God of the Storm (Proper 7B)

God of the Storm
24 June 2012 Fourth Sunday after Pentecost – Proper 7B
Homily Preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. Spoken Mass; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Job 38:1-11, 16-18; Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32; 2 Corinthians 6:1-134-21; Mark 4:35-41

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Several years ago while living in French-speaking West Africa, I had a brilliant idea that I wanted to take my sons deep sea fishing.  I asked about finding what we call in the United States a “head boat” or renting a charter.  A clerk who worked for me at the U.S. Embassy arranged the rental of a small launch and gave me directions to arrive at the commercial fishing port early on the next Saturday morning where he would introduce us to the boatmen, who had “guaranteed” a heavy catch of large sports fish.  We went fishing that day, but, long story short, had a very long, exhausting, and frightening—even terrifying—day.  The boat was not the launch we had expected, but a small dugout canoe with a small outboard motor.  Various voodoo deities of the ocean were beautifully carved on its prow, provoking the clerk to announce solemnly that this was a positive sign that the boat was perfectly safe and that we would be protected by the local deities as we fished in a more traditional way than he and I had expected.  The boatmen were two local fishermen who spoke no known language, leastwise one known to any European, Asian, and American, or even to any African who came from further than 25 kilometers from their home village.     We caught no fish, and got our lines fouled on an off-shore oil drilling platform.  We lost power and drifted into Nigerian waters that were the haunts of pirates and very brutal thugs.  When through what seemed a miracle the engine returned to service, we started back to port, but then the seas rose and a storm approached.  We were tossed by 15 foot waves in our 12 foot canoe with it pitiful 8 inches of freeboard.  Soaked to the bone, skin blue and teeth chattering with cold, though this was in the tropics, we returned to port hours late, thankful to be alive.  I fortunately had remembered to bring life preservers, though there were shark fins visible in the water.   My sons with me that day have never forgotten the day, and still on occasion tease me for almost having gotten them kidnapped by pirates, bringing them low to a watery grave, or feeding them to sharks.

Going onto the waters in a boat has always been the source of awe and fear for human beings, and sailors always thought to be particularly brave or absolutely foolish.   We are just too vulnerable when out on the water in a storm.  The Breton fisherman’s prayer, otherwise ascribed to St. Brendan the navigator who sailed in a small coracle probably about the size of our voodoo canoe, expresses the idea well, “Protect me, Lord.  Your sea is so great and my boat is so small.” 

The story of Jesus calming the storm is more than just a recitation of a miraculous act of Jesus that demonstrates his authority. It is a story underscoring that Jesus is compassionate, and wholly worthy of trust and being relied on when we are in trouble.

Those who told the first stories about Jesus calming the storm that later turn up in our gospels almost certainly had in mind the description of the God who calls the storms and then calms them which we recited today from Psalm 107. In Churches and parishes in port towns and in military chaplaincies for the Navy, we often hear the section of this Psalm that we recited today, the part about “those who go down to the sea in ships.”

But what is interesting to me is this—Psalm 107 is not just about sailors. It has several different sections describing people in many different extreme situations, where they need to rely on God. The whole Psalm could be entitled, “God, the Savior of People in Distress.”

Part (vv. 4-9) talks about people who get lost in the desert and run out of water. God there leads them back to an oasis.

Another part (vv. 10-16) describes prisoners in a dark dungeon. God leads them from darkness to light, from bondage to freedom.

Yet another (vv. 17-22) talks about people suffering from horrible illness, as the Psalmist says, “because of their wicked ways.” They are near the gates of death because they cannot eat food anymore, because it has become so distasteful to them in their illness. One wonders whether whether the Psalmist has venereal disease, alcoholism or drug addiction, or some other ailment in mind, but the bit about not wanting to eat any nourishing food brings all these to mind. In the Psalmist's era, people thought disease came as punishment from God rather than from infection microbes. God heals these people when they call on him.
 

Finally, we see the part about those who go out upon the sea and get caught in a storm (vv. 23-32). Again, God calms the storm when they call on him. The psalm ends (vv. 33-41) by saying that God can change a river into a desert, and rich springs into dusty and arid ground. He can turn fruitful land into a salt marsh, and a desert into pools of water. The point is that God is a reliable savior in any hardship.

So the next time we hear the story about Jesus calming the storm, let’s not just think about Jesus helping mariners only.

Think about the drug addicts and alcoholics who have been helped by Jesus when they call upon him and surrender to him. And that, whatever name they might use to call Jesus, or image they might have of their “higher power.”

Think about the physically ill who have found healing and comfort in Jesus.

Think about how his message can help those lost in mental illness, or harmful ego.

Think about the poor that Jesus calls us to serve and assist.

Think about how he helps those lost in sin and self-deception, ourselves included, and lost in exploitation and deception of others.

“Master, don’t you care that we are perishing?” the disciples in the boat cry when they find him sleeping in the storm.

Before replying, Jesus calms the storm. Then he asks, “Why are you terrified? Where’s your trust in God? Where’s your faith?”

When I heard this story as a young boy, I heard this line and thought that Jesus here was condemning the disciples. "Oh ye of little faith." "If only you had faith, Peter, you could not only walk on water but also calm the sea itself." "If you have faith the size of a tiny mustard seed, you could not only move mountains, but calm the oceans too." All this conspired to make me want to say, "I'm unworthy, unworthy."

But that is not what the story is trying to say. Remember that this is the Jesus who spent his days with drunkards and prostitutes, and when criticized for this replied, "sick people need a doctor, not healthy ones." It is the same Jesus who told the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector.

The point is this--if we are forced by our circumstances to think we need God, then we should realize that it is God that we are in need of. God is trustworthy. God, in the idea of the Psalm we chanted today, is the savior of all in distress. Relying on God leaves little room for fear. Regardless of how things turn out, we know that, in the words of the prayer, God "is doing for us more that we can ask or imagine."

That's why Jesus calms the sea before he asks his disciples why they were afraid. He sympathizes and understands them, but wants to turn their rough fear and general sense of needing into a directed desire for the help of the One who is wholly trustworthy.

Jesus cares, and can help. We need to trust him.

Let us pray. 

Saving God,

entering the flood and storm

of chaos and confusion:

speak peace to our fearful hearts

that we might find our faith

in him whose word

brings rest to all creation;

through Jesus Christ, Lord of wind and wave.

Amen.

(Steven Shakespeare, Prayers for an Inclusive Church, pg.63)

The Sprouting Seed (Proper 6B)

The Sprouting Seed
Second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 6)
17th June 2012
Homily Preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. Spoken Mass; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Ezekiel 17:22-end; Psalm 92:1-4, 11-14; 2 Cor 5:6-10, 14-17; Mark 4:26-34

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

What would the world look like if everything were as it ought to be?  What would it be like if God were truly in charge, right here, right now, of everything?   And the way from here to there—from this messed up worlds where things are not what they ought to be, to one where things are right—what does that process look like?  Is it a political revolution or social disaster? A gradual growth in good trends?  Or simply growth in personal piety and righteousness?  Maybe the growing strength of an institution like the Church? 

How do we get from here to there?  God’s reign—God fully in charge, right here and now—how does that happen?  This is a question that Jesus regularly asked himself, and which became the core of his teaching. 

Mark says that Jesus’ message was a joyful proclamation of the arrival of God to reign in power.  “The time has come.  … God’s kingship has come near. Change your ways and believe the happy news!” (Mark 1:14-15).  

To understand what this means, we need to look a little at the history of the times when Jesus lived.

Jesus lived at a time of world empire. He grew up in Galilee, a minor client state on the fringes of the Roman Empire. Rome had conquered, bought, and otherwise swallowed up all the world known to people living around the Mediterranean. But the Pax Romana, like every “world order” put in into place by force, was largely a creation of the state’s propaganda machine: the leader of a nation about to swallowed up by Rome, is famously reported to have said, “You crucify or enslave whole populations, burn their cities and leave smoldering ruins in their place, and then use the word “peace” to describe the burned-out desert you leave behind.” The state spin-doctors would say again and again that the Emperor was God’s son, and that the Empire was the order and peace intended by the Gods. Like our world today, this was a place where might seemed to make right, and where money and power seemed to count for everything.

Judas Maccabee

One of the peoples thus subjugated by Rome was Jesus’ own, the Jews. Just a century and a half before, they had hoped dearly for deliverance from all their foes and the establishment of God’s just and right kingdom. Judas Maccabee and his army threw off the harsh oppression of the Greek Seleucid kings left behind by Alexander the Great. The Book of Daniel, written at that time, had predicted that the Maccabees and their state would grow and grow, like a rock from the mountains cut out without hands, until it would fill the whole world and smash all systems of oppression and wrong. But that effort had gone seriously wrong. The Maccabees themselves became tyrannical, their rule oppressive and harsh, and their religious establishment hopelessly corrupt. The Temple itself became as much a symbol of oppressive taxes and impossible rules as of God’s presence on earth. Members of the Temple establishment, called Sadducees during Jesus’ time, became quickly the quisling darlings of the Romans. What Daniel had hoped would be the kingdom of God had become just another petty and corrupt oligarchy with a compromised religion and horrendous rulers.

 

Some Jews fled the Maccabean establishment and went into the Judean wilderness, seeking to “prepare in the desert” a way for God’s true kingdom. They called themselves the “sons of Zadok” or the “sons of Light,” and advocated a separation of true believers from the rest of the world, whom they called “the sons of darkness,” and believed they would one day destroy them in a great war for God’s kingdom, together with the evil “Kittim,” or Romans. They are the ones who wrote and left what are now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jewish historian Josephus called them Essenes.

Others reacted to the collapse of political independence with the arrival of the Romans and to the clearly compromised credibility of the Temple authorities by calling for more and more rigorous study and application of the Law of Moses, and for greater and greater distinctions between Jews and non-Jews. We call these people the Pharisees, and it is from them that all modern Judaisms trace their teaching.

Others reacted to the political subjugation of the Jews by the Romans by calling for military rebellion. According to Josephus, a Galilean named Judas led a major revolt against Rome around A.D. 5 in reaction to a tax increase.  The Romans crushed the revolt, and then crucified thousands of the defeated Jewish soldiers. A few surviving guerillas fought on as bandits and terrorists. They are called the Zealots, and were later to lead another revolt from Rome that would bring an end to the Temple, ancient Jerusalem, and most Jewish life in Palestine.

All of these groups in their different ways were trying to answer the question “the Reign of God—what does it look like and how will it come?” The Saduccees and Hasmoneans argued that the world as it ought to be was one fully compromised with the Imperial Power, and in which money, prestige, and control of the religious rites brought order.  The Dead Seas Scrolls covenanters argued that the world as it ought to be was one where their kooky sectarian religion had conquered all others by force of arms in apocalyptic struggle.  The Zealots thought the kingdom of God would come through force of arms.  The Pharisees taught it would come through personal piety, scripture study and prayer, and following God’s commandments.

When Jesus first began to preach publicly, it caused quite a stir. People were excited. Here was a prophet from the backwards part of Palestine, Galilee, declaring that God was beginning to act to establish his kingdom. “God’s kingship has come near, and is in your midst.”  He quoted Isaiah, saying the time had come to declare liberation to the captive, freedom to the prisoner, and sight to the blind. And when he began to heal people as part of his message that God’s kingdom had arrived, they really started to flock to see him and hear him. Would he overthrow the Romans? Would he thrown out the corrupt priests from the Temple? Or would he just cause a stir and get himself and his followers killed in the process? And then, of course, people started to ask him how the Kingdom of God could have come already when the rule of evil, and of the Evil Empire, was still all too evident. How could Jesus possibly mistake his pathetic little gatherings for sermons and healings with the overthrow of evil and the great and terrible Day of Judgment promised by the prophets?

Jesus told stories from everyday life as a means of letting people know about what he thought about these questions.  Many of his parables begin with the words, “The kingdom of God (or, in Matthew, “of heaven”) is like…” 

What would it be like if God were truly in charge, right here, right now?  Jesus’ parables answer this question.  They are directly opposed to the answers of all those other groups around him.   They usually grab you and throw you for a loop—demand a change of perspectives and overthrow conventional expectations, politics, and religion.

Today’s Gospel from Mark has two parables using garden images: the seed growing on its own and the mustard plant. 

 

God coming here and now, fully in charge—It’s like a mustard plant:  a tiny seed that produces a huge plant. Most people think it is a weed and not a cultivated crop.  It grows in unusual places, unplanned, apart from human control.  If it is noticed, it is unwelcome.  If it is some place no one cares about, then it can go wild.  It then will grow really big, though it will never be what you call “mighty.”  It does not measure up to the usual images for God’s kingdom—vineyards, olive trees, or the great cedar tree, which in the passage we read this morning form Ezekiel shelters the wild birds in its branches.  For Jesus, the kingdom is the mustard weed.

God coming here and now, fully in charge—It’s like a growing seed: it sprouts and grows all on its own regardless of whether the person who planted it knows that it grows or understands why it grows.  Jesus says that God’s kingdom comes mainly through God’s action. God will ultimately set things right, and settle accounts, but that is not yet now, he says.

The kingdom, however, is already here, at work, he says. It is like a seed that sprouts and grows on its own, no matter whether see are aware of it, or understand how.

The kingdom won’t come through force of arms. The kingdom will not come merely through human acts. But it will come. It will come. Regardless of how bad things are, how much the evil triumph and the righteous suffer, how overwhelming the imperial power seems to be or how corrupt the religious establishment is, it will come. God actually is in charge, and God’s reign is here and now. And its full manifestation will come. Trusting in God means not worrying that it will, because it will.  It is like a seed growing on its own.

People around Jesus had all sorts of ways to excuse God for not acting, or to try to force God to act, or to act in God’s stead. Jesus focuses on the core issue, the trustworthiness of God. That seed will sprout regardless of us, and will result in something so surprising and so huge that the whole world can shelter in it.

We need to trust in God. We cannot let our impatience get in the way of this trust. We cannot let our laziness get in the way of this trust. We cannot let our pride and desire to control things and have them our way get in the way. We need to surrender to God, and know, in the words of the prayer, that he is doing for us more than we can ask or imagine. That doesn’t mean we are off the hook and don’t have to do anything. But it means the first thing we have to do is trust and realize it is God at work, not us. We have to let God change us and move us to do the works of his kingdom. But again, the seed sprouts and grows on its own. We simply need to let go and let God. We need to get our will and ego out of the way, and let God do his surprising, wonderful thing.

In the name of God, Amen. 

An Eternal Weight of Glory (Proper 5B)

An Eternal Weight of Glory
10 June 2012 Second Sunday after Pentecost – Proper 5B

Homily Preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. Spoken Mass; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Genesis 3:8-15; Psalm 130; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-25

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

These last two weeks, the last week of May and the first week of June, have been very hard for me for many years.  In 1989, I had just arrived in Beijing China as a new Cultural Affairs Officer, and I was there in the last heady days of the democracy demonstrations on Tian’anmen Square and through the bloody military crackdown and political suppression that followed.   I was particularly unlucky as a foreign diplomat for being in the wrong place at the wrong time on a couple of occasions, and I saw things that people should never have to see.   I was haunted for years, particularly during those two weeks, by vivid nightmares that made me afraid to go asleep.  One of the common manifestations of Post-tramautic Stress Disorder is depression, and I suffered from it for years.   Bad sleep, followed by an inability to get up in the morning, disrupted eating patterns, a loss of the joy in life, and a general alienation of feelings and shutting down of emotional life and the disruption in human relations that come from this—all these and more are symptoms of the horrible demon that is depression.  Thanks to a very loving wife, some kind and wise talk therapists, some great exercise trainers, support groups, and newer anti-depressant medicines that came onto the market in the 1990s, I was able to finally overcome the depression.  When we moved back to Beijing in 2009, and we went into the feared two week period in 2010, I slept soundly and without nightmares.  This last week, I had one slightly vivid dream including scenes from that terrible time 23 years ago, but this was not drenched with the dread, horror, and nausea of a full-bore nightmare.  My own pain associated with those events is minor compared with the Chinese people who died, lost family members, were seriously injured, or simply loss hope.  I feel very blessed to be over the depression, and remember those who suffered so in my prayers.     

All of us have burdens and painful experiences.  As we age, lose our vitality and health, and come closer to our own deaths, the weight of such burdens can grow.

Many people feel guilty at suffering from deep depression or hopelessness.  Having heard somewhere that “despair is a sin,” they tend to look on depression, feelings of helplessness or hopelessness, and even acute mourning and sorrow like homesickness or nostalgia as if they were character flaws, sins, or at the least the result of a disturbing lack of faith or trust in God.  We must not do this.  It is not only untrue, but deeply damages our ability to do what is necessary to come out of depression. 

When St. Thomas Aquinas defined “despair” as the gravest of sins (Summa Theologica, Part I, I.20.3), he was talking about the willful choice of denying God’s effective grace and love, including a suite of acts of moral dissolution rooted in such a denial. Few think his discussion applies to the emotional state we call depression.  Significantly, he cites St. Isidore, who says that where committing an evil act may incur God’s wrath, despair is falling into the pains of Hell itself.   

Most modern psychologists and pastoral counselors agree that emotions are things we experience, and that it is all right to have the whole range of emotions.  What matters, and where our moral responsibility comes in, is not what emotions we experience, but in what we do with our emotions. 

Those of us who pray the Book of Psalms on a daily basis, understand very quickly that the whole range of human emotion is found there, from the sublime heights of thankfulness and exultation at the beauty of God to the depraved depths of rage, anger, and vengeance.  Their presence in the Psalter teaches us it is alright to have the whole range of human feelings.  We are only human, after all, and accepting who we are and what God made us means accepting our human condition and emotions.  But again, the key is what we make of them, and how we act or do not act on them. 

St. Paul, in today’s epistle, writes the following,

“So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer selves are withering away, our inner selves are being renewed each and every day. For our current bit of suffering—so insubstantial a burden as to be almost nothing—is kindling in us a light glorious and substantial beyond any possible comparison, because we are looking not at what is before our eyes, but at what is hidden from our eyes; for what can be seen passes quickly away, but what cannot be seen lasts forever”  (2 Cor. 4:16-17).

Paul ’s teaching here at first glance seems to disparage the world in which we live, the world before our eyes.  Remember that when God made the world, God saw it and said it was good indeed.  Elsewhere, Paul very clear that he sees plenty of evidences in the world of God’s good intention and love in the world.  What Paul is talking about in today’s passage is how things seem when we are suffering from some ill and unable to see any good before our eyes. 

He says that what keeps us going in such straits is the vision we have inside our hearts of the important things.   Recognizing that all human life ends in sickness and death, he uses a commonplace from Stoic philosophy: the world is changing and reliably unreliable.  What really matters by contrast—the true, the beautiful, and the good—is unchanging.  It is the vision of this in our hearts and minds, he says, that saves us from “losing heart.”

The word Paul uses for “losing heart” literally means “being beaten down by bad things.”    He contrasts our sufferings, changeable and limited in time, with the unchanging timelessness of the Shining Brilliance around the person of God.  This brilliance is the glory of God, in Hebrew, kavod, or substantial heaviness.  Paul says that our “momentary” sufferings are very light and insubstantial by comparison with this “weight of glory” around God, a timeless beauty that our sufferings actually are creating in us, unseen.  He says that the substantiality of God’s light is literally a “hyperbole beyond all hyperboles,” immeasurable, timeless. 

It is important here to note that Paul is not trying to say that our sufferings are not real or truly bad.  And he is not saying the world is simply bad and needs to be ignored.  He is contrasting how things now appear with how things actually are and will be.

For Paul, the hidden “eternal weight of glory” or “timeless mass of Light” currently being created in us is actually the real thing, while our suffering, all too clear before our eyes, is but a dim shadow, an unsubstantial trifle, that is passing away.    The image in our hearts of what God has promised, and what God is already actually accomplishing in us, drives away the demons of hopelessness and helplessness that threaten to beat us down. 

Paul is advising a path of contemplation, of reflection, as a way of driving away despair, of being “renewed every day” so that “we do not lose heart.”

My father used to sing a popular song from his youth, “You’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, watch out for Mr. in-between.”  This is just part of what Paul is trying to say. 

Paul tells us to contemplate the “invisible things” which do not change instead of the “things before our eyes” that do. 

His argument parallels Saint-Exupery’s belief that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”   

In order to break out of hopelessness, you have to change the dialog going on inside your head.  The dialog inside a depressed person’s head is an argument that he or she can only lose.  Talking of constitutional melancholy, Samuel Johnson observed, “A man so afflicted, Sir, must divert distressing thoughts, and not combat with them”  (Boswell’s Life of Johnson). 

It might be as simple as finding memories, stories, or images that embolden and inspire us.  In Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chief Bromden finds his release and freedom simply through continued memory of McMurphy’s bravery, as badly as that turned out.

For Paul, the ultimate reassuring image is that of God’s love and ultimate triumph over what is wrong with the world.  That is why he dwells so much on  “Christ, Christ on the Cross” and the Risen Lord.  It is why he talks so much about God’s loving promises. 

In the words of two African-American freedom songs, one a Spiritual and the other a Work Song, Paul wants us to “keep our eyes on the prize,” and our “hands on the plough.”  He wants us to “hold on, hold on.” 

Friends, occasional feelings of hopelessness and helplessness are part of being human.  Depression is something that most of us can expect to experience at one time or another.  You don’t have to be alone.  Just as sharing joys with another seem to double our happiness, sharing sorrows with another seems to lighten them. If you are truly depressed, you may need to see a physician or counselor.  The medications now available can help put a bottom in your sinking boat so that you can begin the hard work of bailing the water out.  If you ever start thinking about doing harm to yourself or others, you need immediately to talk to a professional for help.

For most of us, simply worn down by life and its sorrows, it may not be as dramatic as that.  But we must not resign ourselves to being beaten down, and we must not, in Paul’s words, “lose heart.”  The actor Tom Bosley (the guy who played Richie’s father on Happy Days) said, “Many people think that depression is something you just have to live with when you get older, but it’s not.”

We too need to talk and share.  And we need to contemplate the glorious good things of God, not present before our everyday eyes, beaten down as we are. 

In the coming week, I want each of us to be sure to take time each day to simply sit in quiet for a few minutes and thankfully reflect on God’s beauty—in the natural world around us, in the lives and examples of good people whose stories we have heard or whom we have known, in the sacred stories we tell each other, and in the glorious promises given those who trust in God.  Simply reflect, contemplate.  Don’t let the committee inside your head start discussing matters, good or ill.  Just sit and look on.  See with your heart, not your eyes.  And as you do, feel the weight of that glory growing, feel the warmth of that great light burning brighter, and the burden of your pain getting lighter. 

In the name of God, Amen.

Cloud not of Knowing, but of Loving (Mid-week Message)

The Cloud not of Knowing, but of Loving

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

June 6, 2012

I have heard it said several times by different people that many of our people at Trinity come “because of the fellowship, not because of their faith.”  Usually, this is said by way of praising the warm welcoming spirit of our congregation, while perhaps slightly censuring those who come to Church to be with others they love and are loved by rather than out of a fervent support of a system of belief. 

The English mystics saw things in a different light.  Thomas Merton wrote of this group, “they have a charm and simplicity that are unequaled with any other school. … quite clear, down to earth, and practical, even when they are concerned with the loftiest of matters.”   For most of them, the friendship and warmth of human relations within the Church is a primary sign and means of God’s love and work in the world. 

 The Cloud of Unknowing is a fourteenth century mystic work written in Middle English that addresses its reader as “friend in Christ.”  It says the following:

         “Now all rational creatures, angels and human beings alike, have in them, each one individually, one chief working power, which is called the knowing power, and another chief working power called the loving power.  Of these two powers, God who is the maker of them, is always incomprehensible to the first, the knowing power.  But to the second, the loving power, God is entirely comprehensible in each one individually, in so much that one loving soul of itself, because of love, would be able to comprehend the One who is entirely sufficient, and much more so, without limit, to fill all souls—human and angel—that could ever exist. This is the everlasting wonderful miracle of love which shall never have an end.” 

Simply enjoying the fellowship we have with each other, showing our love through service, and simply being present for each other is a key way that God works through us and in us.  Experiencing it, contemplating it, and practicing it bring us closer and more directly to the knowledge and love of God than affirmations or working up some kind of internal mental state where we ignore our doubts and fears, deny who we are, in order to be “orthodox” or “faithful” or feel that we have done the necessary for God to pay us with his blessings.  Love comes unbidden, and so does grace and faith.  By living into our fellowship and being present with our “friends in Christ,” we can get nearer and nearer to the Love that made us. 

--Fr. Tony+   

Three in One (Trinity Sunday B)

Three in One
3 June 2012 Trinity Sunday (First Sunday after Pentecost) (Year B)

Homily Preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. Spoken Mass; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29 and Canticle 13; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

This feast day celebrates an abstract and difficult-to-understand doctrine, but that nonetheless is central. Few of us can get our minds, let around our hearts, around it.

Part of the problem is that talking about God in doctrinal terms, in third person terms, is almost antithetical to how we must experience God in faith, in second person, I-thou terms.  The problem has been expressed well by Kilian McDonnell in her poem, “God is Not A Problem”:

God is not a problem
I need to solve, not an
algebraic, polynomial equation
I find complete before me,

with positive and negative numbers
I can add, subtract, multiply.
God is not a fortress
I can lay siege to and reduce.

God is not a confusion
I can place in order by my logic.
God's boundaries cannot be set,
like marking trees to fell.

God is the presence in which
I live, where the line between
what is me and what
before me is real, but only God

can draw it. God is the mystery
I meet on the street, but cannot
lay ahold of from the outside
for God is my situation,

the condition I cannot stand
beyond, cannot view from a distance,
the presence I cannot make an object,
only enter on my knees

Every week we recite the Nicene Creed to express our Trinitarian faith. But many of us still hear such words as “the Father,” “the Son,” “begotten,” “from” (as in “God from God”), and “came down from heaven” literally. So we tend to understand it in a way that places the Father as number one, the Son as number two, and the Spirit as a distant and somewhat ambiguous number three.

This understanding is precisely what the creed was trying to correct when it was promulgated by the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325, and when it was edited by the Council of Constantinople in A.D. 381.

This mis-reading has to overlook key phrases: “eternally begotten of the Father,” “begotten, not made,” and “through whom all things were made.” People who think that “begotten” somehow refers to the birth of Jesus in history miss the point. The creed sees this “begetting” as something that occurred “from before all worlds,” or, more correctly, as a timeless event that occurs apart and outside of the space and time of the created universe. If God created time, then past, present, and future are frames seen from our perspective within creation, not from God’s perspective as creator.

I was raised in a non-Trinitarian tradition. I realized in college that I believed the Nicene Creed. This is what led me ultimately to Anglicanism. So here are a few thoughts about the doctrine of the Trinity from someone who came to the belief honestly.

It is a difficult doctrine. It seeks to describe what is by definition beyond our experience, our language, and our cognitive range.

The first impression you have when reading the creed is that it must have been the product of a committee. Contradictory phrases stand side by side, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. “There is only one God” vs. “Jesus Christ is God too, and so is the Holy Spirit.” Jewish monotheism seems to have been undermined by a Gentile tendency to deify great historical figures.

The ugly side of story behind the creed doesn’t help—the story of the Arian-Athanasian controversy. Christians killed other Christians in street rioting that exploded intermittently over a 200 year period. Wanting peace, Emperors insisted that there be a single doctrine. They called Church Councils to fix the problem, and then later ordered them to adopt specific solutions. The councils themselves were marred by behavior we don’t like to think of as appropriate for discerning the will of God: opposition bishops were prevented by trickery and by force from attending or voting. On occasion, a minority on both sides used entrapment, blackmail, and character assassination against each other. When the compromise language drawn up by the councils did not resolve the problem, but only encouraged more controversy, Christian princes on either side of the argument actually fought wars with each other. The whole thing makes the current disharmony within the Anglican Communion look like an amicable afternoon tea.

The politics of Church Councils and the promulgation of the Creed did not resolve the controversy. What resolved it was further theological reflection that made many of the specific arguments seem irrelevant. Great scholars and mystics of the Eastern Church—the Cappadocian Fathers Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianus—working on the basis of the creeds, scripture, and deep reflection in a comprehensive program of spiritual direction and prayer, expressed a new phrasing and understanding for what Christians had been praying, living, and reading in their scriptures.

They used the image of the three-in-one and one-in-three character of God, which they expressed with the Greek word trias (three-ness, or trinity). Before the Cappadocians clearly phrased the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, both sides of the controversy would merely quote scriptures at each other that they thought proved their own position. The Fathers showed that these contrary elements of scripture were actually describing varying elements of a greater mystery, something beyond our experience and understanding.

This new fusion of older materials, which the larger Church rapidly recognized as its true faith, included several elements.

Personhood is not the same as being. The fathers taught that God is one being in three persons, and three persons in one being. For us human beings, there is a correspondence between person and being: one person is one being, and that is that. So we assume that they are the same thing. But the Fathers were clear—we are made in God’s image, but God is the original, and we are the pale imitation. In God, there is no correspondence of person and being.

God is more than personal, not less. People today often will say something like, “I believe in God, just not in a personal God.” If you ask them what they mean, they generally say that they don’t think the mystery and wonder and purpose behind life and the universe that they feel at an emotional level can be reduced to the limitations of what we usually think of as a person. But because they have automatically tied the concept of personhood to that limitation, what I think they actually end up believing in is something less than a person. Something more like a gas, or a light, or another non-sentient object. The fathers, through consistently de-linking the concept of personhood with being, described a God truly personal without limitation. Rather than a gas, they described relationship or society.

“How is it even possible to have ‘person’ and ‘being’ distinct?” Remember we are talking about God, about something beyond all that we know. C.S. Lewis compares us talking about God to a flat-lander living in a two-dimensional world talking about a cube. We ask “how can three persons be one being?” The flat-lander asks, “how can six squares be one shape?” The flatlander cannot conceive of a cube, a solid geometric form whose six sides are each a square, each in its own plane.

God is social. God is love. By describing God as an eternal Holy Trinity of Parent, Child, and Sacred Breath, the Fathers described relationship apart from time. The three in unity have always been that way from our perspective within time. The parent-child relationship is a metaphor of desiring and responding, of willing and obeying, of loving and returning love. This unity of persons is so real that it itself is person. When most people say, “God is love,” they actually mean “love is God.” Saying that God is love, and has always been love is nonsensical unless you believe that within God there is a social relation between persons. Some of the fathers described the relationship as a dance that goes on and on.

Often on Trinity Sunday, we recite a statement of Trinitarian faith, anachronistically called the Athanasian Creed, that states this more explicitly. It was probably written in the fifth century after the Church had digested the teachings of the Cappadocian Fathers

So what does this mean for us? I like to think of the Holy Trinity in terms of God as transcendent, as particular, and as immanent.

God as Parent is the aspect we characterize as the transcendent, impassible, all-mighty. It is God acting across the broad sweep of history or in the national saga of a people identified as God’s. What we are not, this aspect of God is. For the average person’s needs, the Almighty is certainly strong enough to rely on in times of trouble. But on occasion he seems perhaps too inaccessible, maybe not really available. Jesus clearly saw this; his response was to call God “Father,” and to teach his disciples to do the same.

God as Child is the aspect we characterize as particular: it has a human face, and that face is Jesus of Nazareth. And it just isn’t a face of God, a mask. Jesus was a real human being with all the limitations, pains, and weakness that implies (save sin). So God as child is personal, historical, submitted, all-passionate, all-bearing As a historical person who lived and taught as a Jew in Roman-occupied Palestine and suffered a cruel and unfair death for political rebellion, he is perhaps too particular and limited; while loving and compassionate, he is perhaps too weak to rely on. But Easter, resurrection, and ascension fill the gap between “Jesus of Nazareth” and “the second person of the Holy Trinity.”

God as the Breath or spirit that makes us more that we are, is the immanent aspect of God. It is personally and communally available, transforming and sanctifying. Because this is experienced in our hearts, it is perhaps too internal and prone to being mistaken or misused. But its action in the Church, its book (the Holy Bible), sacraments, and social service serves as a corrective to solipsistic spirituality.

Let me close by affirming that I believe in one God. This one true God has revealed God’s self as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, unchanged and unchanging in timeless eternity. The way I know this God most particularly and clearly is in Jesus Christ, whom I experience through the Spirit. I am driven by the spirit to face the Father in prayer, with Jesus at my side encouraging me and modeling the way. God is love, and wants us to join in the dance.

In the name of God, Amen.

Worship and Refreshment (Evelyn Underhill)

 

Worship and Refreshment

Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians 

The Trinitarian Parish Newsletter 

June 2012 

Over the last few weeks, I on several occasions have found myself moved to tears of joy and reverence during the Trinity choir’s singing of an offertory or communion anthem.  The choice of music is so fine, the choral direction so sensitive and informed, and the actual singing done with such heart, that it was difficult not to hear the angels in the rafters.  It has made me wonder if our worship and liturgical practices, as good as they are, match the high standard set by our music ministry or our pastoral care teams’ service. 

June 15 is the commemoration of Evelyn Underhill, Church of England writer on the mystic experience, who died on this day in 1941 at the age of 65.

Hill’s 1911 book,  Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness, did much to rid the study of peak religious experience of the intellectual objectification and relative emotional sterility that had been introduced by William James’ 1901 book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. 

 

In describing worship, she likened a congregation to a tide-pool depleted and wasted at low tide that suddenly revives when the tide turns and the fresh ocean begins to flow in: 

“Many a congregation when it assembles in church must look to the angels like a muddy, puddly shore at low tide; littered with every kind of rubbish and odds and ends - a distressing sort of spectacle. And then the tide of worship comes in, and it's all gone: the dead sea-urchins and jelly-fish, the paper and the empty cans and the nameless bits of rubbish. The cleansing sea flows over the whole lot. So we are released from a narrow, selfish outlook on the universe by a common act of worship. Our little human affairs are reduced to their proper proportion when seen over against the spaceless Majesty and Beauty of God.”

This is not just a matter of being quiet and prayerful in the minutes before worship begins and after it ends.  It is a matter of maintaining a relaxed attentiveness to what we are doing in worship, whether it is reading the scriptures, preaching, saying the Eucharistic prayer together, or actually communing at the altar rail.  It is also a matter of being spiritually open to practices that are beautiful and meaningful to others with whom we worship but that we may find, for many personal reasons, uncomfortable. 

As we move into ordinary time and the season after Pentecost, and as we continue to seek to discern what our congregation here at Trinity does best, and what gives us the deepest joy while identifying how we can make this meet the deepest needs of the community around us, may we notice the refreshment that worship gives us.  And may we in our private and family prayer life continue to pray for growth at Trinity, and attracting more worshippers, including young people and families with children. 

Grace and Peace, 

--Fr. Tony+