Scripps Sunday- Alaska Edition #29 1/2
Anna,
* I am with you always.-- With-ness is the whole thing, really. That’s the Trinity collapsed into a sentence. A pervasiveness, a presence. An everywhere-ness.
💕
Creatures From The God Lagoon; A Sermon on Enchantment
The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (last 4 verses of Matthew)
(sermons are a spoken art form… so much meaning comes in the way in which they are spoken…if you have 12 minutes please consider listening! Sermon satrts at 31:45)
Happy Holy Trinity Sunday, friends.
As you know, most festivals of the church commemorate happenings in the story of Jesus: Like the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary. And the star which guided the Magi at Epiphany. We celebrate the messy Baptism of our Lord, the confusing Transfiguration, and Jesus riding triumphant into Jerusalem amidst palms and cheers. We celebrate the night Jesus gathered with his faltering friends for a meal that tasted of freedom, and the next night when those same friends betrayed and abandoned him and left him to be executed. Then of course the empty tomb of Easter, the glorious Ascension, the chaotic coming of God’s spirit to the church at Pentecost —and it all leads up to today… Holy Trinity…
When it’s like the raucous party of Easter and Pentecost comes to a screeching halt while an old crotchety man shuffles up to the pulpit, blows the dust off an enormous leather bound book, the music fades and as the last of the Pentecost streamers float to the ground he clears his throat and says: And now, a celebration of church doctrine
Church Doctrine Sunday.
So let’s get right down to it, shall we? Here we go: God is 3 persons and one being. God is one and yet three. The Father is not the Son or the Spirit, the Son is not the Father or the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father or the Son. But the Father, Son, and Spirit all are God and God is one.
So to review: 1+1+1=1. It boggles the mind.
And who among us hasn’t survived the whole The Trinity is like water explanation – because water can be liquid, ice or vapor but it’s all still water. This is all by way of saying perhaps I can be forgiven for spending most of my career trying to avoid preaching a sermon that attempts to explain the Trinity.
Not to mention, bad spiritual math formulas can be slightly embarrassing for the clever among us. We post-Enlightenment thinkers who fancy ourselves rational. Reasonable. Logic-bound creatures. We who were weaned on Newtonian physics. We who know what 1+1+1 is.
It’s supposed to be 3.
And preachers are supposed to be able to explain things.
But here’s the thing about supposed-to-bes:
supposed-to-bes are not always helpful in the end.
If our kids majored in computer science, they were supposed to be employable for life. If we are good people, bad things are not supposed to happen to us. If you eat broccoli every day, you are not supposed to get a cancer diagnosis.
Supposed to bes are just our brains telling us we are justified in resenting reality.
In our Gospel reading I think the disciples were in their own crisis of supposed-to-bes. Not able to keep up with reality.
They were supposed to be his team – supposed to stand by their teacher but they couldn’t stay awake one hour, Judas couldn’t resist a 30 pieces of silver gift card, Peter couldn’t manage to even say he knew him and so they were nowhere to be seen when he died and had to rely on the testimony of – of all people – the women.
Jesus wasn’t supposed to die but he did.
And then Jesus was supposed to stay dead, and he didn’t.
So after several days of things not going the way they were supposed to, Jesus stands among them –Holiness in the flesh right before their eyes, and yeah they worshipped him but (and this is my favorite part) but some doubted. (chef’s kiss) Those are my people. The ones who can’t see God right in front of them because they are too wrung out by how whatever is happening is not what they think should be happening. I cannot overstate how much I relate to this.
My husband has this laser beam tool - you can point and it will tell you the distance between objects. I have one of those inside me, but it constantly tells me the distance between what is happening and what I think should be happening. The distance between the current temperature and what I prefer the temperature to be. The distance between what my husband is doing in any given moment and what I think he should be doing in any given moment. The judging, calculating mind is continually updating us on the distance between the actual and the ideal. Between what is and what is supposed to be.
But here’s the thing, friends - God only exists in what is real, God is nowhere to be found in imaginary places where everything is just the way we think it is supposed to be. God is only in reality.
And our disappointments -with our lives, our bodies, our families, our churches, our country- are often born in the gap between what is and what our very confident brains insist what should be.
So returning to the unexplainable nature of the trinity - maybe the last thing we need is a God who makes complete sense to the same brains that keep using formulas that make us miserable.
Because a God I can fully explain is just a God I invented. And I’ve tried that. My invented God has let me down every single time; because my invented God is basically just me, with super powers and slightly better judgment.
The thing I didn’t tell you earlier is that Clover said I could actually preach whatever text I wanted to today. I texted her and said Holy Trinity Sunday. This topic was optional and I took the option.
But there’s a reason. Because right now, I really need a 1+1+1=1 God. A God bigger than my explanations. A God my smartest thoughts cannot domesticate into understandable bite size chunks.
Looking back at the Enlightenment… that time a few hundred years ago when the intellectuals of Europe decided that human reason- and not anything spiritual- could provide absolutely everything we needed…. I don’t want to be too hard on it. Universities, human rights, penicillin. Big fan of what came out of that. But it gave with one hand and stole with the other - while the Enlightenment didn’t dispel enchantment, it did make us suspicious of it. Suspicious of things beyond explanation.
But I’d like that back now.
Because I don’t currently need answers I can understand.
What I need is a peace that passes understanding.
That passes it. A peace that sees understanding nods its head and keeps on going.
Since life doesn’t unfold the way it’s is “supposed to” then what I need is a God who defies the reason and logic and Newtonian physics of my own ideas of who God is “supposed” to be.
Don’t get me wrong, there have been times in my life when absolute certainty felt comforting to me. But right now that all feels more like a cold metal cube — protective and reliable maybe, but all sharp corners and exact measurements. Great when you need it. But without much nurture or spaciousness.
But the vast mystery of a triune, three-in-one God — that feels more like a warm lagoon the contours of which, like life, are unruly. It swirls and changes with each drop of water coming in and flowing out. You can swim in it, but try as you might, you cannot hold it in your cupped hands.
I guess what I’m saying is that I’m just finding it difficult to pretend this world- this maddeningly complicated, will-break-your-heart, does-not-adhere-to-your-preferences world… is not absolutely shimmering with holiness. This world in which Christ has all authority, and God is more lagoon than box, and our cleverness has its place but cannot give us everything. Where Jesus sends both the worshippers and the doubters to tell the world an unbelievable story that is at the same time, the most true thing in the world. Where there is no shame in being totally enchanted by Jesus on a mountain in Galilee, saying his final words:
I am with you always.
With-ness is the whole thing, really. That’s the Trinity collapsed into a sentence. A pervasiveness, a presence. An everywhere-ness.
So if today the distance between what your brain is telling you is supposed to be and what actually is feel really far, just know that you are, in fact, as surrounded by the vast mystery of God as you were the moment you took your first breath and the moment you will take your last.
In fact, in late March just two days after my father joined the saints in heaven, I picked my bereaved mother up for church. And I’ll never forget seeing her joy and wonder when she stepped out the door of their assisted living facility, and realized that during the 6 days she remained inside as my father was dying, that outside the crocus had sprung up and the trees had begun to bloom. “I had no idea”, she said, as she breathed in the Spring air, “God’s world has beauty in it no matter what else is going on, you know that Nadia?”.
No matter what else is going on.
Every single day we are all just crawling around, or trudging, or limping, or dancing, or maybe just barely showing up- in a world absolutely saturated with God.
The mystery of that, isn’t a problem to be solved before you’re allowed in God’s waters. The mystery is the water. So Happy Holy Trinity Sunday and may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God and the fellowship of the holy spirit be with you all. Amen.
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