In 1674, Thomas Ken wrote a hymn called Awake, My Soul, and with the Sun, which ends with the following verse, now sung as the Doxology in many of our Christian services:
Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. On this first Sunday after the Pentecost we celebrate and meditate on God's revelation to us that we may think of God as a Trinity of three Persons.
Indeed we may. But must we? Must we believe that the Absolute Reality of God really is this unity/trinity of three distinct Persons emanating from one Godhead?
I don't think so. For one reason, whenever you begin to think about God instead of being in relationship with God, you are thinking about your own idea of God, which is at best a toy model of God, and at worst an idol. All theology is thus tinged with idolatry, which means that we can only take theology as a guide, a pointer to the One who is beyond all theology. And so, the Trinity is a theological construct. Because it fits so well with the New Testament, it qualifies as a model rather than an idol. And it's a model with many virtues. But as for it's being the Absolute Reality of God, well, as Paul says, "Now we see through a glass darkly."
Yet another reason leads me to assert that the Trinity is a model. The historical Jesus and his companions during his public ministry would have rejected such a notion. Yet, neither he nor his followers could be critiqued as "un-Christian." Instead, the notion of the Trinity reflects the opinion of the early Church following Jesus' Resurrection. Indeed, it may even reflect some secret teaching of the post-Resurrection, pre-Ascension Jesus that was kept circulating in oral tradition and not written (not explicitly, anyway) into the New Testament.
Now, although the Trinity is a model, it isn't "just" a model. It's a great model, fitting nicely through all the wickets in the New Testament, and with the experience of God reported by Christian mystics through the ages. We have Jesus, who declares "All that Abba (the Father, or 'Daddy') has is mine," Jesus' emphasis that we are to relate to God as "Daddy," and the Spirit of Truth which came over the assembled worshippers at Pentecost. Indeed they go together, three faces of an inseparable Unity.
It's not so complicated, really. Certainly not so complicated as imagining God to be the ten Sefirot of Kabbalistic Judaism. And indeed, among the Sefirot one finds the Shekhinah, the Spirit (or in Hebrew the "Ruach" or breath of God) who is feminine, and corresponds well to the Holy Spirit recognized by Christians. She is the Sefirah who spends so much time the world of humans.
But let us not fight over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (Eastern Church) or from the Father and the Son (Western Church). That's just arguing over how the Tinker Toy sticks of your model are joined together. If prayer can be compared to making love, then too much concern with this kind of theology can be compared to, shall we say, "going it alone."
So step outside. Consider that the skyscape is brought to you by God, that your breath is breathed for you by the Spirit of God, and that next to you is the Son of God, admiring it all through your eyes.
Leia Mais…
Jesus, whom his disciples loved, had been killed by crucifixion, a form of execution well-known for its pain and humiliation. After this horrific shame, he appeared to his disciples in a hyper-physical living form, able to enter rooms without passing through doors or walls, yet still able to eat food with them, and to touch them and be touched by them. These meetings and instructions went on for some time, the traditional "forty days," as it is written. And now, on this Sunday, we commemorate his leaving them.
And what an exit he made! Rising up from among them and into the clouds where they could see him no more. It was an exit that did not leave them sad, but rather triumphant. Their teacher who had lost his life, had won the sky!
And someday, when it was their turn, they would win it, too. This death thing, is just a phase. They would get through it. They would get over it. And what happens next, well, that would be too glorious to describe.
The promise of Christianity, and the hope of Christians, is that even though you are some 30 generations removed from those who witnessed Christ's ascension, your ultimate destiny is the same as the destiny of those witnesses. Because, despite all appearances to the contrary, ultimately God is in control. The entire Universe, and all the good and bad in it, is on loan to you for a time, in order for you to become yourself and then return to the One who made you.
Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Sounds like some nutty magical thinking. Those who witnessed the event, would answer, "Yes, but I was there. I saw it. I felt it. It's really true!"
Two thousand years later, we have some scant record of their testimony. Yet we live in the world they changed, because of what they experienced. In this age of skepticism, maybe it's time to be a little skeptical of skepticism itself. Maybe it's time to be more open-minded to the proposition that things are actually a good deal better than you think.
Advent, from the Latin adventus, means "The Coming," or "The Approach." Once recognized as a holy season of the Christian Church beginning four Sundays before Christmas, it was specifically about the coming of Christ — in our past as the baby Jesus, and in our future as Redemptor Mundi, the Redeemer of the World. Now it is submerged in the tide of holiday shopping that fills the void from Black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving, when many retailers finally turn a profit for the year) to Christmas Day, the distribution of the loot.
Advent is anticipation, a building of hope and feeling as we prepare to celebrate Christmas, the anniversary season of Our Lord's Birth as one of us. The Twelve Days of Christmas. Twelve days of inspiration, generosity, gratitude , good will, familiar songs, and peace.
So it was on Christmas Eve, 1914, in the trenches of World War I in France and Belgium. The men on both sides were waiting, mostly for another attack by the other side. Instead, an informal truce was struck by ordinary soldiers on both sides, beginning with the singing of Christmas carols. There was even a soccer game, until the ball got punctured on barbed wire. Instead of an attack, the men got a few days — a moment, in the scheme of things — of grace.
At first, the truce was welcomed by their officers as an opportunity to bury their dead. Some of them had lain rotting in the No Man's Land between the trenches for months. But as the British and German troops mingled and got friendly, the officers got frightened. This sort of thing could end the war. Orders were given against fraternizing with the enemy, with dishonorable discharge or death the penalty for disobedience. What ended was not the war, but the peace.
And the rest, they say, is history. World War I led to a defeated, broken and sullen Germany, which led Germany to fall prey to Hitler's ideology of National Socialism (Nazism), which led to World War II and the slaughter of 50 million people, including the systematic genocide of 6 million Jews, and the subsequent mass migration of the survivors who had nowhere else to go to what became the nation-state of Israel, which has endured almost continual war with its neighbors. Defeated along with its ally, Germany, in WW I, the Ottoman Empire was partitioned into many of the countries that form the Middle East today. Some like Iraq, were taken over by Baathism, which is little more than an Arabized Nazism, and many have made themselves enemies of Israel. Weakened by WW I, Russia was overtaken by Communism under which Stalin killed millions to force the collectivization of farming, which inspired many other such takeovers including China with its massacres under Mao Zedong, and provided the ideology that led to the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the Killing Fields of Kampuchea under Pol Pot. The foundation of Israel combined with the loss of the Ottoman Caliphate became some of the principal grievances used by al-Qaeda to recruit the perpetrators of the 9/11 and other attacks. And of course, WW II was ended by the invention and use of nuclear weapons, which together with the Cold War led to "Weapons of Mass Destruction," becoming a common phrase.
Need I go on?
If we humans had had the Faith to trust in and sustain what happened on that Christmas Eve in 1914, we might have avoided most of the bloodshed of past century. In other words, what was at stake was not just World War I, but World War II and all the wars which followed from them.
We were not punished for our failure by a vengeful God. No, God offered us a way to build a better world, and we chose instead the familiarity of business as we usually do it. We have not endured a punishment — we have endured the world we were already making for ourselves.
To tell the truth however, the men involved didn't expect the Christmas Truce of 1914 to hold. They took it as a very much wanted, but unexpected opportunity for a few days relief from the drudgery and stress of slaughter. They would have liked more time, but it didn't occur to them that they could take it. Their common Christian heritage — the Gospel — offered them a moment of Grace, but they did not dare ask a lifetime of Grace for themselves, or a history of Grace for the world of us who would come after them.
The men knew the personal risks of war. Odds were that most of them would make it back home, unhurt, with honor. All you had to do was keep your head down. Poison gas was not yet in widespread use, and nobody expected the influenza of 1918. But the risk of peace — if everybody acted together you might be hailed as a hero or a saint, but if not, you might be branded a coward or a traitor. Or you might be taken prisoner. Or you might be shot — by the enemy troops or your own.
That's the thing about these moments of God's Grace. They catch us by surprise. And if we want them to last, we must have the crazy audacity to ask for more than we ever dreamed possible, and to commit ourselves completely, body and soul. Because God's Grace, the Gospel, offers us new selves to become, with new futures. Too often, as in 1914, we turn away, blinding ourselves to the possibilities, trudging our familiar path into the darkness. Because, ironically, it seems less scary to us. Or worse, as in Nazi movement of the 1930's, the Communist revolutions, or the present Bin Ladenist movements, we allow our capacity for that audacity and committment to be perverted to evil ends.
Advent. Waiting for the coming of God's most radical Grace. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. We are always waiting for moments of Grace, as each Advent we wait for Christmas, a season of Grace, mindful that the original Christmas was also a moment of hope and fear. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
Few moments of Grace in recent history have been so powerful, so pregnant with possibility as Christmas in the Trenches in 1914. But they do come. Let us be thankful for the triumph of Solidarity and the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the non-violent collapse of Communism in 1991. Let us be thankful that India and Pakistan decided not to go to war in 2002 when Pakistan-based Islamic terrorists bombed the Indian Parliament building.
Now whenever our moments of Grace come, small or large, personal or international, may God give us the the audacity to ask for more abundant Grace than we have ever imagined, and the courage to commit ourselves to its path. Or to use more old-fashioned words, may God give us Hope, may God give us Faith.
This Advent may you approach Christmas in God's Grace.
These are the sermons of the Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua. The author is an amateur pastoral theologian and a retired physicist. Please enjoy and, if you are a clergy person, feel free to use them as inspiration for your own thinking and preaching. However, some of my ideas may be considered heretical by keepers of some Christian faith traditions. Read these at your own risk.
Click the seasonally colored "Readings" link below the title of each sermon to view the Psalm and Lessons for that sermon. Please comment on these sermons by clicking the comments link at the bottom of each post.
