Trinity

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the Spirit of God moved over the waters.

This is the very first sentence of the Bible. And already we are talking about God in two forms, the One who creates and the Spirit who moves or the Hebrew means broodes or sweeps, wanders or dances. And the darkness, it covers the face of the deep, but the deep in Hebrew also means the chaos. And the Spirit moves over the face of the waters while God makes everything.

And when God speaks, God says, Let US make man in OUR image…”

Why Us? Why the royal We? For thousands of years, we did not understand why, but, then again, there was much about God that we did not understand.

Then Jesus came, and he told us that he was the Son of God, that he was one with the Father in Heaven. And we were more confused still. And just before Jesus left us, he instructed his followers to baptize and to do so In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Why did he say it this way?

It was not until the third century that theologians came up with the word TRINITY. The Three-in-One concept, a way of pointing to God. It is theology at its best. It is poetry. It tells us a deep truth about God.

God is One and yet God is three. And this makes no sense. Which is exactly the point. We cannot understand God and the Trinity, fundamentally, cannot be understood. Each time someone has tried to explain the Trinity rationally, their theory becomes a heresy. The Trinity is Mystery. Nothing can be one and three at the same time, it defies all rational explanation. But isn’t that just perfect for God?

The Trinity teaches us much about the nature of God. Not only can God not be understood, but God is not alone. God was never alone. We were not created because God was lonely. God has all community and all love within the Divine self. God is complete in a way that you are I are not.

And God is ever-changing, ever-moving. The number three is unbalanced, it is dynamic, it moves and changes. God is always doing a new thing. God is full of surprises.

A week and a half ago, Tim Tuller came to the organ to practice and found that he had company. There was a possum who seemed to have taken up residence in the choir stalls. So Tim consulted Robert Hyde, our properties manager, and they decided to set a trap for Mr. Possum. After all, it was essential to catch the beast. Having a possum join the choir on Sunday might not go over too well. So they put some meat in the cage and set the trap.

But there was just one problem, the possum did not take the bait. No one seemed to be able to catch the little beast. Until finally, on Sunday morning, one of the Vergers came to the rescue and caught the possum with a bucket. Don’t ask me how this was done, the Vergers are a group with many mysterious skills. But God did a new thing at this Cathedral, and we decided to feature a color picture of the possum in the E Eagle for posterity.

God is ever-moving, ever full of surprises. God is Trinity and the Trinity is not only mysterious, it is surprising. God as Trinity plays with us, dances with us. God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are always wanting to show us a new thing. I think God brought us a possum to make us smile.

How could God be ever-changing and yet eternally the same? Again, it is beyond all human comprehension. Don’t even try to understand!

A few years ago, I was celebrating the Eucharist in Kansas. We were midway through the service. I had just made the announcements and was about to go up to prepare the altar when something happened. A voice came over the sound system…

THIS IS GOD.

I just stood there. Was there a drunk man who had gotten hold of a microphone? What was going on? Was it really God? There was nothing about this in the Prayer book…I just stood there for a moment and then I said, “Well, I’m glad that you’re here.”

I worried that God might speak again at the service and if so, I did not know what else to say. But God was silent. It was not until after the service that I discovered what happened. One of the older youth, whose voice had changed and had a deep baritone, was testing the microphone in the fellowship hall. For some unknown reason, it sounded in the sanctuary.

Open your eyes. God does new things with us every day. God comes up with new ideas and new plans. God plays with you and loves to show you a new thing. As Alice Walker wrote in her book, The Color Purple, “I think it makes God mad when you pass by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it…” God loves you and is ever changing, ever dancing with you.

I painted an icon this week. All my adult life, I have wanted to paint an icon. For well over 20 years, I have gazed at the face of Christ to say my prayers , looking at his face before I fell asleep each night and as I woke in the morning. I knew that I wanted to paint his face, but I also knew that I was not a painter.

I am the kind of person who buys paints and paper and with a lot of excitement, starts to paint. Then what gets put on the paper shocks me because it is terrible! I do not understand how to paint perspective, I don’t have a clue about color and I generally make a mess. So I had settled on coloring books with Max until this icon workshop came around.

We painted for 5 days from 8:30 to 4. We prayed and generally kept silence while we painted.

It was like loving Jesus every minute. I got to think about what his hands might have looked like, his face, his hair. And every day was full of surprises. I was shocked to see how much he looks like everyone I love, how much my own he is. The painting itself was full of surprises, new discoveries every day.

I want you to think of God not as something stagnant and boring, like some adult figure who sits stagnantly in heaven, observing your every move. Think of God instead as three-in-one, completely beyond your comprehension, yet always moving and dancing and loving. Like the ocean, think of God as always looking different to you, always revealing something new, something beautiful. Think of God as speaking to you in new and changing ways every day, through color and sight and sound. Wake up to the presence of the Holy Trinity that surrounds you and embraces your life. The more you look, the more you will see Him: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Are We There Yet?

It took one hour to get from my childhood home in New Haven , Connecticut to Salem, where we got to see my cousins. One hour. And yet, it seemed like a lifetime. I remember vividly sitting in the backseat, fighting with my little brother and asking the same question over and over again, “Are we there yet?”


Sure enough, I hear echoes of my childhood self when we take road trips today. TV and games help, but there is still the same longing question that often comes from the backseat. “Are we there yet?” One time Max asked this question just twenty minutes into a trip from Kansas to Colorado. I did not have the heart to tell him how much we were not there yet. After all, his mind could not have grasped the ten hour trip at the tender age of two.

As we move further and further into the Easter celebration, we move deeper into the story of Christ’s resurrection. Today we remember how, after appearing to the disciples many times in the resurrected form, Jesus ascended into heaven. He left bodily, physically. And he would never come back in that way again.

But before Jesus left, the disciples asked him the same question that I asked my parents so long ago, the same question that Max asked me. Are we there yet?

The disciples wanted to know if this was it. Was this the end of the world, the time when Christ would come in all his glory and defeat all the darkness, the time for us to rise with him to eternal life? Was this it? Are we there yet?

And Jesus looks at them and gives them the same answer that he gives us two thousand years later, It is not for you to know the times or the periods that the Father has set…

It is not for you to know.

Just look at things from our vantage point today. We are now more than two thousand years after the ascension and still, we wait. The disciples could not have conceived of this. Their minds would not have grasped it. Just as you and I cannot grasp God’s timing today.

2012 has become the next hotspot in terms of end of the world foretelling. Evidently, the Mayan calendar ends on that year. Probably, this is because the Mayans could not conceive of the human race lasting longer than this, but many people have taken this to mean that the end of the world is to occur in 2012.

I do not believe any of this. You see, I truly think that Jesus knew what he was talking about when he told them that it is not for us to know. Whenever human beings get in the business of fortune telling, of trying to examine the future as if it is some game that God has given us clues to, some kind of puzzle that can be solved if we just piece together slivers of our lives or the lives of others, we make a mess and we waste our time. Jesus told us that this kind of thing is God’s business. We are not to know.

I walked through the MOSH museum yesterday. They have a great planetarium. There are photographs from the Hubble spacecraft: photographs of nebula, of whole galaxies dancing in the darkness, of blue stars and supernova. These photos represent events that are so vast and I cannot take in their size. They are so beautiful that I find myself wanting to stare at them for hours. They display the glory of God, a glory that is simply beyond human understanding. As I stood before them, I felt awe.

In the movie Contact, Jodie Foster is a scientist who courageously volunteers to travel light years away from earth in a ship designed by aliens. She sees beauty that is so spectacular, so beyond human comprehension, that she finds herself speechless. She tries to record all that she sees by speaking into a tape-recorder, but when she comes to the events of the cosmos, she pauses in great silence and she says, “They should have sent a poet….They should have sent a poet.”

Why is it so hard for us to simply not have the answers? Some things are simple to great for words. Some things simply cannot be described or calculated. Why can we not leave certain things up to God? The disciples wanted the whole story wrapped up in their life-times, they wanted it all clean and neat. What was about to happen was so much larger than that.

People will often ask me about the salvation of souls. When a man dies who was angry or who took his own life, I will be asked the question, “Is he going to hell?” But the truth is that I cannot answer, or I could answer but my answer would be insufficient. I do not know the times and I do not know the places. All I know is what Jesus promised, that if we know him and love him we will come to Him.

And whenever we get into the business of determining the salvation of others, we get in just as much trouble as we do when we try to figure out the schedule for the end of the world. We just make a mess of things. Why can we not simply leave this up to God? It is our job to tell others about Jesus and our love of him, but salvation is not for us to determine. It is God’s job, not ours.

When Jesus ascends into heaven, the disciples are left standing there staring after him. They no doubt are wondering where he went, wondering if he will come back. They don’t want to move on with their lives because that would confirm that he is gone, so they just stand there gaping. Two men, messengers of God, angels, have to appear and tell the men that he has gone, but that one day, he will come again in the same way that he left.

So the disciples go home, or the closest thing that they have to home. They go to the Upper Room and they meet together, lost and confused. And that is where the Holy Spirit comes.

If they had stayed looking up to heaven, trying to calculate Jesus’ next arrival, they might never have become the Church. The Holy Spirit came to them when they went back to their lives and tried to figure out how to live in the present moment. For the Holy Spirit does not come in the past nor does God live in the future. God meets us in the now and helps us to see more clearly now, not then, but now.

I would love to see Jesus come again. I would love for Him to come and make all the wrongs right, fix the brokenness of the world, ease the pain, punish the wicked. Sometimes I still look up to heaven and want to ask, Are we there yet? But every time I do, I just get this deep silence in response. For I cannot begin to fathom the answer.

When we were on our way to Colorado and Max asked that question, I leaned over from the front seat (JD was driving) and I looked at his little face. “It’s going to be a while, buddy,” I said. “But I will be with you every step of the way.”

Maybe that is the better question, instead of asking Jesus, Are we there yet or Jesus, Is so and so going to heaven, or Jesus What will happen next, what if we asked one simple question,

God, will you stay with me, every step of the way?

I think that God answers that question, for we can fathom His answer.

Yes, he says. Yes.