Jesus & The Holy Trinity

Jesus said, “We speak of what we know, and testify to what we have seen.” (John 3:11)

Under the leadership of our dynamic and faithful presiding bishop, Episcopalians have been encouraged to embrace, not so much the Episcopal Church, but the Jesus Movement.  Michael Curry has helped us again and again to turn our hearts to Jesus.  This emphasis has done us no harm whatsoever, and I trust that it is actually doing us a lot of good.  There is no place better to turn than to Jesus, and no one better to turn to than Jesus.

But what does it mean to turn to Jesus?  It means that you learn about who Jesus was.  And it means you learn about  who Jesus is.  You read the stories of Jesus’ life told in the Gospels.  You digest the accounts of his ministry of teaching, of healing, and of miracle-working.  You ponder his parables and try to incorporate their meaning into your life.  Turning to Jesus means that you contemplate the facts and the meaning of his suffering, and his death, and his resurrection.  It means that you recall the story of his ascension into heaven.  Turning to Jesus means opening your heart and your mind to the mysteries of how God loves humankind, and accepting that these will always be mysteries.  And, of course, turning to Jesus means that you try to figure out what it means to be a disciple two thousand years after all those stories took place.  That’s the distinction between who Jesus was and who Jesus is.

It turns out that learning to be a disciple two thousand years after the death and resurrection of Jesus involves just about the same things that it involved two months after his death and resurrection: joining together with others who believe that God is still at work through the risen Christ, and forming a community to carry on in Christ’s Name.  We call that community the Church.

A principle mission of the church is to repeat the stories of Jesus over and over again as faithfully as we possibly can, lest we and the rest of the world forget those stories, or misplace their meaning, or obscure their revelations.  We repeat the stories of Jesus in text and in song.  People like me are assigned to elaborate and elucidate the stories, so long as we stay faithful to their meaning.  And we repeat these stories within the community of faith because we are not only interested in who Jesus was. But we are interested in who Jesus is.  And these stories literally come alive within the community of faith.

We don’t just remember that Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish.  When we hear Jesus say, “You give them something to eat,” we hear him saying it to us, too.

We don’t just remember that Jesus said “This is my Body,” and “This is my Blood… Do this in remembrance of me.”  We act as though he was talking to us, and we actually do it.  And in the doing of it, we bask in the living Presence. Of Jesus

I’m aware that I often talk about Jesus as if he was someone I could take you to visit if only we had time and access to his distant and magnificent palace.  I suspect that some people -  many people, perhaps - find this way of speaking fanciful and maybe even delusional, and they conclude that faith in Jesus requires a suspension of disbelief that many modern Americans find ridiculous.

Since Jesus never wrote anything down, we cannot pretend that turning to him involves becoming students of his texts, which might at least add a pseudo-intellectual aspect to the enterprise.  And even the texts we have that tell us about Jesus have complicated histories, part of which is lost, along with the originals.

Of course you know that Jesus does not live in a distant palace that we could visit if only we had time.  Jesus sits on his throne in heaven.  And the Jesus movement recognizes the need for little thrones for him to occupy here in this world: not only  at altars, like the ones in this church, but also on what the great hymn writer Charles Wesley called “the mean altar[s] of [our] heart[s].”

And so, with our faithful and bold presiding bishop, we dare to speak of Jesus, and to promote the Jesus movement, which is a movement of peace, and love, and justice, and mercy.

For us, to speak of Jesus is to speak of what we know, of what we can know of God.  But it is also to acknowledge that we leave much unsaid, since there is much that we do not know about God.  But on this Sunday, we are called to speak of more than the Jesus movement, and we are called to unpack the bags that we carry with us as we go, even if, as a matter of course, we speak mostly of Jesus.  On this Sunday (and of course on other Sundays, too, but preeminently on this Sunday), we speak of God in ways that Jesus spoke of God.  We speak not only of the Son of God, but we speak of the Father, and of the Holy Spirit, too.  And when we dare to speak of God in these ways, we often admit that we are speaking of things about which we do not know very much.

It’s hard for us to adhere to a religion that requires us to admit that there is so much we do not know.  Yet, learning to speak of the Holy Trinity is learning to speak of what we do not and cannot know.  This requires a humility that is very uncomfortable for us.

It also relies on a category of knowledge that is not much in favor these days: revelation.  We can speak of things we cannot not know - that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - because Jesus speaks of what he knows.  

And in conversations like the one he had with Nicodemus, Jesus reveals to us (as he revealed to Nicodemus) things we cannot otherwise know.  Of course, even Nicodemus was confused by what Jesus said to him, “How can any be born after having grown old?”  Nicodemus may have been the first Episcopalian - very uncertain about the idea of being born again.

And we are confused, too.  And we hardly know what to make of Jesus when he says to Nicodemus, “We speak of what we know, and testify to what we have seen.”  The use of the plural pronoun confuses us, the rest of what Jesus says in that conversation confuses us… no matter how you look at it, you can find reason to be confused by what Jesus says here.  And if we are confused, we miss the point, that Jesus speaks of what he knows.  But this is an important point not to miss.

Jesus speaks of what he knows.  And there is no aspect of the mystery of God’s being that Jesus does not know, since he, himself, is of that mystery.  Jesus reveals to those who seek him, that he is in eternal relationship with the Father and with the Spirit in ways that we can never fully know.  Jesus shows us that he is the means of God’s self-disclosure - not only allowing us to know him - both who he was, and who he is - but also allowing us to glimpse his relationship with the Father, and to open ourselves to the gifts of the Spirit.  And we have confidence that Jesus speaks of what he knows, and testifies to what he has seen.

Involving ourselves in the Jesus movement does not, it turns out, lead us away from  a fuller, and more complete image of God, since Jesus speaks of what he knows.  And what Jesus knows is this: that he and the Father are one, and that the Spirit, who is also one with them, leads us into all truth.  

So, even on Trinity Sunday, it’s a good idea to turn to Jesus!  When we turn to Jesus and learn who Jesus was and who Jesus is, we will learn that he speaks of what he knows and that he testifies to what he has seen.  And Jesus knows that God is Father, Son, and Spirit: Holy Trinity, One God.  Without Jesus, I doubt we could ever know this unknowable truth of God’s being - it’s just too hard for us!  This impossibility of knowing what Jesus knows is part of why this day is so daunting for the preacher.  How can we speak of what we do not know?  But it is not actually my job to do that - to speak of what I do not know - rather, it is my job to help you hear Jesus speak of what he knows.

Everybody knows that it’s easier to sing about God than it is to explain God.  That’s’ why it’s so difficult to try to get through today without singing, “Holy, Holy, Holy, merciful and mighty…. God in three persons, blessed Trinity.”  But if I could sing with you this morning, I would actually want to sing another hymn, less well known, with words written by a 17th century English clergyman that asks the question, “How shall I sing that majesty?”

How, indeed, to sing and speak of the things we cannot know, except to turn to Jesus and let him speak of what he knows. But sing, we do, even silently in our hearts, confident in the revelation we have been given in and through and by Jesus.  And the hymn that asked the question, concludes with this wonderful verse:

How great a being, Lord, is thine,
Which doth all beings keep!
Thy knowledge is the only line
To sound so vast a deep.
Thou art a sea without a shore,
A sun without a sphere;
Thy time is now and evermore,
Thy place is everywhere.
(John Mason)

A sea without a shore.  A sun without a sphere.

Holy, holy, holy, indeed, art thou, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Thy time is now and ever more.  Thy place is everywhere.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
30 May 2021
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

Mountains, MIBS, & Truth

The entire 17th chapter of the Gospel of St. John is a prayer that Jesus prayed, directed to God the Father, which was, according to John, overheard by the disciples.  It is often referred to as the “high-priestly prayer.”  We heard the heart of it just now.

In the high-priestly prayer, Jesus asks the Father to “protect [the disciples]... so that they may be one.”  He asks for the unity of his followers.

Within his prayer, Jesus tells the Father that he is speaking these things aloud in the world, “so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves.”  His purpose is joy.

Continuing to ask the Father for protection, Jesus beseeches him to “protect them from the evil one.”  He wants to shield his people from the power of darkness.

And Jesus asks that the Father will “sanctify [his followers] in the truth.  Your word,” he says, “is truth.”  Your word is truth.  Your word is truth.

In the next chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus will be confronted by the most important question in the Bible, at least according to the Mullen Interrogative Biblical Scale (MIBS).

Recall that the second most important question on the MIBS is found early in the pages of Genesis, asked by God of Adam while God was walking through the garden in the cool of the day, and God was confused/a-bit-miffed to find that Adam and Eve were hiding from him, and he discovered that they were doing it because they were embarrassed at being naked.  His heart beginning to break, God asked Adam, “Who told you that you were naked?”  The second most important question in the Bible.

But I digress.  For, it is in the 18th chapter of St. John’s Gospel that we find the number one question on the MIBS, coming from the lips of Pontius Pilate as he prepared to hand Jesus over to be killed.

Jesus had just said to Pilate, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.  Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

And then “Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth.’”  What is truth?  What is truth?

Pilate did not know that Jesus had already supplied the answer to this question, while praying, in the previous chapter.  Pilate had not read the Bible.  Pilate couldn’t have known that an answer to the number one question in all of scripture had already been provided.

Perhaps Pilate thought, as so many people today seem to think, that he had his truth, and you have your truth, and I have my truth, and that each of our truths can be different and yet valid, and that these pronoun-modifiers make something more true, not less true, and that it’s really important to speak your truth, and, in fact, that it’s in the speaking of it that it becomes your truth or my truth, or his truth, etc.  But to make this mistake is to confuse honesty with truth.

There is such a thing as an honest mistake: we make them all the time, even about ourselves.  It might even be an honest mistake to confuse honesty with truth.  But it’s still a mistake - in all honesty.

To be honest, it’s a bit misleading to say that Jesus provided and answer in John 17 to the question we encounter in John 18.  Although it is true that Jesus did so.

When Jesus prayed to the Father, “your word is truth,” - (although it is actually far more likely, if you ask me, that what he really said is “thy word is truth”) - in any case, it’s not really a very clear answer to the question, “What is truth,” is it?  It’s very hard to know precisely what Jesus means here.  Is he talking about the scriptures, which we so often refer to, metaphorically as the word of God?  If so, is he talking about the Hebrew scriptures that he and he companions read together, as did the scribes and the Pharisees?  Could he possibly be talking about the as-yet-unwritten texts of the New Testament?  This seems unlikely.  St. John’s Gospel famously begins with the declaration that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  And, of course, that Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.  Are we meant, then, to understand that when Jesus says, “thy word is truth,” he is talking about himself?  Maybe.

Way back in the 8th chapter of St. John’s’ Gospel (which Pontius Pilate had also not read), Jesus declared, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”  So, he was connecting his word to the truth even before he started to pray for his disciples.  But still, it’s hard to nail down, isn’t it? 

It’s’ interesting, if tangential, to reflect for a moment on how wrong Adam and Eve were after they had eaten the fruit from the tree whereof God had commanded them that they should’st not eat - the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  True enough, they realized that they were wearing nothing but their birthday suits.  But the conclusion they reach about this new knowledge is all wrong: that they have something to be embarrassed about.  This is not true.  They have nothing to be embarrassed about at all, having been made in the image and likeness of God.  And this was no honest mistake: their embarrassment comes, not really from the insights they gain by eating the fruit, but by believing the serpent, whose sole intent was to corrupt them, that they had something to be embarrassed about.  Hence, God’s question: Who told you that you were naked?

Presented with the knowledge that they are nude as a baboon’s bottom, they are distracted from the truth, which would have been easier to hold onto under the shade of the tree of life, that stood in the midst of the garden, the fruit of which was not off limits.  But instead, they end up believing something that is quite un-true.  So, it turns out you can have knowledge, and still not know the truth.

Pontius Pilate seems to have understood how elusive the truth could be.  And so, he just gave up: What is truth?  St. John does not report that Pilate threw his hands up in the air, or rolled his eyes, but you just know he did.  His question is rhetorical because he has already decided that he does not need to know the answer.  This is not an honest mistake, either.

And perhaps it is in understanding Pilate’s failure that we can see how we might encounter the truth.  For, Pilate does not even take up the search.  And our efforts to get at the truth will probably more often feel like a search than a discovery.  This is OK.  It’s when you stop searching that you make the wrong decisions and reach the wrong conclusions.

And our search for truth, will entail a meaningful engagement with the Word of God - by which I mean a meaningful engagement with the Incarnate Word in the person of Jesus.  

Our search for truth will more often consist of questions than answers.  This is OK, too.  (It’s partly why the MIBS exists: because the questions are so important!)

If we were to pattern ourselves and our lives on Jesus, as best we can, then we would turn early to prayer when confronting difficult questions.  And if we prayed with Jesus, and asked him to pray with us, what would we find?

We would find that Jesus wants us to be one: he prays that we will be united, for he knows that our divisions are our undoing.  We know that, too, but we throw our hands up in the air, and roll our eyes, as if there is nothing we can do about it.

We would find that Jesus’ purpose and intent is joy:  that his joy should be in us, and that our joy should be complete.  Although you would be hard pressed to find too many churches that resound with joy.  Why is this?

We would find that Jesus wants to protect us from the powers of darkness.  These powers assert themselves all too easily in our world in the forms of gunfire, artificial enmity, racism, endless warfare, addiction, greed, and a bottomless desire for wealth, among other things.

And we would find that Jesus wants us to be sanctified in the truth - he wants us to be be made holy.  To be made holy is not the same as being right, or strong, or holier-than-anyone-else.ccTo be made holy is to be be drawn more nearly to the heart of God, and to be led more closely to the pathways of truth, as we search diligently for it.

So, if we were to pray with Jesus, we would find ourselves praying for unity, joy, protection from the dark, and holiness in the truth.  What does that look like?

Last week, the New York Times ran a big story on mountaineering, that showed that many of the elite mountain climbers  who had been credited with reaching the peaks of the fourteen mountains over 8,000 meters may never have actually reached the highest possible point on the mountain; they may never have reached the top.  Some of them came within a few feet of the highest point on the mountain, but never actually ascended those few feet.  Some came very close, but found the last bit too hard.  Some were uncertain or disoriented in limited visibility and oxygen, and can’t be sure they made it precisely to the correct location.  The question that’s now being asked is whether or not the claims to these achievements are “true.”  

I have no opinion on the matter.  But I appreciated that the story raised the possibility that “it does not always matter if the top is reached. As [one expert climber] pointed out, it is called climbing, not summiting.”*

In our search for the truth, it is useful to know that there is a summit, but that only one person can be found there.  The rest of us are climbing.  We are not willing to throw our hands up in the air and roll our eyes, and give up.  Unity, joy, protection from evil, and the desire for holiness are our guideposts.  And we carry lots of questions in our packs.

And Jesus urges us on by his prayer.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
16 May 2021

*John Branch, “Has Anyone Really Summited the Worlds 14 Highest Mountains?”  In the NY Times, 12 May, 2021

The Love of God Changes Everything

I wonder if there has ever been a time when you have fallen in love. Perhaps you fell in love with a person. Whether you knew them for many years or met them by surprise, without warning - suddenly there you were: your heart illuminated by a new and unstoppable happiness. 

Perhaps you have fallen in love with a son or a daughter, a child welcomed into your family by birth or adoption, who wrapped their small arms around your soul and brought your life freshness and joy. Or perhaps you have fallen in love with an idea. A vocation. An art form or a call to service. Perhaps you were working or praying or painting or marching in protest one day, and it occurred to you that this - this magnificence - was what you were meant for. 

No matter the object of true love, one thing is certain: love changes everything. 

The Gospel we meet from St. John this morning shows us Jesus speaking of love with eleven of his disciples. This little window into the fifteenth chapter from John drops us right into the midst of something remarkable. We are among the apostles in Jerusalem, just after the events of the Last Supper. Jesus has washed their feet and broken the bread of his body, and Judas has fled the scene. It is here in John’s Gospel where Jesus begins one of scripture’s most extraordinary love songs. Between the Last Supper and the Crucifixion that will occur on the very next day, three entire chapters of this Gospel are dedicated to Jesus’ words to the friends who he loves. By this time he has been with them for years, teaching and healing - and it is here before his arrest where he gathers up the substance of all he has said, all he has seen, all he has done - and lays it before the disciples in a prelude to his Passion and Resurrection. It is a prelude to a hinge of history.     

And we cannot miss the high stakes here. These instructions and this declaration of love are not just some example of a farewell speech in an epic Greek tragedy. This is not some admiral commanding his soldiers on the evening before a decisive battle. Listen closely to what Jesus says: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you;...If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love…” He says, “I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of the Father, is not just sharing some gentle words before his departure. He is not just reassuring the friends who will miss him. By these words of promise and blessing and abundant grace, Jesus invites humanity into the love of God. And the love of God changes everything.

In true love, of a person or of a vocation, one of the surprising conditions is how we discover so much more of ourselves. Suddenly we feel more deeply, we see more possibility. Our happiness seems that much more astounding, and we find ourselves capable of more imagination. And - infuriatingly - at the same time that we find our joy increased, we also realize that the sorrows are that much more sorrowful. The ache of absence or the disruption of fear become even more acute because suddenly everything matters so much more. This more-ness is also a condition of the love of God. In the heart of God, there is more hope, more delight, more passion than our small human people-hearts could ever imagine. And Jesus is telling us that this is what we are meant for. 

And you know, this is not just an exercise in high theology. I would happily meditate on the heart of the Trinity for the next several decades, but these words of Jesus have urgent and material consequences on the ground, both for us as individuals and for us as the Church. 

We see it right away in this morning’s text from the Acts of the Apostles. This is where the rubber hits the road. The whole story of Acts is the story of the first followers of Jesus trying to work out what discipleship looks like. What does loving Jesus really mean? The Resurrection has occurred - praise God - and now this collection of very diverse peoples and cultures are encountering the Gospel in their own contexts. The first apostles have some ideas about how this operation should be run, but at every turn, they’re learning something new about the continuing and relentless love of the living God. One of the major debates in these first years of the church was how much of the Jewish law needed to be adopted by new converts to the church. Jesus was Jewish, after all, and most of his first followers were too. So we can see a logic to their expectation that these new people - the Gentiles, the pagans - should probably adopt the roots of the Jewish faith too. But the love of God changes everything. 

We read that the Holy Spirit falls upon all who hear the word. All. All who hear. The circumcised believers - those of Jewish background - are astonished. This is not supposed to happen! The text tells us that the Holy Spirit is poured out even on the Gentiles. Even those guys! Mercifully St. Peter has by this point learned a thing or two about the love of God and doesn’t seem to hesitate when he calls for the Gentiles to be baptized. St. Peter knows something about the relentless, extraordinary love of the Lord who he denied three times, and yet who still called him “friend.” 

In the Acts of the Apostles, the church becomes more than the first disciples ever imagined. It stretches further, digs deeper, reaches higher than their small human people-hearts could’ve ever imagined. The Holy Spirit, that electric third Person of the holy and glorious Trinity, showers the love of God upon a people that the risen Jesus continues to call friends. These are our mothers and fathers in the faith, and their example is one for us. 

Because here is the truth. The Resurrection may have occurred just over two thousand years ago, but the Resurrection of Jesus on that first Easter morning was never merely an event for the annals of history. We are still celebrating these fifty whole days of Easter - long after the candy has been eaten - long after the tomb has been found empty - because the Resurrection of Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of God’s love for us. This was the assurance forever that nothing, not even death, could stop the majesty of true love. And true love changes everything. True love makes us merciful. True love makes us kind. True love throws open even the darkest doors of our hearts. True love blesses a world that would rather drown itself in curses. True love extends its open hands to broken bodies, cares for those whom the rest of the world has forgotten, demands that we throw away our prejudice and fear, and insists upon the belovedness of each and every person. True, Resurrection love goes into the tomb, into the center of hell itself, and comes back out again - alive.

That same Holy Spirit that poured forth upon the Gentiles pours upon us in this very moment, in this place. We, too, are gathered around Christ’s table and met with the assurance of his friendship. Wherever we may be, we happy friends of the Lord, there his love abides and transforms, knitting our own hearts into fellowship with the true and living God. 

This love will demand more of us...but it will give us more than we could ever ask or ever imagine. 

Preached by Mtr. Brit Frazier
May 9 2021
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia