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Even with your golden tongue and silky vocabulary, dear Reader, it’s impossible to speak of the Mystery of the Trinity.  Some of our holy encounters defy human words to clarify:  all we can attempt are a few similes and lame metaphors.  Of these, I’m most comfortable with St. Patrick’s display of a shamrock, with three equal petals attached to one stem.  Readings for Trinity Sunday are quite able to stand alone, and it’s the wise teacher who doesn’t pick them to death…

Nevertheless…the Old Testament lesson is the famous call of Isaiah (6:1-8), in which the prophet envisions  the throne room of Yahweh.  Realizing his humanity, he laments his “unclean lips”–but a seraph flies to him with a coal from the altar and cauterizes his profane nature.  Only then can Isaiah respond affirmatively to God’s question, “Whom shall we send?  And who will go for us?”  Until the brokenness is acknowledged, the believer’s horizons are limited.   There are those who present this text as a precognition of the Trinity:  “Holy, holy, holy Lord…”  I can’t say that this is entirely true to the Hebrew scripture OR belief…

We also continue to read from the important 8th chapter of the letter to the Romans, vv. 12-17.  Paul speaks often of the tension of living “in the flesh” but yet longing for the Spirit of God.   He avows that only this Holy Spirit can put to death the “deeds of the body” and lead us to be children of God.  In a nutshell, God is God; and we’re not!   Our actions and wills are insufficient unless sustained by the Spirit, God’s sacramental inbreaking.

Many of us have memorized some sections of the Gospel, John 3:1-17.  The whole is presented as a late-night conversation with Nicodemus, a friendly Pharisee.  One of the memorable nuggets is Jesus comment, “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.” (v.6)  Jesus isn’t disregarding “the flesh”–as Paul is often criticized of doing–but  opens new horizons with a concept of receiving spiritual birth.  This is truly Grace, unshaped by human hands yet blowing from above as a heavenly wind.

Each of these encounters bears witness to a Spirit external to our own insulated lives:  Isaiah thought himself doomed until the angel entered his limited horizons to cleanse his speech.  Paul sees a two-floored universe where the spiritual must find footing within our humanity or we’ll perish.  And Jesus presents Nicodemus with an outside birth of the Spirit which inserts him/herself into our sweaty endeavors with the cool refreshment of a sudden wind.  Can we use a butterfly net to catch the Spirit and add to our menagerie?  Or shall we raise our sails in expectation of a breath of God to take us to amazing places?

God Bless Us, Every One

My musings WON’T be seen here next Tuesday, May 29th.  I’ll return for the following week.

Sunday will be the Day of Pentecost, the “Birthday of the Church” marked by the entry of the Holy Spirit into the lives of Disciples.  Readings for the weekend will feature this Divine Visitation, and will remind the hearer of the constant gracious presence of this Spirit.  From the Greek, we read “paraclete”.  Ready with the bad puns?  (“I once had a paraclete, but he wouldn’t talk and his feathers fell out.  So I ate him…”)  This is different: no feathers, but speaks constantly!

Acts 2:1-21 tells the story–the disciples were all together, maybe in the Upper Room.  “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind…a tongue [of fire] rested on each of them.”  And then they began to tell Jesus’ story in languages of every known nation!  More than ecstasy, these were actual languages, and the point of the exercise is to make known the universality of God beyond polite boundaries.  This flowing of the Spirit verifies the “allness” of the Incarnation.  Peter, rising to the occasion, emphasized that “EVERYONE who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

The 8th Chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Christians at Rome is LOADED with nuggets of Godly wisdom:  best to concentrate of vv.26 & 27 today.  Unsophisticated in our prayers as we are, the Holy Spirit intercedes for us “with sighs too deep for words”.  Even when the headlines discourage us, nevertheless in our despair this Spirit revives us with a holy breath, “unceasingly attentive to our pleading, even to the point of bringing our prayers home to God when we are unable to articulate them for ourselves.”  (Clayton J. Schmit, FEASTING on the WORD, B 3:19)   “Such things are promises worth reiterating on the day we celebrate the birth of the Church.”

The Gospel continues Jesus’ farewell discourse to his immediate friends at the Last Supper.  “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate/Paraclete will not come to you…” (John 16:7)  Jesus portrays the coming of the Holy Spirit as a natural succession to his earthly presence, with all of its teaching and healing.  Although Jesus has ascended, an important face of God comes to make a home within us for guidance, training and often nudging us to Live the Life.  Today’s believers are connected thusly to a Holy Wind which fills our sails to take us wherever God wants us to go…  “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…”

Judith M. McDaniel sums this up  better than I:  “Jesus is not with us now; but while he is with the Father, he has left with us his presence in the person of the Paraclete, the Spirit of truth.  It is the Spirit of truth who guides each generation along that way to uncover the grace and beauty in life.  It is the Spirit of truth who teaches us to find God in the midst of life, to see life as Jesus taught us to see.  It is the Spirit of truth who speaks in our hearts the presence of Jesus.” (FEASTING… B 3:25)

God Bless Us, Every One                                 Horace Brown King

My openings to the passages of scripture for the upcoming weekend can be found every Tuesday at this spot on Facebook; or at horacebrownking.com

So now what’re we gonna do?  He’s gone….into the clouds somewhere.  The Teacher was always telling us How & Why; do we just hang out until further notice?  The implications of Jesus’ Ascension are all too important to pass off on a small Thursday crowd, so I’ve chosen to think about such mystery more than the “regular” readings for the Seventh (and Last) Sunday of Easter.  Preaching and teaching this could be a head-game of antiquity–or it could address current perplexities of expected ethic and behavior while the Lord is “invisible”.

Just for today, we’ll turn things around a bit and look at the Gospel first.  Read from the very ending of Luke’s story of Jesus, 24:44-53, it speaks of the ultimate instructions of Jesus to this followers gathered in Jerusalem:  “repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem….so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”  Then, at Bethany, “while he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.”  Popular legend says that you can still see his footprints on the rock upon which he stood!

So it follows that Luke begins his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, by recounting this experience.  And, something new, two “men in white robes” asked, “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”  Was this a re-phrasing of the question in the garden on Easter morning, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”  Jesus rarely remains where we last saw him!  Barbara K. Lundblad remarks that “in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ footprints are all over the pages of the text.”  (FEEDING on the WORD, B 2:507)  We may help folks to see where the Lord’s footprints can be seen in our present time.

Which brings us to the passage from Ephesians, 1:15-23:  readers are encouraged to receive “a spirit of wisdom and revelation” as they grow to perfection.  This is done by God when he Raised Christ from the dead “and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places…”  Can our hearers report “uplifting” experiences, even in the face of bewildering circumstances?  Do we celebrate those often-ecstatic moment when we’re lifted above the daily scrabbles in the dust?  Is this the “resurrection of the body” in our creed?

Ascension Sunday gives opportunity to savor the mystery, perhaps to join God in a bit of playfulness.  It’s an occasion to look beyond the expectable, to gaze into heaven.  The Ascension of Christ calls the Believers to seek out and cherish the Lord’s footprints, for they are many.  Here may reside the realization of the astronaut’s statement, “One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind”.

God Bless Us, Every One                    Horace Brown King

My thoughts about scripture passages assigned to the upcoming weekend can be found every Tuesday at this space on Facebook; or at horacebrownking.com

“The Holy Spirit can be disruptive,” Rosemary Radford Ruether claims, as conveyed by Barbara K. Lundblad (FEASTING on the WORD, B 2:481)   “The church must be organized to do two things:   To pass on the tradition from one generation to another; and to be open to the winds of the Holy Spirit by which the tradition comes alive in each generation.”  Lessons assigned to this weekend address this dynamic in the narration of two very different encounters, hopefully tied with a passage of present and prevenient grace.

The first of these spiritual encounters is really the tag to a greater story, which should be told as a preface to the reading itself, Acts 10:44-48.  Here’s Peter’s dilemma: while praying and fasting on a rooftop, God presented him with a “sheet” on which there were all manners of creatures, some kosher, some not.  “I’ll not eat what’s profane, Lord!”  “Where do you get off calling some of my Creation profane?”  This happened three times for emphasis, and the doorbell rang.  Friends of Cornelius, a–gasp!–GENTILE army guy wanted Peter to come to Caesarea to share the gospel with them!  Peter begins to get it, unlawful as it is to visit goyim if you’re Jewish.  “The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the GENTILES…!”  Something new was afoot!

The reading from First John 5:1-6 has its usual difficulties.  The core verse for me (today) is #4:  “whatever is born of God conquers the world.”  Without undue exegesis,  this helps legitimize the universal Good of Creation and may impress upon us that there are no ranks and preferences within the holy hierarchy.

The Gospel, John 15:9-17, is really a continuance of what we read last weekend, a part of Jesus’ final discourse to his closest guys.  In effect, he’s saying “here’s what I want you to do–that you love one another”.  This encounter is wholly different in mood and setting from Peter’s meeting with Cornelius:  the Upper Room is probably dim and intimate, and the principals have known each other for several years.  Still it’s another venue for the Holy Spirit to work it’s life-changing fire.  (Do I celebrate those thin spots in my life where God has poked through my self-importance?)   Please don’t omit the 16th verse, “You did not choose me but I chose you.”  21st-Century humans want to be masters, choosers–and it doesn’t work that way.

These passages help me to remember who’s in charge, that God is God–and I’m not!  Perhaps the greatest hindrance to the Christian movement in current times is our unwillingness to give ourselves over to God’s leadings.  Church leaders continue to call for extended hours of discernment:  a time to deny our own ego and agenda, a time to wait for the ever-present Spirit.

God Bless Us, Every One               Horace Brown King

My wrestling with the scripture assigned to the upcoming weekend can be observed every Tuesday at this spot on Facebook; or at horacebrownking. com