Saturday, June 18, 2011

Trinity, Year A

God Is …

Readings: Genesis 1-2:4a; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20

"Once upon a time," so the story goes, "there lived six blind men in a village. One day the villagers told them, "Hey, there is an elephant in the village today."

They had no idea what an elephant was. They decided, "Even though we cannot see it, let us go and feel it anyway." All of them went where the elephant was. Each of them touched the elephant.

"An elephant is like a pillar," said the first man as he felt the elephant's huge leg.

"Oh, no!" said the second man, touching the elephant's tail. "It is like a rope."

"You're quite wrong," said the third man as he touched the elephant's trunk. "An elephant is like the trunk of a tree.

"It's like a fan," said the fourth man, touching the elephant's huge ear.

"You're all wrong!" said the fifth man as he touched the belly of elephant. "It is definitely like a huge wall."

"It's like a solid pipe," said the sixth man touching the tusk of the elephant. And so each had their own idea based on their unique experience.

So is our understanding of God. "God is our father," we say. "God provides us with everything we need."

"God is our mother, birthing us, nurturing and caring for us," says another.

"God is our brother, our friend, our companion."

"God is the wind; we feel God without ever seeing what God is like."

"God is a flower, a butterfly, a rainbow, a mountain, a thunderstorm …"

There is so much to know about God that we can never comprehend it all. But the great thing about being human is that we keep on exploring and discovering new and wonderful things about this great God of ours. People through the ages have written about their experience of God. In Christian terms we have come to acknowledge that experience as the Trinity.

That is the essence of this Sunday as we celebrate the attributes of our wonderful and mysterious God. Through the ages we have tried to define God. It has never been an easy concept. I have had people point out to me many times, "You've never seen God, so how can you presume to try to prove the existence of God to me." And no! I can't prove it to anyone. But through faith I can prove it to myself because I have come to an understanding of God, not only through the doctrines of the Church and through the study of Scripture, but more importantly through my own very personal experience of who God is and how God has worked in my life.

Barbara Brown, one of the outstanding preachers of our time, says "to know God, we need to learn to see the world as God sees us, and to live as if God's reality were the only one that mattered." She goes on to explain that to accomplish that we would need to use our imaginations. And of course, imagination is a dirty word. It is about make believe. That would make our search for God an emotional exercise rather than the intellectual one we seem to think it should be.

On the other hand it poses an even greater problem if we try to explain God using the doctrine of the Trinity because it is a purely intellectual way of expressing something that needs to be experienced to be understood. We make analogies to help ourselves understand how God can be three persons and yet one God. We get ourselves tied up in semantics and Greek philosophy. And quite frankly, we get nowhere.

Yet when you come down to it, isn't the doctrine of the Trinity simply way of explaining our relationship to God? 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit' are all relational terms. They are not about how we think. They are about how we relate to God. When we speak of God in human terms, we are relating God to ways in which we experience and respond. And isn't that what people are really hungry for? We want to be in relationship to God.

Today's readings open us up to exploring our relationship with God by reminding us of the connection between all living things. The Genesis passage expresses the story of our relationship to God as creator of the world. It is a very human God who whimsically yet methodically goes about the task of creating and then takes a break from it all. God has a special on-going relationship with creation. God does not create and then abandon. God creates for a purpose, for God's purpose.

In the letter of Paul to the Corinthians we meet a group of people who are the product of Pentecost. They have experienced the power of God indwelling their lives. The Spirit that energizes creation is at work in them.


And in the Gospel we meet the disciples, a fractured community following the resurrection, but a redeemed community, an empowered community being sent out into the world to relate to it as God relates to us.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not some great truth that God has put in stone for us to believe. It is a metaphor developed over the centuries to express how we experience God’s presence. The concept of the Trinity should open us up to explore our experience of God in our lives. It calls on us to turn to God to satisfy our hunger. In the midst of anguish and trouble we experience the God who walks with us. In the beauty of nature, we experience the One who created us with wisdom and care. Through the study of science we understand God’s awesome power. When life gets too serious, we experience God joyfully dancing at the thought of creating the human race. When we are filled with guilt, regrets and anxieties, we experience a God who justifies us, not in a legal sense in black and white according to some rule book, not because we are worthy, but because we have claimed it and are significant to God.

I have bumped into God many times over the past few weeks. I bumped into God in a conversation with some dear friends over a leisurely lunch; during a walk with my dogs around Lake Aquitaine; watching a heron take off from the reeds along the shore; over a cup of coffee in the garden early one morning as I watched the sun come up; when memories of good times spent here at St. Francis came flooding back as I read over some of the pages in the Scrapbook you have made for me; being with a family as they celebrated the life of their beloved mother, grandmother and great grandmother, seeing the relationship between the generations. Think back over the past week about your own list. Are those not the kind of events that we translate as love? Are they not ways in which we relate to our loving God?

Truthfully, that can only leave us hungering for still more. Can we ever be satisfied of that hunger for truth? What we need to discover during this season is that the hunger is the Spirit itself drawing us into the truth, guiding, teaching, interpreting so that we may come to a deeper understanding of God. We need to allow ourselves to experience God in new and wonderful ways. Our prayer times can be effective ways of allowing God into our lives, but really the way to meet God is to open up every facet of our lives. All of life is sacramental, holy. The way to be in relationship with God is to understand that and live our lives open to God’s grace.

We can have confidence in God, our loving and caring creator. For we know the saving action of Jesus Christ. We know the guidance of the Spirit. We continue on our life long journey of discovery of the God in whose image we are created. That is the great mystery of the Trinity that we celebrate today. We share in the joy of the God who created us, sustains us and redeems us. Amen.

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