That We All May Be One

We gather to celebrate the Feast of the Holy Trinity today. When Christians say that we understand God as Trinity, we are not saying, of course that we believe in three gods. Or that the one God is somehow “divided into three parts.” What we are trying to say, among other things, is that we have experienced that one God in three ways – ways we have identified as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 And, also, that there is a complexity, a multifaceted reality, about the very nature of God, in which we need to be saying several things at once about this awesome Being. Things which may, at first glance, seem to be contradictory but which, we have come to believe, are all true about God. I think our Readings from Holy Scripture this morning are attempts to identify those different aspects of God.

 First of all, we have the Exodus account of Moses encountering God in the wilderness. And it’s an encounter with the power, the transcendence, the wholly “otherness” of God.

“Moses, Moses…Here I am…Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground…And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.” (Exodus 3)

 Well, this may be our first experience, our first encounter with God as well. I mean if this God we worship is the Creator, and ultimate Sustainer, of this entire world; indeed of the  vast Universe in which our whole galaxy is just a speck of microscopic dust, this is indeed an “awesome God!”

 Taking off your shoes, or falling on your face (as, for example, Muslims do every time they pray!) is probably a pretty appropriate thing to do. It’s why we Christians kneel sometimes to pray, and at certain times in our liturgy. We are to be in awe of God!

 And the temple worship of the Jewish people, the whole sacrificial system, the Hebrew Bible itself on which Jesus grew up majors in this understanding of God. They would not even pronounce God’s name out loud lest they be taking it “in vain.” To see God face to face was to risk almost certain death.

 But Jesus of Nazareth, in whom we have experienced God, emphasized another aspect, another “nature” of the Divine. A nature so different from the one we’ve just been talking about that he tells Nicodemus in the Gospel that you almost have to be “born all over again” to get your mind around it.

 “Very truly,” he says, “I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” (John 3)

 God…loves the world, Jesus taught. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life!” What Jesus was trying to say, and to hold in tension with the awesome, transcendent nature of God which he took for granted, was the loving nature of God. Jesus wanted us to understand, not only the power of God, but the compassion of God.  He wanted us to know that God was not “against” us, but always, and for ever “for” us…as human beings created in the divine image. God so loved…that he gave…

 Power…complemented by…love. And St. Paul, writing some twenty years later to the Christians in Rome, takes it one step further. He says, “…all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” 

 “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry ‘Abba, Father’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ…” (Romans, chapter eight)    

 Paul is emphasizing…intimacy. You know, you can have power over someone and not have any real relationship with them at all, not care about them in the least. And you can love someone without being particularly intimate with them. Power is simply the ability to act and power “over” someone else is the ability to act in such a way as to have influence over them.

 Love, at its simplest, is not an emotion at all. It is a decision. A decision to put the best interests of another ahead of your own interests. But intimacy implies a connection…and even more than connection, a relationship, even a kinship. “When we cry ‘Abba, Father’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ…”

 At its simplest, I think that’s what the Church – through her creeds and liturgy – is trying to say when we confess God as “in Trinity of Persons and Unity in Being.” We’re trying to say that the One God is the transcendent Power which created and sustains the Universe. But at the same time that Power is guided by Love. The guiding principle of God’s power, and the guiding principle at the core of creation, is none other than the power of love itself.

 And because of that, God wants to be in relationship with each and every one of us. And that relationship is to be one of intimacy. For the God who spun out the heavens, the God who became vulnerable in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, is the same God who is as close to you as the next beat of your heart, and the next breath you take!

 One God: powerful, loving, intimate. One God: creating, sustaining, sanctifying. One God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 Amen.

The Passover meal awkward and tense somehow. They didn’t know exactly what was going to happen next and, when they did, didn’t know exactly what to say.  He broke the loaf. “My body.” He poured the wine. “My blood.”

They finished and went out into the night. He tried to pray. They tried to stay awake. And then it all began to happen. Angry voices. Fighting. Arrested. For what?

The hurried “trial.” Mock justice for the poor. They could expect nothing more. Torture. The lash. The “crown.” Blood everywhere. The long, encumbered walk. Through the city. Up the hill.

Hammer. Nails. The scream. Deed done.

And now the hours of waiting. Struggling to breathe. Inching his way up the cross to catch a breath. Pain forcing him down again. Muffled conversations.  Consciousness fading. Darkness.  Death.

Empty silent Sabbath. Confusion. Grief. Despair.

But the next morning. The women came at sunrise. Fearful. But the stone was gone.

So was the body.

He’s been raised…he’s not here!

We have to tell Peter…and the others!

He’s been raised!    

He is alive!

We are in the middle of a fascinating series of lectures and discussions with Bill Bishop, a journalist, and Walter Brueggemann, the Old Testament scholar, on pluralism and unity in world and church as we meet as a House of Bishops here at the Kanuga Conference Center in North Carolina.

Mr. Bishop has written widely on the “sorting” Americans are doing by retreating not just into “red” and “blue” states but in local communities. Withdrawing from any engagement with those who may be different, but “ghetto-izing” ourselves into neighborhoods (and churches!) of like-minded people. This has a tendency to reinforce our own prejudices and lead us deeper into extremism on all sides. It makes conversation and community extremely difficult.

Dr. Brueggemann is challenging us to see the Bible, not as some kind of seamless document of universal Truth, but as a conversation itself between different narratives. The Hebrew Bible itself, he maintains, is such a conversation between (among others) the “Priestly” and “Deuteronomic” traditions — between “purity” and “prophecy.”

His point is that neither tradition “won out” because both are true and need each other. Similarly, in the church today “conservatives” (who emphasize purity) and “liberals” (who emphasize prophecy) desparately need each other and cannot afford to allow this cultural “ghetto-ization” to separate us from one another and so lose “the rest of the story.” (To quote the late Paul Harvey!).

He thinks that, at least within the church today, we need fewer “prophets” of the kind which arose in Israel in  and around the Babylonian captivity. Instead, he believes, we need more “scribes” who are able to go back to the Tradition, bringing out “what is old and what is new.” This scribal approach flourished more in the Persian period in Israel and required a subtle combination of “accommodation and resistence” to the Empire under which they found themselves.

If we are to be a truly “prophetic church” against the Empire of our day — consumerism, militarism, etc. — we cannot afford to be lobbing “prophetic grenades” against one another in the church. We need instead to keep the conversation going between the “priests and the prophets,” the “Puritans” and the “Revisionists”, the “conservatives” and the “liberals”

Because none of us has a corner on the Truth. The wheat and the tares must be allowed to grow together. Because “The Big Sort” is yet to come!

And only God can do that.

It was good to hear the keynote speaker — Dr. Louis Weil — at this year’s “Epiphany West” conference come out strongly against so-called “open communion” (communion of the un-baptized). That was especially courageous here in California where the practice is becoming widespread.

Cautioning against “playing God at the altar rail” (meaning that he would never turn anyone away from communion), Dr. Weil nonetheless  believes that this practice trivializes baptism and wonders why, after all the years reclaiming its centrality, we would now want to make it virtually optional.

The theme of this conference has been “Baptismal Water: Thicker Than Blood” and we have looked at baptism through a variety of lenses — liturgical, ecumenical, and missional. Dr. Weil, of course, has taught generations of clergy and laity about the important rediscovery of a baptismal ecclesiology, the recovery of the Easter Vigil, and the use of the rich symbols in our liturgical life.

I am in absolute agreement with Louis Weil here. I am familiar with the “open table” of Jesus argument — that he ate with outcasts and sinners and never turned anyone away, etc. However, I am unpersuaded that this is the same thing as the Eucharist and would encourage congregations really to invite the poor into their homes and parish halls for meals rather than believe that they have  actually exercized hospitality by inviting the unbaptized to communion.

Certainly, it is an ecumenical nightmare. An Orthodox priest friend of mine wandered into an Episcopal Church inviting “all who are hungry for God” to receive the sacrament and later told me, “If you think Gene Robinson is a problem, that is nothing compared to this from our perspective!”

The point being, we have ecumenical covenants and commitments that we have made over the last forty or fifty years which are predicated on our commitment to certain basic sacramental practices. When these practices involve the most basic sacrament which unites all Christians together, regardless of our other differences, surely we run the risk of being considered unreliable ecumenical partners when we make these changes with virtually no theological conversation among ourselves and certainly none with our ecumenical partners.

And, of course, any priest who formally and publically invites the un-baptized to Holy Communion is in direct violation of canon law and subject to discipline for that.

But, hey, who cares about that, right?

Like so many, today’s seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 brings back so many memories. As I join in the “moments of silence” today, I remember someone interrupting Morning Prayer in the Chapel of Christ the Lord at the Episcopal Church Center with the news that “a plane had apparantly hit the World Trade Center.”

After prayers, watching the news from our coffee break room with other staff…trying to get through to my fiancee who was in a meeting at General Seminary…being told to stay in the building…watching hordes of people, eventually, in the streets of New York…the incomprehensibility that this really could have happened…

Days later, standing in Grand Central Station, like some scene out of a WWII war movie, trying to get my wife-to-be on a train back to the Midwest since all the flights were cancelled…participating in a still-convened House of Bishops meeting where we pled for a thoughtful and studied response to this tragedy and to avoid retribution… 

Much later, serving as chaplains through St. Paul’s Chapel near Ground Zero…conducting two funeral services for the son of an Iowa priest and his wife who had been in the building… grieving at, not only the loss of life, but at the squandered “opportunity” for this country to stand in solidarity (for a change) with the world’s suffering, to accept the goodwill which came from all around the planet, and to turn this gut-wrenching sorrow into joy. 

Would it have been possible for this awful day to have been transformed into actions leading more closely to a world where “we all may be one?”

I guess we’ll never know…

But, it would have been good to have tried…