanent as well as transcendent. Our life reveals this both/and aspect of relationship with God. It IS a mystery to be entered, not solved nor explained with words alone.

The Trinity challenges us to be together while also being separate.

For example, I have related all my life with an identical twin brother – David. David and I have had to work very hard, especially in our youth, asserting our differences more so than our similarities. At one point our friends seemed to get the “how-similar-we-were” part more than our individualities.

I think in loving relationships, like marriage, we get the “together” part well. And certainly in healthy marriages there needs to be that sense of emotional connection and a desire to be together – to be sure.

But how do healthy relationships also exhibit a separateness, which is equally important? And Godly. Let there be spaces in our togetherness. Don’t blur relational boundaries. Don’t become enmeshed with another so much that individualities are denied, ignored, suppressed. Kahlil Gibran, who wrote the book “The Prophet”, is often quoted at weddings. He wrote this famous poem On Marriage:

Let there be spaces in your togetherness /And let the winds of the heavens dance between you … /Love one another but make not a [smothering] of love; /Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls … /Stand together yet not too near together …

By respecting our separateness we discover our unity. Unity is paradoxical. Because only by accepting our inherent diversity will we truly be able to celebrate our unity in the triune God. We sometimes, I think, assume that for the church to be unified we need to conform one to another. We have to be same-minded. We need to be uniform and march together in lock-step to the same tune on all doctrinal and liturgical issues.

But our differences are as important if not more in experiencing organizational health. Our unity is strengthened in Christ Jesus when, like a body, the parts are free to function as they are meant and not coerced or forced into some conforming imposition.

The one aspect of the famous David and Goliath story from the bible I love occurs when King Saul expects that the only way little shepherd boy David can defeat the giant Philistine warrior is by putting on all the armor trappings of a typical Israelite soldier. But David, thankfully, is able to recognize his own giftedness and shed the uniform and use the simple gifts given to him – some stones and a sling.

Healthy, relational love is not expressed just in warm fuzzies/feel good, go-along-to-get-along ways. But also needed is some tough love; that is, asserting one’s own wants and needs even if it might upset someone else that you love and care for.

When emotional distance is established in any relationship, when clarifying your stance, taking a stand, taking responsibility for your needs flavors the nature of the relationship, there will be health and healing. Thank God Martin Luther had the guts to stand up over 500 years ago and clarify his stance when he said, “Here I stand.” Those three words set a religious world in motion for centuries to come.

I quoted Dutch priest Henri Nouwen at the beginning of my sermon; Henri Nouwen lived a large portion of his life as pastor caring for the intelligently disabled people at L’Arche Daybreak Community inTorontosome decades ago. He wrote several books about the Christian life, spirituality and ministry before dying in the mid-90’s. He has been, for me, a mentor through his written word.

He writes often about the importance of a balance between a ministry of presence AND absence. While being present constitutes much of pastoral care work, he argues for the importance of also being absent. In other words, not always being with, but being apart from the one for whom you care.

God entered into intimacy with us not only by Christ’s coming but also by his leaving – in his dying an earthly death, in the ascension. In fact, the Gospels show that on the Cross where God’s absence was most loudly expressed by Jesus when he cried, “My God, My God, why have you deserted me…” (Psalm 22:1-15) God’s presence was then most profoundly revealed. When God through the humanity of Jesus freely chose to share our most painful experience of divine absence, then God became most present to us, in the Spirit our Comforter. Without a separateness in the relationship, we would not know God’s profound presence.

Thank God for the Trinity! In relating to a triune God we learn first hand in our life’s experience what it means in relationship to be both together and separate in holy love.

Amen.

Trinity Sunday – The End of Days?

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Matthew 28:20 “…. I will be with you to the end of the age ….”

We come now to the end of things.

It’s the end of a school year. It’s the end of many church programs. On this Trinity Sunday we read the end of the Gospel of Matthew, the last words of Jesus. You may remember recently some zealous Christians, among them Harold Camping, were touting May 21, 2011 as the end of days. And others still look to next December 2012 as the end of time.

We are a people consumed with thoughts of things coming to an end — even to catastrophic proportions.

Why is that? Perhaps a simple answer is: Understandably, as we age we cannot deny the reality of our mortality. We begin in earnest to reflect on and come to terms with the end of ourselves.

But do our thoughts of “end times” simmer over the cauldron of fear? I suspect our curiosity about the end is often tied to a fear of the unknown, fear of suffering, fear of something going horribly wrong, out of our control. Fear of something.

And, I suspect the cloak of fear surrounds the popular theology about most religious speculations concerning the end of days. Some call it the Rapture. Some call it Judgement Day. Most Christians call it the Second Coming of Christ.

This theology of the Rapture began with a British preacher in the 19th century, John Nelson Darby. Darby used what Lutheran New Testament professor at the Chicago School of Theology, Barbara Rossing, calls “pick-and-choose literalism”; that is, taking a verse from 1 Thessalonians about us flying up into the air to meet Jesus, and a verse from Matthew where two people are working in the field, and one is taken, another left behind, and a verse from Daniel 9 coupled with some violent imagery from Revelation — put those together and you have this belief that Christ doesn’t just return once at his second coming– there are actually two second comings divided by a seven-year period of tribulation inbetween. And you are either a pre-tribulation believer, or a post-tribulation believer — and fundamentalist churches are divided over this rapture belief — you are either pre-trib, post-trib, or as some joke: pan-trib — believing it’ll all pan out in the end!

And then, we become pre-occupied by that question in our lives: What happens next? About death — what happens after we die? At the end of it … what happens next?

If fear is the dominant emotion attributed to our beliefs — whatever they are — let me suggest we need to put that belief under the microcope and examine its validity and truth. Why? Because if the underlying and constant state of the heart is fearful — then there is no room for faith, for trust, for hope, and for love. And if our lives don’t demonstrate these higher spiritual qualities, but only fear — then what does that say about our faith?

I agree with Barbara Rossing who debunks the popular notion of the “Rapture” — a term not even mentioned in the Bible. She relates a story of some children raised with this belief who when they come home from school are overcome with fear upon finding their parents absent. They are worried that their parents have been “raptured” and taken up to heaven. And, they are traumatized that they have now been left behind.

The danger of Darby’s rapture theology, for one thing, is that it prescribes certain world events must take place for Christ to return. It prescribes what is necessary, what is requisite, in order for Jesus to come back to earth — such as the third temple being built in Jerusalem, and agreements between world leaders in Israel, Russia, and America. Consequently it encourages some radical Christians to take action to precipitate these contrived world events so Jesus can come back. And to top it all — these scenarios are incredibly violent in nature.

Does this theology accurately describe what God wants for our future? Does God want for us to live in perpetual fear? Does God want for us to live out our lives on earth under a tyranny of anxiety and trepidation looking to violent solutions to God’s will? Certainly, fear plays a role in our development and maturity as people of faith. And yes, there is biblical truth pointing us to the second coming of Jesus. Absolutely.

But essentially God is not a fear-mongering God, but a God of love. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” we are reminded by the author of 1 John 4:18.

The word “trinity”, like “rapture”, is another word not found in the bible. But the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a foundational doctrine for the church of all ages. I would encourage us to reflect more on this doctrine, rather than the rapture, when we consider the end of days.

What does the doctrine of the Holy Trinity tell us about the God we worship today? Many good things. But, fundamentally, it teaches us that God is a relational God — one God in three persons. And so, we understood God, not a solitary entity unto Godself — detached, autonomous and individualistic in expression. Rather, God is a God of mutual relationship.

And so it shouldn’t surprise us to hear Jesus’ last words in Matthew’s Gospel suggesting an ongoing, loving relationship with his disciples to the end of time, even if the future remains somewhat clouded to us. The point is not to figure it out to the last detail how it will all pan out — that is not the goal of biblical study.

Because even persons of faith can’t know exactly how things will pan out in the end. Saint Paul said himself in 1 Cor 13:12 — “Now, we see as in a mirror dimly, but then we shall see face to face ….” when we are united with God in heaven. On earth, we cannot know such things. Imbedded throughout that famous apocalyptic text from Matthew 24 are those words we need to affirm time and time again: “But about that day and hour no one knows …”(v.36), ” … for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming (v.42)” and “… the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour” (v.44).

So, what does happen next? I believe the biblical writers were inspired by God for a reason to do what they did. Because the bible is not a closed canon. The bible is not just stories about what happened a long time ago. The bible is not just a history book, or a legal textbook that we study to satisfy some intellectual pursuits or to make propositional statements about God. The bible is not a code book to decipher, as many pop-fiction books today suggest.

The bible is a living text — a living Word — that invites us in. All the books in the world cannot contain all that can be said about the ongoing relationship between God and people (John 20:30; 21:25). The story of faith, in other words, continues. What happens next?

WE happen next. GOD-with-us happens next, no matter what.

The teachings of Jesus are not the last word. The last word is that there is never a last word with God. In the original Greek, it does not literally say “Remember I am with you to the end of the age” — as the NRSV suggests. Jesus is not to be a memory only.

“Behold!” would be a better translation beginning the last verse of the Gospel of Matthew (Meda A. A. Stamper, Feasting on the Word, Year A Volume 3, eds David Bartlett & Barbara Brown Taylor, p.49). Behold! “I am with you.” The one who is named Immanuel, “God is with us,” before his birth will be with his followers all their days until the close of the age.

Therefore we can be true to the biblical call for us to “remain awake” and “be ready” for the coming Saviour; that is, we can live in trust and hope that even in the most scary, horrific of circumstances, we will not be alone. Even should the heavens crumble and the earth shake and the tempest of life unerve us, we are infinitely lovable and infinitely loved in relationship with God, with creation and with one another.

Martin Luther had one of the best responses to the question about the end of days: He said that if he knew for sure the end of the world was coming tomorrow, he would still go outside and plant an apple tree today. This is a statement that reflects abiding hope and abiding truth: Facing the direst of situations, we are called to act, as we are able, in promoting hope, promoting good, promoting love, promoting life, promoting relationships guided by the good news of salvation in Christ Jesus. Now this is what a life of faith, hope and love is all about.

What endures is not fear, but love. Therefore, may we live our end of days as ambassadors of God’s grace, God’s light, in a darkened world hell-bent on violence, destruction and hatred. Let us go forward in faithful, loving, and trusting relationship with the Triune God. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.