In Search of the Holy Trinity

If I could go to Jesus by night, under the cover of darkness, so as not to get caught, with even half an expectation that he could deliver to me something like John 3:16, more or less on a platter - the Gospel in compact form - I might ask him to explain himself to me, or at least to explain how God works.  Why does it have to be so difficult? I might ask. Why so much mystery?  Why this confusing business about three persons in one God?  And why, if I try to say that the Father does this, and the Son does that, and the Spirit blows where it wills... why will I be accused of heresy, when it is so much easier to talk this way, than of the undivided unity, without confusion, change, division, separation, or what have you?  And why must we be stuck with this unhelpful, patriarchal language, stubbornly rooted in the old ways?  That in so many other ways, it seems we must outgrow?

If I could sit with Jesus, I’d like to ask him how God works: how the Father works; how the Son works; how the Spirit works, blowing as it does, where it wills.  How does the holy, blessed, and undivided Trinity work?  I’d like to tell Jesus a thing or two about how difficult it can be to spread a religion whose inner workings are so opaque.  I’d like to explain to him the value of transparency.  I’d like to point out that even the “born again” thing has proved difficult and confusing, as evidenced by that early conversation with Nicodemus, let alone the Gon-in-three-persons-blessed-trinity thing.  Easy to sing about: harder to talk about.

I wouldn’t need much time: no more than Nicodemus had, I think.  Not that Jesus let Nicodemus get much of a word in.  Not that Jesus even let him ask whatever question he arrived with.  Not that Nicodemus left understanding something that he hadn’t understood before.

But still.

I’d like to get my question out - how does God work? -  and at least give Jesus a chance to reply.

And if I sit quietly, and prayerfully, and think about it, I wonder if Jesus would say this in response.

“You want to know how God works.  You say you hear talk of the Father, you hear talk of the Son, you hear talk of the Spirit, and you want to understand the inner workings of the divine.  You are frustrated by the mystery of it, and you want to know.

“Of course you want to know, but how can you know?  You do not even know what questions to ask, let alone how to accept the answers.

“You want to know how God works, how it is that I am, if I am is what I am.  You say you are confused by the way we speak of ourself.  And you would like to dissect the various parts, autopsy-style, and see how they work, as if by speaking of the Father, by speaking of the Son, by speaking of the Spirit, I am speaking of the way we work; when what I am speaking of is who we are, who I am, who I will be, but not of how I work.

“ I am speaking of eternal love, which is not a beacon, or a flag, or even a river that runs down from a mountain; it is a relationship of constant giving, constant receiving, constant dancing.

“You imagine the throne of heaven, as though the Godhead is is seated upon it, as if for a portrait, and your two dimensional imagination.  You imagine that you can say something meaningful about God by writing it on a page, which is a little like comparing a sheet of paper to a tree: they may have a thing or two in common, but they are far from the same thing.

“When I speak of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, I am speaking of who I am.  If the language seems awkward, unhelpfully bound to a particular time and place and power structure, then you begin to see the limits of speaking of me, for you are correct that it is wrong to think that I am rooted in one-sided, either-or vocabulary, in the same way that describing a rainbow in terms of seven colors is embarrassing in its paucity.

“And yet, you struggle to perceive that in speaking of who I am, I wish for you to know who I am.  And I am using language that gets as close as it can, flawed and damaged though that language now may be.  I have been employing the flawed and the damaged for my purposes for a long time, with reasonable results.  Have a look around.

“I desire that you should understand that even what Isaiah saw was inadequate - only a flash - as if there is some throne somewhere that could contain what the heavens themselves cannot contain.

“But still.

“You think that when you hear it said that you were made in my image and likeness, that it means that you can see something of me when you look in the mirror.  When actually what it means is that when you also hear that you could not bear to be alone in the garden, it was then that you were displaying my image within you.  

“For if you are to bear my image you need someone to give to and to receive from; you need someone to dance with; you need someone to love and to love you back.  But you can’t see that in the mirror.

“I am beauty.  I am wisdom.  I am truth.  I am love.  

“Light is my diadem, darkness is my mantle, and the earth is a pebble.

“Pi is the dust that collects in my pocket, and that I delight to know is always there, always accumulating, just as I delight when you gather its specks, beginning with 3.14.  You want to be able to calculate me, like the digits of Pi.  You think you should be able to dismantle me, to freeze me and slice me into sections to see how I work, to isolate me as though I am hardly more than an atom.  But I created every atomic structure and property without much effort, and I could buff my fingernails with atomic power if I wanted to.

“But I want you to see that I am always in splendid communion, but never in isolation.  I am always we, I am always us.

“I am not a problem for you to solve, for I am beyond solving.  I am not a machine with moving parts to be monitored, identified, and schematized.  I am motion.

“I am not a series of actions, or a series of accomplishments, or a series of tasks.  I am the origin of all action.

“I have no meaning to be articulated in carefully defined terms, for I am meaning.

“And the meaning, the action, the motion is fluid, and expressive, and inter-relating.

“The music in heaven never stops, and I never stop dancing, embracing, holding, letting go, leaping, and landing, nor did I ever start dancing, embracing, holding, letting go, leaping, and landing.  I was always like this, and I always shall be: always more dimensional than you can imagine or describe, always more vibrant than you allow for, always more love than you believe in or have room for.

“In and of myself, I am love, which gives me direction and purpose in and of myself, so that anything I do carries the direction and purpose of love.

“I am holy - thrice holy, which is the perfection of holiness.  And you do not even know what holiness means.  You are not sure how to define it.  But my entire being is holiness itself.

“And I have given you my Son.  I have allowed you to call me Father.  I have anointed you with my Spirit.

“I have given you myself, I have shown you so much more than I ever allowed Moses to see.  I have poured myself over you.

“But you insist on coming to me in the night to complain that you do not understand.

“You cannot understand, because I am beyond understanding.   And love does not rest on understanding.  

“Love rests on acceptance, as I have accepted you.  For I am in a constant process of accepting and offering, in and of myself.

“I have accepted you.  I have shown myself to you.  I have poured out my holiness upon you, and I have called you.

“Will you now do more than come to me by night with your questions?  Will you love me, as I love you?”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Trinity Sunday 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

An Eternal Word

Easter is fifty days long.  That’s a liturgical fact that we talk about for lots of reasons at this time of year.  We’ve carefully noted the passing of the days and weeks lately.  We began our Easter season with readings from the scriptures that focused on the appearances of Jesus to his disciples in locked rooms, on the road to Emmaus, by the Sea of Galilee.  We’ve heard the adventures of the apostles in the book of Acts, recounted the miracles and the preaching and the conversions through which the early church grew so rapidly and so improbably.  In this past week we have commemorated the Ascension of our lord into heaven, and now we are preparing for Pentecost Sunday, next Sunday, when we commemorate the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles.  The word “pentecost” comes from the word for fifty.  We’ve been counting the days.  Some of us take the fifty-day commemoration of Easter as a personal challenge, nudging ourselves to remain especially aware, particularly joyful, all that time.  We remind ourselves that Easter isn’t just a big day or even a week, but a long liturgical period of rejoicing and giving thanks for the mystery of our salvation.

The church does this for us regularly.  It shapes our time.  Our celebrations here together tell us where and who and why we are, and they remind us that the world’s calendar is not our calendar, no matter how dutifully we check that calendar app on our cellphones.  The time we are living in is not the time the world acknowledges.  In the world, history is just, as they say, “one ‘darn’ thing after another.”  No real shape, just an inexorable moving forward that may scare us or fill us with a sense of promise, depending what we are telling ourselves about the “progress” of human history.  We just happen to be here for the early part of the twenty-first century, and after we go it will be someone else’s turn.

But Christian time is different.  Time as we experience it moves back and forth.  Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.  We say that just about every Sunday, and every year we move through the life of Jesus, marking the moment of the Angel Gabriel’s announcement to Mary and the season of Advent, the joyful feast of the Nativity, the stories of the life and ministry of Jesus and the powerful season of Lent, leading up to Holy Week and Easter and Ascension and Pentecost.  

But even in this period when we are marking and reliving the events of Jesus’s life, time has a startling depth and a complexity for us.  Easter may be fifty days long, but then it comes for us again every Sunday.  Every Sunday is Easter.  And every Mass is also the Last Supper, the banquet Jesus shares with his disciples before he is abandoned by them and given over to death. And every Mass is also the feast at the end of time, the great banquet at which we all have a place waiting for us. 

And our marking of these feasts, even the calendar-specific ones like Ascension and Pentecost, is something much more complicated than historical reenactment.  We aren’t putting on a play about the past here.  We aren’t looking backwards, exactly.  We are celebrating the way that God has broken into time, and is continually breaking into time, in the person of Jesus.  In our own lives.  We are celebrating that Jesus is with us now, and that we are in some sense already with him in his kingdom.  We are trying to map eternal life onto a calendar that only has three hundred and sixty-five days, and so we take every chance we can to remind ourselves that with Jesus, our great Alpha and Omega, we are participating in the creation of the world, the redemption of the world, and the celebration that is the end of all things. All the time.

And that thought brings us to this rather awkward Sunday, the Seventh Sunday of Easter.  Also known informally as that Sunday squeezed between the Feast of the Ascension and Pentecost, when it’s not entirely clear where we are in time.  You may have noticed that the gospel we read this morning is not a post-resurrection passage at all.  It’s from the seventeenth chapter of John, and it tells the story of Jesus’s prayer for his disciples, just before Jesus is arrested in the garden and taken away to his crucifixion.  

The way these events unfold in John’s gospel, it’s the evening meal just before the Passover celebration.  Jesus has gotten up from the meal, wrapped a towel around his waist, and washed the feet of his disciples.  That happens in the thirteenth chapter of John.  And in our liturgical life that happens on Holy Thursday.  And then there is a long set of discourses that culminates in a long prayer, and what we hear this morning is from the middle of that prayer.  Jesus is speaking directly to God the Father, allowing his friends to hear him pray.  He is praying for them.  And so for us today it’s still Holy Thursday.

We don’t have to think of it this way, but the way our readings are set out in this season we may imagine that that moment of unity, of Jesus’s love for his disciples-- “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them until the end”—this sharing of prayer with and for them, has quietly continued in the background during our busy Easter.  As we have observed Holy Week and all the joyful days since then, as we have marked time, as Maja and Z have been baptized and as ten others joined them in confirmation and reception into the church, as our bishop has come to celebrate with us on the feast of Saint Mark, as great and good and difficult changes have come to our community, as new plans are being made and our sidewalks repaired and the feast of Pentecost is eagerly awaited, as winter gives way to spring and summer, that moment of Jesus’s loving prayer with his disciples has quietly continued.  Somehow, between Ascension and Pentecost, Holy Thursday comes back to us, as though it had never ended.  As Jesus becomes more and more mysterious, rising from the dead and then ascending bodily into heaven, we are catapulted back into the still center of his communion with the ones he loves, whose feet he has washed, still praying to the Father for them and with them.  This vulnerable Jesus, surrounded by the ones he loves, allowing them into the very prayer of his heart, just before they betray and abandon him.

We know Jesus in triumph and mystery, late in this Easter season, and yet in the middle of his triumph we hear him softly speaking words of love for fallible humanity.  We hear him praying for our protection.  We hear him praying in thanksgiving that the Father has given us to him.  “They were yours,” Jesus says, “and you have given them to me, and I have protected them, and now I give them to you. What they know about me is that everything I am comes from you.  My glory comes through them and their joy is complete in me.”

This prayer of Jesus narrates the still, contemplative center of our life in him.  Though time passes, with triumph and with agony, this never goes away.  This moment in scripture promises us that our lives are gifts from God.  This moment of prayer contains the certainty that we are living in God because Jesus has given himself to us and Jesus and the Father have given themselves to one another.  This prayer is the assurance of grace, the knowledge that nothing we have done has made this gift of life in God possible.  In the beginning, the word was with God, and the word was God.  The word of God has been given to the church, and the church has kept the word of God.  And now--even this very day--the word speaks to us: unchanging, undeterred, unafraid even of death. 

Jesus prays, just after the passage we hear this morning, for those who will believe through the words of his disciples.  That is, he prays for us.  We receive his word.  His word assures us of belonging and protection, of being sent, of being chosen, of being given.  This hour of prayer, this time of Jesus’s intimate presence, never ends.  This word is never not spoken.  And in all the changes of our times, this word is all the reassurance we will ever need.  

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

13 May 2018

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Living Baptized

“Holy Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body the Church. The bond which God establishes in Baptism is indissoluble.” So begins the section entitled “Concerning the Service” before the liturgy of Holy Baptism in the Book of Common Prayer. The page goes on to describe many of the particulars of this sacrament in our church. For example, Holy Baptism is most appropriately administered during a Mass, and by a bishop, if possible, or if not, by a priest. Baptizands, whether they are adults or children, should have Sponsors who promise to pray for them and bear witness to the life of discipleship. On a later page, the prayer book lists the days that are particularly appropriate for baptism – Pentecost, the Baptism of our Lord, All Saints’ Day, and, of course, the Easter Vigil. Here you can also find answer to some specific liturgical questions: can you sing the Gloria during a baptism? Yes, you can. Should you say the Nicene Creed during a baptism? No, you don’t need to. And so on and so on.

The prayer book provides a number of important details about the sacrament of baptism, particularly about the how and the who and the when. What it does not provide is any instruction about what the baptizand needs to do in order to be baptized. There is no mention of a pre-baptismal exam or a denominational statement of faith that needs to be memorized and affirmed. There is no mention of the baptizand’s frame of mind or quality of life as a prerequisite for receiving this sacrament. In the catechism, those eighteen pages at the back of the prayer book that present an outline of the faith, the only requirements listed for those to be baptized are that we renounce Satan, repent of our sins, and accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior. So, quite simply, if you show up, and renounce, repent, and accept, you can be baptized.

Here at Saint Mark’s we make it abundantly easy for people to be baptized. You don’t have to be a member of the parish to be baptized here. We offer baptisms on Saturdays as well as Sundays. And, apart from the season of Lent, we do baptisms all year round, including on those four Sundays the prayer book mentions. We are quite happy to baptize those who ask, at almost any time. This is not to imply that we take the sacrament of baptism for granted, or that we treat it casually. Quite the contrary: it is because we have such great reverence for the sacrament and a deep understanding of its fundamental importance that we are so free with it. It is because we understand how baptism strengthens all of us and the whole Church, whenever and however it is accomplished, that we make baptism so available, so easy, for all of those who desire it.

So when we hear this man from Ethiopia ask Philip, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” it’s easy for us to imagine the answer. Nothing. In our context, there is really nothing to prevent you from being baptized. Maybe you’ll have to wait a few weeks until Lent is over, or until your godparents can come to town or the baptismal gown is delivered, but that’s it. Look, here is water! There is nothing to prevent anyone from being baptized.

But this Ethiopian does not live in our context, and when he asks Philip what might prevent him from being baptized, he is not being rhetorical. This is a real question, expressing a real doubt, that while there might be room for him in the body of these faithful, there might just as well be something about him that would keep him outside forever. For in his context, there was plenty that could have prevented his baptism. In the Jewish community that surrounded and gave birth to the early Church, this man would have been decidedly on the outside. He was an Ethiopian, not an Israelite; more problematically, he was a eunuch, and according to the Law of Moses, he was placed permanently on the margins, forever forbidden to enter the holiest places of his faith.

This man’s question is real, and in his context, the answer is far from obvious. To him. For Philip, filled with the Holy Spirit, the answer is ringing loud and clear. Nothing. There is nothing to prevent this baptism. There is no study, no cleansing, no identification necessary. The man asks, What is there to prevent me from being baptized, and Philip says…well, we don’t know what he says, but something he says, or some look in his eye, makes the eunuch suddenly call out for his chariot to stop – stop! I wouldn’t be surprised if the two men were on their way down to the water before the wheels even stopped spinning.

This story makes me profoundly grateful to be a part of a Church that has done the work of study and prayer to come to an understanding of a truly open baptism. Thank God we don’t have to be a part of the in-crowd to receive it, or that we don’t have to try to earn it somehow. Thank God that baptism in the Episcopal Church is not something we hold tightly as a sacrament too precious to be given away but is instead something we offer freely as a sacrament too precious to be contained. Thank God that we, too, answer the question “What is there to prevent me from being baptized?” with a holy “Nothing.” But part of this story also nags at me a bit. Part of this story raises another, deeper question for me, for us. For when we like the Ethiopian went away from our baptisms rejoicing, how long did the rejoicing last? How long did the holy feeling of our baptisms linger? The truth is that in our context, while there may not have been much to prevent us from being baptized, there is plenty to prevent us from living baptized.

There is plenty in this world to prevent us from living the promises of our baptism. Think about it – springtime Sunday morning activities or summer travel gets in the way of continuing in the apostles’ teaching and in the breaking of the bread. Fatigue or feelings of inadequacy gets in the way of our prayers. Resisting evil is harder than it sounds when we find ourselves tempted by a particularly delicious morsel of gossip, or a substance that promises to take all of our pain away, or an opportunity to cast out fear by securing our own power even if it means casting out others along the way.  Social niceties get in the way of proclaiming the Gospel; human frailty makes seeking and serving Christ in all persons messy and frustrating, and the world’s seemingly intractable systems of abuse and inequality make striving for justice and peace exhausting. This world is quite content to throw up roadblocks before our baptismal promises; there is plenty in this life to prevent us from living baptized.

The Church knows this, of course. Why else do you think we have stoops of holy water stationed at every single door in and out of this place? Why else would the font be kept open and filled during Eastertide, a holy prompt that will be even easier to recognize when the font is moved to the center of the church later this spring? Everything about this building, everything about our liturgy, is carefully crafted to help us live baptized. The world will continue to throw up its roadblocks, and the Church will continue to knock them down by showing us the power of worship and prayer, of repentance and proclamation, of love and service. The Church will always continue to remind us of the joy and the truth of our baptism.

The greatest truth of our baptism, of course, is that we never live them alone. The Spirit of the Lord remained with us after our baptism, and that Spirit is with us every moment of every day. In our baptism we abide deeply in Christ, and Christ abides deeply in us. While we may have moments, weeks, or years when we forget the joy of our baptism, Christ never forgets the moment that he marked us as his own forever. Whether we realize it out not, we are protected and healed, called and challenged, comforted and fed every day by the fruits of our baptism. How much richer would our lives be if we stopped to notice this, if we saw the stream of living water that runs through our hearts, stopped the chariot of this whirlwind of a life, and asked, What is to prevent me from living baptized? For there is nothing – no worldly worry or temptation, no inconvenience or frustration or fear – that can stop Christ from claiming you as his own. There is nothing that can prevent you from being his. And if you ever need a reminder, just turn to the pages of the Book of Common Prayer: “Holy Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body the Church. The bond which God establishes in Baptism is indissoluble.” The bond of your baptism is indissoluble. This is your true context. So why not go out and live it? Live baptized, and go your way rejoicing.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

22 April 2018

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia