Trinity Sunday 2013
There and Here.
Isa 6:1-8, Ps 33, Rev 4:1-11, John 3:1-15
High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.
Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor ever eagle flew –
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee Jr. wrote that. He bids us to put mundane things away and to rise into the divine presence. The poet calls us to transcendence. We need not be bound to this earth. Why would we be, when we can touch the face of
God?
Another poet sees God reaching down to touch our hearts, this one in Psalm 33:
The LORD looks from heaven; He sees all the sons of men.
From the place of His dwelling He looks on all the inhabitants of the earth;
He fashions their hearts individually; He considers all their works.
Up and down, there and here, God and us. He loves us. He wants fellowship with us. He died for us. Yet we, frail creatures, are prone to worship the familiar; we are lovers of things, the created rather than the Creator. To adore the
things of this world is to see them without seeing God behind them.
There’s a word for that: materialism. Materialism anchors us on earth so that we cannot ascend to God. It cannot have corrupted our lives without fouling our worship.We bow down at the altar of the profane, that which is at war with the holy. It has given us the prosperity gospel, the social gospel, liberation theology . . . and so on. It is mundane worship, destitute of transcendence. It will not coax men up, up, the long, delirious burning blue to that poet’s perch where they can touch the face of God.
What shall we do? Cranmer gave England a liturgy and Spurgeon topped off her theology yet today England knows not the Doxology. Edwards wove God’s wrath and His beauty into a mesmerizing tapestry . . . and got fired. And America is yodeling down the road to the altar of the profane.
One day soon many will appear before God and fill Him in on how His promise of forever in the glory of His presence failed to measure up to their requirements. Our epoch reeks of faux transcendence.
Because God hasn’t made Himself real enough for the human taste, men have set out on a course of salvation by homogenization. If we can only wash away all the differences of black and white, rich and poor, male and female, we
will overcome. Merged into the one -- a gray, proletarian hermaphrodite . . . what then?
Well, justice, so they tell us. But if I join myself not to God but man, will I have slipped the surly bonds of earth?
Self mingled with self, sin with sin; a profane communion. Justice mired in time. Welcome to the Kumbaya Kathedral. All hold hands. Worship circuits round and round. We are the change we seek. Shabbat R Us. True transcendence ain’t exactly flyin’ out of the cooler like rum raisin these days.
A lot of preachers have gone broke trying to peddle it and many more seem to have given up, so to sing the siren’s song of Your Best Life Now. Every huckster knows you gives the people what they wants. But that’s for them. And so we ask, on Trinity Sunday, what’s for us?
We say a prayer and travel up and up and up. Up into the glory cloud, up into the realm of God. Not will or skill of man
prevails but finger of God seeks out those He calls His own. And so I propose: We stretch out an open hand. We bid them peer with us into the revelation of the Lord to His apostle, John:
"The four living creatures . . . do not rest day or night, saying: "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God
Almighty, Who was and is and is to come!" Whenever the living creatures give glory and
honor and thanks to Him who sits on the throne, who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four
elders fall down before Him who sits on the throne and worship Him who lives forever and ever,
and cast their crowns before the throne, saying: 'You are worthy, O Lord, To receive glory and honor
and power; For You created all things, And by Your will they exist and were created.'"
God is there, right where the poet found him when he went to touch His face. And He is here, where the Psalmist saw Him touching our hearts.
An autobiographical note: I was worshipping at that other altar. Yes, and justifying myself quite smartly. I had everything
until that day I awoke to the undressed truth, old as parchment, that I had nothing. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
And so I looked around and came to know that He is there, and He is here. He revealed himself to His people and gave them to know that He is not like those “other gods.” We can’t pin a job description on Him.
He is not the god of fertility or war, or even peace. He is not the god of wrath, or even love alone. He is not a geographically challenged god. We cannot pen Him up in Egypt or Mesopotamia, Persia or Greece. He is King of kings and Lord of lords; He is above all things, He is Lord of all.
This God on high left His celestial realm to wrestle with Jacob, whom He called Israel, whom He called “My people.” Ever wrestled with someone without getting close to him? Yet there He is, down in the muck of our sin, wrestling belly button to
belly button with His people . . . ceaselessly. Transcendence happens; a two-way street.
This God left his glory and became man to die for men. He took no form or majesty that we should look on Him, and no beauty that we should desire Him. The highest of the high became the lowest of the low, the richest of the rich became the poorest of the poor, to die on a cross for . . .
For me? You dare not hear a catalogue of my sins. You beautiful ladies would swoon and you strong men would weep to hear a catalogue of my sins. He left the celestial throne room of the eternal King to die . . . for me?
From streets paved with gold and crowns encrusted with emeralds and streams of unceasing worship to this earth, where the foxes have holes in the ground and the birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has no place to
lay his head. He is there, and he is here.
“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
The God of Glory washing feet.
Elijah and Moses, here with us, heaven intrudes upon the earth,
Shekinah on this mortal coil. This . . . is . . . my . . . Son. This is my Son. This is my Son! Listen to him!
“At the top of our news this evening, the Son of God received a much-needed endorsement today in His campaign to win the eternal office He already holds. Critics dismissed it as a self-endorsement, noting that it is simply not credible to claim that He is there and He is here. More at 10.”
This is My Son upon the cross. His passion is His glory. The God of heaven whom men have seen, humbled and exalted. He is there and he is here.
And the Holy Spirit, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, today dwells in us. Oh, we have a high old time, the Holy Spirit and I, wrestling every day. Would that I could tell you He always wins but often. . usually . . . almost always . . . the carnal I prevails. But -- this is the part that knocks me over – He always comes back and lets me try to lose the next round. His patience with my pathetic victories seems to know no end.
He is three and He is one; He was and is and is to come; He is there and He is here. Because His transcendence is at first horizontal, within Himself, I can achieve the vertical, and touch the face of God. Because His transcendence is eternally vertical, I can wrestle with Him now and here.
But I must ascend. I must ascend, up to the Trinity, to the altar of the One in Three revealed in Revelation.
Intriguing word, revelation. It sounds tame enough in English but the Greek behind it is “apokalupsis.” An apocalypse is a thing too strange and terrible and powerful and wonderful to behold, the eschatological triumph of good over evil.
But that victory will come dear. St. John has heard from the Lord already, “Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.” This final book prepares the church for things to come. How St. John must have shuddered as, in the Spirit, he surveyed the celestial array before him, gazed upon the One in Three and Three in One. How it must have dazzled and bewildered and terrified him. What did this revelation mean?
The theologian Gerald Bray sums up: “The sense of the presence of God is so overwhelming that we can move among the persons almost without noticing, yet we are always fully conscious of their presence. There is never any confusion in the reader’s mind about who is speaking or acting, yet in coldly logical terms, the three cannot be clearly
distinguished from the one God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit reveal themselves to John, and so also to us, as one God, living and moving in the fulness of his trinitarian being.
“The doctrine, culled from the rest of Scripture, and laboriously constructed, is here presented to us in all its profound complexity and splendid simplicity. The God whom we cannot explain, we know, the One we cannot picture, we see.
The Book of Revelation is first and foremost a revelation of the Trinity, and it is only when we understand this that we will be equipped to interpret its meaning, which is nothing less than the mystical vision of God.”
Listen to the words of the Prophet Isaiah, who ascended, too, to hear the seraphim’s cry, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory.” The burning coal touched his lips, purging him, and he uttered those fateful words: “Send me.”
Pay heed to the report of St. John: “You are worthy, o Lord, to receive glory and honor and praise.” Our God is the God of order, pictured first within the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit perfectly related in “all its profound complexity and splendid simplicity.”
Once, it seemed not-so-strange. The Athanasian Creed we spoke today catches it nicely.
I went to hear the historian and theologian Allister McGrath and he spun a yarn: “I don’t think you use it over here in the States,” he said, “but back in England we occasionally bring out the old Athanasian Creed. It refers to ‘the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.' Well, after church one day two old blokes were walking out and one was overheard to say to the other, ‘The whole damn thing’s incomprehensible to
me.’”
And so it should be. The Trinity is not for finite minds to penetrate. But the mystical vision of God is not too remote for us. The author of Hebrews, in fact, promises us we can ascend into the divine presence when we worship.
Who can make bold to aspire to this journey into the heavens? Who may plunge into transcendence? Just plain folks, for all are naked before God. In St. John’s gospel, our Lord confronts the wealthy Pharisee Nicodemus, who is wedded to the law of Israel, the fount of all that is good.
Nicodemus comes by night, but the wonder is he comes at all. Nicodemus – God bless him! – is more enchanted than he is afraid. He must know who this Jesus is. A teacher of the Jews who performs wonders never seen? He must have come from God. What precious jewels of wisdom must He bear!
But the truth He reveals gives Nicodemus a good old jolt: Only one who is born again can see the Kingdom of God.
Now, already unhinged, Nicodemus must grapple with the Greek word anothen. It may indeed mean “again.” It may mean “from above.” It may mean “in the beginning.” Or might it mean that to see the Kingdom of God one must be born again from above and restored to his sinless state in the beginning?
Oh, dear. Nicodemus blurts, back into the womb? A literal-minded man, he latches onto “again” and he is superbly befuddled. At last, he is in a state to receive divine instruction.
That man must be born of water and the Spirit. Water cleanses, the Spirit empowers. One who is washed can roll in the mud again but one who has the Spirit has the strength to endure in the glistening purity of God’s truth. And so, says St. John, one born of the flesh has naught but his own meager resources but one born of the Spirit has within him the victorious life of God. He is re-created. The God who has come to earth to usher in the Kingdom has graced him with transcendence.
And so the choice is clear. Faux transcendence and profane communion? They have desecrated the altar. But we ascend to a God who is Three and who is One, who bids us come and feast on him. And we invite all who will to join us on our journey. We say a prayer and we look up. Up into the glory cloud, up into the realm of God. True transcendence, holy communion. Bread and wine, flesh and blood. Come feast on him. He is there, and He is here. Amen.
There and Here.
Isa 6:1-8, Ps 33, Rev 4:1-11, John 3:1-15
High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.
Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor ever eagle flew –
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee Jr. wrote that. He bids us to put mundane things away and to rise into the divine presence. The poet calls us to transcendence. We need not be bound to this earth. Why would we be, when we can touch the face of
God?
Another poet sees God reaching down to touch our hearts, this one in Psalm 33:
The LORD looks from heaven; He sees all the sons of men.
From the place of His dwelling He looks on all the inhabitants of the earth;
He fashions their hearts individually; He considers all their works.
Up and down, there and here, God and us. He loves us. He wants fellowship with us. He died for us. Yet we, frail creatures, are prone to worship the familiar; we are lovers of things, the created rather than the Creator. To adore the
things of this world is to see them without seeing God behind them.
There’s a word for that: materialism. Materialism anchors us on earth so that we cannot ascend to God. It cannot have corrupted our lives without fouling our worship.We bow down at the altar of the profane, that which is at war with the holy. It has given us the prosperity gospel, the social gospel, liberation theology . . . and so on. It is mundane worship, destitute of transcendence. It will not coax men up, up, the long, delirious burning blue to that poet’s perch where they can touch the face of God.
What shall we do? Cranmer gave England a liturgy and Spurgeon topped off her theology yet today England knows not the Doxology. Edwards wove God’s wrath and His beauty into a mesmerizing tapestry . . . and got fired. And America is yodeling down the road to the altar of the profane.
One day soon many will appear before God and fill Him in on how His promise of forever in the glory of His presence failed to measure up to their requirements. Our epoch reeks of faux transcendence.
Because God hasn’t made Himself real enough for the human taste, men have set out on a course of salvation by homogenization. If we can only wash away all the differences of black and white, rich and poor, male and female, we
will overcome. Merged into the one -- a gray, proletarian hermaphrodite . . . what then?
Well, justice, so they tell us. But if I join myself not to God but man, will I have slipped the surly bonds of earth?
Self mingled with self, sin with sin; a profane communion. Justice mired in time. Welcome to the Kumbaya Kathedral. All hold hands. Worship circuits round and round. We are the change we seek. Shabbat R Us. True transcendence ain’t exactly flyin’ out of the cooler like rum raisin these days.
A lot of preachers have gone broke trying to peddle it and many more seem to have given up, so to sing the siren’s song of Your Best Life Now. Every huckster knows you gives the people what they wants. But that’s for them. And so we ask, on Trinity Sunday, what’s for us?
We say a prayer and travel up and up and up. Up into the glory cloud, up into the realm of God. Not will or skill of man
prevails but finger of God seeks out those He calls His own. And so I propose: We stretch out an open hand. We bid them peer with us into the revelation of the Lord to His apostle, John:
"The four living creatures . . . do not rest day or night, saying: "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God
Almighty, Who was and is and is to come!" Whenever the living creatures give glory and
honor and thanks to Him who sits on the throne, who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four
elders fall down before Him who sits on the throne and worship Him who lives forever and ever,
and cast their crowns before the throne, saying: 'You are worthy, O Lord, To receive glory and honor
and power; For You created all things, And by Your will they exist and were created.'"
God is there, right where the poet found him when he went to touch His face. And He is here, where the Psalmist saw Him touching our hearts.
An autobiographical note: I was worshipping at that other altar. Yes, and justifying myself quite smartly. I had everything
until that day I awoke to the undressed truth, old as parchment, that I had nothing. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
And so I looked around and came to know that He is there, and He is here. He revealed himself to His people and gave them to know that He is not like those “other gods.” We can’t pin a job description on Him.
He is not the god of fertility or war, or even peace. He is not the god of wrath, or even love alone. He is not a geographically challenged god. We cannot pen Him up in Egypt or Mesopotamia, Persia or Greece. He is King of kings and Lord of lords; He is above all things, He is Lord of all.
This God on high left His celestial realm to wrestle with Jacob, whom He called Israel, whom He called “My people.” Ever wrestled with someone without getting close to him? Yet there He is, down in the muck of our sin, wrestling belly button to
belly button with His people . . . ceaselessly. Transcendence happens; a two-way street.
This God left his glory and became man to die for men. He took no form or majesty that we should look on Him, and no beauty that we should desire Him. The highest of the high became the lowest of the low, the richest of the rich became the poorest of the poor, to die on a cross for . . .
For me? You dare not hear a catalogue of my sins. You beautiful ladies would swoon and you strong men would weep to hear a catalogue of my sins. He left the celestial throne room of the eternal King to die . . . for me?
From streets paved with gold and crowns encrusted with emeralds and streams of unceasing worship to this earth, where the foxes have holes in the ground and the birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has no place to
lay his head. He is there, and he is here.
“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
The God of Glory washing feet.
Elijah and Moses, here with us, heaven intrudes upon the earth,
Shekinah on this mortal coil. This . . . is . . . my . . . Son. This is my Son. This is my Son! Listen to him!
“At the top of our news this evening, the Son of God received a much-needed endorsement today in His campaign to win the eternal office He already holds. Critics dismissed it as a self-endorsement, noting that it is simply not credible to claim that He is there and He is here. More at 10.”
This is My Son upon the cross. His passion is His glory. The God of heaven whom men have seen, humbled and exalted. He is there and he is here.
And the Holy Spirit, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, today dwells in us. Oh, we have a high old time, the Holy Spirit and I, wrestling every day. Would that I could tell you He always wins but often. . usually . . . almost always . . . the carnal I prevails. But -- this is the part that knocks me over – He always comes back and lets me try to lose the next round. His patience with my pathetic victories seems to know no end.
He is three and He is one; He was and is and is to come; He is there and He is here. Because His transcendence is at first horizontal, within Himself, I can achieve the vertical, and touch the face of God. Because His transcendence is eternally vertical, I can wrestle with Him now and here.
But I must ascend. I must ascend, up to the Trinity, to the altar of the One in Three revealed in Revelation.
Intriguing word, revelation. It sounds tame enough in English but the Greek behind it is “apokalupsis.” An apocalypse is a thing too strange and terrible and powerful and wonderful to behold, the eschatological triumph of good over evil.
But that victory will come dear. St. John has heard from the Lord already, “Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.” This final book prepares the church for things to come. How St. John must have shuddered as, in the Spirit, he surveyed the celestial array before him, gazed upon the One in Three and Three in One. How it must have dazzled and bewildered and terrified him. What did this revelation mean?
The theologian Gerald Bray sums up: “The sense of the presence of God is so overwhelming that we can move among the persons almost without noticing, yet we are always fully conscious of their presence. There is never any confusion in the reader’s mind about who is speaking or acting, yet in coldly logical terms, the three cannot be clearly
distinguished from the one God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit reveal themselves to John, and so also to us, as one God, living and moving in the fulness of his trinitarian being.
“The doctrine, culled from the rest of Scripture, and laboriously constructed, is here presented to us in all its profound complexity and splendid simplicity. The God whom we cannot explain, we know, the One we cannot picture, we see.
The Book of Revelation is first and foremost a revelation of the Trinity, and it is only when we understand this that we will be equipped to interpret its meaning, which is nothing less than the mystical vision of God.”
Listen to the words of the Prophet Isaiah, who ascended, too, to hear the seraphim’s cry, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory.” The burning coal touched his lips, purging him, and he uttered those fateful words: “Send me.”
Pay heed to the report of St. John: “You are worthy, o Lord, to receive glory and honor and praise.” Our God is the God of order, pictured first within the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit perfectly related in “all its profound complexity and splendid simplicity.”
Once, it seemed not-so-strange. The Athanasian Creed we spoke today catches it nicely.
I went to hear the historian and theologian Allister McGrath and he spun a yarn: “I don’t think you use it over here in the States,” he said, “but back in England we occasionally bring out the old Athanasian Creed. It refers to ‘the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.' Well, after church one day two old blokes were walking out and one was overheard to say to the other, ‘The whole damn thing’s incomprehensible to
me.’”
And so it should be. The Trinity is not for finite minds to penetrate. But the mystical vision of God is not too remote for us. The author of Hebrews, in fact, promises us we can ascend into the divine presence when we worship.
Who can make bold to aspire to this journey into the heavens? Who may plunge into transcendence? Just plain folks, for all are naked before God. In St. John’s gospel, our Lord confronts the wealthy Pharisee Nicodemus, who is wedded to the law of Israel, the fount of all that is good.
Nicodemus comes by night, but the wonder is he comes at all. Nicodemus – God bless him! – is more enchanted than he is afraid. He must know who this Jesus is. A teacher of the Jews who performs wonders never seen? He must have come from God. What precious jewels of wisdom must He bear!
But the truth He reveals gives Nicodemus a good old jolt: Only one who is born again can see the Kingdom of God.
Now, already unhinged, Nicodemus must grapple with the Greek word anothen. It may indeed mean “again.” It may mean “from above.” It may mean “in the beginning.” Or might it mean that to see the Kingdom of God one must be born again from above and restored to his sinless state in the beginning?
Oh, dear. Nicodemus blurts, back into the womb? A literal-minded man, he latches onto “again” and he is superbly befuddled. At last, he is in a state to receive divine instruction.
That man must be born of water and the Spirit. Water cleanses, the Spirit empowers. One who is washed can roll in the mud again but one who has the Spirit has the strength to endure in the glistening purity of God’s truth. And so, says St. John, one born of the flesh has naught but his own meager resources but one born of the Spirit has within him the victorious life of God. He is re-created. The God who has come to earth to usher in the Kingdom has graced him with transcendence.
And so the choice is clear. Faux transcendence and profane communion? They have desecrated the altar. But we ascend to a God who is Three and who is One, who bids us come and feast on him. And we invite all who will to join us on our journey. We say a prayer and we look up. Up into the glory cloud, up into the realm of God. True transcendence, holy communion. Bread and wine, flesh and blood. Come feast on him. He is there, and He is here. Amen.