Understanding God

Trinity Sunday is just ahead. Often we ( perhaps preachers especially) seem to shy away from that day because – although we might not say it aloud – we tend spontaneously to think of Trinity Sunday as a day on which we are meant to understand God and to express to the rest of the Church our understanding of God.

But I don’t think it is that at all actually. The absolutely vital thing is not to understand God. The absolutely vital thing is to rejoice in the truth that God understands us. God understands you. God understands me. And God loves us anyway. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that extraordinary? Isn’t that divine? It is!

Just resting in that understanding – that comprehension that might better be described as love – is enough. It gives freedom. It offers the end of fear. And in so doing, oddly enough – or maybe not – it opens the possibility perhaps to actually understand something of God after all! After all, God has seen fit, in astounding generosity to reveal the very life of God to us. It’s just that the light coming off that revelation is so very bright that it is hard to know what we are even seeing.

I begin to think that it takes decades of human life and thousands of mistakes – otherwise known as sins! – to begin to dare to look toward that light with the hope that the eyes of our soul might begin to adjust to the light and begin to see.

Way back in the book of Genesis, in the first chapters, at the beginning of the beginning, God decides to create us in God’s own image and likeness. What an unexpected starting point that is! And it opens the opportunity to believe that when we finally – in all honesty and truth begin to understand ourselves (as individuals and as communities and as a species even a little bit) – we can begin then as well to understand (maybe?) something of who God is. If we dare. If we are willing to sit with the desire to know God, and let it become a quest of ours, not in our spare time, but deep down in our gut as one of our most vital human callings.

Wise people who have lived long before us and followed Christ and listened to the Gospel and felt the Spirit and seen God as Father/Mother alive in the world have sat with that question. It took the Christian Church the first four centuries after the Resurrection to be able to agree on how to speak about who Jesus Christ is. And then it took another century to be able to do something of the same about the Holy Spirit. So then, way back then but only after hundreds of years of the whole Church wondering about these questions together, we came to an agreed way to speak about the Trinity, about God as one God in three Persons. And then almost right away most of us were confused again. But at least we had language to talk about the work of God in the world and the inner life of God as well.

So I am wondering if we look at that Christian understanding in the Creeds of who God is, can we receive some light about who we are and who we are meant to be in God’s eyes? In other words, to return to where I began: can looking toward God’s identity as God has shared it help you and I to see ourselves through God’s eyes – and maybe then to see something of the magnificence of God’s love for us?

Now some paraphrasing or saying things of the faith in my own little way.

Though the outward works of the Trinity are works of all 3 Persons in God, thus sayeth the faith, God the Father is spoken of as Creator. God the Father brings things that were not into being. We are made in this image and likeness. Here then is a fair question: what do we bring into being? What do we – working with the raw materials we are given in life – in some sense of the word ‘create’? Many of you have helped to make new humans. Bravo! There’s a really good example. Maybe in your chosen line of work you have brought about a new way to get something done that needs to be done? Maybe in the kitchen at home, in your own little oven, you have brought to be Toll House cookies or brownies that – in your circle of family and friends at least – are acclaimed as the best of the best? I want you to really to think about this: what do you create in your living? What do you make in your life that reflects in some degree and sense the goodness of creativity of the Creating God?

God the Son, the second Person of the Trinity, the one who took on flesh in the Incarnation and lived a fully human life and died a painful human death, is named as the Savior, as the Redeemer. I could express that in these words: Jesus is the One who will not leave anything or anyone broken behind. He cradles the broken by the side of life’s road – as the Good Samaritan did in one of his best stories – and cares for them with all the tools he has until they are whole and well again. To those blinded, he reveals the sight they have. By the deaf he is heard. He stays with the mute until they find their voice. And he enters the room, or the tomb, of those who have died and he trembles with the fullness of life until they live again. So you and me: where are the places in our lives where we possess a faithfulness and a care profound enough to keep us by the side of the suffering until suffering is over? Where in our hearts is there – at least sometimes in life – the willingness to sit with those in pain as long as they need us, even when we have no idea how bad the pain really is or how to relieve it? When and where are we able to be healers even if we don’t trust ourselves to get it right? We stay simply because the others ones, the broken ones, need us – and after all, we too know what it is to be broken.

And God the Spirit, the 3rd Person, is sometimes so mysterious to us as to be rarely mentioned. But the Creed calls the Spirit ‘the Lord, the Giver of Life.’ The Spirit was there at Creation, active as the wind. And we might say that the Spirit is the One who activates us, who makes things happen that otherwise would not happen; the One who energizes us in every season of our living. That’s an incomplete description, but all three of these are only partial, as they only can be. But again it is worth asking. If those words capture something of the Holy Spirit and you and I are created in the Spirit’s image, where do we bring energy? Where do we breathe new life? Or to put it in terms of Jesus’ description of the Spirit in the Gospel of John’s sharing of the Last Supper: where do you and I remind our friends, our family and total strangers of the truths of Jesus? Where do we act as Paraclete – as comforter, counselor, advocate, friend to others – without end, with indefatigable energy? This may in some sense be the hardest question. Maybe we can only answer this one late in life. Maybe we will only know when we stand ourselves face to face, heart to heart, with God revealed and loving us forever.

How am I one who brings new things to be? How am I one who never leaves the broken lying on the ground alone? How am I one who infuses new energy into human life when it has become tired and seems unable to go on?

Considering these questions this Sunday may be a start. But carrying these questions with us on the weekdays between the Sundays from year to year may provide the Divine key to our finally being revealed as genuinely human beings. Only then might we finally understand what God sees in us and why this triune God loves us all with such mad faithful unending abandon. God understands us. And that is, as a place to begin, a beautiful thing.

my brother my brother

oh my brother

my brother

a pope lies silent before the altar in saint peter’s today

an athlete lies unmoving in the middle of a field of movement tonight

you lie beyond my reach, silent and far away

from now on

until death do us join.

my soul feels, severed by pain

the eyes of your children spill heartache

the word of your going-forth shocks and paralyzes

my smile is an echo

my tears are proclamation

I cannot surrender to this enemy

nor to his crime

scripture, tradition, the voice of God repeat:

the final enemy is death, is death, an enemy

to be opposed until beyond the end.

i will not reconcile, i will not come to terms,

i will not accommodate with this breaker of the

covenant of life, with this lie who claims to

speak the final undeniable truth.

my brother, o my brother

i will not accept death’s word, which

denies the Word of God, rather I

will rail against it today tomorrow and

the third day, even after my voice is stilled and

i will call out your name

into the raging wind of dark night until

the morning dawns and you speak again

and speak those words that Christ gives to all

his sisters and brothers, the words that are

the everlasting truth; after i have wept alone

and with your dear ones, until i’ve no

more tears to offer, i will listen to the light

at the eastern edge of all that is holy

and i will clearly hear the word of Christ in

your words:

“I live.”

oh my brother, my brother,

my poor brother, away too soon,

in your memory i will walk deliberately

i will speak by syllable

i will slow the pace of my breath

so that all is awareness

all is measured thought and godly healing

weighed meditation

listening intently for the echo:

I live

we live.

Amen.

Worshiping with Jesus

We have a 5:00 pm vigil Eucharist on Saturday evening. It has been, in my experience, a small group since we began gathering in person again. Maybe 6, 8 tops; sometimes 4. At the heart of that number has been a group of 3 whose situations have just changed so that they cannot come anymore (as far as I know). Nowadays, in churches the size of ours, little changes like that have out-sized repercussions.

At 4:50 today there was only me. By 4:55 I was joined by one person and by a second at 4:58 or so. Each of those present were persons whom the parish has been helping as we can. By any point of comparison they have very little, and one of them has recently been homeless for the first time ever. As we were about to begin they said more than once something like, “It’s a shame that no one is here,” and I would respond that, “You are here and that is enough.” But I must confess, to my own shame, that inwardly I was wondering things entirely too much like: What are we doing here? Is this worth doing? and the like.

They weren’t very responsive on the prayers. One could speculate why, but that would not be either fair nor immediately helpful. But as we proceeded, through the readings and the (changed on the spot) homily, heading toward the Prayers of the People, something began to happen. Spontaneously, first one and then the other, one from her seat and the other moving around the Chapel, began telling the stories of real people who need God’s help right now. With great energy. A man on hospice, sent home to die. His helper who is worried about being without work and a place to stay after his coming death. A girl hit by a car up the street the other night. And more. They did not ask for anything on their own behalf. They asked for others, on behalf of others. And we prayed for them.

By the time the bread and wine were on the Table and I was praying the Lord’s words from the Last Supper, I kept thinking: “I am saying Jesus’ words here in the presence of Jesus. In the presence of Jesus.” These two children of God themselves have needs that we have never been able to fill completely. Of course not. And so, at times I tell you honestly, they have driven me to distraction, to the point of not knowing how to respond.

I was reminded of Mother Teresa’s words, the like spoken more than many times during her life and work:

Seeking the face of God in everything, everyone, all the time, and his hand in every happening; This is what it means to be contemplative in the heart of the world. Seeing and adoring the presence of Jesus, especially in the lowly appearance of bread, and in the distressing disguise of the poor.

And He can be quite distressing in the disguise of the poor. But He is also blazingly unmistakably present.

In the homily I spoke about recognizing God’s presence and action in life even when life is hard, as it had to be for the 10 lepers Jesus met and talked to and saved in the 17th chapter of Luke’s Gospel. And then I looked in front of me, and I saw.

And I knew why we were doing what we were doing, and how absolutely vital it is.

Eternity

Dear God

How often do

My actions

My own words

Move me to remind you that I am unworthy of your time

Of the smallest fragment iota nuclear particle of your time

And you

Calmly respond

With tenderness unmatched

That I am worth your eternity,

Made for the time that is beyond all time and not time at all, unmeasurable,

And bright with love.

And if I move to resist argue remonstrate you begin to sing

The tune is amazing grace but the words

Are new

Not me singing of my emptiness and acclaiming your faithful filling

But rather you singing the gift of you into all the ones like me who

Inhabit this land, and need to know (so much)

The wonder of you.

Image: Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash