Making (Some) Sense of the Trinity (Romans 5:1-5; Trinity Sunday C; May 26, 2013)

Making (Some) Sense of the Trinity

Romans 5:1-5
Trinity Sunday C
May 26, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

In the secular calendar of our nation it is Memorial Day weekend.  At cemeteries around the country there are special ceremonies.  We are remembering our nation’s war dead, those whose lives were lost in the course of fighting our many—too many—wars.  We should remember them.  I think that we should also remember those who put on uniforms, went away to war and came home wounded and changed in ways that have made it difficult to impossible to live normal lives again. 

But in the church we have a different calendar, one that is tied, not to the rhythms of national life, but to the life and work of Jesus Christ.  You’ve been overhearing, I’m sure, when I’ve talked to the kids about the church year and the various colors that go along with it.  You may remember that there are two major seasons of the church year: the season that centers on Easter and the season that centers on Christmas.  Those two seasons take up twenty Sundays of the year, leaving thirty-two Sundays that belong to what we call “ordinary time.”  Ordinary time comes in two blocks, one after Epiphany and the other after Pentecost.  In their wisdom, the folks who put together our modern version of the calendar decided to “frame” these blocks of ordinary time with minor observances.  The ordinary time after Christmas begins with the Baptism of Christ and ends with the Transfiguration.  The ordinary time after Easter ends with Christ the King and begins, today, with Trinity Sunday.  The color for all four of those minor observances is white.  In four Sundays we have white, red, white, and green—it keeps us alert.

So today is Trinity Sunday.  Hooray, I guess.  What do we do with that?  Well, we’re Christians, we believe in the Trinity.  Uh huh.  So, Pastor, explain to me about the Trinity.  What do you want to know?  What is it?  The Christian tradition teaches that there is one God and that God is known to us in three persons.  Where does it say that in the Bible?  It doesn’t.  But we believe it?  Yes.  So, one plus one plus one equals three?  I suppose so.  Then why aren’t there fights with math teachers about arithmetic like there are fights with science teachers about evolution?

Now, of course, in this imaginary conversation, if I were not being flippant, we could go into the whole story of how the catholic, orthodox church—the part of the Christian movement where our roots lie—came to this decision about how we should talk about God.  It is not a pretty story. 

I had the chance to have lunch this week with Eric Schubert who will be commissioned as a minister two weeks from today.  I’m impressed with him.  He has just enough education to be dangerous and just enough experience in the church to be prudent.  I predict a challenging and rewarding journey for him in ordained ministry and challenging and rewarding times for the congregations where he will serve.

Anyway, Eric points out that the current fights in our denomination haven’t really been going on very long.  We’ve been fighting about sex for forty years.  We fought about the Trinity for over four hundred years.  We are amateurs, mere dabblers, in conflict compared to the heroic partisans of the early days!

It was a bitter struggle.  In Alexandria, Egypt, there were riots between the orthodox who believed that the Son was of the same substance with the Father and the Arians who believed that the Son was of a similar substance to the Father, the difference being expressed with a single letter, an iota, that marked the difference between the orthodox homoousios and the Arian homoiousios.  To this day the Eastern (or Greek) Church and the Western (or Latin) Church cannot agree on whether the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father” or “from the Father and the Son.”

We can study the debates and controversies if we’d like.  They are things that fascinate the sort of people who are fascinated by these things.  As for the rest of us—not so much.  So maybe the question before us is, “Is this something that we don’t understand, something for which there is no practical use, but which we are nevertheless supposed to believe?”

The short answer according to me is, No.  Of course we can’t understand the Trinity completely.  Human language is not big enough to contain God, even on a good day.  But we ought to be able to understand enough to be able to experience in practice what the notion of the Trinity is getting at.  We ought to be able to make some sense of the Trinity.

Paul seems to be doing something of the sort in the early parts of our reading from Romans.  Paul says we have peace with God through Christ and, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit, we are being formed and transformed so that we share in God’s glory.  So, we have God, Christ and the Spirit and all are involved in some way in forming us.

The Trinity is an elegant solution to a difficult problem that Paul has touched on.  The trouble is, the language that early theologians used to work this out makes as much sense to us as an algebra word problem written out in ancient Akkadian.  We have to express both the problem and the solution in language and forms of thought that make sense to us.

And here’s the background of the problem that I think Paul is touching on and the Trinity addresses squarely: We are followers of Jesus because we have met the God of Jesus.  We have met the God of Jesus because we have met Jesus.  We don’t meet Jesus in the flesh the way that his first disciples did.  Instead, we meet Jesus through the Spirit who is present when and wherever the followers of Jesus gather.  The problem itself is this: How do we live with confidence and boldness as followers of Jesus?  How do we know that the God that we meet when we gather with other followers of Jesus is authentic?

Let’s start at the beginning.  Jesus’ first disciples met God and experienced God’s love in the life and teaching, the ministry and person of Jesus of Nazareth.  But is this authentic?  Is the God whom they met in the life and teaching, the ministry and person of Jesus of Nazareth the same God as the God who made the mosquito, set the Israelites free from slavery in Egypt, and entered into a committed relationship with them?  If so, then the disciples can trust the love that they found in Jesus.  If not, then who knows but what God is holding something back that might call that love into question? 

The idea of the Trinity says that the answer is, Yes, this is the same God.  You can trust the love that you find in the life and teaching, the ministry and person of Jesus of Nazareth as the love of the God who made the mosquito, freed captives and entered a committed relationship with the Israelites.  This God they met in Jesus is not a different God, or a being who is something like God, but the very same God.  The disciples can live with confidence and boldness as followers of Jesus.

But our situation is different.  We can’t see Jesus.  We can’t touch him, smell, hear or taste him.  He isn’t here for us in the same way that he was there for the disciples.  Without using any of the five senses, though, we are able to sense a Spirit when we gather with other followers of Jesus.  Sometimes that Spirit can barely be felt at all and other times it nearly clubs us over the head.  And in that Spirit we meet Jesus.  And in our meeting with Jesus in that Spirit we meet the love of God.  But is this authentic?  Is the God whose love we meet in the Jesus we meet in the Spirit the same God as the disciples meet in Jesus of Nazareth, the same God as the God who made the mosquito, delivered captive slaves and made covenant with those freed captives?  If so, then we can trust the love that we meet.  If not, then who knows but what God is holding something back that might call that love into question? 

The idea of the Trinity says that the answer is, Yes, this is the same God.  We can trust the love that we find in the life and teaching, the ministry and person of Jesus of Nazareth whom meet in the Spirit as the love of the God who made the mosquito and did all those other things.  Yes, the God whom we meet in Jesus is God.  Yes, the Spirit in whom we meet Jesus is God.  They are the same God, the one God, the God who made the mosquito.  And we can trust this love that has met us.

The idea of the Trinity was not something written down in the Bible.  Instead it is our attempt to make sense of our experience as followers of Jesus.  But it is not just arcane speculation.  It is a practical matter for a practical people like us.  It is the encouragement that we, acting together as the Church, give to ourselves as individual followers of Jesus that we are indeed on the right path.  It is our reminder to ourselves that we can trust this way of living out of and toward God’s love.  It is our charge to ourselves to live with confidence and boldness as followers of Jesus.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

In the Native Language of Each (Acts 2:1-21; Pentecost C; May 19, 2013)

In the Native Language of Each

 

Acts 2:1-21
Pentecost C
May 19, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

For lay liturgists and lay readers, the reading from Acts 2 is a giant slayer: all those strange names for places we have never heard of, much less been!  The main reason for going to seminary, I say, is to learn how to say the names.  It takes about three years.

But the names of the places are not the only strange thing about this story.  While the story makes sense on its own, it’s pretty clear to me at least that its meaning extends far beyond the boundaries of the story itself.

The first part of Luke/Acts begins with people from all over the Roman world going to their hometowns.  The second part of Luke/Acts begins with people from hometowns all over the Roman world coming to Jerusalem.  Luke/Acts moves on from here to have followers of Jesus going from Jerusalem to places all over the Roman world.  As a result of that scattering of apostles, people all over the empire become Jesus followers. 

When Pentecost came and they (whoever we imagine “they” might have been) were all in one place, many spoke all at once in different languages and many others heard this jumble of voices and could pick out their own native language being spoken and all the speech was given to the praise of God.  Out of confusion came common understanding and agreement.  This is the reverse of the theme of the confusion of languages at Babel. 

In fact, I’m not really sure which is the more marvelous: that each disciple was able to praise God in a different language given by the Spirit or that a “United Nations” crowd of different ethnic groups and languages could understand them. 

I am sure that at the heart of these marvels is a commitment: a commitment to the translatability of the message of God’s love.  Wherever the good news of God’s love has gone, missionaries undertook to translate the Bible into the native language of the people.  This isn’t just true of the modern missionary movement of the last two hundred years or so.  It was true in the earliest days.  There are ancient translations into Latin, Gothic, Syriac (a language very similar to the Aramaic that Jesus spoke), Coptic (spoken in Egypt), Armenian, Ethiopic and Georgian (the language spoken in Atlanta) to name just a few.

From the very beginning, Christians have insisted on the translatability of the good news.  This seems normal to us, but it’s really a rare commitment.  The Jewish tradition admits translations of the Hebrew Bible into other languages, but really Hebrew is the proper language of Scripture.  To this day Jewish young people learn at least enough Hebrew to be able to read a selection from the Torah at their Bar or Bas Mitzvah.  Jewish religious instruction for young people is often called simply Hebrew School and learning Hebrew is the vehicle for greater learning about Jewish faith and practice.

When it comes to Islam there is an even stricter line drawn around the sacred text.  The Quran is written in Arabic.  You can buy translations, but Muslims are clear that these translations are interpretations rather than the Quran itself.  To read the Quran itself you must learn Arabic. 

Being able to read the Bible in the original languages is important to me.  It really is amazing just how often subtle differences between the meaning of a word in Hebrew or Greek and the word used to translate it in English make a real difference in understanding.  This is why serious Lutherans learn Norwegian so that they can read the works of Martin Luther in the original.

I also believe that every language carries with it a different map of human experience.  In that sense each language is a complete world.  Each language is able to express some thoughts that other languages cannot.  Some ideas or experiences cannot be translated.  But Christians have been convinced from the very beginning that the love of God is not one of those ideas or experiences.  The love and justice of God can be expressed in every language.  God’s good news in short is translatable.

We do not expect people to learn our language in order to learn about God’s love and justice.  We learn their language in order to tell God’s story.

I’m not just talking about learning Spanish or Somali to be able to share God’s love with our newest neighbors.  I am talking about that, but not just about that.  There are lots of people who speak English who are not speaking our language.

Each generation speaks a different dialect of English.  Each generation has had a different experience of the world.  Each generation has a different way of mapping that world.  Trust me when I say that “gay” no longer means happy or care free.  Trust me when I say that for most people grace is not a theological word and when we talk about God’s grace they wonder why we’re saying God is like a figure skater.  When the word God means the one who protects soldiers from bullets and IEDs, helps us sink foul shots and punishes bad people; when love means the same thing as sex; and when justice means what happens in a prison, telling the story of God’s love and justice may require us to come up with different words.

As this story and the rest of Acts make clear whether it’s a matter of the language that people speak or the place where they live, we go to them.  We don’t expect people to come to us.  We don’t expect them to learn our language.  We don’t expect them to conform to our customs.  We don’t expect them to dress like us.  We don’t expect them to know our unwritten codes of behavior for how “good people” are supposed to act.  The challenge that we face today is not how to get other people to come through the doors into our church.  The challenge we face today is how to get us out the doors of our church to go to other people.

Now here is where it gets scary for us, just as it got scary for the early followers of Jesus.  A commitment to going to where people are and telling God’s story in the language they understand—even if that language is English—means that we are committed to letting God’s love and justice take us to uncomfortable places.  We meet other people on their safe ground, not ours. 

It’s scary because we cannot control how those meetings will turn out.  We are likely to be changed by them.  Conversation and conversion both come from the same Latin root that means “to turn with.”  Whenever we have a genuine conversation we risk conversion.  The story of God’s love and justice will remain but everything else is up for grabs when we commit ourselves to going to others.  That’s scary.

The Spirit—that presence of the God of love and justice that propels us into the world as God’s agents—is never very predictable.  We never know what will happen when the Spirit moves among us any more than we know what will happen when we dump eighty balloons on a singing congregation.  We know that our plans will be disrupted.  Our lives, the lives that we had imagined and planned for ourselves, will be ruined.  We will go places we had never intended to go.  We will meet people we had never intended to meet.  We will become people we had never intended to be.

I can testify in some detail that in this way God has ruined my life.  And I wouldn’t have it any other way.  A long time ago I decided that I had no idea where I would go, nor whom I would meet.  And here I am and here we are together in Decorah!

I hope for all of us that God will come as fire and burn our plans and our spreadsheets.  I hope for all of us that God will come as wind and scatter the resulting ashes.  I hope for all of us that God will ruin our lives by moving among and within us, urging us beyond the cocoons we would fashion for ourselves otherwise, pushing and shoving and even—to use the word that Mark uses to describe how the Spirit moved Jesus—driving us to meet other people on their ground and to tell the story in their language.  I offer this blessing especially to those of you who are graduating from high school or college or vocational training and have your future all neatly planned: I pray that God will ruin your life.  Otherwise the life that you end up with will only be the one you have been able to imagine, rather than the life that God dreams for you.  Having your life ruined isn’t comfortable or pleasant, but it is an adventure.  And I can guarantee that you will have a story to tell, a story of “the mighty works of God.”Some will scoff and say you’re probably drunk, but others will know that they have a glimpse of what God is like because they have known you.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

A Disruptive Influence (Acts 16:16-34; Seventh Sunday of Easter; May 12, 2013)

A Disruptive Influence

Acts 16:16-34
Seventh Sunday of Easter
May 12, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Mother’s Day is no picnic for preachers.  It’s a minefield that we are required to tiptoe through once a year and without a map.  A few years of experience will provide some sense of where the safest paths may lie and where some of the most powerful of the mines may be buried.  But the Mother’s Day minefield is sown on shifting ground.  What was safe in 1980 cannot be counted on now and a well-worn path may turn out to hide deadly hazards.  But then I’m not really a preacher who sticks to the safest paths.

In this country we celebrate mothers today.  Or rather, we celebrate motherhood.  We lift up the important work that mothers do and express our gratitude toward our own mothers.  Mothers accept the adoration of their children and all seems right with the world.  And what could be wrong with that?

Ah, but this holiday is booby-trapped.  There are women who were unable to have children as they had wanted to and perhaps had dreamed that they would.  Mother’s Day serves to remind them of the hole in their lives that was never really filled by anything else. 

There are women who chose not to have children because they were called to a life’s work that left too little room to raise children well.  There are women who knew themselves well enough to know that they didn’t have the gifts and inclinations needed to raise children.  Mother’s Day holds up before them an accusatory set of expectations not only about being a mother but about being a woman.  We do not honor the women who have chosen to devote themselves to a calling or a cause with such faithfulness that they have decided to set aside having children. 

Then there are, tragically, the women who had children once, but have suffered the heart-break of having survived them.  Mother’s Day for them is a troubling reminder of all that they have lost.   There are those whose children went astray somehow.  For them Mother’s Day is an annual occasion for self-blame and shame.

Even mothers who are doing the job well suffer.  The expectations today around motherhood are so high, so ridiculously high, that I don’t think there is a mother today who doesn’t secretly feel weighed in the balance and found wanting.

And let’s not forget the women who are not the mothers of the children they are helping to raise,but who nonetheless are doing their best and for their troubles are pinned with that dreaded label: step-mother.

As if all that were not enough there are the children who are troubled by this day.  In the normal course of things we will outlive our mothers, but it’s still painful.  Those of us who have lost our mothers find this day bittersweet.

There are children whose mothers died when they were young and there are children whose mothers walked out of their lives when they needed them most. 

And then there are the children whose mothers have simply failed to meet even the barest of minimum expectations, whose neglect or abuse have left their children maimed.  Once a year we remind these children of what they never had.  And if, which is the case far too often, this abuse and neglect is still a secret, the thing that everyone in the family knows but no one is allowed to say aloud, they may even be under pressure to pretend that they had the mother they wish that they had had.

You see?  There are mines buried everywhere.  Does that mean we shouldn’t observe the day?  Families may certainly celebrate the day in ways that make sense in their circumstances.  It is never wrong—quite the opposite—to thank the people who have nurtured and cared for us and helped us to grow, whoever these people may be, whether parents or teachers or neighbors or others.  But when we bring this holiday to church we can hurt people without meaning to.  For followers of Jesus that’s reason enough to be careful.

Maybe if the first founder of a Mothers’ Day in this country had had her way this wouldn’t be so hard.  Julia Ward Howe, the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was so aghast at the slaughter of the Civil War for which her poem had provided a significant part of the soundtrack, that she turned to the cause of promoting peace.  She was convinced that, if the women of the world could have their way, there would be an end to war.  In 1870 she issued a proclamation and called for women to gather at peace conventions around the world to mark a Mothers’ Day for Peace:

Arise then...women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: "We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies, our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.[1]

Peace conventions gathered but the movement lasted about as long as she paid the cost of the conventions.  In the end, as you know, war went on.  Howe’s voice was not heeded.

Two women figure prominently in the story of Paul’s ministry in Philippi.  The first is Lydia. We heard about her last week.  She was a widow and business woman who underwrote Paul’s ministry there by giving Paul and his companions a place to stay and meals to eat.

The other woman is a female slave whose name we do not know.  She had a fortune-telling spirit and her owners used this gift to make money.  When she met Paul she appointed herself his herald.  While Paul was going about his work, she was announcing, “These people are servants of the Most High God!  They are proclaiming a way of salvation to you!”  She kept repeating the message.  She did it for days.  Paul became annoyed.

Finally he ordered the spirit to come out of her and it did.  Notice that he was not motivated by concern for her welfare, for this slave woman who was possessed by a spirit.  Notice that she wasn’t saying anything incorrect or untrue.  But she was a woman.  And she was speaking in public which was unacceptable in those days.  Paul cast out the spirit.  We don’t know whether she had any more to say or not, but in the text she falls silent and is heard no more.  She loses her voice.

Slave women in general don’t have much voice in the two-volume work we call Luke and Acts, even though they all tell the truth.  The slave woman who identifies Peter as a follower of Jesus in the high priest’s residence meets with Peter’s adamant denial.  No one believes Rhoda, the slave woman who answers the gate at John Mark’s mother’s house, when she tells the congregation in the house that Peter is free from prison. 

Slave women don’t have much voice in Luke and Acts.  But that’s not the way it was supposed to be.  When the Spirit of God fell on the disciples on the day of Pentecost and the crowd demanded an explanation and Peter stood up to give it, he quoted the prophet Joel: “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit upon all people.  Your sons and your daughters will prophesy.  Your young will see visions, and your old will dream dreams.  Even upon my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.”[2]

The community of Jesus followers was a new thing, a new way for people to live with each other, a new way to be human.  But it was hard to let go of the old.  The early Jesus community fell short of its promise.  Especially it was hard when letting go meant that women would do things that they had never done before, when letting go meant letting go of male privilege and power.  Paul had a hard time doing it.  The reality of having women as partners in ministry was hard; he preferred it when they were silent partners like Lydia.  The reality of women proclaiming the truth in the public marketplace was more than he could bear.

Julia Ward Howe’s case shows that it hadn’t gotten much easier even eighteen hundred years later.  We would still rather install women safely on pedestals where we can celebrate them when they meet our expectations (and vilify them when they do not) than to listen to their hopes and cries for peace.  We still fall short of our promise. 

This story isn’t finished, though.  We can still take a step toward the promise that Joel made in God’s name.  There is nothing wrong with taking your mom to dinner, especially if she is the one who does the family’s cooking.  There is nothing wrong with giving her a break from her routine work.  There is nothing wrong with giving her a card or a gift.  But we might take a step beyond thanking her for resembling what we want her to be to ask her what she needs in order to resemble the dream that God has placed in her heart.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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[1] Howe, Julia Ward. “Mothers’ Day Proclamation”, 1870. http://womenshistory.about.com/od/howejwriting/a/mothers_day.htm.

 

[2] Acts 2:17-18 CEB.