Trinity Sunday
Isaiah 6
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”
4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
You worry that through all the cultural references made from this pulpit—the films, the books, the internet memes—that somehow the pinnacle of human expression would be overlooked. Well worry not more: today I want to begin with Looney Tunes.
So here are (in my opinion) the five best cartoons in the ‘short comedy’ genre ever produced:
“Operation: Rabbit” (1952) where Wile E. Coyote introduces himself as a genius and Bugs proves otherwise.
“Mad as a Mars Hare” (1963) starring Marvin the Martian who shows us he is “very very angry.”
“Rabbit of Seville” (1950) proving that kids can love Rossini as much as adults.
“What’s Opera, Doc?” (1957) which had kids everywhere singing “Kill the Wabbit.”
“One Froggy Evening” (1955), selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress for being the “Citizen Kane” of cartoons.
And, of course, it’s “One Froggy Evening” that’s generated much scholarly debate. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? And if it’s a tragedy, is it actually a double-tragedy, pushing the literary envelope even further? And what about Michigan J. Frog himself? Is he just a singing frog, or is a symbol of something else?
“One Froggy Evening” begins, of course, with a demolished building and a singing frog that emerges from the cornerstone. He sings ragtime standards, and the man who finds him immediately dreams of vast riches. But the frog won’t sing, neither to a talent agent nor to a crowded theatre. Eventually the frog ends up in another cornerstone, and the story repeats.
I share all this because I’m spent 25 years waiting to sing “Hello Ma Baby” from the pulpit, and because I want to use the story to explore an idea I’m working on, on that brings together Michigan J. Frog and the call of Isaiah, as read by Bunny, who is no slouch when it comes to singing ragtime standards.
The thesis/idea is this: Faith should be something that if you try to tell people about it, they will struggle to understand. Like the singing frog, faith should be something that we experience but may not be able to share with others, at least not without considerable effort—and effort that may ultimately fail.
So we begin with a book most likely written in exile, that period of literal and figurative dislocation when the elite of Judean society are carried off the Babylon. In searching for reasons, they turn to the prophet Isaiah, an eight-century prophet who predicted with some accuracy what would some day befall Judah. Isaiah believed that the disobedience of the people led to their exile, and he spends thirty-nine chapters being specific.
But the passage that Bunny read takes us back to the beginning, to the call of Isaiah. It’s a rich visual moment when call and response evoke the wonder of this God who needs prophets to express God’s worldview and will. The moment begins with a vision of complex creatures with wings and various covered parts singing some of the most familiar words in scripture, words that we say every time we share communion:
Holy, holy, holy, Lord, God of power and might;
Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
This passage (called the Sanctus) continues with a quote from Psalm 118 and is familiar as the words shared on Palm Sunday, “Hosanna in the highest: Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”
That’s the polite part of the story, in contrast to a young Isaiah who cries out “Woe to me!” when multi-winged seraphim are flying toward him. Convinced he is going to die (he saw the Lord) he confesses that he has unclean lips and comes from a people with unclean lips, only to face one final confrontation: Seraphim touch his lips with a coal from the fire and his sin is forgiven. If only that was the end of the story, but it is not:
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
The obvious contrast here is to the call of Samuel, that extended dialogue between old Eli and young Samuel. It’s a humorous call, meant to delight:
Then the Lord called Samuel. Samuel answered, “Here I am.” And he ran to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.” But Eli said, “I did’t call; go back and lie down.” So he went and lay down. Again the Lord called, “Samuel!” And Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.”
“My son,” Eli said, “I did’t call; go back and lie down.”
You get the picture. Eventually Eli understands that this is a call story, and sends the lad back to truly answer the call. It’s light, it involves a loving relationship between young and old, and it’s about as far from the frightening call of Isaiah as you can get.
Some of you are still wondering about the frog, so I won’t torment you any longer. The double-tragedy of “One Froggy Evening” is that the man cannot realize his dream of sharing the remarkable thing he has discovered, and the frog ends up back in the box. Yes, his motive is crass, but he sincerely believes that the world will gain from the experience of a singing frog, something he is unable to share.
Isaiah, like a new Moses, has met God face-to-face and lived, a tale worthy of telling of ever there was one, but he is unable to share the complex majesty of the moment. Instead, God says ‘share this’:
‘You will be ever hearing,
but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing,
but never perceiving.’
This people’s heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
And that’s the gentle beginning, before God get’s really mad. Eventually forgiveness will follow, much in the way the coal touched the lips of Isaiah, but until then God will speak through the prophet and share a message that would fit just as well today as them: Here’s Isaiah 10:
Woe to those who make unjust laws,
to those who issue oppressive decrees,
to deprive the poor of their rights
and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people.
In fact, when J.S. Woodsworth, the minister who would go on the found the CCF shared these words during the Winnipeg General Strike (1919) he was arrested for seditious libel. And I’m sure similar words are being shared that the end of the First Nations’ Truth and Reconciliation event, being held in Ottawa as we speak.
So this is one example of faith being something that if we try to tell people about it, they will struggle to understand. Seems in 1919 at least, this kind of faith might even get you arrested. Nonetheless, it is the expression of our faith in the public realm that may puzzle (and offend) precisely because God may call us to deliver an unpopular message to a people ill-disposed to accept it.
Another example would the complexity and majesty of an encounter with God. Much ink has been spilled trying to understand the number of wings possessed by the seraphim, what the wings cover, and how this relates to the architecture of the Temple itself. And that’s just three verses of the hundreds that describe an encounter with God.
Fast-forward to the New Testament, and we meet God in Jesus Christ, and the encounter becomes more complex still. For every “I am” statement that tries to make plain our relationship to God in Jesus, there is another that leaves us shaking our heads. Treasure in a field, a dishonest steward, the fish with a drachma in its mouth—surely the Kingdom of God doesn’t need to be this complex?
By Matthew 13 the disciples have had enough. They ask, “Jesus, why do you speak to them in parables,’ meaning ‘we don’t have a hot clue what you’re saying.’ Jesus says, “Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them” and they likely did that wide-eyed thing people do when they are truly speechless. Then Jesus quoted the passage from Isaiah 6:
‘You will be ever hearing,
but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing,
but never perceiving.’
Thanks Jesus, thanks a lot. Faith should be something that if you try to tell people about it, they will struggle to understand. It wasn’t terribly clear to the disciples, and they were there the whole time—right there. How much more will we struggle to describe a relationship and a set of beliefs and ultimately fail.
Finally, faith as something that if you try to tell people about it, they will struggle to understand often comes down to worldview. The seraphim speak and begin to commission Isaiah by cleansing him with a hot coal from the purifying fire: “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
We begin each service words of regret and concession—we concede who we are and what we tend to do. This reminds us first, that we have sins and second, that our sins are forgiven. The parables of Jesus might be a confusing mess, but the message “you’re sins are forgiven” couldn’t be clearer. And Jesus’ need to remind people has an obsessive quality to it, because it’s God’s key theme too.
But the world struggles to understand this obsession. And by the time the self-esteem movement took hold, we struggled to understand it too. ‘That’s a real downer’ people said, or my favourite—’I didn’t do anything wrong this week.’ Really? A full week without negative thoughts toward anyone? Were you in a coma?
Faith should be something that if you try to tell people about it, they will struggle to understand. And that includes faith in a God who stands with the poor and the oppressed, a God who is complex and mysterious down to today, and a God who forgives us even when we forget we need forgiveness.
May this God continue to call, and may we always say “Here I am, Lord. Send me!” Amen.
Pentecost
Acts 2
When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues[a] as the Spirit enabled them.
Psalm 104
27 These all look to you to give them their food in due season; when you give to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.
I worry that I may confuse my son.
Some years ago, quite unexpectedly, I said to Isaac “I didn’t give birth to you for you to turn around and do something as foolish as that.” I don’t recall what the ‘that’ was, but the saying sort of took on a life of its own and has been repeated many times.
And it seems to fit into the new thinking where men are reminded that they too have having a baby, not just wives and partners. So I think the “I didn’t give birth to you...” is actually very ‘au courant,’ if you pardon my French. Maybe we should all say it, particularly if you have foolish children. We owe it to them.
I got thinking about childbirth because it appears in the reading from Romans 8, it’s hinted at in Psalm 104 and it appears in wonderful passage in Isaiah that fits with our Pentecost theme. And as metaphors go, childbirth seems to perfectly describe the chaos and the promise of that day long ago—the day the Christian church was born.
So perhaps we should begin there:
When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.
Suddenly they are describing the wonders of God in a cacophony of languages—from every nation—in a list that makes even the most confident Bible-reader break out into a cold sweat. “Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs. It’s good to practice.
And then Peter speaks. In what may be one of the most unintentionally funny verses in the Bible, he says “These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning!” Obviously Peter never attended Grey Cup week or Octoberfest. Nevertheless, his point stands: these people have been overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit, enlivened and enabled to proclaim the Good News in every tongue.
Peter shares an extended quote from the prophet Joel (“I will pour out my spirit on all people”) and then introduces them to Jesus Christ. He mentions signs and wonders, and then does something very risky: he reminds them that they—with help from wicked men—put him to death by nailing him to a tree. You might worry that he has lost the crowd at this moment, but he carries on: God raised him from the dead, proving that death was ended.
And it falls to St. Paul the finish the thought:
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption.
In other words, everything that has come before has been moving toward this moment: creation, covenant, liberation, law, land, prophecy, exile, return, renewal, incarnation, reconciliation—all necessary steps that lead to this moment of rebirth. The Spirit moves and we are adopted as God’s own, children of the living God.
Adopted, named, and led by the Spirit—we then must begin to understand this God we praise, this God who has led us to this moment. The journey has been long—maybe a thousand pages—and we can be forgiven for wondering out loud about the nature of this God we follow.
What led me to this question was a lecture I attended last week with Walter Brueggemann, a name you have heard more than a few times from this pulpit. Brueggemann spoke on the topic of ‘fidelity and certitude’ two ideas that describe our sense of God and God’s nature. He argued for fidelity and said some very unpleasant things about certitude (seems he has a bit of a potty mouth). You might argue that he was giving each of us something to say on the morning of Pentecost, and for that, I’m grateful.
Certitude—absolute certainty or conviction that something is the case—is a something that quite naturally enters the room every time we talk theology. We crave certitude, the knowledge that everything can be defined or explained away in a way that brings comfort and a sense of security. We long for a God who is firmly in control—all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present—but the scriptures just don’t bear this out. As Dr. Brueggemann said, “this God operates in freedom” and cannot be contained by theologians or preachers.
Listen to the psalmist wrestle with the same question, describing the life of God’s creatures, which I assume includes us:
When you give food, they gather it up;
when you open your hand,
they are filled with good things.
When you hide your face,
they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit,
they are created;
and you renew the face of the ground.
The joy of Pentecost appears in Psalm 104, the very reason we recite it this morning. “When you send forth your spirit, they are created,” breathing new life into the dust, renewing the face of the ground. Wonderful stuff, but all held in the context of those words that are hard to hear and at the same time very familiar: “When you hide your face, [we] are dismayed.”
This is the opposite of certitude—absolute certainty—and speaks instead to fidelity, the promise when God says “I will be your God as you will be my people.” (Ex 6, 2 Cor 6) So listen to the psalmist again, and this time think about the difference between the God who is exactly who we want God to be and the God who simply wants to be in a relationship:
When you give food, we gather it up;
when you open your hand,
we are filled with good things.
When you hide your face,
we are dismayed;
when you take away our breath,
we die and return to the dust.
When you send forth your spirit,
we are created;
and you renew the face of the ground.
God gives us good things, but God is unknowable. God can’t solve the problem of mortality, but God gives us the Spirit to renew the face of the earth.
And this brings us to the other great childbirth passage, this one from Isaiah 42. Listen to this most unusual God describe God’s inner life, God’s own thinking:
14 “For a long time I have kept silent,
I have been quiet and held myself back.
But now, like a woman in childbirth,
I cry out, I gasp and pant.
16 I will lead the blind by ways they have not known,
along unfamiliar paths I will guide them;
I will turn the darkness into light before them
and make the rough places smooth.
These are the things I will do;
I will not forsake them.
God will lead us along unfamiliar paths, bring light to the dark places in our lives, make smooth the rough places in our lives, and we will never be forsaken.
This the nature of our relationship with God: a source of blessing, but not all the answers; a source of light, but shadows remain; and a source of hope, even when God’s face is hidden.
May the Holy Spirit attend our rebirth this day, and from the chaos and the mess of it, may we be made new. Amen.
Sixth Sunday of Easter
John 15
9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my command: Love each other.
Three things left for today: preach a sermon, pray, and then...the third thing...coffee with Team May!
Don’t you hate it when that happens? Gov. Rick Perry does, the presidential candidate who tried to recall the three government agencies he would eliminate upon taking office: “Commerce, Education and...the ah...”
It happens to all of us. But some have handy solutions. Sarah Palin, for example, famously wrote three points on her hand: ‘Energy, tax cuts, and lift the American spirit.’ Ironically, the third thing Rick Perry was trying to remember was the Energy Department, which was somehow written on Sarah Palin’s hand instead.
Then people mocked her, which seems unfair. Writing on your hand to remember something is as old as pens or hands, and I expect all of us have done it. Maybe you have something written on your hand right now. “Go to coffee, see what Team May can do.”
The mocking involved the need to write down the three most important points she wanted to make—her three themes—and the suggestion that if you are truly committed to these themes there would be no need to write them down. She had no real response, but she could have said public speaking isn’t as easy as it looks. Instead she took a jab at the president and called her hand ‘the poor man’s teleprompter’ and later suggested—quoting Isaiah 49.16—that God writes important notes on the divine hand. Very clever, appeals to the base.
Obviously, I watch/listen to too much American electoral politics, but it is endlessly fascinating. And with 2016 right around the corner, it will only get more intense.
I share all this because my reading of John’s ‘love command’ and surrounding instructions reads like something a poorly paid scribe might cobble together. Notice how Jenny’s reading made to seem seamless, but it is anything but. The passage begins well, then something happens:
“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”
So far so good. Remaining in the love of Jesus will bring you great joy. Our scribal friend remembered a unit of instruction in it’s entirety, and it makes perfect sense. But having made such a good start, this person practiced in the art of listening and transcribing seems to hit a bump in the road. The next unit of the passage seems very different:
My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.
This is actually three different points, three sermons, maybe given on three different days. Maybe I’m being harsh, and maybe (you’re thinking) I should try listening in the hot sun all day long and then rush home to record the good stuff before it fades from memory completely. And that’s fair enough. I can use my Sharpie, cover a hand and an arm, and this scribe could not. There were no ancient Sharpies.
But listen again, and I think you will agree:
My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command.
The first command flows directly from the summary beginning, the command to ‘remain in my love.’ Love each other as I have love you dovetails nicely with the Golden Rule (‘do unto others...’) and it looks forward to that moment when Jesus will be with them no longer, which is the main theme of the season of Easter.
The second command (‘Greater live has no one’) seems to take us to another place altogether, back to Holy Week perhaps, and the abiding sense that what is coming is the ultimate act of love: ‘to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’ It fits in the general heading of the love we ought to practice, but it departs from the seasonal theme of remaining together that your joy may be complete.
And the third point, I’m not sure where that fits at all. “You are my friends if you do what I command” is the kind of thing my daughter and her little friends would say in the daycare yard. I know I’m risking a lightning bolt here, and I believe that Jesus said just such a thing, but I’m just not sure he said it here. Jesus had all sorts of friends who didn’t do what he commanded, including the tax collectors and sinners that he counted as friends.
And this is precisely the problem of remembering. You cobble together things that sound similar, you present then in a way that seems to make sense, and some times it just doesn’t work. Jesus spoke all day every day for at least three years, teaching and preaching to people with hungry hearts and itchy ears, and it makes sense that the record that we receive might be a bit of a jumble.
Now, having given you some classic textual criticism, the mainstay of every liberal seminary education, I think we need to step back, and take another look. Maybe it’s not so much a ‘jumble to pick apart’ as a challenge to reassemble. What if the challenge before me (and you) is to weave these three misremembered passages back together into something as coherent as the opening paragraph of the passage? Where would it lead?
First, we recall that that the passage itself, while appearing in the run-up to Pentecost, actually belongs to the run-up to Good Friday and Easter Sunday. So perhaps we need to set aside the seasonal impulse and simply let the passage remain where it belongs. Taking us back to Holy Week means that the words exist in the shadow of the cross, the very location that may reveal meaning. So listen again, but this time we will reinforce the proper context by adding a word or two:
My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you (on the cross).
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (on the cross).
You are my friends if you do what I command (on the cross).
Suddenly they fit. Even the awkward final command fits, so let me say more. To love each other as Jesus loved us (on the cross) takes us to the ‘good thief’ who came to understand that Jesus would not try to cheat death, and then said ‘Jesus, remember me, when you come into your Kingdom’ (Luke 23.42). And it takes us to what ought to be regarded as the first Mother’s Day when Jesus commends his mother to the care of the beloved disciple (John 19.26). It explains what St. Paul meant when he said ‘I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me’ (Galatians 2.20). An instrument of death became a source of life as ‘no greater love’ was shown that day.
Finally, ‘You are my friends if you do what I command (on the cross)’ brings us to something that William Countryman said and I frequently quote near the beginning of our service: ‘What God says to you in Jesus is this: You are forgiven. Nothing more. Nothing less.
This is the message Jesus spoke and lived.’ I say it as an assurance of pardon, but it’s really a window on the entire Gospel.
Countryman argues that we can’t simply talk about love—we need to do it in the context of forgiveness. Love, he says, is a fine concept, and worthy of the place we give it, but it can mean many things. It can be extravagant and freely given, but it can also be conditional, and quickly withdrawn. But the love that forgives, the love that reconciles and makes new—that is love we receive from the cross. ‘You are my friends if you do what I command (on the cross) makes sense, because the last word spoken was from the cross was ‘forgive.’
Back to the beginning for a moment, and the best response to Sarah Palin came from Robert Gibbs, White House Spokesman, who a day or two later wrote on his hand ‘eggs and milk’ (to make his son pancakes) and the other two things he didn’t want to forget: ‘hope and change.’ Maybe we can take a page from all this hand-writing and make our own list: ‘love, forgiveness, reconciliation,’ or just draw a cross, which gives us all three. Amen.
