[Propertalk] Trinity jamboree

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

I'm tinkering with this, and will continue to do so up to and during 
delivery, no doubt!

Bob


THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY         THE FIRST SUNDAY AFTER 
PENTECOST:TRINITY SUNDAY – B
ISAIAH 6:1-8                            		    	                	                          	 
3rd JUNE, 2012
ROMANS 8:12-17		                                                	                 			 
CANCTICLE 13
JOHN 3:1-17

	John Donne wrote:

		Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
		As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
		That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
		Your force, to breake, blow, burn and make me new.
		I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
		Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
		Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
		But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
		Yet dearley'I love you,'and would be loved faine,
		But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
		Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe,
		Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
		Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
		Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee. 1

	All of life is about communication – how we do it, when we do it, with 
whom we do it. This holds especially for those close to us, but it holds 
also for those whom we don’t know. And it holds for our faith, how we 
relate to God, how we understand who God is and how we relate.

	I have friends who describe imagining the Trinity as trying to reflect 
on a wonderful dance, something with continual movement which doesn’t 
always make complete sense if one stops the video and looks only at one 
pair of feet. But maybe if we try thinking about the Arthur Murray 
School of Theology for a moment, maybe if try to look at individual 
images for a while, then we may begin to stitch them together to get 
some sort of a picture of who God is and what God’s like.

	One thing to remember, maybe this will be helpful. No matter whether 
someone writes the most fantastic treatise on God, if we can’t translate 
the words or the images into what makes for a personal experience for 
ourselves it may not be too useful. This doesn’t mean that we can think 
what we want about God, that we can make any definition we fancy. But 
God can speak to each one of us in any number of ways. There’s no 
limiting the activity and desire of God. The only constant is that God 
is love and that God desires that our relationship continues to deepen 
throughout our earthly lives. So how you find yourself receptive to God, 
how you may picture God and you interacting this morning, may be 
different from yesterday’s experience just as it will be from 
tomorrow’s. That’s the wonderful thing about God. There’s no way that we 
can limit God. So we do our best to try to listen to what’s being said, 
what signs are being left for us, and we pray that we’ll be open and 
ready for whatever self-revelation God may bring to us.

	Molly Wolf, a Canadian woman who writes about how theology creeps in to 
her understanding of every experience, posted a really interesting 
article last week. It was about her preparations for Pentecost Sunday 
worship, but I saw in it something about how we think about God in 
general. 2

	She began, “A tourist lady was wearing a big, boxy, loose-swinging 
shirt in a big, boxy, loose-swinging cotton fabric, and I thought ‘Gee, 
it would be nice to make one of those in red for Pentecost.’ So I betook 
myself to my fabric store, which was having a major sale anyway, and 
(among other goodies) I brought home big shirt’s worth of loose-woven 
slubbed cotton, in red.
“By red, I mean fire-engine red. Screaming red. Not my colour, but it 
was about time I started to fool around with dyes, wasn’t it? So I did 
that, and the fabric came out a deeper red — still very bright red, but 
not screaming. Barking loudly, perhaps, and a bit blotchy, but the 
blotches could be a design element. Necessity is the smother of 
intention.

	“This fabric I then ironed and laid out, and upon it I pinned out a 
pattern for a big, boxy, loose-swinging shirt, and I measured everything 
(with one exception — I’ll get to that), and all looked good. So I cut 
the shirt out and pinned the pieces together and sewed the seems, all 
with a newfound sense of confident pleasure: Hey, I know how to do this 
now!

	“Tried the thing on. Oh.

	“There is loose and boxy, which is kicky, and then there is feed bag, 
which is just plain sad. This was a feed bag.

	“Remember I didn’t measure everything? The thing I hadn’t measured was 
the width across the neck at the back, which, now that I looked at it, 
might accommodate a small kayak, perhaps even a canoe. Think wide. …”

	She made a mental note, “Check shape of back neckline in non-standard 
patterns. I’ll remember that.”

	In case you’re wondering, here’s what struck me when I was trying to 
get a handle on the Trinity.

	Molly wrote, “Sewing, I find, is a little like doing your own theology: 
if you try this at home, you’re going to make a whole bunch of mistakes 
and the occasional real disaster. Which is likely why those in 
ecclesiastical authority sometimes feel that a large part of their job 
is to protect the religious hoi polloi from fooling around with their 
own ideas, because they might get things wrong (by the authorities’ 
standards, which may or may not be God’s).

	“But,” she continued, “mistakes are often where we do our most in-depth 
learning. …

	“The only way to stay out of trouble in sewing, or in theology, is not 
to get into it at all. But that takes out all the creative fun. Is that 
perhaps why this world is as gloriously, inchoatly (sic) messy as it is, 
because God knows something we strenuously reject: you don’t get it 
perfect if you want it to be interesting? Maybe God is still fooling 
around with this world, just as the red shirt could still use some work 
on the front neck (it’s developed a sag since I hung it up — loose 
weaves are fluid substances, like the lead in stained-glass windows).”

	This is expressed in a marvellous way at the opening of “Night Prayer” 
from “A Prayer Book for New Zealand”. “My brothers and sisters, Our help 
is in the name of the eternal God. Who is making the heavens and the 
earth.” – “Who is making… ” – present tense!

	The God whom we worship; the God who’s made self-revelation; the God 
who has met us and continues to meet us, bringing us incredible joy as 
well as wonderful comfort; our God invites us to participate in creation 
every day.

Our God is truly amazing. Compared with all the misunderstandings in 
which I’ve engaged, Nicodemus never put a foot wrong. But other than 
tweaking both of us, Jesus doesn’t give up – not on Nicodemus; nor on 
me, no matter how tempting that must be!
	
	The good news is that not only has God not wiped the floor with me, God 
hasn’t put a stop to the way my mind seems to keep asking questions.

	Molly Wolf asked a really astute question about the way that we try to 
understand the Trinity, and get a handle on what our vocations are meant 
to be and accomplish. She asked, “Would God prefer us to buy our 
theology ready-made at WalMart or some more upscale emporium, put 
together by others’ better trained and nimbler fingers? Certainly that’s 
better for the general economy, and it makes sense for those without the 
time or inclination to make things from scratch. But if you buy a thing, 
you don’t engage with it the way you engage with something you’ve made; 
you take it for granted instead of seeing it critically, squinting over 
the present lamentable mess to where there might be possibilities for 
new and glorious creation.

	“If you want to learn something, really learn and understand it, you 
have to get hands-on, and that inevitably means making mistakes — and 
emerging with an awed sense of the skill of really good craft. I am a 
purely terrible weaver/potter/stained-glass artist, but boy, do I 
appreciate the well-made stuff far more than I ever did before I tried 
it. Creation is like that.”

	That’s how Jesus treated Nicodemus, and everyone else whom He met. 
That’s how the Creator dealt with every aspect of creation. That’s how 
the Spirit moved through the lives of people before and after the 
earthly life of Jesus.

	If there’s one thing that people seem to pick up on, eventually – 
six-hundred-and-some laws notwithstanding – it’s that God seems to be 
incredibly patient, even flexible, as we stumble around trying to 
understand what we know we CAN’T understand this side of the pearly 
gates. But this doesn’t let us off the hook in terms of talking to God, 
frequently; of bringing to God all of our hard questions and the things 
that make our hearts ache; in terms of trying to get to know the God 
with whom we have such an interesting relationship and with whom we can 
be completely open.

	The great news about God – Father, Son and Spirit – exemplified by the 
humourous way in which Isaiah’s call to his prophetic ministry was 
verified; and the way Jesus and His friends were guided and supported in 
their faith journey; and the way Paul was given the confidence and 
insight to establish and encourage congregations around the north side 
of the Mediterranean; the great news about God is expressed so well once 
again by Molly Wolf when she wrote, “I think perhaps that our Creator 
God is a whole lot more tolerant of error than we are, just as adults 
will smile over children’s first pictures and put the scrawls up on the 
fridge door. None of us has it completely right after all, because none 
of us — not even the sum total of all of us over all of human history — 
none of us has ever walked all the way around God. So we are all in 
error. Get used to it. Knowing that basic truth is the priceless gift of 
humility, and it helps us take ourselves less seriously and turn 
ourselves towards God’s joy and love. As we become less full of 
ourselves, our emptying out leaves room for the Spirit to sneak in and 
find a hidey hole.”

	What’s certain is that we HAVE to cook in our own theological kitchens, 
at home or wherever.

	A radio broadcast of about six weeks ago left me with several comments 
which have been working on my mind. All the comments begin the same way: 
“Doubt is a glorious reminder …”

	The first completion of that sentence is “of our limitations as human 
beings”.

	The second is “of how little we can ever know.”

	And the third completion, perhaps the one which should exercise us 
most, is “of how suspicious we should always be of certainty.” 3

	All of these may prove helpful as we try to chip away, with God’s help, 
at getting more and more glimpses of this marvelous Creator, sacrificial 
Redeemer, enabling Spirit with whom we walk and talk.

	And that’s actually pretty good news for this morning, perhaps 
especially for all graduates. After all, questions, doubt, ARE our 
friends.

	So
		Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
		As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
		That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
		Your force, to breake, blow, burn and make me new.
		I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
		Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
		Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
		But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
		Yet dearley'I love you,'and would be loved faine,
		But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
		Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe,
		Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
		Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
		Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

NOTES

1 	John Donne (1572-1631) Holy Sonnet XIV: 
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~lyman/english233/Donne-Batter_My_Heart.htm

2	“The Pentecostal Feed Bag” by Molly Wolf 26th May, 2012 
http://molly2rivers.wordpress.com/

3	A series of discussions on how doubt informs various disciplines in 
life. BBC Radio 3, 9th – 13th April, 2012.



Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)