Sunday, May 30, 2010

Sermon for Trinity Sunday

May 30, 2010

Readings


So, you may have noticed that we have the flags up front this Sunday. A parishioner wrote and asked if we couldn’t have them up front on this Memorial Day weekend to honor those who gave their lives in the service of their country. Seemed like a good idea, so here they are. There are a lot of good reasons why the national flag is being moved away from the altar in churches. The Catholic church called for their removal over thirty years ago, but it still seems very appropriate that we show these colors on this weekend, so I was glad someone made the request.


My father piloted a flying boat in world war two picking up downed pilots in the Pacific. I’m guessing he had lots of stories about friends who didn’t make it back from that war, I just never heard them. He didn’t tell stories about the war. Sometimes he’d catch a battle scene in some movie on tv and either say, “it wasn’t like that,” or just get quiet. I learned more about his service in the war from commendations and letters I found among his papers after he died than he ever told me in all the time I knew him. What he did talk about though, what did kind of light him up as a he spoke were stories about being a cadet in flying school. He talked about his friends in the good times, the “safe” times right before the war. He occasionally told a story of something that happened to a friend during the war, but only if that friend made it back. My Godfather flew with my dad as a tail gunner, and it amused me as a little kid more than it should have that he had gotten hit in the backside on one of their runs. I didn’t get any real sense from my father of what the war and being in it was like. What I did get was the idea that in those awful times and in some pretty terrible situations a community formed and life-long friendships were created. At the end of the day, what my dad wanted to remember was his connection to the people who had been there with him, a community that in hard times sustained and gave courage to its members. And it is that community message I got from him that now turns me back toward the message of this Trinity Sunday in which we celebrate the God who begins as community.


Some of you may know that I joke at times about this Sunday. I joke about trying to get out of preaching the deep and unfathomable concept of the triune God. I have had seminarians preach on Trinity Sunday, I have been on vacation or sabbatical on this Sunday. Two years ago I even managed to get the bishop to visit on Trinity Sunday. I suppose I could just stick with Memorial Day and skip the Trinity this morning but the truth is, I like the richness of Christianity’s understanding of God. So I am glad that every few years I am pushed to spend some time thinking about this three-in-one God of ours.


That really is the way to approach thinking about the Trinity. Come back year after year and see what you notice, see what new vision of God is visible at this point in your journey, what new understanding of God might be possible because of recent experiences in your life. The three readings today each emphasize a different person of the Trinity but they do it in a messy kind of way that sort of mixes the three up. The Proverbs reading speaks about creation. The Creator, the first person of the Trinity is brought to mind in this reading, but is named Wisdom, a name more commonly associated with the Spirit of God. Then Paul in his letter to the Romans points to Christ, the second person of the Trinity as the one through whom we receive access to grace. He then goes on to say that he can boast about his hope in Christ only because the Spirit has been poured into him. Finally, today, we hear Jesus in John’s gospel telling his disciples about the Spirit, who will guide them in all things.


Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit. They are all here, and in the readings they seem a bit scrambled. Anyone familiar with the beginning of John’s gospel, you know--in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and everything was created through the Word--anyone who has heard that will here hear the voice of that creating Word in Proverbs today. For Paul, Christ and the Spirit are a party of the same answer. In John, Jesus speaks of the Father and the Spirit. What stands out for me this year as I approach the Trinity is not the distinction between these three faces of the one God, but their connection, interrelatedness and interaction with each other. I am reminded that very early on in its life the Church began to speak about the God who is community, the God who begins as community and would draw us into the community that already exists between Creator, Christ and Spirit.


Everything we really need, the good for which we were created comes to us through our association with others. Community is where we learn and grow and discover our true selves. Looking at any part of our own stories, life is what happens between us; it is what takes place between people. In relationship with others we learn who we can be, we find ourselves wanting to be more, to give more, to care more deeply, to be more courageous, to be better parents, spouses, children, friends. Who doesn’t have memories of long conversations in which the world outside the words falls away leaving only the reality and solidity of another? Who hasn’t been changed and discovered hidden resources because of the needs of another? Who hasn’t wanted to change in order to be more accessible to another? Community calls to us, draws us in. I read somewhere recently the statement, “love is community.” I’m pretty sure it would work the other way too, to say community is love. It forms us and creates us.


I’ve enjoyed live music for many years, and I am still surprised and delighted when I find myself listening to a musician whose music is fueled by a palpable connection with the audience. Who hasn’t left a concert knowing that something tangible existed for a time in the space between stage and the crowd assembled? Physicists tell us that the smallest particles of matter are held in their orbits of relationship with each other by something that is simply referred to as the “strong force.” The connections between us are so important that we organize our lives and our governments to protect the space in which those interactions take place. All of our structures, our laws, our institutions exist to support what happens between people, in community, whether we are talking a community of two or thousands. Today we celebrate the God who calls us into relationship. We remember that God is relationship. We remember today the God who invites us to join the dance that has always been going on, a dance that requires our presence if it is to be complete. Creator, Christ, Spirit and all creation. The dance was written with us in mind. For this, we were invited into being.


It really does seem to be the case that whatever is good, whatever is real, whatever is lasting and important takes place between individuals and among individuals in community. Maybe that’s why I never heard the kind of stories from my dad that a kid expects to hear about war. Maybe, in those long silences, he was still pondering lessons about what lasts and what doesn’t. Maybe he was remembering long conversations in the cockpit, friends gone but not gone, truths told, memories sealed and saved. Some stories can’t be told. Community can’t really be explained. You can write about it, talk about it, I can preach about it, but we can’t know about what happens in community until we have been in it. Whatever is good, whatever is real takes place between us and among us. And any time that kind of “real” is taking happening, you can be sure that somewhere in the mix, somewhere in the conversations and exchanges, is the God who is the life that binds us together. Amen






Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Sermon for the Day of Pentecost

May 23, 2010



Growing up in the deep South, I pretty much got used to hearing people ask me if I’d been saved. I took some comfort in the fact that it wasn’t just me. The saved would ask anyone they thought might still need redeeming, and they would ask pretty boldly. I heard the question in all kinds of settings, and even though the question always made me a bit uncomfortable, I had to admire the tactics of some of those weekday preachers who seemed able to slip an inquiry as to the condition of one’s soul into any conversation.


Part of my problem with the question about being saved had to do with my being an Episcopalian. Episcopalians, at least the ones I knew, didn’t go around asking such questions. And, to complicate maters, some of the signs of un-savedness cited by those concerned preachers, drinking, cussing, dancing and lusting, just to name a few, were all practiced by good upstanding Episcopalians I knew and liked and trusted. I was an accepted member of one Christian community being preached at by members of another Christian community who seemed to be trying to pull me over to their side. Those preachers seemed a bit scary. But my friends, the Christians I was familiar with, never expressed any concern about my soul so I wondered. I was, for a time, pulled in two directions. I was caught in the kind of tension that can only be understood through theological reflection, so in my teenage years, before I had any idea what theology was I became a theologian. That is to say, I came to understand that there were differing ideas about God and church and I was going to have to think about it all for a while.


One of the notions that helped me remain an Episcopalian, aside from that list of Episcopalian benefits I mentioned earlier, was a question that began to explain my discomfort with those soul-saving zealots. I wondered, isn’t there more to all this than saving souls? If you get everyone to accept Jesus, then what? What would it all be about if everyone said, “ok. I’m in.” It just seemed to me that the focus for a lot of those other folks was so much on who’s in and who’s out that there wasn’t much discussion of what it would mean to be in, what life would be about, what difference one would make in the world after they were saved. Except, of course, going out and asking other folks if they were saved, and I didn’t feel cut out for that work so I stayed with what I had.


And through these last forty or so years since that time, I have come to believe more and more that the faith we claim, the faith Jesus commended to us isn’t about who’s in with God and who’s out. It isn’t about being saved. It is about what kind of difference we will make in the world because we are a part of God , a part of God’s creative work in the world. I think that is what Jesus came to tell us, but we miss it so easily because we humans just seem to be hard wired for “us versus them.” Jesus showed up in the midst of a people who had, as one of the central organizing principals of their faith, the idea that they were special. That they were different from everyone else around them. In story after story, Jesus tried to break open that idea and break down the strong sense of “us and them” that ran through the faith of his people, but it was a hard message and we are still struggling with it. If we hear it and grapple with it this message of inclusion will make theologians out of all of us and that’s not a bad thing.


Jesus came when he did because the time was right for this new message of inclusion. We hear that in the stories for this Day of Pentecost.


First we have a story from Israel’s mythology explaining why God might have created diversity. That story is followed by one about God deciding that the time was right for us to know our common relationship with the creator.

The story of the Church after Pentecost is not about salvation, about who is in and who is out, but about community and about growing into a new understanding and a new role in the universe. After all those years of seeing themselves set apart, the only ones privileged enough to hear the voice of God, the time now comes when everyone hears the same voice in their own language. Being saved, being part of the inside group, is no longer the agenda. The agenda now has something to do with living in community with people whose ways and languages and understandings are different from our own. “In the last days,” says God, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.” All flesh. The who’s in and who’s out question has been settled. We’re all in. Everybody.


That question being settled, we are ready, or at least Jesus seems to think we are ready for the real question. The real question, the one for our time, can be summed up in two words. Now what? We never again have to worry about being separated from God. God is as close as our breath, our flesh, our thoughts. Now what? What difference will the knowledge that God is with us make in our lives? What difference will it make in the world in which we live and work and make choices every day that affect the people around us?


From very early in the Christian story, the message turned back from what Jesus taught about inclusion and acceptance and began to focus once again on who’s in and who’s out. We Christians have struggled with the pull of that simpler, more comfortable message since the beginning. It is easy to be in. We have rituals, our names go on lists, and if who’s in and who’s out is the question we are finished when we cross the line. We Christians have always been tempted to focus our attention there.


What is harder and what we have to keep coming back to is the work for which we were empowered in that Pentecost story, the work of being God’s hands and hearts in the world. This way of understanding what it means to be a Christian is more difficult because we can never finish its work. We can never reach a place where we can say, we’ve arrived.


This week you may go out and work in the local soup kitchen. Eventually you realize that the soup kitchen exists because of other problems that require your attention. Soon you are attending the local town hall meeting, and maybe in another year or two or twenty, you have the names and contact information for all your elected representatives stuck on the refrigerator. This year you buy a Prius because you begin to see that even though you can afford a gas guzzeling car you have an obligation to future generations to protect the environment they will inherit. In a few years you may be riding a bicycle. Living out the “what now” question involves an ever deepening understanding that we must let go of some of what we might claim as “our rights” so that others can have better lives.


As we approach this Pentecost life of giving and sacrifice and growing concern for the welfare of others--the life Jesus taught--it looks hard. There is much I am not ready to give up. Much I hope I will never have to give up, but I know there is still much I could give up, and that doing so would make a difference to others. The Pentecost life involves treating everyone as neighbor--everyone as someone who is in--a part of the group we are so glad to be a part of. It involves living our lives with their best interests at heart. That life doesn’t come easily to us, but it is the life to which the new church was called, the life to which we are still called.


The call is not easy, so thank God for the rest of today’s message. The part about how that new fledgling little group, people trying, hoping to be faithful, found within them on that day resources they had not expected. We will go out into the world today--we will leave this place in a little while-- reminded, trusting, I hope, maybe even rejoicing in the power of the Spirit that draws us all together and empowers us for the work of community. Amen