Quarks, Kissing, and the Trinitarian God

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF ST FRANCIS
BATCHELOR (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
TRINITY SUNDAY (26^th MAY) 2013

 Readings:        Proverbs 8.1-4, 22-31
                        Psalm 8
                        Romans 5.1-5
                        John 16.12-15

I was for a few years a priest in the NSW diocese of Bathurst. Still in many ways a wet-behind-the-ears young priest, I was proud to be under the nurture of three or four senior priests, including the bishop of that diocese.  A few years after leaving, though, I was sadly and deeply stunned when one of the finest of those priests, with whom I was having a nostalgic drink or two, announced with solemnity that if Christianity was to survive in the 21^st Century it was going to have to ditch what he called “the nonsense of the Trinity”. He argued – though I was too jaw-dropped to contribute anything but spluttered gasps to the conversation – that this was no more than a fourth century pseudo-doctrine designed to appease a secular emperor and his political support base. I wanted to beg to demur, but my jaw was under the bar stool, and I’ve never been good at arguing anyway.

Yet someplace deep within my spirit (within my wairua) I heard my own voice mumbling “over my dead body”. It was very deep within – I never spoke the words, but they remain with me still. The Christian faith, in my books, stands or falls by the doctrine of the Trinity. Anne had a Muslim friend who used to chide her “if you Christians rid yourselves of the doctrines of the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, and the Trinity, you’d have a great religion.” We would indeed: we’d have either Judaism or Islam. I have great respect for our Muslim and Jewish cousins, but I would passionately argue that Islam and Judaism and Christianity are not one and the same. We may well share a God, but that, believe it or not, is another matter. And it is enough of a different matter to believe that my Bathurst mentor was deeply, deeply misguided. Perhaps that’s when we learn to fly, when our mentors let us down?

Can I explain the Trinity? No. And not “no” in the way I cannot explain quantum physics, either. I cannot explain quantum physics, but there are some who can. I have a friend whose life has been spent measuring the weight of quarks.  I have no idea what he is even talking about, but he is engaging in an activity that is at least in theory humanly possible. I do not believe we can or should ever place the doctrine of the Trinity in the same folder as potentially possible human knowledge.

I too have sat through sermons attempting to describe this mystery of God in terms of ice, steam and water, fleur de lyse, or three leafed clovers, in terms of love, lover and beloved, and a thousand more. They are bound to fail. My favourite will always be Rublev’s Icon of the Trinity: three humanesque figures gathered around the chalice and paten of the eucharist. But such an icon will always fail until we understand that eastern orthodox iconography is never meant to be a representation but a deliberately flawed visual metaphor, a darkened window through which the light of faith can illuminate, teach, but never close a book of factual information.

To speak of the Trinity is to stand on holy ground.  The language I will inadequately use, if I dare to use any, will always ever only be the language of poetry, and will be the language of experience, perhaps even of ecstasy, not the language of description, much less analysis. We should not be afraid of that. The obsession of western society with enlightenment rationality may have its place when building literal bridges, skyscrapers, or balancing balance sheets (all of which are practices at which I am woefully inadequate) but not when we engage in the language of love. And, similarly, the language of love can never be reduced to physics, as those who have read a scientific description of the human art of kissing may recall. “Osculation” sounds so prosaic in any poem!

It is no accident that the words “poem” and “poet” are intrinsically related to ancient languages’ attempts to render the idea of “creator”, related to making, creating and composing. “God, the poet” is not a common idea in western Christianity, yet it is I believe one of our profoundest truths: “in the beginning was the word”, the fourth evangelist tells us. In the beginning was the poet, and we became the poem. Our puny post-enlightenment attempts to reduce the mysteries of God to language that we can understand are bound to fail. But to speak, especially in praise, in the language of poetry, in imagery and metaphor of the mysteries of God is to open ourselves up to God’s healing and redeeming energies: “consubstantial, co-eternal, while unending ages run.”

All in the end I will suggest, and the reason I will stand distinct from my Muslim and Jewish cousins in faith, is that, as the earliest Christians tried to formulate a language of the Trinitarian God, they were driving to the heart of the mysteries of Good Friday and Easter. In the event of the Cross of the Son every moment of pain in all creation is drawn into the heart of God, and every cry of dereliction, every “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me” is pierced with Easter light. And every moment in time, not just a Friday afternoon in Palestine two thousand years ago, is imbued with resurrection hope and resurrection light. Neither more nor less than that is the doctrine of the Trinity as best as I can stutter it.

 TLBWY

Memories of a British Visit

[reflections based on a diary entry, journaling a Sunday in England in 1999]

Day Two in England was a Sunday, and we went with our hosts to their church, a place called St Peter’s Loudwater, near High Wycombe. I described it in my diary, with grammatical abandon, as

the single worst piece of Anglican (arguably) pseudo-liturgy I’ve ever experienced: a gauche Gumble-esque goof in civvies appeared to preside over something (the OHP screen, like an Orthodox iconostasis, blocked all vision of the candle-less table) arguably resembling communion (but omitting all the glorious prefaces telling of the glorious acts of God). Then some rabid enthusiast told unsubstatiable “evidences” to authenticate a meaningless and subjective (and at times demonstrably wrong) narrative allegedly about the power of prayer.

I was livid at the liturgy. It began with the mufti-clad gentleman announcing that “we have a really great speaker this morning so will get communion over and done with … we’ll start at the holy holy bit on page …” whatever it was. Apart from not being able to see anything for the OHP screen, I doubt that there would be much reverent action to watch anyway. Forgive me, God, but I genuflected ostentatiously as I left my pew to receive the liturgically invalid communion, and again as I made my way back.

Anne later told me how she had felt my entire body stiffen more and more with each liturgical inanity. Reciprocally Anne became more and more angry as the “fantastic speaker” narrated his tale, telling how he, single handed, with of course help from the Holy Spirit, had converted the entire Zimbabwean parliament to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. Subsequent events would suggest that, if the speaker’s diatribe was not an entire self-interested fabrication, then the converted Zimbabwean Parliament soon apostatized, bringing a truckload of demons to join those that our not so humble speaker had driven out.

Fortunately, after leaving our hosts, we were able to find a more benevolent and magnificent God at St. Paul’s Cathedral. We arrived in plenty of time for evensong, and were electrified by the sheer God-proclaiming magnificence of the architectural surrounds. The acoustics were beyond words: as the Precentor, a not unattractive woman who I would later discover was named Lucy Winkett, sang with a voice as pure as any I have ever heard, her notes reverberated around the roofs of the building. It was heaven. The choir sang Fauré’s Verbe égal au Très-Haut - words originally translated by Jean Racine, which when reset to music by Fauré launched his greatness. For both Anne and me the piece rated as one of the ultimate expressions of divine beauty, and it seemed once more a happy providence of God that we should hear it performed in this iconic cathedral on our only visit together.

 A sermon by evangelical bishop Graham Dow, Suffragan bishop in the diocese (and later Bishop of Carlisle) reminded me that the vacuous nonsense perpetrated at St Peter’s Loudwater was not the summation of British evangelicalism. A post-evensong beer at Scruffy Murphy’s tavern reminded me that God was God of liturgy and laughter.

Nyerny Nyerny Nyerny God?

Political leaders in two US states hit by tragedy in recent weeks have had to learn some hard lessons in humility. In Texas, following the tragic chemicals factory in the small town of West, senators Ted Cruz and Bill Flores, who had voted against federal aid for the states smashed by Hurricane Sandy, were quick to negotiate aid with the Federal Governments on behalf of their constituents. This week, following the devastating impact of a tornado in Moore, a region outside Oklahoma City, the Obama administration has responded with immediate offers of federal aid (and so they should), despite Oklahoma senators Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn’s repeated strident opposition to federal aid in other parts of the US, and their virulent opposition to increased Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funding.

There is in the US context a study in grace. It would be tempting, were one President Obama, to remind the Texans and Oklahomans (Okies) that they have supported politicians virulently opposed to federal intervention and “big government”, and to leave them to dwell in the results of their choices. Which is not, incidentally, to imply that a chemical explosion or a twister is the wrath of God poured out on states who have made bad choices, although it is a safe bet that within hours fundamentalist Christians will be spewing vitriol about Oklahoma in particular being the wrath of God poured out on America in punishment for, probably, growing acceptance of gay marriage. God is not a celestial despot, despite the attempts of some sick parodies of Christ-followers to make God appear that way.

Of course the US Government was always going to respond with political compassion to such a catastrophe as West, Texas or Moore, Oklahoma. Politics in any case is a deadly game of symbolic stand-offs and bold pronouncements designed to win the feeble minds (like mine) of media-manipulated voters.  But what the scenario represents is a study in grace. Were Obama  to pronounce a federal nyerny nyerny nyerny to the so-called red states (paradoxically the conservative or right-wing states in US-speak) he would rark up the cycles of hatred and paranoia that destroy a nation and its people – the cycles now demonically devouring Syria, re-escalating in Iraq, and potentially poised to emerge again in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, in all its tragedy, Moore Oklahoma and to a lesser extent West, Texas stand as a parable: “There was a man who had two sons …”.

Michael

Niceness and the God of Merd?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
FRED’S PASS (NORTHERN TERRITORY)
SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (5th APRIL) 2013

Readings:     

             Acts 16.9-15
             Psalm 67
             Revelation 21-10-14, 21.22 – 22.5
             John 14.23-29

Too often Christianity is little more than a slightly “godified” reflection of the society around us. We adapt the narratives and mores of the society we live in and then do little more than dress it up with a little bit of goddiness. Of course I include myself in this … we are all almost inescapably entangled in what I like to call the dominant paradigm, the dominating attitudes and behaviours of our society and our media. It ain’t easy to escape, and I for one know that my attempts to do so are by are large reasonably pathetic, reasonably token. That of course is why over and again I return to the theme of practising the presence of God, exposing ourselves to the narratives of scripture and liturgy, hoping that somewhere, sometimes, like a sieve, we will despite our leakiness retain some of the God-nutrients that flow by us.

So much of our society is nice. “Nice” is not altogether a complimentary word in my vocabulary. Nice so often fails to dig beneath the veneers of our society. Nice sends Helen Steiner Rice lyrics, which, while she may have been the “ambassador of sunshine”, do not dig deeper into the vicissitudes of human experience. Nice has very little to say when we receive the death knock from our doctor, or watch the television news and wrestle in our utterly bewildered minds with the past complexities of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burundi and Rwanda, Auschwitz, or the present atrocities of Syria. Nice perhaps even means our media steer us away from the deeper questions, so that we become inured to the suffering in the world around us. Nice cauterises feeling. Atrocity dwells just beneath the thin veneers of civilization, as many of our hate-filled bumper stickers and other messages to boat people remind us.

It is not only Christianity, of course, that has swallowed the pills of niceness. It is a human malaise, as our media reflect. How often I am engaged in conversations with those whose religious faith, not wholly disconnected to Christianity, is something to do with being on the whole rather nice to people, but ignoring the fact that we are, even on a tiny scale, well and truly capable of losing niceness, well and truly capable of brain explosions that send our veneers of niceness skidding into the shadows. These lapses may be minor – me, as I have said, behind a 67 kmh driver without a car in sight on the overtaking-impossible curves of Tiger Brennan Drive, muttering unChristlike imprecations – but they can, as our television news reminds us night after night, be very deep indeed. Thomas Paine, the great US humanist atheist declared sombrely ‘my religion is to do good, my country is the world’. Yet, as Paul the Apostle so clearly saw, there is so often within us the volition not to do good. “I do the things I do not wish to do”, wrote Paul, about the human condition. Not terribly nice at all.

The greatest truth of Christianity, I have from time to time contended, is its doctrine of sin. It is that that takes us deeply away from niceness into the heart of being human. It takes us away from our own strength into the need, the desperate need for a source of strength beyond us. More even though than the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, it takes us beyond a Higher Power, “out there”, into the higher power who, in the events of the life of Jesus, dives deep into all the awkwardness and unpleasantry of being human, and only there begins to breathe hope and what we might salvation.

It was this that the author of the fourth gospel was telling us as he recalled the Jesus sayings about the Spirit, the one referred to in John as paraclete, comforter, advocate. The entire gamut – if I may put it that way – of human unpleasantness is invaded by Christ, in all time, is touched and healed, though with the slightly inconvenient rider “for as long as we allow it to be.” The wrestlings of Christian thinkers of the past twenty centuries to make sense of this have been inevitably inadequate, but it is imperative that we hold on to this strange and mysterious truth that John was pointing us towards, that in the coming of the Comforter all that we need of the invasion of Jesus into our lives is made available even to us, even far away and long removed from the events of Jesus’ life and teachings and death and resurrection. It is imperative too that we surrender ourselves again and again to this Christ who touches the deep places of who we are, and who, even if we are often kicking and screaming in resistance, shapes us slowly into what we might by the grace of God become.

Every now and again, by the grace of God, we encounter those who are so transformed into the likeness of Christ that they remind us that the darknesses of our television news, or of our hate-filled bumper stickers and simplistic news-bites, or even of our own lives, are not the final word on being human. Niceness is good, but tragically niceness falls short. It must be over and again our prayer that we surrender not to niceness but to the ugliness of the Christ who reaches into the deepest darknesses of human existence and breathes there his Easter light. Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me, said Jesus. But this is not just the language of niceness, and it is for that reason that Jesus (or John) goes on to speak of the Comforter and Advocate who will draw near. It is by the Spirit of Christ that we can be transformed from the darknesses of our failure to the possibilities of a God-filled life. May God help us so to be.

TLBWY