God, Experienced

Sermon, 5/30/10 (Trinity Sunday). No one can explain, much less define, a triune God. But we can express and describe and learn from it as a relational model for our spiritual maturity: the “Godhead” as beacon for all human development, from dependence to independence to interdependence …

Scriptures:         Psalm 8        Romans 5:1-5

The Trinity: God, Experienced

We are “a little lower than God”, today’s Psalm informs us . Tom Long is a much-celebrated contemporary preacher. He was reminded one day that he was quite a bit lower than God when his wife – a noted pulpiteer herself – was asked what it was like to live with one of the finest preachers in the English language. She responded, “I wouldn’t know. Ask my husband.”

Would you pray with me? …

Prayer …

Lord of all Love, and God of all Gifts …

We remember that your church was born in wind and fire,

Not to sweep us heavenward like a presumptuous tower,

But to guide us down the dusty roads

So that we may lift up the downcast, heal the broken, bear the load,

And reconcile what is lost

Bringing peace amidst unrest.¹

Now, in this message to come, may we enter into your grace,

That we may feel your grip and glimpse your face –

Yet, a little lower than you ...

     Yet, a little lower than you.   Amen.

According to the great poet Emily Dickinson, we speak the truth best when we speak it "slant". I wonder if the Holy Trinity was far from her thoughts when the Belle of Amherst penned this line? Probably. And yet: Her characterization of truth-telling is good to keep in mind when approaching this mysterious feast of God. The three in one? The one in three?! We must tell it slant – because the direct approach just won't cut it.

Telling it "slant". This is where preachers and teachers of the Good Book suffer from a handicap:  our incurable penchant – not to mention the terrible burden we feel – to explain things.

Women and men who normally would not be caught dead with a prop in the pulpit have been known to show up on Trinity Sunday with, e.g., an egg –three-in-one, shell, white, yoke. Or, there’s the apple in our hands: tree, fruit, seed. Embarrassment is palpable throughout the sanctuary.

If the preacher is seminary fresh, she or he will likely reject such homely analogies, and seriously approach this daunting subject with mini-lectures of early church councils responsible – bad or good – for trinitarian doctrine.  With the graying and mellowing agents of ministry years, however, these same pastors – including yours truly – often cast aside such didactic attempts as futile, and may turn to that egg, or to that apple, or ... well, you name the absurdity.

Why all this explanatory fuss? Because the annual recurrence of Trinity Sunday marks the persistent attempt to make sense of an abstraction that perhaps presents a greater stumbling block, and makes for greater folly than even the Cross. On this particular day, and without anyone wanting such a thing to happen, the mystery of God's own self (a fleeting phrase, it: "God's own self"), the Trinity becomes a puzzle to be solved, an analogy to be analyzed, a formulation to be fetched from afar ... and, through dint of ministerial effort and – yes – ego ... improved upon.²

Ah, may we all learn instead from the poets and the mystics of the ages! May we all learn, indeed, to tell the Trinity slant. Sharing a few – and let there be few – words of wonder that flower with meaning versus funnel in prose.

Not as a problem to be explained, much less solved … but as a mystery to be lived.

The mystery … of God’s Trinitarian model of divine relationship within the Godhead for all our human relationships.

The Trinity as relational model. For all humankind.

God … experienced.

My own particular way of striving to experience, versus explain, a triune God is to engage the divine as a model of human development. We who are fashioned by our Creator – as Psalm 8 puts it today – “a little lower than God”. 

We begin, appropriately enough, with God. The One whose incarnation in Jesus’ birth – Immanuel, “God-with-us” – provides us a model for human dependence at birth and at our early years. No need to get our knickers in a twist over one of the most ancient of theological controversies: Is Christ in God? Or, is Christ from God? Regardless how we frame it, the relationship model for our human experience is what we can know and what we can celebrate. The relational experience of God-in-Creation and God-in-Christ as an infant and as a little child, molding the Play-Doh and constructing the Lincoln Logs of a new and dependent existence between Mother Earth and Son of Man.

God come to earth not as demanding, aloof taskmaster, but as childish, creating, creative wonder: What a concept! No, wait: What a reality! What a relational, developmental God … experienced.

Moving dynamically – versus, I pray, doctrinally – to the experience of Christ in our lives: God’s development – as we imagine it with the aid of our scriptures – forms and informs our human development in a movement from the overture of dependence to the allegro and adagio of independence. The earliest disciples – dependent at Jesus feet – are moved gently by God’s incarnation among us into an unsolicited declaration of independence known as the Last Supper. “Here,” our servant Lord says to them – and to us. “This is my body, broken for you. Here: You, my children, are my body now! You are now Christ’s body: the Church!”

And what an allegro and adagio this is! Our discipleship in adolescence – clinging one day to that upper room, and cursing the next the separation through his cross and ours. And God’s resurrection glory is hardly better – for soon comes the ascension: the parent letting loose the child, and for good. God, experienced … as we develop in and through the second “person” of the Trinity into the places and spaces of our independence.

And then – finally: Pentecost! That promised Spirit! Many languages of our adult lives, heard separately, and yet … heard! Issues of nation and ethnicity and gender and – if we are especially mindful – class melt away into an interdependence of Church – Christ’s body. Many members, and yet one. Many gifts, and yet … equality!

To recap: God: Creator and Child, dependence expressed through elements and nurture.

Christ: Bringing our clinging selves, in our dependent clutch, around the table of Communion, that by the bread of God’s brokenness and the cup of God’s compassion. independence is declared to be like, in-kind. Individuating as Christ’s body of Church, borne forth to the world.

Spirit: Helper, Comforter, Advocate: Speaking out! Interdependent. The Resurrection of God’s hospitable and passionate and diverse world is ours – now ours!

From overture to allegro and adagio to rondo. God’s developmental dance the model for ours: from dependence to independence to interdependence. ‘Twere it that easy! ‘Twere it that neat.

For we may be created, as today’s Psalmist says, “a little lower than God … crowned … with honor and glory.” But oh, how we forget. And so oh, how we suffer.

Which is precisely why the Apostle Paul conveys to us today – in one of my favorite passages of scripture – another sort of human development altogether: One that carries us through and into a world rejecting of the God-experience. Paul writes to a church persecuted in Rome, “(We know) that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Given to us now – on the cusp of the season of Pentecost.

Dependence, independence, and interdependence: God’s developmental, Trinitarian dance, one we consciously mimic in our good moments – on our good days. God, experienced: so fleeting, so … ephemeral.

Yet ‘tween these moments of goodness, gaps – chasms, really. Those massive spaces between our mountaintop experiences where bridges of longsuffering suspend us into hope. And back into the poetic arms of Emily Dickinson, saying it slant:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune – without the words,
And never stops at all.

Midst our developmental, relational bluffs of the Triune, we so desperately need those spans of hope.

Because for most of us, along those spans, plotting and tracing our pilgrim’s way, God is experienced … most of all.

Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

¹Adapted from Garth House, Litanies for All Occasions (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1989), p.49. As found in Kenneth T. Lawrence (ed.), Imaging the Word: An Arts and Lectionary Resource, Volume 1 (Cleveland: United Church Press, 1994), p. 215.

²Peter S. Hawkins, Christian Century, May 23-30, 2001, p. 16.

Prayers of the People …

Holy God, Creation's Artist: Tiny infants babble your praises, as you reach out and heal us with the touch of your fingertips. We depend upon you.

Jesus Christ, Gateway to grace: You clarify what we have confused.
You build your kingdom on the foundation of our faltering faith. You exchange your body around your table of departure. We grow independent through you.

Holy Spirit, Advocate of Justice: Those voices we hear, those cries in the wilderness – their language is different … our language is one. Interdependence is your gift. We open our hearts to you.

Developmentally, relationally: Yours is Ours, in the language and lore of Trinity glory. We experience you, O God. We delight in you. We give you thanks and praise …

Benediction …

Perhaps poets can communicate the Trinity -- the communal presence of God – best, because they know that truth can at best be told at a slant ... between the lines ... beyond where words themselves can go ... 

In the final canto of his Commedia, Dante Alighieri brings the reader into the communal presence of God. Bathed in light, Dante first sees absolutely everything in the universe coming together within a book whose gathered pages are bound together by love. In the twinkling of an eye, he sees that first vision become another:  three circles of identical dimension make an appearance, but each with its own distinctive color: an image of unity and diversity. Finally, he notices that the central of the three circles is painted with la nostra effige, literally "our effigy", our human image and likeness.

A pictorial presentation of incarnation with a face like ours, at the very heart of our Triune God.  

With that image burnished in your mind, go out into the world in peace, to love and serve our servant Lord …