Our Mysterious, Complex, Relational, Knowable God

I have a question for you. As we contemplate and celebrate the Feast of the Trinity, and as we enter into the “everyday,” “workaday,” and, yes, the “summer vacation” part of the Church’s year, I have a question for you. It’s simple. And not so simple. You ready? Here it is:

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: 

1. God is complex to the point unknowing;
2. God is relational; and,
3. 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!

Of course, God is bigger than the universe, and our brains can only fit into a baseball cap; so yeah, the best we can do is use analogies to describe the fullness of God. This is a start, but it can get us into trouble.

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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Bulletin for Worship for Trinity Sunday, June 4, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for Trinity Sunday, June 4, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on June 4, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on June 4, 2023.

The vastness and closeness of God

In 2008, Fr. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, said that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

When I mention this to folks, the first response I get is “Wait. The Vatican has an observatory?”

This seems more than a little ironic given that little falling out between the Inquisition and the astronomer Galileo 500 years ago.  Actually, the Church—Roman Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, and Protestant—has supplied the scientific community with physicists, astronomers, and all kinds of researchers for long time, many of them ordained, since the beginning of what we now call “modern” science. But that’s not the point.

Basically, this Jesuit priest said that it is okay for Roman Catholics (and the rest of us) to believe in aliens. As Admiral Pike will someday say to Captain Kirk, “I am relieved!”

This is not just esoteric speculation. The question is really this: now that have a hint of how vastly big and how vastly small creation is, is God really bigger than Creation?

I am no scientist, and I don’t play one on television, but knowing that we have the technology to see to the very edges of the universe and measure its size, at the very same time we can use colliders to measure the smallest particle we can imagine, which was unofficially named after God, what Fr. Funes said begins to make sense. God is greater than all creation and the more we see the vastness of creation, the more we see the majesty and power of God.

Okay. So, God is very big. Does that make God incomprehensible?

Well, except for God’s grace and for the fact that we humans are wired to inquire, that would be “yes.”

God has always been incomprehensible by any ordinary standard. Justin Martyr, that seeker for the truth who died in about 167, said that anyone who thinks God can even be named is “hopelessly insane.”  And yet we still seek.

Would it surprise you, you who routinely and daily live with the benefits of chemistry, physics, microbiology not to mention also live under the shadow of a global pandemic and what we used to call “The Bomb”, to hear how a 14^th Century English mystic once contemplated both the very big inside the very small?

Dame Julian of Norwich was an anchoress who lived in a private monastic cell attached to an English Cathedral when she had visions, or “showings” of God. One of those “showings” concerned happened when she contemplated what she saw inside a walnut. She saw all of God and God’s creation contained in that little shell. To see the vastness of God in something so small ought to appeal to us who know the wonder of DNA and marvel at pictures taken from an orbiting telescope.

Rather than be overwhelmed by God’s sheer size, Blessed Julian found love. Toward the end of her life, she penned this short but profound exchange: “Would you know your Lord's meaning?” she asks. “Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love.”

We can seek and ponder and reason…and we should because we are wired to inquire… but finally we discover that God is always shown best in relationship.  This is where our evangelical friends, have it right, along with sacramentalists like us: what really changes us is our relationship to God who comes to us where we are and touches us as we are, at the point of our deepest need.

There are people, some of whom are of a scientific mind, and even some religious folk, who proudly wear the badge “skeptic”, who tell me that the Trinity is incomprehensible. To which I say “yeah…and…?” 

I might also reply “tell me again about the multiverse….?” You know, the idea that there are multiple universes that exist at the very same time? Besides the fact that it makes for interesting science fiction, it shows us that Christians aren’t the only ones in the cosmological marketplace where apparently contradictory truths can co-exist at one and the same time.

And how about the mathematics that underpin not only modern physics but also chemistry and astronomy…what is the basis for that? About a decade ago, Scientific American spent a whole issue debating the assumptions—and implicit acts of faith within them--behind the high-level mathematics that undergird the advances we take for granted. The funny thing about physics is that when you drill down deep enough not only do our perceptions change, but the line between fact and faith becomes pretty darned blurry. The more we unravel the mystery, the more mystery there is.

And that to a person of faith, as Archbishop Rowan Williams once said to evolutionary biologist, and famed atheist, Dr. Richard Dawkins during an Oxford debate, is a beautiful thing.

The Trinity, the Christian doctrine that says that the oneness of God is expressed in a trinity of persons and a unity of being, tells us some things about the very nature of God. I'll name three:

First, God is complex to the point of unknowing.

Second, God is by definition relational and that means interactive; and

Three, God is by grace knowable.

The God of the whole vast universe, who made heavens and earth, is also the One who walked the earth in the person of Jesus Christ. The God whose Spirit moved at the beginning of the universe and brought it forth, either by word or by big bang, is also the Holy Spirit who animates our hearts. And as vast as creation is, God is this close!

We are able to measure how big and how small creation is using the tools that see down to the sub-atomic level and also galaxies far beyond our own; but there is no limit to how close God is to us.

Of course, we can only know so much, and often we distort or trivialize what we do know about God. We can hyper-focus on that one truth that makes God real to us … and in our fervor risk turning that truth from liberation to oppression. That’s how heresy happens: you take one truth and follow it out to its own illogical conclusion.

The Pop Atheists claim there is no God based on the folly of those who do awful things in the name of God, which, of course, says nothing about God, but a lot about us…and the prophets described that observation first and in greater detail.

Similarly, the folks who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” take the truth that we are all spiritual and have the capacity to inquire and to know God and assume, therefore, that there is nothing that the community of faith, ancient liturgy and scripture can teach us. To which I reply, if we cannot see the farthest galaxy or the smallest atom alone, without the help of others; if we cannot learn and fight disease alone; then why should we think that knowing the depths of God in the depths of human experience is a thing we can do all by ourselves, without tools and without help?

In all this…skepticism about religion, doubts about God, anxiety about our future…the common element is the human one. What really worries—and turns off people—is not God (nor science) but the messiness of human relationships. The politics, the meanness, the unpredictability, the irrationality, the selfishness—the sin—of humankind, is really what gets in our way. Blame it on God, if you like, but the problem is us.

The Trinity, which we celebrate today, tells us that our complex God is at once relational, knowable, and intimate. 

The Holy Trinity is, for me, my spiritual "LaGrange Point" where life hangs in the gravitational pull between science, spirituality, and lived experience. 

And I love that we start our season of “ordinary time” between now and Advent—where we drill down into the nuts and bolts Christian living by learning (and doing) the teachings of Jesus—by first contemplating and celebrating the wonder, complexity, and simplicity of the Holy Trinity.

God knows that we are limited and that we can only know so much. We can’t get away from the fact that the universe is vast and yet our brains can only fit under a baseball cap. But the Trinity tells us that remarkable truth that God is not so distracted and entranced by the bigness of creation to forget about us. That is why God comes to us in ways we can understand and know and touch; in the incarnation and person of Jesus; in beautiful things both small and vast; in redeeming relationships; in prayer and silence, in music and art, in science and meditation; in broken bread and poured out wine; in companionship and service to others; in birth, cross, and resurrection.

The Trinity reminds that the very bigness of God is as close to us as our hearts.

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Here is a link to the bulletin for the First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater

Here is a link to the Scripture readings for Trinity Sunday

Here is a link to a video of the sermon.

Here is a link to a video of the liturgy. 

Here is a link to a sermon by Bishop Nicholas Knisely of Rhode Island (web link).

How big is God?

How big is God?

From time to time, I would ask this question of kids. And sometimes they’d shrug, and sometimes they’d shout back “Big!” 

Hmm, I’d say. “This big?” (holding my fingers and thumbs apart) 

“Bigger!” 

“Ok, this big?” (holding hands apart) 

“No! Bigger!” they’d all shout.

“Okay, then. How about this big?” (hold arms wide apart) 

“Bigger!” …. you get the idea!

This exercise reminds of that last scene in the 1997 film Cosmos, where astrophysicist Dr. Eleanor Arroway, played by Jodie Foster, meets a group of school kids in front of the deep space array of radio telescopes in New Mexico, talking about how big space is and about the possibilities for intelligent life "out there." A lot of Christians, especially Episcopal ones, love that film because it asks all the Big Questions and shows pretty well how scientists go about answering it with a sense of awe and mystery and respect, which we Episcopalians deeply share. To paraphrase (in a way that the original author, the late Dr. Carl Sagan, might object): for me, God is there, and God is real, because if God weren’t, “it’d be an awful waste of space.”

So how big is God? And how would you go about describing God? I have nearly a truckload—literally! -- of books on that subject, but in the end not even all those books even scratch the surface!

In ancient times, cultures dealt with this in a variety of ways. Some divided up God into bite-sized chucks. Some cultures had a particular god for a particular locale or tribe. Others, like the Greeks or Romans, divvied up their gods by function: a god of love, a god of evil, a god of thunder (with or without the hammer!) and so on.

Some limit God solely to the luminous or transcendent, who is so far away that if the divine is knowable at all… it is only through certain specific skills or disciplines, or perhaps for the very few with some kind of "special" knowledge.

As Seinfeld once said “Not that there’s anything wrong with that…” but, these only scratch the surface.

The Hebrews had the triply scandalous notion that there is only One God; that the One God is both holy and at the same time immanent (a fancy word for "not far away") living in a covenant relationship between God and God's people; and that it is the job of God’s people is to make God known to the world by following God’s ways. In some Jewish circles, it's understood that the observance of the law and the prophets is really for and on behalf of us all!

Of course, Christianity holds this concept too, but with a different emphasis on the syllahble.

Christians believe that the One God came to earth and joined with humanity in the person of Jesus Christ and his incarnation, and that the One God is made present to us in the person of the Holy Spirit, and that the One God creates and reigns over all creation God, in the Christian context, is at once accessible, complex... and busy! It is by the grace of God combined with our God-given curiosity and imagination that brings it all together.

I know a lot of folks who just can’t wrap their minds around the Trinity: it’s either too big, too esoteric, or because—no matter how much you reassure them that it’s not—it sounds to them like Tri-Theism. But here it is: there is One God, undivided. And we see all of the fullness of the One God and all of the fullness of all of humanity in the person of Jesus Christ; we see all the Fullness of the One God in the Father; and we see all the fullness of the One God in the Holy Spirit.

But wait! There’s more! 

The One God is with us, near and immediate, involved in everything we do and experience while, at the very same time, setting us free to think, make choices, and to act, in response to God or to our impulses or both…!

The One God has a moral and ethical core which is at the heart of our own moral and ethical longings, our own sense of meaning, but is at the heart of creation itself, which is once free and subject to the laws of physics and nature, but also endless its minutiae and its expansiveness.

We see the One God expressed in a Trinity—a Unity of persons—and where each person of the Trinity each witnesses to the One God in the integrity of their persons. Where God is at once transcendent and knowable by us who are created and living in God’s own image.

I know: Ka-boom! Mind blown. 

Wasn’t that fun?

Once, many years ago, a friend of mine, who is a Unitarian Universalist minister, invited me into his church in Southeast Ohio on Trinity Sunday to talk about, or debate with him, the Trinity before his congregation, remember, of Unitarians in all their variety. My point was that in the early church, when these things were being debated, it was the Trinitarians who were the true Unitarians by emphasizing this dynamic unity!

I don’t think I changed any minds, but it was a whole a lot of fun!

So how do you get at it… how do we make sense of the Trinity? Well, the theology helps even if it is a little, uhm, complex. And we have a wonderful Catechism in the Book of Common Prayer that can walk us through that. 

Some people choose to ignore the whole subject… by glossing over the complexity. Others dodge the intellectual bullet by making the debate about something else, misrepresenting the Trinity and then, presto!, refuting the very silly idea that they just made up.

Other try to defend it by just going to the Creeds; but in a bland kind of “The Creeds say it, I believe it, that settles it!” way. To me, this is kind of the theological equivalent of plugging your ears and saying “la la la!”

I mean, look, it's hard. If I only heard some of things people have been told about the Trinity from various pulpits and Sunday school classrooms over the years, I wouldn't believe it either!

Okay. So how do we get at it?

In participation. We get at the Trinity by living faithfully every day with an inquiring and discerning heart.

I have discovered in prayer, holy silence, and meditation, that an open mind and heart helps. And yes, meditating on the Apostles and Nicene creeds line by line, is a good thing to do. I’ve done it in retreat and as a prayer and journaling exercise.

I have found in art, literature, dance, theater, cinema, music, and science that imagination also helps.

Imagination invites us and allows us to experience the fullness of God… and imagination opens us to hear and be challenged by God’s call. To open our minds, our hearts, our wills, and our imagination to fullness of God, is to hear God’s voice just as God called out to the young Samuel while he was trying to sleep.

I think that we need to let the artistic and poetic side of the brain in on the conversation when we contemplate the Trinity: this is a place for poets, musicians, and artists as much as it for systematic theologians, scientists, and apologists.

The Holy Trinity, through the sacramental life, scripture, life in community, prayer and contemplation, invites to a life steeped in holy imagination. Not making things up... but resting in God, listening to the traditions of the Church and paying attention to world around us.

Allow me to demonstrate.

Think of your favorite hymn.

Got it? Terrific!

Now think about the text of that hymn… how does it speak to you? What aspect of God does that text activate in you?

One hymn that stands out for me is an American hymn called “Wondrous Love” which begins:

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul?
What wondrous love is this, O my soul?
What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss
to bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,
to bear the dreadful curse for my soul?

The third verse goes:

To God and to the Lamb I will sing, I will sing,
to God and to the Lamb I will sing,
to God and to the Lamb who is the great I Am,
while millions join the theme, I will sing, I will sing,
while millions join the theme, I will sing.

I think that meditating on your favorite hymns is one way for you to know how God best makes Godself known to you… and to know how you might most easily approach God! It isn’t foolproof—but when it come to meeting the God of all Creation, what is?

It’s still a very good place to start.

So let’s try it. Turn in your hymnals to Hymn 409 (in the Episcopal Hymnal 1982). This is another one of my favorites. First of all… the tune. What can top this magisterial score by none other than Franz Joseph Haydn? This hymn paints a picture of in music and text of the wonder of creation, evoking “the spacious firmament with all the blue ethereal sky….” Let’s sing the third verse, which is the punchline:

What though in solemn silence all
move round the dark terrestrial ball;
what though nor real voice nor sound
amid their radiant orbs be found;
in reason's ear they all rejoice,
and utter forth a glorious voice,
for ever singing as they shine,
'The hand that made us is divine.'

Oh, yeah! It’s oh so very 18^th Century, isn't it? But then so were the folks who wrote our constitution! When you sang it, did you see a picture, painted in your minds eye, of God revealed in… and the source of… everything? Or, as we might say, God the Father!

Turn to Hymn 435. King’s Weston is a marvelous tune by the great Ralph Vaughn Williams, describing and extolling the Lordship of Christ. In six verses, the hymn sums up how we understand who Jesus is and what God is doing in and through him. The hymn invites us to come to him in love, wonder, and joy.

Let’s sing verses 2 and 5:

Humbled for a season to receive a name
from the lips of sinners unto whom he came,
faithfully he bore it spotless to the last,
brought it back victorious, when from death he passed.

In your hearts enthrone him; there let him subdue
all that is not holy, all that is not true;
crown him as your Captain in temptation's hour:
let his will enfold you in its light and pow'r.

A lovely little hymn about the Holy Spirit is hymn 513, written by Father Carl P. Daw, Jr., an Episcopal priest, it appeared for the first time in the Hymnal 1982. It beautifully evokes both the power and the intimacy of God the Holy Spirit. Let’s sing verse 1:

Like the murmur of the dove’s song,
like the challenge of her flight,
like the vigor of the wind’s rush,
like the new flame’s eager might:
come, Holy Spirit, come.

Finally, let’s contemplate the fullness of the One God in Trinity of Persons through this well known and magnificent Reformation hymn Nun danket alle Gott, “Now Thank We All Our God,” Hymn 396, singing verse 3 together:

All praise and thanks to God
the Father now be given,
the Son and Spirit blest,
who reign in highest heaven
the one eternal God,
whom heaven and earth adore;
for thus it was, is now,
and shall be evermore. 

Trinity Sunday is the first Sunday of what some call “ordinary time” or the Sundays after Pentecost. But there is nothing ordinary about our Creating, Redeeming, and Empowering God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! 

We have now entered a season of contemplation and action. We will spend the summer and next fall learning to follow the teachings of Jesus. We listen for the Spirit to move us to do them! Day by day we stand in awe and humility before the presence of God, as we learn to know and walk with God. We do that in lots of ways: Baptism and Eucharist, Scripture and prayer, Holy Service and Holy Companionship. We do this in concert with the Church Catholic in all time and places. God has given us imagination, intellect, art, music, science, and more to bounce off the witness of Scripture and the life of the whole Church and see God working and alive… and then we only catch the merest glimpse of God’s love, God’s power, God’s majesty….

Blessed with holy imagination, we find that in all that we do, in all whom we love, in all our creativity and inquiry, and in all our care for each other and creation, that our loving, living, Triune God is active in all of us and in our world.

In the Trinity, we see that the fullness, the love, the intimacy of God is bigger than the universe, and as near as our hearts.

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A sermon for Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2021 at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater, Florida

Here is a video of the Liturgy for Trinity Sunday (Facebook)

Here is a video of the Sermon only. (Vimeo)