3 + 1 = ∞

Isaiah 6.1-8

Mathew 28.16-20

Romans 8.12-17

3 + 1 = ∞

Trinity Sunday

            I was sitting at the light down at the end of Conant St. a few weeks ago when I noticed on the car in front of me a clever vanity plate from New Hampshire.  It read, “+ Beyond.” (And beyond).  It took me a moment to figure it out, and it finally came to me that I was sitting behind a Nissan Infinity, so what I was looking at was an infinity and beyond.  Since that light takes so long to change, I took a quick photo of it with my phone and posted it up to Facebook later, adding it took me a minute to figure out, but I didn’t provide the solution.  It was our own Gail Morris who came up with it first, asking if the car might belong to spaceman Buzz Lightyear from the movie “Toy Story;” if you’ve seen the movie, then you’ve heard Buzz exclaim, just before takeoff, “To infinity and beyond.”  It has always struck me as a clever turn of phrase: I mean, since infinity is, well, infinite, what can possibly be beyond it?

            Infinity.  I wonder what would happen if we woke up one morning – either as individuals or as a church – and found that a rich old uncle we never knew we had left us an inheritance whose size is simply unimaginable – infinite, perhaps.  That we had suddenly become possessors of such wealth that we would never have to go to work to earn any more income for the rest of our days.  What would we do with such wealth?  Or more to the point, what, if anything, would we do differently?  How would we employ our newfound windfall?  How much would we invest – although we would already have so much that investing would be a purely redundant exercise?  How much would we share?  If we knew our future were absolutely secure with no possibility of financial worry, how would that affect our attitude and behavior and understanding of our present?

            The apostle Paul suggests that this scenario is anything but an impossible dream.  I know you all talked about the Holy Spirit last Sunday, and were invited to dream dreams and imagine visions for ourselves as people of faith, and as a church.  These are the things God’s Holy Spirit, which poured down as tongues of flame in a one-of-a-kind baptism, make possible.  You called on the power of the Spirit to bring the dreams and to equip us to achieve them.  In our reading this morning from Romans 8, Paul reveals to us that the dreams and the visions are real.  “Everyone who is led by the Spirit is a child of God… When we cry Abba! Father!, it is the very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs, heirs to God and joint heirs with Christ.”  You and I are the children of God – the inheritance is already ours, riches beyond imagination, and more durable than any fungible good.  We are not heirs to the flesh, as Paul insists, but rather heirs to the Spirit.  At Pentecost, we the church received the gift that keeps on giving, the Spirit that brings life and community.

            Today, the Sunday after Pentecost, is considered by the church to be Trinity Sunday.  That is, since we celebrated the coming of the Spirit last week, today we have the leisure to consider what it means that God the Creator, Christ the Redeemer and the Holy Spirit of Pentecost, our community and our strength, work together as one.  Actually, the whole notion of the trinity is something that the church formulated only retroactively.  The idea itself only occurs twice in scripture, one a verse in Hebrews that was clearly shoehorned into the text years after it was written, and the great commission at the end of Matthew, which is also most likely a later addition.  We’ve already heard the words twice this morning, once in our New Testament lesson and again at Nathaniel’s baptism:  “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them everything I have taught you.  And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” 

            Now I recognize, the Trinity is one of those things most church members don’t lose a lot of sleep over; in fact, if any sermon topic is guaranteed to cure insomnia, it is the sermon on the Trinity.  Millions of words have been printed about it, thousands of books have tried to parse and explain it, and it still remains one of the more inscrutable yet foundational theories in Christian theology.  How can God be God, Jesus be Jesus, the Spirit be the Spirit, and yet the three are at the same time one and the same yet unique and different?  Kenn Storck, a retired pastor and sometime poet, admits to the absurdity of the whole idea in a poem he calls simply “The Holy Trinity,” part of which reads, “Go ahead:  draw your pictures / color your triangles / Speak of the Three-in-One / And the One-in-Three. / Use the Athanasian Creed litmus test / of Father / Son / Spirit / But all the while do not trust / the limit of language / the confinement of metaphor / the simplicity of simile.”

            I think there’s an easier way though, and we may have talked of it this way before.  The trinity is simply a picture of God in relationship.  God in relationship.  Here’s what I mean.  I’m a Dad, right?  I have two beautiful daughters, and they have two wonderful men in their lives – I’m a father-in-law to one of them.  I’m also a husband.  I’m a son!  I’m fortunate enough to still have both my parents living not-too-far away.  I’m a brother, a nephew, an uncle many times over.  I’m your pastor.  I’m your friend.  So does this mean there are nine different Alans for the roles I play? Good Lord, deliver us!  No; it simply means I have different relationships with different people in different circumstances.  Now this is, I admit, a degree of oversimplification, but not too much so.  God is Creator in relationship to Creation, which includes you and me; Jesus is brother, savior and friend, and provides another avenue, or approach to God distinct from God’s creating; and the Spirit is that which binds you and me together as the church, as brothers and sisters, and opens up ways to God that are unique to the Spirit – I’d say things like prayer, song, meditation, and the heartfelt joy that comes from loving God and living in community.  As Lutheran Theological Seminary President David Lose writes, “You can’t fully or finally understand God without talking about relationship – that God is so full of love that there has to be some way of talking about that love shared in and through profound relationships.”

            But it is not just about God’s relationship with Godself, or God’s relationship with us, but our relationships with others that is one of the sure marks of the spirit’s presence and work among us.   And as I looked at the visions and dreams for Second Church that everyone wrote down on those flame-shaped slips of paper last week, the visions and dreams inspired by that same spirit of relationship and community, I noticed something not only unusual, but downright uncharacteristic.  I counted forty-seven flames and tongues of fire that were written on and placed on the board, and of those forty-seven visions and dreams for Second Church, guess how many had to do with relationship and community-building and reaching out to the world around us?  Sixteen, or a hair over one-third of them.  That is so unlike us!  (Then again, only one mentioned God, and only two mentioned Jesus, but that’s another sermon for another day.)  Last Sunday’s reading from Acts 2 describes how the Spirit brought people together from all around the region – from Cappadocia and Phrygia and Pamphylia and all those other unpronounceable places – and made them one body, one community.  It describes how the Holy Spirit of God creates community and relationship.  If it is the love of God that brings us together – if it is our love for Christ that brings us together – if it is the love that is breathed into our hearts by God’s Holy Spirit that brings us together, then everything we do wants to be about sharing that love.  As David Lose put it so simply yet profoundly, “it is simply impossible to think about love that is not shared.”  You and I are the heirs to an incredible fortune, an embarrassment of riches of love, of compassion, of redemption, an embarrassment of opportunities to build the same kind of spirit-filled community that same spirit built in the second chapter of Acts.  The over-abundant inheritance of the spirit releases us from any and all self-imposed or self-inflicted confines, and frees us to look beyond ourselves with the love that cannot not be shared with those around us.  If the Spirit is present in this community, this is what the Spirit does.

            Knowing this, how will the things we do and the decisions we make this week reflect the boundless and irrepressible wealth of love that has been bequeathed to us?  How might our relationships with the people around us be transformed – our family, our friends, our co-workers, the next stranger we meet?  How might this boundless and irrepressible inheritance of love shape and transform our dreams and visons for Second Church?  And what kind of risks will be willing to take once we know that we are heirs to a fortune that is inexhaustible?

            The prophet Isaiah once heard a voice a long long time ago; it was the voice of God, asking, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”  And Isaiah said, “Here I am – send me!”  The power of the triune God – the three – coupled with the conviction of even one person of faith – Isaiah, or you, or me – results in a community-creating, compassionate power of love that is greater than all our combined abilities and imagination put together.  Or, to put it into an equation, three plus one equals infinity – and beyond.

            Let us pray.

I Got Them Post-Resurrection Blues Again

Exodus 33.12-23

Luke 24.36-53

                                                                             

                                       I Got Them Post-Resurrection Blues Again

Second Sunday of Easter

            Feelings are notoriously difficult to put into words, aren’t they?  For example, we can explain why we’re happy – maybe we just got our IRS refund, or we had a great day with the family yesterday, or it’s finally feeling like Spring, or the Red Sox’ home opener is tomorrow and all things are possible, or maybe there’s not any particular reason for it, but we’re just happy.  But to try to explain what happiness feels like, what a good mood is, is a lot more difficult.  Is it the smile in my heart?  The feeling of lightness that lifts me up?  Does it qualify as sheer unadulterated happiness, quiet contentedness, ebullience, elation, ecstasy or euphoria?  How would you describe the feeling of happiness?  I think the only way we can convey that feeling is if the person we’re talking to has also felt the same way, and can identify with what we’re saying.

            The same goes for the flip side of happiness, that deep subjective feeling of melancholy or sadness that is sometimes called “the blues.”  People with real jobs talk about “the Monday morning blues,” though since Monday is my day off, I can’t imagine what they’re talking about.  But as it is with happiness, the blues are a tough feeling to explain or describe to somebody.  I mean, we all know what it means to be blue, to feel down in the dumps, to be bummed out, but what are the blues?  How do we describe them?  What makes us feel dispirited?  With April 15 mere days away, those of us who did not receive refunds probably don’t have to think too hard to be able to answer this question.  The blues are what you feel when that big family outing you’ve been planning suddenly falls through.  The blues are those stubborn piles of snow that just will not go away.  The blues are when you have to have your pet put to sleep.  The blues are when your partner in a business venture suddenly disappears, or when one of your closest friends dies.

            And if we can identify with either one of these last two examples, then we can understand how, when Jesus was suddenly gone from their company, and their lives, the disciples came down with a vigorous case of the blues.  Here was a small band of people with varying degrees of skills who coalesced around the one person who helped them discover the potential they had when they all worked together, who brought out the best in every one of them.  Not only were they good business partners, after a fashion, but they really enjoyed themselves when they were on the job together.  Jesus made them laugh, he made them think, he gave them work to do, and they achieved a real sense of satisfaction whenever they did the job right, and made him smile.  They certainly shared a good deal of affection for one another, and made lasting friends of people they would never have met had Jesus not brought them together in the first place.  It was a good group of people working together, doing good things for people all over the countryside.  And then, just as they were beginning to hit their stride as disciples, to understand the importance of their work and of Jesus’ deep and abiding love for all of them, he was gone.  Now that’s the blues.  There used to be a television commercial that said “It doesn’t get any better than this,” but for the disciples, I don’t think it was possible to get any worse.

            It might strike us, at first thought, that the flip side of the blues would be elation.  But if the blues are what follow after we’ve hit what seems to be our lowest point, consider what happens after we’ve reached our highest.  Not as we’ve reached our peak, but after - what comes in its wake.

            Several of you have told me you really liked the Children’s Message I gave a couple months ago when I brought our youth and some Scouts into the balcony and suggested we could all just sit up there for the rest of the service.  It’s a story that actually had its roots in a trip I took one summer of my college years, when some buddies and I went camping for a week in the White Mountains, and the highlight of the trip was going to be our climb up Mount Washington.  It was a drizzly morning, when the clouds were so low you couldn’t see even the first thousand of Mount Washington’s six thousand foot ascent.  And as we began our climb, you might say we were a little apprehensive, wet with the morning mist and wondering about the approachability, if not to say the existence, of the mountain peak none of us could see.  But up we trudged, and at about four thousand feet we finally broke through the cloud cover to a glorious, sunny vista, which, as a thoroughly inexperienced climber, I hadn’t even imagined.  Climbing closer to the top, we caught sight of other nearby peaks, not quite as tall, but each one poking its head through the clouds, offering a view that day unseen by the wet world below.  When we finally reached the pinnacle, we sat for a while, and rested, ate a leisurely lunch, cast our youthful self-satisfied sneers in the direction of those who drove to the top.  You’ve seen the bumper sticker that said, “This vehicle climbed to the top of Mount Washington?”  We wanted one that said “These legs climbed to the top of Mount Washington!”  We chatted with other climbers, and generally tried to put out of our minds the fact that we couldn’t really stay there; eventually, we had to descend.  You see, we knew what awaited us at the base of Mount Washington:  the same damp drizzly day we had left, our familiar and probably by now muddy campsite, the return to the everyday world we had left behind.  Sure, there were other mountains we intended to climb later that week, but none would be as majestic nor as satisfying as Washington, and each of us knew it.  So you can understand why our descent, when we finally undertook it, seemed to us a rather anticlimactic experience.  We had just climbed the highest peak in New England, and stood over six thousand feet closer to the sun.  Literally, it was all downhill from there.

            You’ve felt the same thing in the wake of the elaborate dinner party you’ve spent weeks preparing, or after that great trip to Disney World - who wants to go back to work when you’ve seen the enchanted kingdom?  It is inevitable, that whatever pinnacle we reach, whatever exaltation we’ve experienced, whatever comes in its immediate wake has to seem second rate, if even that.  It takes a while to escape the afterglow of such an experience, and as that interim time passes, anything else is simply blasé.  Mounts Liberty and Lincoln were spectacular in their own ways, but it took a few days’ distance from Washington for us to appreciate them.  After such intense and happy times, we tend to cope by simply going through the motions, trying to avoid the inevitable feeling of let-down.

            I used to think there was a deep theological or liturgical meaning to the term “Low Sunday,” an occasion which occurs twice a year: the Sunday after Christmas, and the Sunday after Easter.  But I have come to discover there is nothing theological about it - the “low” in “Low Sunday” simply refers to church attendance on those days, the levels of interest and of effort in getting ready for church the Sunday after Christmas and the Sunday after Easter.  And in a way it’s understandable, because it follows the pattern of so much else in life.  After the seven week preparation of Lent, the activities of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, sunrise Service and Easter morning, a lot of fine church-going people have hit their peak, and a case of those notorious post-resurrection blues tends to settle in.  After all, what could be more exhilarating than the victory over death of one of our own, Jesus the son of Joseph and Mary?  What could possibly surpass the resurrection for good news?  Once we have been to the pinnacle, seen the glory of Easter morning, heard the inspired hymns and anthems, inhaled the fragrance of the lilies, experienced the resuscitating word of the risen Christ and shouted our Alleluias in the midst of so many of our brothers and sisters we haven’t seen in quite some time, any other Sunday morning is bound to seem a little humdrum by comparison.  And I’ll confess right now that when I got to the office Tuesday morning, my first day back at work after Easter, I kind of puttered around, cleaning up the accumulated papers on my desk, catching up on a little reading, but not quite ready yet to move beyond the aura of a busy but immensely satisfying Holy Week.

            Of course, part of the reason for this might also have something to do with our own expectations.  Do we as a congregation find ourselves suffering a kind of let down, a benign case of the blues, because we know we can’t expect the Hallelujahs and the bulging balconies and a friendly game of connect-the-dots every week of the year?  In its own way, every Sunday is a “little Easter,” but maybe after the Big One we figure we’ve seen everything there is to see, so we may as well pack in and sleep in for a week or two.

            But we are here, aren’t we.  There are all kinds of remedies for the blues, but one of the best is simply meeting life straight on, and letting each day bring what it wants to bring.  With four different resurrection stories in the Bible telling us about what Jesus did on Easter and beyond, I think it is revealing to consider what Jesus did not do after the resurrection.  For example, he did not gather the downcast disciples into the Upper Room and give them a pep talk:  “Don’t worry Peter, skies are always darkest before the dawn.  And remember, James, into every life a little rain must fall.”  Don’t you just love advice like that?  It is a terrific way of saying something without saying anything at all.  But Jesus wasn’t known to waste people’s time with meaningless words.  Nor did he indulge the disciples’ self-pity:  “Go ahead, Bartholomew, tell me how you’re really feeling deep down inside - you’ll feel better if you get it all out.”  And notice that he doesn’t dodge the issue with an anecdote:  “You know, the same thing happened to my old uncle Zechariah, cut down in his prime by a Roman chariot - you’ll get over it too - eventually.”

            No, Jesus’ cure for the blues at the end of Luke takes seriously his disciples’ spiritual and emotional sense of despond.  First he let them see that he was for real.  He wasn’t an apparition, a product of collective wishful thinking.  The disciples were not deluding themselves that, well, yes, in some undefinable and ineffable way, Jesus is always present.  No, there is nothing ineffable about a fish, which is what Jesus ate in their midst.  They needed to know Jesus was there and was real, and he assured them of that.

            But he knew they needed more than reassurance, so Jesus gave them something to do.  Remember when Moses asked God for a little reassurance, God promised that the divine presence would be with him?  This wasn’t a kind of presence you could see, and Moses knew it, and God knew it, so God proved it by doing great things through Moses.  Food appeared as if from out of nowhere; water was drained from a rock; a company of thousands was sustained through a barren desert.  God worked through Moses.  Jesus worked, and works, through his disciples both then and now.  “Repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in my name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.  You are the witnesses of these things.”  The disciples have a job to do.  Jesus intends for us to keep busy, and by the fruit of our work his presence is known.

            What do you and I find when we descend from the mountaintop experience of Easter?  We find the Hernandez trial and the Tsarnaev trial.  We find a video of a police officer killing an unarmed black man, and a video of a black man shooting a police officer in the face.  We come back down into a world that cries out for justice and mercy; and so what do we do?  How are we living into this week that starts off with the so-called “Low Sunday?”  Like the disciples before us, we get busy doing the work by which the presence of God can be known.  And so this morning we are setting up to house homeless families in our church home for another week.  On Friday we will sit with the kids & staff at Recovery High School.  On Saturday night we will invite the community over for supper.  And on Tuesday and Wednesday nights we meet with the boards and committees that make so much of this happen.  We come down from the mountain.  Life goes on, and in the bright light of our mission and ministry the blue fog of despond gradually evaporates.

            Even though Easter is past, there is still a lot of work to be done in God’s world:  the work of justice, the work of prayer, the work of feeding and sheltering and loving...  The disciples didn’t wait around until they were in the mood to go out and do something for God, and they didn’t just move around in their old comfortable circle of friends.  In fact we know that a lot of their work was as decidedly uncomfortable as it was discomforting.  But it was work – it was hard work – it was good work:  it was just what the doctor ordered.  When we find ourselves singing the blues, we should look around and find ourselves something to do instead, because there’s a lot of good to be done out there, and Easter reminds us that we are among the best-equipped to do it.

            Let us pray.

Something Greater Than Ourselves

Something Greater Than Ourselves

Christmas Eve 2014

            I did a double-take when I saw the headline:  NASA Emails a Wrench to International Space Station.  Did you see that in yesterday’s paper?  NASA Emails a Wrench to International Space Station.  How do you email a wrench?  Evidently, you email a wrench the same way you email anything else, if you have the design on the sending end and a 3-D printer on the receiving end.  It was a monumental moment, because it demonstrates that you don’t necessarily need a space shuttle to move material objects from earth to space any more.  And if we can digitally send objects to the space station, then we can send them to a base on the moon, and we can send them to a base on Mars, and we can send them beyond the solar system.  It was less than three weeks ago that the Orion spacecraft was launched, the first test of a capsule designed to take human beings on trips millions of miles and multiple years long.  To some of us, this may come as a mild surprise, because it’s been forty-two years since a human being last stood on the moon, and the whole idea of space travel has slowly disappeared from our consciousness; there’s just too many other things going on in our world and our lives to occupy our minds.  But there is no denying the human desire to explore and expand our boundaries, to breach the frontier and to look to the stars.  From the very beginning, humanity has yearned to seek out something greater than ourselves.

            And I think this is one of the things Christmas does for us.  People all over the world will come to worship tonight and tomorrow morning.  Some are people of deep and abiding faith, some are still working out their own idea of God, and some come simply because it is Christmas.  And every reason is a good one.  This is a good place to be tonight and tomorrow morning, because it reminds us that no matter what our lives are like, no matter what we’ve had to deal with since the last time we were together in this place, in this moment you and I yearn to seek out something greater than ourselves.  Whether we are scanning the sky for the star, checking Santa’s progress with our children on the NORAD web page, or taking these precious moments on Christmas Eve to look deep within our hearts to discern the presence of the Christ child’s spirit, you and I are drawn into the presence of God because it is God’s spirit that beckons us, the same spirit that beckoned the shepherds and the magi two thousand years ago.

            In fact, it was two thousand years ago that the skies commanded humanity’s attention in a manner unlike any other.  It was the host of heaven that sang the Gloria in Excelsis:  “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace, good will among humanity.”  And when the angels departed, they returned into the heavens.  On that first Christmas, it was the reach of the skies and the depth of the heavens that spoke to the shepherds.  And the magi – the wise ones – were in fact astrologers, studiers of the stars and the skies, and it stood to reason that if anyone noticed the star in the east, its import and meaning, it would be they.  Throughout human history, humanity has felt compelled to look to the heavens in order to make sense of life on earth, from the time of the ancients who looked to the skies and saw the archer and the water-bearer and the dippers and the twins and the ram, to our contemporaries who dream of travelling beyond the moon to the planets and stars, we yearn to seek out something greater than ourselves.

            But as I suggested, sometimes this can be found, not millions of miles above us, but deep within our hearts and spirits.  Last Friday a handful of us sat with the students and staff at Recovery High School, a school for young people with drug and alcohol dependencies.  We had a conversation with them about the second of AA’s twelve steps, and asked them, “Who or what – to you - is the power greater than ourselves?”  Now, we are usually very careful to avoid specifically religious topics, because Recovery High School is a public school, and as such can’t compel any kind of organized religion on its students – although as we often say, we’re the UCC – our religion is about as unorganized as it gets!  But that morning, the question about the power greater than ourselves evoked a conversation deeper and more profound than any we’ve had in the four years we’ve been reaching out to them.  One of the students talked frankly about his wrestling with God, and his inability to make it through even one day without God’s help. Another talked about the community being her higher power, her family, her friends.  Another talked about her complicated prayer life, how it has to spell out for her each and every relationship in order bring her meaning.  It was truly astonishing to hear these kids, who by the way liberally season their sentences with four-letter words and phrases that would make both your Aunt Gladys and your Uncle Henry blush, talk about how they understand their higher power, that piece of their lives which not only provides spiritual succor, but helps them get through that day sober.  Most of the time.  I didn’t say this on Friday morning, because I wasn’t quite aware of it yet, but their words during that discussion actually helped me to write tonight’s sermon.  Because their thoughts and their easy way of telling difficult truths, revealed in a unique way, the common human yearning to seek out something greater than ourselves.

            It was on Christmas Eve in 1968 that human beings first slipped away from earth’s orbit and circled the moon.  Astronauts Bill Anders, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell took the first photograph of an “earthrise,” a shot of the earth “rising,” over the curvature of the lunar surface.  I was a freshman in high school, and I can remember watching the television broadcast through the din of our annual family Christmas Eve party, and hearing the voices of the three astronauts as they took turns reading from the opening chapter of Genesis: 

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.  And God said, ‘Let there be light;’ and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.  And God called the light Day and the darkness Night.  And the evening and the morning were the first day.”

On that Christmas Eve 1968, whether it was a literal watching out the window or the figurative following it on television, millions of human beings around the world looked to the skies, because in that moment, we were collectively engaged in something greater than ourselves.

            And so it is on this Christmas Eve 2014, forty-six years later, when you and I know that now at this time, close to the stroke of midnight, and here in this place, we can find the object of our yearning.  Whether it is in the venerable hymns we can sing from memory, or hearing the comfortably familiar nativity stories, or sitting once again with family and greeting dear friends, or knowing that the presence of Christ, alive in our hearts, at once transforms us as it transforms our world, there is something greater than ourselves that calls us, that makes us one in this moment, and that brings the depth of meaning that is sought by every human heart on this night of nights.

            Will you join me in the closing prayer, one that was first spoken by astronaut Frank Borman on that Christmas Eve forty-six years ago:

Give us, O God, the vision which can see your love in the world in spite of human failure.  Give us the faith to trust your goodness in spite of our ignorance and weakness.  Give us the knowledge that we may continue to pray with understanding hearts.  And show us what each one of us can do to set forward the coming of the day of universal peace.  Amen.