Trinity Sunday, 2014. (Proverbs 8)

     “I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” From the Book of the Proverbs, chapter 8, verses 30 and 31.

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

     Today is Trinity Sunday, the First Sunday after Pentecost, a day on which preachers typically protest that they are not up to the task of understanding, never mind talking about, the Trinity. You’ll be relieved to hear, no doubt, that I’m not going to make any such protest. Today’s reading from Proverbs, which I just quoted, encourages us rather to rejoice before God, which means, to rejoice in his revelation to us of his true nature, and our true nature in relation to him and each other. God is always our subject, in every homily and prayer and act of worship. To be reluctant to think about, to talk about, the Trinity, is to be reluctant to open ourselves up to the real nature of God and to his saving work in us. To be uneasy in considering the Trinity is to be uneasy in our faith, to put ourselves in a contradictory position in which we implicitly, or maybe even explicitly, deny the faith we say we believe in every time we recite the Creed. 

     Today’s readings portray the Trinity at work, so to speak. The Trinity is not an abstraction, an ethereal concept remote from actual experience. Rather, it is a revelation of who God is and what he is doing in us and in the rest of creation. And since we are created in God’s image and likeness, we discover a Trinitarian structure in our own nature. God, far from being remote from us in his nature, has actually created in us the means by which we can share in his life, and he can share in ours.

     The reading from Proverbs reveals to us God as Creator and Lord, the Father, the first person of the Trinity. But at the same time, Wisdom is beside the Father from the beginning, participating, as it were, in every act of creation, as a master worker.  This reminds us of the opening of John’s Gospel, where the Evangelist says of the Son, “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” In this chapter of Proverbs, we hear the beginning (but only the beginning) of the revelation of the second person of the Trinity, the Son, through whom all things came to be. John’s Gospel makes explicit what the writer of Proverbs is beginning to reveal of the role of the Son, although in Proverbs he is called Wisdom. But we cannot identify the Son with Wisdom exactly, because in verse 22 it says “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.” We know from John’s Gospel that the Son is God, and is uncreated, begotten, not made, as we recite in the Creed. The writer of Proverbs begins to understand what John’s Gospel, and the New Testament as a whole, fully reveal.

     But also in this passage, Wisdom sounds like another word for the Holy Spirit, although they aren’t exactly equivalent. Like the Holy Spirit, Wisdom leads humans to understanding. Today’s reading omits some lines that would make this clearer. Verses 6 and 7, not included in today’s selection, say “Hear, for I will speak noble things, and from my lips will come what is right, for my mouth will utter truth.” Jesus recalls this when he says in John’s Gospel, “When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” It is the work of the Holy Spirit, as it is the work of Wisdom, to lead us to every noble thing, to every truth. 

     There is more to discover in Proverbs, chapter 8, than the concepts of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit implicit in the words Lord and Wisdom. There is the relationship between the Lord and Wisdom. Wisdom is there from the beginning, accompanying the Lord in his work of creation, and participating in it as the master worker. Wisdom is participant, witness, and, finally (if I dare put it this way) admirer of the creation. Wisdom says, “I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” In other words, the relationship among the Lord and Wisdom and creation is personal. And it is this understanding of the nature of God as personal, which is the clue to the real nature of the Trinity, and to our own nature. The writer of Proverbs has revealed something of the nature of God; this revelation is fully developed in the Christian revelation of God as Trinity, as the relationship of the three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

     It seems to me that the writer of Proverbs makes it clear that the Lord could not have created if Wisdom had not been there from the beginning. There is an almost reciprocal character in this connection between the Creator and Wisdom. It is as though the Creator needs Wisdom to be there, to complete his work. Creation, in other words, is not the work of an isolated divine individual, working alone in the depths of his own glory, but is rather the work of a God who has an inner life, an inner life which he wants to communicate to his creation, and to us. God is, in effect, an eternal, timeless process of communication. And the nature of that communication is delight, a delight which is personal.

     To be a person is to be in relationship. We probably tend to think of ‘person’ as ‘an individual,’ forgetting to realize that it is in our relationships that we become fully personal. The word has come a long way from its meaning in the ancient classical theater, when the word ‘persona’ meant ‘mask,’ the mask of the actor. The word actually means ‘through-sounding,’ and of course that is exact, since the actor had to speak through his mask. When the Church used the word to refer to persons of the Trinity, its meaning of ‘mask’ was dropped, and it came to signify the relations among the persons of the Trinity, and the relations of the Trinity with us. In other words, God dropped his mask of remote, unapproachable divinity, utterly different from ourselves, speaking through prophets, or hidden in clouds, or thundering from mountain tops. Instead, he became incarnate in the Son, and proceeded into the world in the Spirit.  In his humanity he became as we are, so that we may become like him.

     And God made us personal as well, that is, able to relate to each other and to him. We all seek that community with Wisdom, who is with us as we create, as we do the work in the world which God has given us to do. We all lead each other, like the Holy Spirit, when we allow ourselves to do it, into the truth. We are all, like Wisdom, made to “rejoice before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world, and delighting in the human race.”
 

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

    

    

Ascension (Acts 1)

“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.”  From the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 1, verse 11.

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

     It seems to me that the Gospel of Luke, and the Book of the Acts, should be put together as one narrative in our Bibles. As we know, they were composed by the same writer, and the Book of the Acts is a direct continuation of the Gospel of Luke. Of course, it is easy to see why the compilers of the New Testament separated the two books as they did; the Gospels concern themselves mainly with Jesus, and the Book of the Acts is concerned mainly with the activities of his followers after his Ascension. But the two books overlap, and their area of overlap is the Ascension. Luke says, in his last chapter, that “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.” That’s it, the entire statement in the Gospel about the Ascension. Luke expands on this in the first chapter of Acts. He expands the final blessing with some more teaching of Jesus, during a forty day period, no less, and only then does Luke say, “As they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” So we can understand the opening of the Book of the Acts as a rewrite, an expansion, of the last few verses of Luke’s Gospel. We can see this rewrite, this expansion, if we read Luke and Acts as one continuous narrative.

     In Acts, Jesus speaks about the Kingdom of God (about which he doesn’t give many details, at least at this moment), and promises that the Father will baptize the apostles with the Holy Spirit within a few days. Typically, the apostles somewhat miss the point with their question, “Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus answers the question by repeating his promise about the coming of the Holy Spirit, and then he is lifted up.

     The teaching about the coming of the Holy Spirit IS the core of Jesus’s teaching about the Kingdom, at least in this passage. The question about the restoration of the Kingdom received the correct, the complete answer, when Jesus redirected the attention of the apostles away from the time of the Kingdom’s restoration, to the manner in which the Kingdom is to be proclaimed: “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea, and to the ends of the earth.” There is no limit, no time limit, to this proclamation. “To the ends of the earth” is not simply a geographical statement, but a statement of time as well. The Kingdom is not limited to Israel. There will be no “end” to the earth, and no “restoration of the Kingdom,” at least not in the short time that the apostles were hoping for, and not in a narrow, worldly sense. The Kingdom is not about time or place or extent at all, but about the coming of the Holy Spirit. The witnessing of the apostles to the reality of Jesus, risen and ascended, is the beginning of the restoration of the Kingdom. Jesus does not allow the apostles to limit themselves to too narrow or shallow an understanding of the Kingdom, but helps them to understand that all they will need is the power which the Holy Spirit will give them, to be his witnesses. That is the clue to the real nature of the Kingdom, which is the presence of the Holy Spirit in the apostles, and in all of us who are baptized with water and the Holy Spirit, as the apostles were.

     “And a cloud took him out of their sight.” We can all easily imagine what this event may have looked like. We can see in our minds’ eye what a Hollywood filmmaker could do with this, with computer-generated imagery and music to match. But I would like us to think about this in a less pictorial way. I don't wish to sound flippant, but I want to emphasize that the story of the Ascension is not about Jesus’s flight plan and the technical details of his takeoff.

     Luke’s Gospel says that Jesus’s departure is from Bethany. It is not accidental that the story of the Ascension is set here. Bethany comes from “Beth Anya,” which has the somewhat alarming meaning of “House of Misery,” which apparently means “Poor House,” a site for the care of the poor and the sick. It is the home of Martha, Mary, Lazarus, and Simon the Leper, the site of Jesus’s important meeting with Martha and Mary, and of the raising of Lazarus. Siting the Ascension in the place where women have a prominent role in the life of Jesus, and where he raised Lazarus from the dead, and where the sick are cared for, keeps the Ascension firmly connected to important this-world events in the ministry of Jesus. It is not an event which separates Jesus’s earthly life from his heavenly life, but one which unites them, and reminds us that in Jesus the earthly and heavenly, the divine and human, are not to be separated.

     “And a cloud took him out of their sight.” Let us think for a moment about this “cloud.” It takes Jesus out of the sight, the earthly sight, of the apostles. That is to say, it takes Jesus out their view of him as limited to a  particular time and place. We know this, because the text goes on to say, that “they were gazing up toward heaven.” The apostles, in other words, were letting go of a limited, earthly understanding of Jesus, and replacing it with a heavenly understanding of him.  The “cloud” does not need to be some external physical phenomenon, like fog flowing over Twin Peaks, but it can be an internal, spiritual phenomenon, a way of expressing the growing spiritual maturity of the apostles and their understanding of Jesus. Their understanding has grown to see Jesus as earthly and heavenly, as human and divine.

     But the apostles don’t remain in the heavenly cloud for long. It is a constant temptation in the spiritual life, to want to leave earth behind and attain, and remain in, some vision of a divine world, so much more beautiful, we are tempted to think, than the world that God has put us in. And what happens? “Suddenly two men in white robes stood beside 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.’”  In other words, heaven and earth, human and divine, are not separate.  We are not to imagine that all we need to do is ‘stand looking up toward heaven.’ We are to remember Our Lord’s promise, that he will send the Holy Spirit, which enables us to witness to the reality of Jesus, divine and human, in the here and now. The Ascension, in other words, brings heaven to earth, just as it brings earth to heaven. Not only Jesus, but we, ascend to heaven, and we return to earth to continue its transformation in the power of the Holy Spirit.

     “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.”

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

    

Peace I leave with you. (John 14)

     “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” From the Gospel according to John, the Gospel for today, chapter 14, verse 27.

     In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

     Peace. We all know what this word means; we all have an idea of it. Perhaps we tend to think of it as an absence of conflict, of violence, an absence of any kind unpleasant or painful or disturbing condition or situation. And we certainly know what it means, or would mean, in Syria today, and in every other place torn apart by war. In our own city, peace would mean an end to gang warfare. I remember, when I lived in Los Angeles, that a truce was arranged between two major gangs. The peace that followed allowed people to walk the streets without fear of being struck by stray bullets. Peace is a universally understood concept, a universal desire and goal. For most people, anyway. And we all use the expression “peace and quiet;” this kind of peace is the absence of noise. We’ve all heard the Arabic “salaam aleikum,” “peace be with you,” close to our liturgical expression, and the Hebrew “shalom.” And young people today use an expression, “peace out” to conclude an email or a text message. Or at least they do when they’re communicating with me! I don’t know how current it is. In any case, it is an improvement on the old radio expression, “over and out!” And I’ve noticed lately on Muni buses and trains, placards portraying sayings expressive of various ideals: Respect, Love, Gratitude, among others, and, of course, Peace.

     All these concepts and experiences are examples of peace “as the world gives.” They are all good and necessary. They all come from that universal desire for safety, security, freedom from violence, for the absence of conflict. Taken together, they suggest a way of living that would be comfortable, contented, and safe. This is peace “as the world gives.”

     But Our Lord says, “I do not give to you as the world gives.” Our Lord knew well, as we know, how fragile the world’s peace really is, and how fragile, temporary, fickle even, our own personal peace can be. Peace between friends, in families, on the job, and of course in government and the world, is easily lost. This is the real nature of the world’s peace. And this is not the peace Our Lord is talking about.

     “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” This sentence points toward what Our Lord is getting at. Perhaps we think that if everyone else would just calm down, and stop being so selfish and small-minded and demanding, then there would be peace. After all, isn’t it obvious that there are lots of people out there behaving badly, and if they would just stop, everything would be fine? But, Our Lord says, to his first hearers and to all of us, “Do not let YOUR hearts be troubled.” In other words, he locates the difficulty in finding peace, not in others, but in ourselves. He is addressing us, not some hypothetical other who is the source of all the trouble in the world. “Do not let YOUR hearts be troubled.” And what is the source of this trouble in our hearts? “And do not let them (your hearts, he means) be afraid.” The source of the trouble in our hearts, is FEAR. Fear is the real opposite of peace, not conflict, as we may be tempted to suppose. There may be no apparent conflict in one situation or another, creating the impression of peace, but if there is fear, there is no peace. And conflict arises from fear. If we want peace, we must let go of fear, our fear.

     In Form I of the Prayers of the People, which Deacon Michael and I use from time to time, we pray for “the peace from above, for the loving kindness of God, and for the salvation of our souls.” And then we go on to pray for “the peace of the world, for the welfare of the holy Church, and for the unity of all.” The two kinds of peace could not be more clearly distinguished. The peace of God IS his loving-kindness, and IS our salvation. And the peace of the world, at its best, IS the well-being of the Church, and the well-being, and unity, of all. And the peace of God, the peace not of this world, makes the peace of the world possible.

     In our liturgy, we greet one another with the Kiss of Peace. Perhaps we experience it only as a perfunctory gesture, a polite nod in the direction of an ideal, but I would like us to experience it as something more than that. We are extending to each other, with the grace that is given us, the peace not of this world which Our Lord has extended to us. If we can let go of the trouble in our hearts, the fear, if there is any, even for a moment, we can catch a glimpse of what Our Lord is getting at. There is a double movement here, since extending peace to each other in this way, we are helping each other and ourselves to let go of trouble and fear. We are able to give each other the kiss of peace, because Our Lord has enabled us to let go of our trouble, whatever it is, for a moment at least, and beyond, in ways that we may not perceive directly, but which are endlessly working in us. Let us appreciate this grace-filled moment, this gesture, of peace, and think of ourselves as carrying it out into the world, the trouble-filled, fear-filled world, which needs the peace from above to help find the peace that we all desire.

     “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”  In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.