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Trinity Sunday is upon us.  Not an occasion for task-oriented missional preaching, but a time to admit that God’s Person is mysterious, and to let this God BE God.  Since the Age of Enlightenment, we demand rational explanation for all happenings, and thus deprive ourselves of the awe of things beyond.  Readings for this weekend follow up on Pentecost’s experience of the Holy Spirit, yet also take us to new vistas of the sacred.  The preacher’s dilemma is that of how to express flooding wonder in the limitations of human language!

Isaiah tells us of the vision which launched him into a life of confronting idolatry in the sixth chapter of his oracles:  “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple.” (v.1)   And it dawns on him, “I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (v.5)   Kristin Emery Saldine says it well:  “Prophets are often called to speak the word of the Lord to those who have forgotten the distinction between holy and human….God is holy, we are not….Yet it is this realization that opens Isaiah to the possibility of forgiveness.  He is touched by divine intervention and made clean.”   (FEASTING ON THE WORD, B,3:28)

Fast-forward a bit to Paul’s Letter to the Romans.  Chapter 8 is perhaps the most wisdom-packed unit of Grace there is; verses 12-17 meet our imperfections head-on, yet assure us of a loving God who stands by us to the end.  Our human actions and wills are insufficient, unless they are sustained by the Spirit:  God persists in breaking into our hiding-places and bringing us home.  “It is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”  How ’bout THAT?

The Gospel is the account of Jesus meeting with Nicodemus “by night”, John 3:1-17.  Here again is one of those heaven & earth encounters which drive both Testaments.  Like us, Nic wants an explanation; what he gets is a vision of mystery.  My favorite part of this oft-abused passage is verse 17:  “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”  This saving is through our participation in a holiness which cannot be defined or confined by Reason alone…

St Patrick, they say, explained the Trinity by pointing out the shamrock, with three equal leaves coming from one stem.  St Augustine presented a hard-boiled egg:  a shell, a white band of protein, and a yolk.  Perhaps it’s only through such images that we can begin to approximate those things that are beyond speech. God is holy, we are not.  Egg-zactly…

God Bless Us,Every One           Horace Brown KIng

Pentecost:  Fifty Great Days since Easter, a strong season to ask, “What Now?  What’s God about?”  Weekly readings have explored our reaction to Jesus’ Resurrection as we’ve recounted the experiences of The Apostles.  It’s been a quantum leap between the culture of Then to the culture of Now–is there any similarity, any common denominator of the human condition?  We try to affirm an ubiquity (look it up) of a Holy Presence, maintaining that travelers to the soul present like issues in all places and histories.  So as the Church was “born” on Pentecost, the date also marks our own birth into the fire and wind of belief and disbelief.

Read again the annual story in Acts 2:1-21.  The Holy Spirit thundered in with tongues of fire and the sound of a rushing wind!  An antidote to human grasping of God and being divided by multiple languages (Genesis 11:1-9), now God grasped humans (!) with mutual understandings despite diverse forms of speech.  (The miracle was not that some could speak, rather that all could hear!)  “All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?'” –an appropriate response to being confronted by God’s Spirit.

The Epistle comes from the Letter to the Romans, chapter 8:  “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought…” (v.26)  Here again God’s Spirit is recognized as a heavenly guide for those who’re tired of stumbling about in the Cloud of Unknowing.  We do the Spirit an injustice to see this Presence only as assurance of a Safe Ending:  I believe that this Spirit takes us on the most adventurous and scenic route through Creation, causing us to stop and marvel at the view!

John’s Gospel re-visits Jesus’ final admonitions during the Last Supper, 15:26 to 16:15.  The Lord urges them/us to watch for the Advocate who will continue to unfold glimpses of Heaven.  “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth….”  What’s Real??  Can there be a Godly Presence who stands near and helps me to sort out the treasure from the styrene peanuts which surround and hide it?  Emmanuel Y. Lartey (Candler Seminary, Emory University) has some interesting thoughts:  “The Holy Spirit connects the creative genius of the Father with the redemptive love of the Son and the courageous witness of the Church.  There is a bond that keeps history, current experience, and future hope together in Christian faith.” (FEASTING ON THE WORD, B, 3:24)

My best driving vacations have been “blue-liners”:  leaving the Interstates and major routes (red lines) and following the side roads.  Its’ there that you can experience the little museums, the cross-road diners, and hitherto unknown trivia.  What’s even better is to have a friend along who knows where the overlooks are!  It seems good to be amazed and often perplexed by the rich contours of the landscape…  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

God Bless Us, Every One          Horace Brown KIng

What an ambivalent guy I am!  So much of my heart & soul seems caught up in worldly crises: the earthquakes in Nepal, oil-exploration in the Arctic Ocean, new lows of mistrust in Albany,  a continuing fuss about LGBT’s,  what’s shaping up to be a long hot summer in racial confrontations….  I could really go for an extended exile to St. Brendan’s fieldstone hermitage on the Dingle Peninsula, or a little white church singing “This Is My Father’s World” on a sunny morning….  Is there a word from scripture or the pulpit for me and others like me?

The passage from early in The Acts of the Apostles (1:15-26) tells how the first Believers attempted to restore the Christian community broken by the defection of Judas.  Peter, already acting as Pope, convened the discussion by saying, “One of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us–one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection.”  After throwing the dice, they deduced that God was pointing out Matthias–who became an Apostle and was never heard from since!  But the message is that even severely shaken communities can find a wholeness to go on…

How does John’s First Letter (5:9-13) fit with this?  Or does it need to?  The core of it is the “testimony”  that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. (v.11)  But then the writer continues, “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.”  Can we really “have” the Son?  Is it like having a merit-badge?  The better question, I think, is not “Do I have the Son?”, but “Does the Son have ME?”  Move over, St. Brendan…

Jesus’ High Priestly prayer continues in the Gospel, John 17:6-19.  I read “those whom you gave me from the world” as referring to the embryonic Church:  a collection of individuals, to be sure, yet having greater value than the mere sum of its parts.  His phrases are filled with “them” and “their”:  the only individual mentioned  is “the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled.”  There’s a semantic minefield here:  how does the dichotomy of being “apart from the world” square with the earlier affirmation (3:16-17) of God’s LOVE for the world?   Verse 18 may help: “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”  Left Foot, Right Foot..

But it’s Spring.  The devil of the noon-day sun has me firmly in his grasp.  We planted a grapevine (Marie is determined to grow grapes; how many vines have we planted in parsonage backyards?) and a Rose of Sharon bush.  The strawberries are loaded with blossoms, and chives and mint are terrorizing the herb-beds.  The world and its dysfunction seem far away.  I’ll go sit among                “the virtues of the starlit heaven, the glorious sun’s life-giving ray, the whiteness of the moon at even, the flashing of the lightning free, the whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks, the stable earth, the deep salt sea, around the old eternal rocks.”     For a while.

God Bless Us Every One!              Horace Brown King

Lucy the Infamous Cat knows just where her territory is; and woe to any critter entering therein!  A big part of life is establishing and maintaining boundaries:  residence in a different State means adjusting licenses and perhaps work-visas.  Some lines are more clear:  Foul-lines and baselines govern our sports, our traffic lanes are marked by lines, and we are encouraged at an early age (unfortunately) to color within the lines.  Barriers and fences and dress-codes mark Mine from Thine.  Scripture readings for the upcoming weekend tell us how God thinks outside of the box…

There’s a remarkable, trend-setting occasion recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 10:  Peter, hungry from fasting, sees a “sheet” from heaven containing various animals; and a voice says, “Peter, kill and eat.”  Being a Good Jew, Peter disdains “the unclean” three times.  (Everything seems to happen to Peter in threes.)  About this time, messengers from the Gentile Centurion Cornelius urge Peter to come to his house and to preach about Jesus!  What to do??  With continued Divine Prodding, he goes, he preaches–and the Holy Spirit arrives…on Gentiles, those guys across the fence!  Yer outta bounds, Peter!

The First Letter of John is way heavy on esoteric loving.   He says, “for the love of God is this,. that we obey his commandments.  And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world.” (5:3-4)  John’s faith-community has been really good at distinguishing between us good guys and those worldly ones on the other side of the wall.  Some will use this to maintain an elitism complete with passwords and secret ritual–yet I think that John here implies that “love conquers all”, and that God continues to reach across the aisle in gracious compassion.

The Gospel of John gives us the extensive musings of Jesus at The Last Supper.  Here the Lord speaks about commandments (rules or good intentions?) and the resulting intimacy.  “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” (15:15)  Business as usual demands a wide gulf between master & servant (respect, d’y see?), but here’s the Master of All breaking down that separation.  What a precedent that sets!

The post-modern Church needs to be really concerned with wrecking wrath’s walls!  I’m sorry to say that in past times and not so long ago we’ve acted as referees, calling too many Out of Bounds.  If we’re serious about being Reconciling Congregations, it’s an opportunity to grant access and acceptance to those who also have been Created in Sacred Image.

God Bless Us, Every One                    Horace Brown King