SERMON Shacking Up

The Holy Trinity (B) (2009): Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

On the cover of today's bulletin is the shack from William Young's novel The Shack. It is in this shack and its environs where the protagonist -- a father named MacKenzie or "Mack" whose daughter has been abduced and murdered in the shack -- hangs out with the Godhead: "Pappa," an African American woman, Jesus (human and Jewish to core), and Sarayu, beautifully nymph-like. Shacking up with the Trinity so to speak. An interesting concept to wrap one's mind around. Especially today.

Today is Holy Trinity Sunday, one of the six major festivals of the church year. Now other being one of six major festivals, Holy Trinity is a Sunday unto itself. Unlike any of those other major festivals, it is the only festival that celebrates a doctrine. Not only do we celebrate a doctrine on Holy Trinity but, as doctrines go, it is without question the least accessible. And I am not alone in this assessment.

In the words of Dorothy Sayers, the English mystery writer, "of all Christian dogmas, the doctrine of the Trinity enjoys the greatest reputation for obscurity and remoteness from common experience." She's right. I don’t know about you, but usually when I think of the doctrine, I think of diagrams like the familiar triangle with interlocking circles. Or worse. I cannot tell you how many theologians, old and new, attempt to diagram the Trinity with flow charts and arrows.

Here’s an example. When I turn a page and see a diagram or flow chart of the Godhead like this, my gut response is to close the book. And I usually do.

But why such a response? After all, the doctrine of the Trinity has been around along time. Why shouldn't the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be represented by three interlocking circles? Maybe even with arrows? What’s the problem?

Part of the problem is that the doctrine of the Trinity is something that developed in the fourth and fifth centuries as the church struggled to spell out the true faith in the face of all sorts of heresies that denied either Jesus' humanity or his deity. The church did this in terms that those fourth and fifth century Roman and Greek Christians understood. And in those terms, they did a very good job. We will get a flavor of this when we recite the Athanasian Creed this morning.

But we don’t think in those terms, not even those of us who lean to new age thought patterns. In our everyday world, concepts of "substance" and "being" and "persons" and "nature" mean very different things to us than they meant our mothers and fathers in the faith. Their terms are not necessarily our terms even though their faith is our faith. Diagrams based on those terms are, as Dorothy Sayers would say, "obscure" and "remote."

Even so, doctrines of the Trinity based on diagrams and arrows are not always that obscure or remote and are not really the problem. After all, many modern theologians have redefined the fourth century concepts to come up with their charts. And not only theologians but authors like William Young, have creatively portrayed the Trinity in fiction in ways that transcend stereotypes and explore relationship.

Nor is the problem with the Trinity itself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Long before the first creeds were written, we hear Jesus in John's gospel telling Nicodemus about the spirit and a God who had sent a son into the world that world might be saved through him. Even earlier, Paul writes to the Romans that we call God "'Abba!' Father!" and, when we do, it is "the Spirit of God bearing witness with our spirit as joint heirs with Christ." The Trinity is already there even though it is not yet a doctrine.

So what's wrong with the diagrams, arrows, and flow charts and even the absorbing shacking up that happens in The Shack?

What's wrong is that it too much and too little. At the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity is a mystery. St. Augustine captures this when he writes: "Since it is God we are speaking of, you do not understand it. If you could understand it, it would not be God." God is hidden as well as revealed. Listen to Luther when a student asks him what God was doing before creation. Luther responds, "Making whips to beat people who asked impertinent questions like yours!" God can never be reduced to diagrams, arrows, and flow charts or even engagng fiction. We simply don’t know. We cannot know.

In some ways trying to diagram God is like the attempts of the three blind men to describe the elephant. You’ve probably heard the story. It is from India. There are three blind men and an elephant. One of the blind men feels the elephant's leg and states that it is a tree. Another blind man feels the elephant's trunk and decides that it is a snake. The third blind man feels the elephant's tusk and reports that it is a spear. None of the three blind men can agree on what the elephant is. If each were to diagram what he thinks an elephant is (or how it relates to each of its parts), each diagram would be very different.

So where does this leave us? With a mysterious, hidden God whom we experience as the blind men experience the elephant? As a God only partially revealed?

Yes and no.

Yes, God is mysterious and hidden. But, no we don’t experience God as the blind men do.

We don’t experience God as the blind men experience the elephant because what we know in our experience of God is more than an object.

Unlike the blind men feeling the elephant, we are, as a community of faith, in relationship with a God whom we experience individually (as Mack does in The Shack) and corporately. Experience as Spirit, as Son, as Father. Experience through word and sacrament. And this is what Jesus' encounter with Nicodemus and Paul's letter to the Romans so powerfully demonstrate.

Jesus tells Nicodemus, a Jewish religious leader who has sought Jesus out under the cover of darkness, that in baptism -- water and Spirit -- there is eternal life through the Son whom the father had sent into the world. When he speaks to Nicodemus of the necessity of being born of the Spirit, Jesus uses a plural "you."

As demonstrated at Pentecost last week, the early church lived powerfully in the now of the Holy Spirit. And, for John, eternal life is something that the first Christians knew and experienced with the coming of the Holy Spirit -- life here and now that is radically other. Paul describes this life and relationship in terms of adoption. Through God’s Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, we become the children of God. And we cry out, "Abba!" which is the Aramaic word for "Pappa" because, in relationship, we know the God whom Jesus knew and called "Pappa."

And it is here that many people would abandon the Trinity altogether, or at least the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There are too many flawed fathers, they argue -- fathers like the one who abducted and murdered his two young sons a few weeks ago. Fathers who are physically or emotionally abusive or both. The radical feminist in our family also points out that fathers are male and suggests that calling God "Abba" or father makes God a man.

But what people who object to calling Jesus' God father fail to realize is that the God that Jesus calls "Abba" is neither a flawed god nor a male deity. The God Jesus calls "Pappa" is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The awesome God of today's psalm. The God who appears so immediately to the prophet Isaiah.

As described by Isaiah, the scene has the feel of the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark -- a scene where there are both flying winged seraphs and a heavenly fire triggered by the desecration of the Ark of the Covenant. We hear this morning how Isaiah experiences the awesome holiness and glory of a God who is the God of the whole earth. He sees God -- something that is not suppose to happen. But he not only lives, but a seraph touches his lips and he is made pure. And it is then that this God, the God who is the father of Jesus and father to Isaiah and to us, asks, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And Isaiah says, "'Here am I; send me.'"

And that is what the relationship to the triune God we know as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is all about. We will probably never have Isaiah's stunning prophetic vision or MacKenzie's intimate shacking up experience, but in this community, in relationship to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we do know and have that call.

And this call is not just any call.

For Isaiah it was a call to speak out forcefully and vehemently on issues of social justice. The oppression of the weaker members of society offend the Lord God's holiness. And this is Jesus' call as well. It is Isaiah whom Jesus quotes when he goes into the synagogue and reads: 

                                            “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

                                             because he has anointed me

                                                       to bring good news to the poor,

                                             He has sent me to proclaim release

                                                                  to the captives

                                                       and recovery of the sight to the blind

                                                       to let the oppressed go free,

                                             to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." 

And that this morning is our call. And for it, we praise Pappa, and give thanks for the Spirit, the source of our light and our life. And living in that Spirit, we pray this morning for the vision and courage to answer God's call to serve others. Amen

June 7, 2009

Ruth VanDemark

Wicker Park Lutheran Church

Chicago