UNFATHOMABLE
May 18, 2008
sermon given at St. Thomas Episcopal Church,
Medina, Washington
Where can we go after last Sunday? After the bright red outfits and the balloons and the bagpipes and the pinwheels and the water and the oil and the dancing and the ice cream? The joint was jumping, and the energy was unfathomable. So where can we possibly go next?
Right back to the beginning, of course—to tell the entire story again. Because the story is that good.
It’s like when I’m driving my daughter Sarah somewhere in the car and we get to the end of the Mary Poppins soundtrack. Clearly, we have to go from “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” all the way back to “Sister Suffragette” and hear the whole thing all over again.
Today, we’ve gone right back to the beginning of Creation, but we told it differently than usual. And instead of printing the text in your bulletin, we just gave you pictures. Telling this familiar story in a different way can keep us from getting stuck in the usual debate—you know, about what should be taught in public schools in Kansas.
You see, the creation story asserts poetically our faith that God created all that is: all the light that is light, all the water that is water, and all of us, too. God’s creation speaks for itself, undeniably present and good. Our psalm today reflects on that act of Creation. So what are we humans, that God should care for us? But God made us, and God is love, so how could God not care for us? Thank you, God. Thank you.
And then, alongside all that talk of the very-goodness of creation, we heard the Great Commission, in which Jesus sends his disciples out to be apostles, to baptize the peoples of the world into his death and resurrection. Last week, Josselyn, Elizabeth, and Alexander became the world’s newest Christians, and we celebrated God’s love for them. As surely as their parents make sure they take regular baths, God will perpetually shower them with new life. They are always new, always fresh, always clean … and sent by Jesus to do the same for others.
Jesus instructs us to obey everything he commanded us. And everything Jesus has commanded us can be summed up in one word: Love. We are commissioned to love extravagantly, love wastefully, love to the limits of our being. Give ourselves away so more people have at least a vague idea of what God’s love looks like, and so that they, in turn, can do the same for others.
Today is Trinity Sunday, the day on which we honor a wholly confusing doctrine about what God is like. God is one God, undivided, a whole person … with three Persons. God the Father creates us. God the Son redeems us. God the Holy Spirit sustains us. But it doesn’t stop there. You see …
God the Father creates us, redeems us, and sustains us.
God the Son creates us, redeems us, and sustains us.
God the Holy Spirit creates us, redeems us, and sustains us.
God is not three different people doing three different things. God does all of it. The closest I can come to understanding this is to think of myself as a father, a son, and a husband.
On Friday, Christy, Sarah and I will fly to Arizona to visit my parents. There, I get to be a father, a son, and a husband all at once. Oh yes … we’ll see my brother and his wife, too. So I’ll also get to be a brother. And a brother-in-law. I don’t know how to be all of those people at once, so I may need to take some time away from one person or another sometimes to regroup.
These family images show up in the Bible as metaphors for the trinity. God is our father. Jesus is God’s son. Jesus is our brother. Jesus is the bridegroom, and the Church is the bride.
The Holy Spirit somehow escapes all the anthropomorphic language, which can cause problems. C.S. Lewis once told a story about a woman whose forward-thinking parents had raised her to just imagine God as the “perfect substance.” Unfortunately, that left her imagining God as something like a vast ocean of tapioca pudding … and she didn’t even like tapioca pudding!
We need many metaphors for God, because one—or a few—will never do. We need to keep coming up with new metaphors for God, because adding a new one does not take away from the old ones. The old ones are still perfectly valid and just as incomplete as the new ones. That’s why it doesn’t need to be threatening to speak of God as our Mother, as long as we remember that this metaphor falls just as short as the metaphor of God as Father. Both metaphors are used in the Bible, and neither one is enough.
Last week at our raucus Pentecost celebration, a newcomer asked me, “What’s the metaphorical connection between Pentecost and ice cream?” I guess I could have made something up. After all, when my wife Christy was in college, she and her friends developed an ordinary lunchroom corn dog into a sophisticated metaphor for the Trinity,
with the mustard representing sin. But I don’t think that fast, so I fessed up. “No metaphor—it’s a St. Thomas tradition.”
Sometimes ice cream is just ice cream. And at St. Thomas, ice cream and all the other trappings of Pentecost mark a liturgical shift into a lower gear.
Trinity Sunday takes us into “Ordinary Time,” the time when we’re not telling the Jesus story per se, but remarking on it and going deeper into certain aspects of it. It’s a subtler, less dramatic style of storytelling. From next week until November 30, the standard color of the vestments and other trappings will be green. We have entered the “green growing season,” the time from planting to harvest, the time when our faith grows within us in subtle, ordinary ways.
Last week, my spiritual director and I were ruminating on Ordinary Time. I confessed that I had come up with a marketing slogan for this season: “Make your Ordinary Time Extraordinary!” And we would follow that slogan with new faith formation programs! Big, exciting events for kids! A full summer of wow! Wow! Wow!
And my spiritual director said, “Stop it. It’s called Ordinary Time. Let it be ordinary! And take a vacation.”
I have so much to learn. We all do. This half of the year is supposed to be ordinary. Nothing special. Just church. Just each other. Just Jesus. Just the Good News. Not bouncing from one “high” to the next.
The Good News is mind-blowing enough; we don’t have to add to it. We just need to keep reminding each other of it, because it’s easy to see it as “Too-Good-to-Be-True News.” We Christians are reasonable optimists. We are willing to believe that the glass is half full, but we rarely imagine it as overflowing.
Yet the Good News isn’t even that the glass is overflowing; it’s news of an eternal ocean of life, death, and rebirth that is always drowning us and then drawing us alive again from the water. So what’s all this pessimistic, short-sighted talk about a glass that’s only half full? The ocean of God’s grace is an unfathomable mystery! God created the world. The world is good. And the parts of it that aren’t good are in the process of being redeemed.
Last week, a different newcomer said to me: “This was my first time at church in four years. I spent the entire service trying not to cry. There was so much beautiful music from so many different traditions, but it struck me: my ancestors were the ones who oppressed all these people—Jewish, Scottish, Mexican, African, you name it. How do I live comfortably in the dominant, Christian American culture without being a hypocrite?”
That’s a good question, and listen up, because it’s the question that is keeping many, many people away from church these days. As we hear of Jesus’ Great Commission, we are left to wonder: in our attempts to “make disciples of all nations,” have we honored the spirit of the original command? We sing triumphant hymns about the Church spreading through the entire world, but what are we spreading? What are we humans? Greedy murderers. Cowardly hypocrites. Short-sighted fools so desperate for certainty in a chaotic world that we’ll foist our own tenuous certainty on others … at gunpoint. To quote today’s psalm again: what are we humans, that God should care for us?
There are two kinds of guilt, my friends. Destructive guilt leaves us stranded, unable to imagine that anything could possibly change our situation. Some of us are familiar with “white liberal guilt.” This guilt is based on reality, but it doesn’t come from God. You can tell, because it doesn’t promise redemption.
Then there’s motivational guilt. Motivational guilt starts by acknowledging all the destructive forces, even the ones we participate in just by existing. And then it puts them into a faith perspective, empowering us to make a change. Nothing sweeping—just ordinary stuff like feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and sending money to Myanmar and China and Oklahoma. We could always do more of these things, but we only have so much time. And it’s not up to us to do it all, because our faith tells us that God is ultimately in charge. We just keep on keepin’ on.
So let’s ask again: what are we humans? Creatures who do amazing things. Creatures who sometimes do sacrifice our own needs for those of others, despite all the fear and all the danger. Creatures who sometimes do understand that it’s all about Love, with a capital L. We are made in the image of a God who is the essence of community, of three persons in one. God somehow finds us worthy of redemption—indeed, God insists on including us as co-workers in the project of building the Kingdom! God made us, and God is love, so how could God not care for us? The Creation of the universe is good, but the Creation of human beings as a part of that universe is very good. Thank you, God. Thank you.
Dwell in the mystery today. Enjoy the fact that God is unfathomable. For the next six months, make this Ordinary Time just plain ordinary. Join us at church. Listen and pray. Reach out to others. No big deal. Just each other. Just Jesus. Just the unfathomable mystery of God’s grace. Amen.