What is your way in to God? What opens
the door to the divine for you? What introduces you to Jesus and readies your
heart for the Holy Spirit?
Is it the vastness and wonder of God’s
creation? Is it the sense of meaning and redemption that you have found in your
relationship with God in Christ? Maybe you were a person who has suffered
addictions, or abuse, or stuck in a cycle of really bad choices and have found
healing and wholeness when you came to faith. Perhaps there was a time when you
sought meaning, hope, or direction, and it came to you in an encounter with
God. Maybe the door opened for you when you came to sobriety, to health.... or
just to your senses!
Some people don’t really know… I get that!...
but they know… something is drawing them in. I have found a surprisingly useful
tool that can help all of us explore and go deeper into our spiritual journey
and discover how wonderfully close the fullness, vastness, wonder, and love of
the One God is to every single one of us.
It’s music. I love the visual arts, too,
especially painting and iconography, but on this Trinity Sunday, I want to
invite you to go deeper into this wonderful theological textbook and book of
poetry that is our Hymnal. In doing that, I’d like you think about how it is
that you meet God… because however that happens, I’ll bet that there is hymn
for you!
The Trinity, the Christian doctrine that we
contemplate and celebrate today, says that the oneness of God is expressed in a
trinity of persons and a unity of being. The One God is manifested in a Trinity
of persons. This is much more than metaphor, and we must avoid the temptation
to reducing our language of God to mere "base three" thinking.
The Trinity tells us several things about the very nature of God. Not only do we know the One God as a unity of persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but the Trinity also tells us that:
- God is complex to the point unknowing;
- God is relational; and,
- Because of that, through God's grace and action, God is knowable.
So, among other things, the Trinity also tells
us that God offers us a variety of ways “in” to our relationship with God:
- We can contemplate the majesty and wonder of the God of All Creation in God the Father.
- We can enter in to intimate, healing relationship in Jesus, God the Son.
- We can enter in to the mystic power and mysterious movement of God in God the Holy Spirit.
These "ways in" should not be
confused with the "roles" or "functions" of each person of
the Trinity. While God want us to know Him, and know we have to take small
spiritual bites on the way to knowing God, we have to be careful not to slice
and dice the One God!
Remember that each
person of the Trinity all contain the entire fullness of the One God! And
before you reach for the aspirin, remember that the Trinity shows us that God
is complex, mysterious, and knowable
all at the same time! What we need is holy imagination, grounded in prayer,
scripture, the creeds, tradition, and in the worship of the church.
Think of the ways
that God has led you into a deeper knowledge of God, I think that you will find
that it depends on your learning style and way of looking at the world.
One of my favorite
films is the 1997 movie “Cosmos,” where Jodie Foster plays a scientist…and
religious skeptic…who is sent on a mission into an artificial wormhole built on
the basis of instructions received via a radio transmission from the star Vega.
As she travels she witnesses a magnificent celestial event, the birth of a star
or and on seeing the light show she sobs and exclaims that she “... no words, no
words... to describe it. Poetry! They should've sent a poet. So beautiful! I
had no idea.”
Back in 2012, famed atheist Richard Dawkins debated the Rt. Honorable Rowan Williams, who had just
wrapped his term at Archbishop of Canterbury, and described in nearly poetic
terms the vastness and complexity of the cosmos asking why one would want to
“clutter” up the beauty of science with religion. But as he spoke, Archbishop
Williams just nodded, closing his eyes as if he was imagining the scene for
himself. In response, Williams pointed Williams did not see God as mental
clutter. “Let’s call him a combination of love and mathematics,” he said.
“The
writers of the Bible,” Williams noted, “were not inspired to do 21st century physics.
They were inspired to pass on to their readers what God wanted them to know.”
And
that’s why we find ourselves expressing our encounter with God in poetry, art,
and music, and why we often turn to the language of mystics and spiritual
directors like St. Julian of Norwich, and even writers like Tolkien, Charles
Williams, or Dorothy Sayers or Jan Karon, who in various ways explore their
encounters with God in poetry and fiction.
And that brings us to the job that we’ve
been given. Go and tell. Make disciples. Baptize and teach.
God speaks to us in the way that meets
us exactly at the point of our greatest need. In Matthew’s last chapter we see
people who go and tell about the risen Christ. Some people see the Risen Christ
and don’t know what they’ve seen, like the soldiers who observed the risen
Christ from afar, but since they have not met him, there is no relationship. It
is at best only an interesting phenomenon, or a story but nothing more. Without
that connection, there is no belief and there is no change.
But for those who enter into a
relationship with God in Christ, who dare to go deeper, everything changes. The
two Marys who met the risen Jesus in the garden. The eleven and the rest of the
imperfect church who met the Risen Christ on the mountain. We meet him here in
Christian community and in the sacramental life. The fullness of God being made
known in Jesus tells us that Godself is best known in relationship. And from
there, we meet God in the people God gives us.
So here is both Good News and a
challenge: We who worship, and we who are still trying to understand are also
all sent! The challenge is not to be distracted by what we don’t know but to
dare to enter into relationship with God in the everyday. The fullness of God
is made known in the Holy Spirit in the person of Jesus, who give us the power
to change so that every day we can become more and more God’s people.
And every day, we go and tell. We can
choose to be intentional about our message or we can just leave it up to the
first impression. What will we say? How will we live. There is a saying out
there, sometimes attributed (without evidence) to St. Francis of Assisi,
“Preach the Gospel. When necessary use words.”
We have seen the fullness of God,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit made known to us where we live and work and play.
In Christ we know our savior and friend, our companion and teacher, our
sovereign and our rest. We will tell that we have met the risen Jesus in our
daily living and that God is changing us.
So, fellow friends and apprentices of
Jesus, we are blessed, truly blessed, when we live Good News, and we tell what
we have seen and heard. And remember, we are never, ever alone.
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