Walking into the Sea: Reflections on Commitment

 

RCL Proper 19B

11 August 2024

 

Church of the Epiphany

Surrey BC

 

Choosing to Commit

            In the fall of 1960 my father was transferred to an overseas assignment in Germany.  His assignment came during that time of heightened international tensions we call ‘the Cold War’.  Because there was inadequate family housing in Germany, my mother, sister and I lived with our grandparents in England while my father lived on base in Wiesbaden.  I went to an American school on a nearby US Air Force base.

 

            It was a presidential election year in the United States.  Richard Nixon, the Vice President and a Republican, was running against Senator John F. Kennedy, a Democrat.  Even as schoolchildren we became embroiled in the emotions of the election.  Because Kennedy was a Roman Catholic, some of his opponents questioned whether his loyalty was to the Pope or to the Constitution.  In an era of black and white television, Nixon did not come across well.  No matter how closely he shaved, he always looked a bit sinister.  But, as you know, Kennedy was elected, the first Roman Catholic president and the first president to have been born in the twentieth century.

 

            In January of 1961 Kennedy was sworn in as president and gave his first and only inaugural address.  Even though I was only seven going on eight years old, I remember these words:  “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”  He asked the American people to choose to commit to becoming the country they desired rather than waiting for something to happen.

 

Waiting for Bread

            Over the past weeks we have been hearing portions of the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to John.  Again and again we hear Jesus talk about himself as the ‘bread from heaven’ or the ‘bread of life’.  These words of Jesus follow the feeding of the five thousand (John 6.1-14), a miraculous multiplication of meagre supplies of bread and fish.  What is draws my attention is not so much the miracle, but the response of the people to the miracle.

 

            To be sure the people of Judea in the time of Jesus did not enjoy what we now call ‘food security’.  People struggled to feed their families and themselves, so it’s no wonder that a miraculous meal would appeal to the real physical hunger people were experiencing.  But the miracle obscures what Jesus is asking of the people.  They want bread to feed their immediate hunger; he wants commitment to lives that embody the eternal life that Jesus is living and proclaiming. The bread that Jesus is offering to them, the bread that lasts, is God’s invitation to live as members of God’s beloved community in the here and now.

 

            The writer of the Letter to the Ephesians describes what living as members of God’s beloved community means.

 

·      It means speaking the truth.

·      It means preventing anger from guiding what we do and say.

·      It means building one another up rather than tearing one another down.

·      It means choosing tender-heartedness and forgiveness over bitterness, wrath, slander and malice.

·      It means walking in the same love as Christ has shown to us.

 

If we look around us at the world today, at Canada today, then it is not difficult for us to see that there is still much for us to do in living as God’s beloved community.

 

            Sometimes it seems to me that people keep hoping that something or someone will drop down from heaven and magically solve our every need.  Someone has come, but, in order to benefit from God’s invitation and gift, commitment is required.  We are, as the writer to the Ephesians puts it, to become “a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5.2b).

            We forget what the word ‘sacrifice’ actually means.  We are used to thinking about sacrifices as something we give up in order to achieve a goal.  But the roots of the word are ‘to make something holy’.  To sacrifice is not about giving something up or self-denial, unless that helps us become ‘imitators of God (and) beloved children’ (Ephesians 5.1). Sacrifice is the choice to every moment of our lives a living witness to the love of God made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth and, dear friends, made flesh in us, the on-going community of God’s beloved.

 

Walking in over Our Heads

            There is a Jewish story about the parting of the Red Sea.  Although Nahshon, the lead character in this story, is mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the New Testament, the story is not found in the Scriptures themselves.  It’s a story told in the Jewish tradition to interpret and to expand upon the biblical story itself.

 

            The story goes like this.  When the Israelites arrived at the Red Sea, the waters did not immediately part.  With Pharaoh’s army fast approaching behind them, the people began to despair.  They knew that Moses had promised a miracle, but they would not commit to entering the waters.  They wanted the waters parted and a clear path.  But nothing was happening.  

 

            God has promised to protect the people.  God had already performed many signs on their behalf.  But were they ready to act in faith and go forward?

 

            From among the people Nahshon emerged.  He entered into the waters of the Sea and continued to walk until his head was under the water.  Then the waters parted and the people were able to cross in safety.  But only after someone had taken the risk, made a commitment and walked in over their head.

 

Taking the Risk

            These are not easy times to be a Christians, especially for communities such as ours that have rich traditions of worship, theology and spirituality.  Our way of following Jesus and of seeking ways to become more truly a community of God’s beloved requires taking risks and making commitments. 

 

            We are here today because people have taken risks and made commitments.  I am here because my parents took the risk of getting married and having children.  They also made the commitment to raise their children in the Christian faith.  Each one of us here has a similar story of risks taken and commitments made that we can tell.  Perhaps the stories are of the risks we have taken and the commitments we have made.

 

            Miracles and signs from heaven do not just happen.  They happen when people such as you and I decide to enter the waters of faith and to continue to walk forward even as those waters rise to our ears, to our noses, to our eyes – perhaps even over our heads.  

 

            We are at such a point in the life of this Parish.  We know what our needs are.  We know what our fears are.  I trust we know what our hopes are.  The Bread of Life that God offers us in Jesus continues to feed us and to sustain us, so that we can enter the waters and experience the promises.

 

            We do not enter the waters alone.  We have the beloved community of Epiphany.  We have the beloved community of our Deanery and Archdeaconry.  We have the beloved community of the Diocese.  There is no end to the beloved communities with whom we are joined through the Spirit in the Body of Christ.  So let us walk with confidence and see how wet we need to get.

Dining Across the Divide: Reflections on Ephesians 4.1-16

RCL Proper 18B

4 August 2024

 

Church of the Epiphany

Surrey BC

 

            One of the first things that I do most mornings is to read the headlines from The Guardian, a British news source that has been operating since 1821.  It has a chequered history with some of its founders having profited from the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved people but, over the last one hundred years, The Guardian is now one of the media voices for those who are arguing for a more progressive approach to our world’s challenges.  Unlike most media outlets, The Guardian is not owned by a private company but is financed by a Trust whose proceeds benefit journalists and journalism rather than shareholders.

 

            One of the features that I read regularly is entitled ‘Dining across the Divide’.  In these features two people who would not regularly break bread together because of their differing political and social view share a meal.  They are then interviewed about their experience of having a conversation with each other.  More often than not the two people leave the meal with a greater appreciation of each other’s points of view.  They may not agree, but they come away acknowledging that the other person is not a ‘monster’ or ‘weird’.  Sometimes they even become friends.

 

            At the heart of the Letter to the Ephesians is the conviction that “(the) mystery of faith . . . is that through the one body of Jesus, God has brought together two disparate groups under one plan of salvation.”[1]  Most Christians today do not know that one of the greatest crises the early Christian movement faced was the relationship between Jewish believers in Jesus as the Christ and the non-Jews who heard the good news of God in Christ and became followers of the Way of Jesus.  Evidence as to how the leadership of the Christian movement tried to deal with this crisis or failed to deal with this crisis can be found in almost every book in the New Testament.

 

            Many – but not all – Jews in the time of Jesus and the early Christian movement had come to believe that the non-Jewish world was a threat – unclean, unethical, unworthy of respect.  Many – but not all – non-Jews in the time of Jesus and the early Christian movement had come to believe that the Jewish way of life was bizarre, disloyal to the Empire, narrow-minded.  Since all of the first followers of Jesus were Jews, it was difficult to know how best to respond to the growing numbers of non-Jews who were coming into the movement.

 

            The unity that the Christian community needed in order to navigate the religious, political and social currents that threatened to overwhelm the community was not easy to maintain.  Christians knew that they were already one body through their baptism, a spiritual unity that came as God’s gift.  But the visible unity of the community, a community made up of people with distinct views on who Jesus was, on how the community should be governed and on what made good disciples, was, and still is, a work in progress.

 

            The writer of the Letter to the Ephesians understood that key to managing our growth into more visible unity was, and is, the character of the leadership of the movement.  What we heard in today’s second reading has been for me what I might call one of my ‘desert island’ passages of scripture.  I believe it lays out before us the necessary elements of the unity that God desires for us, not just as Christians, but as people living in the world.

 

·       We need ‘apostles’, people who have the gifts to lead us as we share the good news of God in Christ to a world in which there are many who aren’t sure that the good news is good news.

·       We need ‘prophets’, people who speak God’s truth to us in real times and in real places and who are willing to face the cost of speaking the truth in love.

·       We need ‘evangelists’, people who know how to share the good news in the many languages and cultures of our world, our local communities, our distinct generations.

·       We need ‘pastors and teachers’, people who use their knowledge, skills and experiences to build us up by appealing to our hopes rather than whip us by catering to our fears.

 

            Leadership is meant to equip us for ministry, to build us up in the unity of faith and the knowledge of God, to nurture us so that we become fully who we are as human beings made in the image and likeness of God.  Leadership, true leadership, equips us to be a community of self-giving, self-sacrificing love, the love we know in Christ Jesus.

 

            Unfortunately, we are living in a world where such leadership is not as evident as we might wish.  We see too many examples, particularly in the partisanship of many political leaders, both in Canada and in the United States.  In a world of sound bites, character and concern for the public good of all people are casualties in the quest for political power.  Few if any of our leaders seem to be willing to dine across the divide.

 

            But here in our parish as we continue our journey towards the next chapter in our history, we have the opportunity to build one another up, to nurture each other, to rejoice in our distinctive ways of finding God’s presence in our lives and in our choices.  “In a world that increasingly seems to embrace arrogance, violence and short-temperedness,” the writer of the Letter to the Ephesians invites us “to embrace humility, gentleness and patience.”[2]

 

            Beginning this Sunday and on the rest of the Sundays of August, I will be asking you to answer a question after the sermon.  Your answers, whether in English or Arabic, will help the Search Committee craft a vision that we hope will attract the ordained leader we need to nurture us to grow into the maturity that God in Christ offers to us.

 

            So today, my friends, here is the first question:  ‘What do you value most about the Church of the Epiphany?’

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[1] Susan Hylen on Ephesians 4.1-16 at workingpreacher.org.

[2] Doug Pratt on Ephesians 4.1-16 at cepreaching.org.

 

Seeking a Better Country: Reflections on Canada Day

 BAS Canada Day Propers

30 June 2024

 

Church of the Epiphany

Surrey BC

 

Seeking a Better Country

            When I first came to Canada, I did my best to learn about its history, its cultures and its institutions.  One of the institutions that immediately caught my attention was the Order of Canada.  It caught my attention because of its motto:  Desiderantes Meliorem Patriam.  It means ‘They desire a better country.’  But I wonder how many members, companions and officers of the Order of Canada know the source of the motto.  It comes from chapter 11 of the Letter to the Hebrews, a chapter that describes the faithfulness of patriarchs, matriarchs and prophets who lived before the birth of Jesus, a faithfulness fuelled by hope rather than goaded by fear.

 

All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.  They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.  If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return.   But as it is, they desire a better homeland, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them. (Hebrews 11.13-16)

 

            I know that there are members of our congregation who came to Canada seeking a better homeland.  I have been an immigrant twice in my life – from England to the United States and then from the United States to Canada.  I came for a professional opportunity thinking to return to the United States.  I have ended up spending more than half my life here and as a Canadian citizen.  I, and perhaps many others, am seeking what I hope to find.  But I know that I have not yet found that place where God’s promises have been complete fulfilled.  

 

Political at all times

            During the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu express his surprise that some people insisted that religion and politics do not mix.  He is supposed to have said this:  “When people say that religion and politics do not mix, I wonder which Bible they are reading.”  He was right.  Being a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth means that we are always political.  

 

            We are political because we are concerned about the ‘public good of all people’.  It’s important to remember that when the first Christians were asked to describe what their communities were, they chose the Greek word ekklēsia.  An ekklēsia in the ancient Greco-Roman world was an assembly of the citizens of a city to debate and to determine the policies that would guide their city or state.  In ancient Greek the city or state was called the polis, the word from which we get the English word politics.

 

            The earliest Christian communities understood they were nots club or a fraternal societies.  They were and we are a gathering of people whom God has called together (i) to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and with all our strength and (ii) to love our neighbour as ourselves.  The importance of our love of neighbour finds voice throughout the whole of the apostolic writings we call the New Testament.  The writer of the 1^stLetter of John states quite simply, “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” (1 John 4.20)

 

            We are political but we strive to avoid a partisanship that does not listen.  There will always be different points of view among any group of people about how we best serve the common good of the whole community.  Unfortunately there is a psychological reality that humans must struggle to overcome.  We tend to hear only what we want to hear.  We tend to hear only what conforms to our existing set of norms and expectations.  In other words, we find it hard to listen to other people, especially other people who may have a different point of view than we have.  But if we are to be faithfully political, we must listen to one another.  Only by listening to one another, by asking open-ended questions that seek understanding, can we move towards that better country we all hope to reach.

 

            We are political because we occupy a visible place in the communities we serve.  We have what is sometimes called ‘social capital’.  We provide many of our neighbours with space to gather to attend to their needs – day care providers, twelve-step groups, non-profit community groups, refugees, food banks, thrift stores and more.  We provide for the hungry and advocacy for the voiceless.  When some years ago, the City of Richmond wanted to withhold the discretionary property tax exemption from the churches and other religious organizations, the churches came together and demonstrated that the City would lose more in far more in social capital than it would gain in property tax dollars.  The Council changed its mind.

 

Paving the Way 

            On this Canada Day weekend our Parish is on its way towards what we hope is a future where we continue to play our part in God’s great work of re-creating right relationships between all peoples, to bear witness to Christ’s compassion for each of us and to be open to the Spirit leading us in paths as yet unseen.  We are here to listen to God and to one another to discern how we might best serve the common good of all.

 

            The coming eighteen months will test us.  On the world’s stage there are elections in many countries where some of us have ties.  Our own country faces a federal election at some point between now and the end of next year.  Our province will hold an election this fall.  But perhaps the most important challenge will be our work together to search for a new Rector and to discern what how best to use the property and buildings entrusted to our stewardship.  Like those who bear the insignia of the Order of Canada, we who bear the sign of the cross are seeking a better country, a place where we and all God’s children shall be free and the whole earth lives to sing the glory of God.

We Walk by Faith: Reflections for the 4th Sunday of Pentecost (RCL Proper 11B)

Church of the Epiphany

Surrey BC

16 June 2024

 

            When I was in seminary, I was taught that sermons, in principle, should not focus on a single verse in a reading from the Scriptures but on the entire reading itself.  When the preacher focuses on only one verse, they run the risk of losing sight of the whole idea the writer is trying to express.  Just as location is one of the most important things to consider in real estate, the whole picture, the context, is one of the most important parts of preaching.

 

            But today I am going to take that risk.  I think that I am doing it in a way that is faithful to the intent of Paul in his second letter to the wild and woolly bunch of Christians who were in Corinth in those days.  This verse speaks to us and to all the parishes around us who are seeking to discern what the future holds for us and who are trying to identify how we navigate our way towards that future.

 

            Here’s the verse:  “ . . . for we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5.7).  This one verse inspired a hymn found in our hymn book that was written by Henry Alford, the Dean of Canterbury, in the late nineteenth century.

 

We walk by faith, and not by sight;

no gracious words we hear

from him who spoke as none e’er spoke;

but we believe him near.

 

We may not touch his hands and side, 

nor follow where he trod;

but in his promise we rejoice

and cry, “My Lord and God!”

Help then, O Lord, our unbelief;

and may our faith abound,

to call on you when you are near,

and seek where you are found:

 

that, when our life of faith is done,

in realms of clearer light

we may behold you as you are,

with full and endless sight.[1]

 

            In English the word ‘faith’ can be used in at least two ways.  In the first way ‘faith’ means a set of religious beliefs and practices.  We speak of the Jewish faith or the Muslim faith or the Hindu faith or the Sikh faith, for example.  When we use the word in this way, to walk by faith means to carry these beliefs and practices in our pockets as a guidebook to our daily lives.

 

            It’s a good thing to have beliefs and practices to guide us.  As Christians we believe that all that is, seen and unseen, is the work of a loving Creator.  We believe that in Jesus of Nazareth we meet this loving Creator and learn how to live into God’s likeness.  We believe that the Holy Spirit continues to sustain us, to guide us and to warn us.  We continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and the prayers in order to be nurtured and shaped into a more Christ-like life.

 

            But sometimes, when we face particular challenges, we find our beliefs do not give us clear guidance.  The practices that have been so important to us may not seem as helpful to us in these moments.  We may begin to doubt our beliefs and to find less meaning in our practices.

 

            It’s perhaps at this point in our lives, whether as individuals or families or communities that the other meaning of faith comes to our aid.  In this sense ‘faith’ is our trust or confidence in someone or something.  It is more often an intuition or a feeling or an insight than a set of beliefs we can recite or a set of practices that we undertake.

 

            This kind of faith understand that to be a person of faith is to be someone who does, from time to time, have doubts.  Having doubts does not mean we have lost our faith.  Doubts are signs that our faith is seeking to understand what is going on at this moment in our lives.[2]  Our history is full of saints and teachers who have often had questions and doubts about God and God’s purposes.  It is a sign of a truly active faith to ask questions and to seek out the wisdom and experience of others.  

 

            Have you ever gotten up in the night in the dark to go to the bathroom or to get a drink?  Have you ever wondered how you returned to bed without stumbling over things?  It turns out that there are two small matching parts of our brain just behind our ears called the hippocampi (meaning ‘seahorse-shaped’).  They help take short-term memories and turn them into long-term memories.  They are particularly associated with our spatial memories.  They allow us to walk without sight.  They are the parts of the brain that help blind people navigate their homes – so long as someone doesn’t re-arrange things without consulting the blind person!

 

            I believe our trust and confidence in God comes from our spiritual hippocampi, our memories and experiences of God’s presence and action in our lives.  There is a practice called ‘the healing of memories’ that some counsellors and spiritual directors use.  In this practice a person is invited to remember a troubled time and to seek to find where God was in those moments.  God’s presence may have been only a kind word from a stranger or a friend calling unexpectedly.  But remembering this in the past can heal the present.

 

            My friends, we walk by faith, not by sight.  We walk by our beliefs.  We walk by our practices.  But in the difficult times, in the uncertain times, in the challenging times, we walk by those deeply-embedded memories that sustain and embolden us.  They enable us to walk in whatever darkness we find ourselves as surely as we walk in the night-time darkness of our homes.  God has built into our souls the spiritual equivalent of those two small seahorse-shaped structures in our physical brains.  For us, the dark night of the soul is not an experience of the absence of God but of our deeper search for God.

 

            Recently on Facebook a friend of mine posted a piece of spiritual advice.  I think that it has something to say to us here at Epiphany as we search for a new rector and as we discern how best to serve our neighbourhood through our property.

 

Faith doesn’t always take you out of the problem,

Faith takes you through the problem.

Faith doesn’t always take away the pain,

Faith gives you the ability to handle the pain.

Faith doesn’t always take you out of the storm,

Faith calms you in the midst of the storm.

 

            My friends, we walk by faith, not be sight.  But that is not bad news.  It is good news.  It is the promise of God’s creating, redeeming and renewing love in all times and in all seasons, in the light of day and in the dark of night, and in times of clear paths and in times of untrodden paths.

 

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[1] Henry Alford, ‘We Walk by Faith, and Not by Sight’ in Common Praise #244.

 

[2] Anselm of Canterbury speaks of ‘faith seeking understanding’.

 

Be Careful What You Wish For: Reflections on 1 Samuel 8.4-11, 16-20

RCL Proper 10B

9 June 2024

 

Church of the Epiphany

Surrey BC

 

            For more than forty years I have made use of and been guided by the Myers-Briggs Personality Types.  It’s a tool that can help a person understand themselves, how they work, how they engage the world and how they relate to other people.  It’s a helpful tool because it can also help a person understand how they respond to stress and conflict.

            When I am ‘in the grip’ of stress and conflict, I react in a number of ways.  I become negative and pessimistic about everything.  I alternate between being helpful and not being helpful.  Instead of taking responsibility for my actions and decisions, I blame other people or circumstances.  I become inefficient and unproductive and can even shut down for long periods of time.

            Because I know these things, I also know how to get ‘out of the grip’.  I take some time away.  I set smaller goals and accomplish them.  I seek help in setting priorities and ask others to work with me.

            What is true of me as an individual is also true of communities.  When communities are ‘in the grip’, they also behave in ways that are less than helpful.  They may even act in ways that are potentially self-destructive.

            When the people of Israel entered the land of Canaan, they were a people who were guided by the Law God gave to them on Mount Sinai and by the wisdom God’s Spirit gave to the judges and prophets like Joshua, Deborah and Samuel.  But over the centuries things began to fall apart.  People being people, they often disobeyed the Law and ignored the advice and counsel of the judges and prophets.  And, as so often happens, not every judge or prophet was of the same calibre as the judges and prophets from ‘the good old days’.  Political and military catastrophes caused public confidence in their traditions and leadership to evaporate.

            Instead of a healthy re-boot of the tradition of the Law and a renewal of the leadership of the judges and prophets, the people now wanted a king.  They wanted to be like every nation around them.  So, in response to their desire we heard voiced in the first reading, God agreed and gave them a king – Saul.

            ‘But be very careful what you wish for’, Samuel said to them.  There will be some good kings like David and Solomon, but there will also be some really bad ones like Ahab.  The country will also eventually split into two distinct kingdoms, Israel in the north, Judah in the south.

            Perhaps their corporate mistake was failing to ask some basic questions of themselves as a community.

·      Who are we?

·      What are our strengths?

·      What are our ‘growing edges’?

·      What are our hopes?

·      What are our fears?

Instead they reached out for someone else’s solution that fit someone else’s social, cultural and political situation – not the social, cultural and political situation of the people of Israel.

            What was true for the people of Israel three thousand years ago is true for us as Anglican Christians in the twenty-first century.  We are ‘in the grip’ of social and cultural stress.  We could, like the Israelites of Samuel’s time, reach out for someone else’s solution to someone else’s challenges, or we could examine ourselves carefully.

·      Who are we now?

·      Who do we wish to become?

·      What are our strengths and values?

·      What are our ‘growing edges’?

The good news is that we do not travel this road alone.  God walks with us wearing many guises and offering wisdom through our shared knowledge and experiences.  Our life will not be free of problems, but God will preserve us and give us grace to endure and overcome them.  We travel with our sisters and brothers in other congregations.  We share a life of worship and service with them.  We are part of a wider community whose resources join our own in building the future we hope to see.  We do not need a king; we have someone who has called us his friends and who is our way, our truth and our life.

Let us pray.

O God,

you have called to your servants

to ventures of which we cannot see the ending,

by paths as yet untrodden,

through perils unknown.

Give us faith to go out with good courage,

not knowing where we go,

but only that your hand is leading us

and your love supporting us;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Weaving the Tapestry of the World: Reflections on the Feast of the Trinity

RCL Trinity B

26 May 2024

 

Church of the Epiphany

Surrey BC

 

            In the summer of 1980 I left Nashotah House, my theological college near Milwaukee, to drive to my parish internship at Trinity Episcopal Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a six-hour drive.  Now in those days we relied upon letters and long-distance telephone calls to keep in touch with one another.  Long-distance telephone calls weren’t cheap, so most of us depended upon sending letters.  A letter from Fort Wayne to Nashotah usually took three days.

 

            So, as I drove my car out of the college grounds, the postal truck arrived to deliver the mail.  Among the letters was one from the Rector of Trinity asking me to preach that Sunday, Trinity Sunday as it happened to be that year.  I blissfully drove to Fort Wayne and arrived on the Friday afternoon.  I was unaware of the invitation and the Rector made no mention of it.

 

            As we were lining up in the narthex for the Sunday eucharist, he turned to me and said, ‘I am really looking forward to your sermon.’  Before I could say anything, the opening hymn began, and we were off down the aisle.  As we were processing, I checked the bulletin.  Sure enough, there in the bulletin I read, “We welcome our Seminary Intern Richard Leggett who will be our preacher this Sunday.”

 

            I listened very carefully to the readings as I sat in the sanctuary.  As I was listening, I gave thanks to God that I had been a member of my high school’s speech team with a speciality in extemporaneous speech.  When the moment came, I entered the pulpit and offered what was probably the shortest sermon ever preached on the Trinity in that parish.

 

            Because of that experience, I have always had a special interest in how we Christians talk about God, the One-in-Three, the Three-in-One, the holy and undivided Trinity.  I made a promise to myself that I would never be caught off-guard again if I were put on the spot to talk about this mystery of our faith.

 

            At the heart of the mystery of our faith in God and our experience of God is that God is not an idea to be debated.  God is a mystery to be explored.  By mystery I do not mean that God is something we can solve like some crime drama.  The mystery of God is, as C. S. Lewis once said, ‘like an onion which, as you peel away the layers, gets bigger not smaller’.  To believe in God as Christians speak about God is to enter into a life-long personal relationship with the One through whom all that exists came into being and in whom we live and move and have our being.

 

            We sometimes forget the difference between the words ‘individual’ and ‘personal’.  An ‘individual’ is a quantity.  A ‘person’ is a someone who lives in relationship with others.  It is our personhood that reveals the you and I have been made in God’s image.  Our relationships with other persons creates an interlocking web of connections that the Anglican poet John Donne described in one of his most famous poems.

 

No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were:

As well as if a manor of thy friend's

Or of thine own were.

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

 

            Each one of us has such a web of relationships.  I, for example, am a son, a brother, a spouse, a father, an uncle, a friend, a priest and probably several more relationships that I cannot recall now.  No one of those relationships define who I am.  The whole of who I am is more than the sum of those relationships.  No one ‘knows’ me fully nor, for that matter, do we know anyone else fully.  I never cease to be amazed at how people I have known and loved for decades can surprise me with a new revelation.  And I never cease to be amazed at how I can surprise myself when I discover something new about myself as a result of all these relationships in which I participate.

 

            When Christians speak of God as a Trinity of Persons, what we are trying to describe is a God who also lives in a network of relationships.  The influential early church theologian, Augustine of Hippo, spoke of God as the Love, the Beloved and the Love.  We know God as the Lover who made room for others in the act of creation.  We know God as the Beloved who reveals God the Lover in our time and space.  We know God as the Love that binds the God the Lover and God the Beloved in such unity that to speak of One is to speak of Three, to speak of the Three is to speak of the One.

 

            We show ourselves to be faithful witnesses to the triune God when we nurture our relationships with friends and families.  We show ourselves to be faithful witnesses to the triune God when we reach beyond ourselves to establish relationships with the ‘other’, whomever that ‘other’ might be.  We show ourselves to be faithful witnesses to the triune God when we tend the relationships that help us take care of our neighbourhoods.

 

            Our confession of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as Lover, Beloved and Love, is desperately relevant to our world today.  You perhaps have heard the saying that a tree farm is not a forest.  A true forest exists through the inter-dependence of each and every species.  This inter-dependence creates an eco-system that is robust and resilient.  In contrast an entire tree farm can be destroyed by the intrusion of a single virus or destructive insect.  

 

            We dare to believe that diversity is not a threat to unity but absolutely necessary for genuine unity.  Unity depends upon the network of relationships in which the gifts and distinctiveness of each and every participant contribute to the weaving of the tapestry of creation in all its varied beauty.

 

Let us pray.

 

 

God of delight,

your Wisdom sings your Word

at the crossroads where humanity and divinity meet.

Invite us into your joyful being

where you know and are known 

in each beginning, 

in all sustenance, 

in every redemption,

so that we may manifest your unity

in the diverse ministries you entrust to us,

truly reflecting your triune majesty,

in faith that acts,

in the hope that does not disappoint,

and in the love that endures.  Amen.