Being Personal
January 07, 2007
Texts: Luke 3:15-17, 21-22; Isaiah 43:1-7
About a dozen years ago, I was taking the boys to school one morning – can’t remember much about the particulars. But I do remember that Tyler was going to have a friend over after school. And I remember that something was going on with Jason – I don’t think it was a big deal, maybe a scheduling thing about needing to take him to various activities later, but I arrived home preoccupied with Jason’s stuff and was still thinking about it when the telephone rang. “Hello, is this Tyler’s Mom?” the woman asked, and I answered, “No, this is Jason’s Mom.” Whoops….I quickly got my bearings, and reassured the mother of the boy who was coming over after school that I did know all my children, and could be trusted with hers for a couple of hours.
We each have a number of identities…we can be confused too. Tyler’s mom/Jason’s mom/Corey’s mom – minister, daughter, wife, sister, friend – most of my identity is relational. So, too, with the Trinity: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – how we understand them is by who they are in relationship to each other. Let me tell you upfront that a lot of the thinking in this sermon came from a lecture on Trinity given by the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. But not all of it. For example, Rohr did not mention that this story of the baptism of Jesus is one of the most important defining stories in the Bible from the life of Jesus. Of the four gospels, only two tell the story of the birth of Jesus, of Christmas, and they don’t tell it in the same way. But all four Gospels describe this event, this moment when God is experienced as Trinity.
Karl Rahner said that “The fact [is] that, despite their orthodox confession of the Trinity, Christians are, in their practical lives, almost mere ‘monotheists’, and were the doctrine to be eliminated as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged.” Unfortunately, that is probably true, although Trinity, if we ever get our heads around it and allow our hearts to be embraced by it, can change the way we understand God, and therefore, can change the way we experience our lives.
Rohr believes that we can’t think our way into understanding the Trinity, that we can only come to some understanding through contemplation, that style of prayer which rests in the presence of God, rather than talking with God. And I wish we had time to spend 10 or 15 minutes in contemplative prayer during worship. We will close the sermon with some music that Dan Mitchell and Shenandoah Sowash will share will us, and perhaps that will edge us closer to a contemplative experience of the message, but in the meantime, let’s love God with our minds.
There are a number of explanations I have heard, and I have given, for Trinity. The most important dimension of Trinity however, is that in God’s very self, God is in relationship. Relationality is integral to the divine. We get closer to Trinity by thinking of a circle than a triangle. The ancients describe the Trinity as perichoresis, which meant a dance. And in that description, they were getting at the dynamic and relational quality of the Trinity. When we say God is love, we are not describing a noun, love, we are saying that God is relationally, dynamically loving. Think of God as a verb as much as a noun.
Rohr describes the Creator God as the mystery of total givenness, Jesus as the mystery of total receptivity, and the Spirit is the gift. I believe it was Augustine who described God the Father as the Lover, God the Son as the beloved, and God the Holy Spirit as the Love which flows between them, and to-and-from God and Creation.
Meister Eckert said it this way, “The Father laughs with the Son, the Son laughs with the Father; the Father likes the Son, the Son likes the Father; the Father delights in the Son, the Son delights in the Father; the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father; this laughter, liking, delighting, love is the Holy Spirit.” And we are called into this cycle of laughter, liking, delighting and love. Because the study of Trinity is the study of the very shape and style of God, and finally the very shape and style of all that is. It is unhindered communion and dialogue. This is the relationship we see in the baptism of Jesus. God proclaiming the blessing, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Jesus receiving the blessing, and the Spirit as the blessing in the form of a dove descending from the Father to the Son. Giveness, receptivity, and love, in a dynamic, flow from one to another. The movement towards unity, reconciliation, this is the Godly energy in the universe.
It is a participative relationship – we, too, are invited into this circle of love – and that is one of the keys of the Isaiah passage – we have always been invited into the dance. Jesus did not make our relationship with God possible, except insofar as he reveals God’s love to us and God’s solidarity with us in a way that finally convinces us. Isaiah was written several hundred years before Jesus came among us. And God was beckoning people into a dynamic relationship of trust and love even then.
So, perfect giving, perfect receiving – this is the nature of being. Life in God is a circle of praise – mutual affirmation, mutual deference flowing from one to the other – not only from God to Jesus and back, but from God to us, and back, and so the real meaning of sin is probably better understood as brokenness. It is any way that we stop that flow – which comes from our fear, of intimacy, of God, of each other.
The only thing that can keep us out of that divine dance is our fear…for God will use everything to get us into the dance, ESPECIALLY our mistakes. So we need to resist our fear of vulnerability before God…and haven’t you noticed that so often, when a messenger of God begins a conversation with a human in the Bible, they open by saying, “Fear not….”?
And so the three persons of the Trinity are the three ways we receive love and life from God. The word person is from the Greek word, personare, denoting the mask that was used in drama – it was a word which means ‘to sound through’, and describes the mask – that which is spoken through. It was adapted to the three persons of the Trinity, because it was describing the three Persons of God as being the three forms through which the One love is spoken.
So when we think of ourselves as persons, we are saying that we, too, are beings who are spoken through. The word person suggests our connection to that Holy Circle of Praise, that Godly energy of love which is the heartbeat of all that is. And so, how we do faith is how we are human, it’s how, again, we are persons – are we able to be intimate, to be open to another, to give freely, to receive freely? Are we able to be spoken through?
We get so easily caught up in the negative voices of our culture which tell us to fear or hate each other, and to feel bad about ourselves. We get so easily confused even in our faith – focused on sin, which is not what God intended at all. Look at the Isaiah account: You are precious in my eyes, and I love you…in the eyes of God, as God sees us, we are precious, we are beloved. Notice that in this passage – God’s love is not contingent on anything – we can’t add to or subtract from God’s love for us. All we can do is participate or not participate in the flow – for we are always welcomed into the love of God. God is on our side, more than we are on our own. God was always on our side.
For many of us this is a new way of thinking about God, and about ourselves. And Jesus knew it would be hard for us to hold onto this way of thinking , and this is why he told us about the Holy Spirit. In the Gospel of John, in the last conversation with his disciples, Jesus speaks of the Advocate. The Greek word is Paraclete – a term from the Greek legal system, for the defense attorney. We need an advocate to remind us of who we are, of whose we are, to defend us from the lies the world will tell us about ourselves. And Jesus tells the disciples as he describes the Holy Spirit, in John 16:8, “And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment….” Jesus didn’t need to convince God to love us – God was already loving us, we are precious in the eyes of God. Jesus came to convince US. The Holy Spirit comes within us to speak the Truth of God’s love to US, and it is as we grow to appreciate the Truth that the very Spirit of the Living God can fill us, and draw us into that circle of praise where we find our hearts drawn to worship the Holy One. And by participating in this life of God in three persons, we too become persons, those through whom God’s love is spoken to the world.
Catherine LaCugna wrote in her book God For Us, “The very nature of God, therefore, is to seek out the deepest possible communion and friendship with every last creature on this earth…” Let us allow ourselves to be drawn into that holy communion. Within us, alongside us, for us: this is God. The one whom Rohr described as that love which is always near, always now, and always enough. Amen.
About a dozen years ago, I was taking the boys to school one morning – can’t remember much about the particulars. But I do remember that Tyler was going to have a friend over after school. And I remember that something was going on with Jason – I don’t think it was a big deal, maybe a scheduling thing about needing to take him to various activities later, but I arrived home preoccupied with Jason’s stuff and was still thinking about it when the telephone rang. “Hello, is this Tyler’s Mom?” the woman asked, and I answered, “No, this is Jason’s Mom.” Whoops….I quickly got my bearings, and reassured the mother of the boy who was coming over after school that I did know all my children, and could be trusted with hers for a couple of hours.
We each have a number of identities…we can be confused too. Tyler’s mom/Jason’s mom/Corey’s mom – minister, daughter, wife, sister, friend – most of my identity is relational. So, too, with the Trinity: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – how we understand them is by who they are in relationship to each other. Let me tell you upfront that a lot of the thinking in this sermon came from a lecture on Trinity given by the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. But not all of it. For example, Rohr did not mention that this story of the baptism of Jesus is one of the most important defining stories in the Bible from the life of Jesus. Of the four gospels, only two tell the story of the birth of Jesus, of Christmas, and they don’t tell it in the same way. But all four Gospels describe this event, this moment when God is experienced as Trinity.
Karl Rahner said that “The fact [is] that, despite their orthodox confession of the Trinity, Christians are, in their practical lives, almost mere ‘monotheists’, and were the doctrine to be eliminated as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged.” Unfortunately, that is probably true, although Trinity, if we ever get our heads around it and allow our hearts to be embraced by it, can change the way we understand God, and therefore, can change the way we experience our lives.
Rohr believes that we can’t think our way into understanding the Trinity, that we can only come to some understanding through contemplation, that style of prayer which rests in the presence of God, rather than talking with God. And I wish we had time to spend 10 or 15 minutes in contemplative prayer during worship. We will close the sermon with some music that Dan Mitchell and Shenandoah Sowash will share will us, and perhaps that will edge us closer to a contemplative experience of the message, but in the meantime, let’s love God with our minds.
There are a number of explanations I have heard, and I have given, for Trinity. The most important dimension of Trinity however, is that in God’s very self, God is in relationship. Relationality is integral to the divine. We get closer to Trinity by thinking of a circle than a triangle. The ancients describe the Trinity as perichoresis, which meant a dance. And in that description, they were getting at the dynamic and relational quality of the Trinity. When we say God is love, we are not describing a noun, love, we are saying that God is relationally, dynamically loving. Think of God as a verb as much as a noun.
Rohr describes the Creator God as the mystery of total givenness, Jesus as the mystery of total receptivity, and the Spirit is the gift. I believe it was Augustine who described God the Father as the Lover, God the Son as the beloved, and God the Holy Spirit as the Love which flows between them, and to-and-from God and Creation.
Meister Eckert said it this way, “The Father laughs with the Son, the Son laughs with the Father; the Father likes the Son, the Son likes the Father; the Father delights in the Son, the Son delights in the Father; the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father; this laughter, liking, delighting, love is the Holy Spirit.” And we are called into this cycle of laughter, liking, delighting and love. Because the study of Trinity is the study of the very shape and style of God, and finally the very shape and style of all that is. It is unhindered communion and dialogue. This is the relationship we see in the baptism of Jesus. God proclaiming the blessing, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Jesus receiving the blessing, and the Spirit as the blessing in the form of a dove descending from the Father to the Son. Giveness, receptivity, and love, in a dynamic, flow from one to another. The movement towards unity, reconciliation, this is the Godly energy in the universe.
It is a participative relationship – we, too, are invited into this circle of love – and that is one of the keys of the Isaiah passage – we have always been invited into the dance. Jesus did not make our relationship with God possible, except insofar as he reveals God’s love to us and God’s solidarity with us in a way that finally convinces us. Isaiah was written several hundred years before Jesus came among us. And God was beckoning people into a dynamic relationship of trust and love even then.
So, perfect giving, perfect receiving – this is the nature of being. Life in God is a circle of praise – mutual affirmation, mutual deference flowing from one to the other – not only from God to Jesus and back, but from God to us, and back, and so the real meaning of sin is probably better understood as brokenness. It is any way that we stop that flow – which comes from our fear, of intimacy, of God, of each other.
The only thing that can keep us out of that divine dance is our fear…for God will use everything to get us into the dance, ESPECIALLY our mistakes. So we need to resist our fear of vulnerability before God…and haven’t you noticed that so often, when a messenger of God begins a conversation with a human in the Bible, they open by saying, “Fear not….”?
And so the three persons of the Trinity are the three ways we receive love and life from God. The word person is from the Greek word, personare, denoting the mask that was used in drama – it was a word which means ‘to sound through’, and describes the mask – that which is spoken through. It was adapted to the three persons of the Trinity, because it was describing the three Persons of God as being the three forms through which the One love is spoken.
So when we think of ourselves as persons, we are saying that we, too, are beings who are spoken through. The word person suggests our connection to that Holy Circle of Praise, that Godly energy of love which is the heartbeat of all that is. And so, how we do faith is how we are human, it’s how, again, we are persons – are we able to be intimate, to be open to another, to give freely, to receive freely? Are we able to be spoken through?
We get so easily caught up in the negative voices of our culture which tell us to fear or hate each other, and to feel bad about ourselves. We get so easily confused even in our faith – focused on sin, which is not what God intended at all. Look at the Isaiah account: You are precious in my eyes, and I love you…in the eyes of God, as God sees us, we are precious, we are beloved. Notice that in this passage – God’s love is not contingent on anything – we can’t add to or subtract from God’s love for us. All we can do is participate or not participate in the flow – for we are always welcomed into the love of God. God is on our side, more than we are on our own. God was always on our side.
For many of us this is a new way of thinking about God, and about ourselves. And Jesus knew it would be hard for us to hold onto this way of thinking , and this is why he told us about the Holy Spirit. In the Gospel of John, in the last conversation with his disciples, Jesus speaks of the Advocate. The Greek word is Paraclete – a term from the Greek legal system, for the defense attorney. We need an advocate to remind us of who we are, of whose we are, to defend us from the lies the world will tell us about ourselves. And Jesus tells the disciples as he describes the Holy Spirit, in John 16:8, “And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment….” Jesus didn’t need to convince God to love us – God was already loving us, we are precious in the eyes of God. Jesus came to convince US. The Holy Spirit comes within us to speak the Truth of God’s love to US, and it is as we grow to appreciate the Truth that the very Spirit of the Living God can fill us, and draw us into that circle of praise where we find our hearts drawn to worship the Holy One. And by participating in this life of God in three persons, we too become persons, those through whom God’s love is spoken to the world.
Catherine LaCugna wrote in her book God For Us, “The very nature of God, therefore, is to seek out the deepest possible communion and friendship with every last creature on this earth…” Let us allow ourselves to be drawn into that holy communion. Within us, alongside us, for us: this is God. The one whom Rohr described as that love which is always near, always now, and always enough. Amen.