A Fourth Church Sermon by Calum I. MacLeod

June 10, 2001 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Holey; Wholly; Holy

Calum I. MacLeod
Interim Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Romans 5:1–5
John 16:12–1

“God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit
that has been given to us.”

Romans 5:5 (NRSV)

Anthony De Mello, an Indian Jesuit priest, was a great collector of wisdom and religious stories from throughout the ages; he died towards the end of the twentieth century. One of his stories is about a poet who is sitting on his porch one evening bent over a vessel of water. His neighbor walks by and hails him, saying, “Can I ask, what are you doing?”

The man replies, “I am contemplating the reflection of the moon in a bowl of water.”

Now the neighbor is a bit puzzled by this and says, “Why are you doing that? Unless you’ve got a broken neck, why don’t you just turn around and look directly at the real thing?”

De Mello offers a commentary to the story. He says, “Words are inadequate reflections of reality.” He imagines a man who sees a piece of marble and is told that the Taj Mahal is made of marble. The man says, “Well I can see what it is, it’s just a collection of these bits of marble put together;” or a man who is given a bucket of water from Niagara and imagines that because the Falls is just more of that water, he has somehow seen the Falls.

Contemplating the moon in a reflection in a bowl of water. I feel a bit like that today because of my bad luck in getting to preach this morning! Today is Trinity Sunday, one of those Sundays in the church’s calendar which is set aside for congregations to reflect on particular aspects of our Christian story and Christian traditions. The trouble is that most Sundays have a good story attached to them. At Christmas, you’ve got a baby and Bethlehem and shepherds and sheep and all that good stuff. And at Easter you’ve got the big story: the Passion and the death of Jesus and then the great celebration of the mystery of resurrection. Even Pentecost, which was last week, has got a great story about the disciples gathering and the Holy Spirit coming down and everyone thinking they’re drunk. And what do I get? I get Trinity Sunday. Even the dates in the calendar that we have created as Protestants, like Reformation Sunday, have stories about Luther and Calvin and at least we hear the bagpipes being played. No bagpipes this morning, I’m afraid.

Trinity Sunday. We’re given the chance to contemplate and to reflect on what we might call a difficult or even an abstract concept, which yet is one of our basic articles of faith, one of the foundational ways in which we understand God. That’s why this morning in welcoming these little children into the community of faith we do so in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Creator, the Redeemer, the Comforter. God’s nature expressed somehow in three ways.

Scripture doesn’t help much, I’m afraid. Earlier we read together the beautiful poem from Proverbs that invites us to reflect on Wisdom, which in the Hebrew scriptures is a woman. The poem invites us to imagine Wisdom being present with God at the Creation. As we read scripture in the light of scripture, we may think of Wisdom as the personification of the Holy Spirit, identified with the Word at the beginning of John’s gospel, “the Word became flesh” and through the Word all things came into being. In a sense we’re given what one commentator described as another person to deal with on Trinity Sunday, as if three weren’t enough!

In the New Testament scripture there’s no parable or story that explicates this concept of Trinity, rather it’s implied in the scripture as we heard in Paul’s letter to the Romans and in the text from John’s gospel. So we’ve got no story. We’re sitting here, contemplating the moon in a bowl of water, reflecting on that which transcends our human thought processes and language—that which we call God. And yet doing it with all that we have at our disposal: human thought and language.

It’s a dilemma—a dilemma which is raised in a very funny and provocative poem written by Mark Jarman, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He has a collection called Questions for Ecclesiastes, and in it there’s a section in which he follows on George Herbert’s “Holy Sonnets,” and writes “Unholy Sonnets.” This is “Unholy Sonnet #1.”

Dear God, Our Heavenly Father, Gracious Lord,
Mother Love and Maker, Light Divine,
Atomic Fingertip, Cosmic Design,
First Letter of the Alphabet, Last Word,
Mutual Satisfaction, Cash Award,
Auditor Who Approves Our Bottom Line,
Examiner Who Says That We Are Fine,
Oasis That All Sands Are Running Toward.

I can say almost anything about you,
O Big Idea, and with each epithet,
Create new reasons to believe or doubt you,
Black Hole, White Hole, Presidential Jet.
But what’s the anything I must leave out? You
Solve nothing but the problems that I set.

The dilemma of language there. What a great line, “I can say almost anything about you, O Big Idea.” We are indeed liberated in our language from where we were fifty, a hundred years ago, where the only concept of God that was articulated was male in gender. We’ve come a long way, and yet is it now that we can say “almost anything,” and if so, does that mean that we are losing meaning? Even meaning of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

Peter Hawkins, a professor at Boston University, in a journal for preachers, warned about Trinity Sunday. He warns against finding easy meaning. He talks about “the dangers of persistent attempts by preachers to make sense of an abstraction. . . the danger that the Trinity becomes a puzzle to be solved.” He’s right about the danger, I’m aware of that this morning. But I also know why preachers get up and try their hardest to find some hook that we can hang our thoughts on. That’s because we want to engage with this God, this God whom Christian tradition has spoken of for two thousand years as three-in-one and one-in-three. I know it because of my own situation, I know it because I meet members of this congregation who will say, “I can deal with God and Jesus but the Holy Spirit I don’t get,” or “Jesus and the Spirit is fine but the whole cosmic God and Creator stuff is difficult.” Tradition hasn’t helped us too much either, I don’t think. It’s full of concepts like “persons” and “natures,” “begotten,” “proceeding,” “Paraclete.”

So with all this abstraction and complexity facing us, I decided the only thing to do this morning was to revert to the old preacher’s trick of having a three-point sermon! Some of you might not know what a three-point sermon is. I was brought up on them. My minister at home started studying when there was a reaction against the old forty-five minute rants from the pulpit, and so they realized that to communicate they needed three points: an introduction, three points, and a conclusion. It was helpful if your three points were alliterative, they all started with the same letter, and then everyone could go home for brunch remembering the point of the sermon. This morning your three points—you don’t have to guess them—they are Holey, Wholly, Holy.

If you’ve not looked at the sermon title in the bulletin, (there is a reason for sermon titles, it’s when you have puns, like I do this morning), it might help because our first point, our first “Holey” this morning, is the one that means having holes in it, h-o-l-e-y. And that’s the first point because no matter what happens this morning here, no matter how in the unlikely event that I would ever be erudite and that you would walk off with something to contemplate; no matter how wise you were in discerning God’s spirit today through scripture and preaching and song and prayer, no matter, you would not have the complete story. There will always be holes in our understanding of God and of God as Trinity.

But we stand in good company in that. Remember Paul’s familiar words from 1 Corinthians 13, “Now we see in a mirror, dimly,” and in the King James’s version, “. . . we see through a glass, darkly.” Almost like the reflection of the moon in a bowl of water. Protestant doctrine has been strong in emphasizing the sovereignty of God and our limited ability to understand God. Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and theologian, describes God as being the complete qualitative Other. Completely out of our bounds of understanding and knowledge, and Karl Barth in the twentieth century picks up on Kierkegaard’s concept in his commentary on Romans, when he says, “The Gospel proclaims a God utterly distinct from humanity.” For Barth, we have no way of apprehending God except through where God intersects with humanity in Jesus Christ.

And so, our first point is a kind of warning, that we must be careful about how we use the concept of Trinity lest it become dogmatic and seem fully systematic. To accept and acknowledge the holey-ness of this perhaps can cause a change in our engagement with faith. We find, looking back on human history and the history of the church, that it’s littered with corpses, literal and metaphorical, of regimes which demanded loyalty to an all-encompassing and systematic world view; religious orthodoxy, which burned heretics; expansionist colonialism, which oppressed the poorest in the world. National Socialism, totalitarian Communism, you know the stories. You know the –isms. Scholars call them meta-narratives, over-arching stories in which all the different parts sustain and support each other with an internal logic. Kind of like houses of cards. And they’re still around today, we still have them, religious fundamentalism of the Iranian kind and of the Bible Belt American kind. Over-arching stories, like the certainty of those in power that unbridled free market capitalism is the only way in which to allocate the world’s resources.

We have something of a story this morning. For the Trinity is a kind of story of how we glimpse our experience of God, and it doesn’t have to be complete or self-sustaining or fully thought out or totally self-supporting. We can stand again with Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 and affirm that “Now we know only in part.” Our understanding is full of holes, is holey, and because of that, it takes us to our second point of how to approach God, and that is, Wholly, this time from the word, “whole,” meaning unified.

Our talk of God often places God apart from us and our daily existence and daily life. God has been seen as a distant creator who winds up the universe and then lets it run and watches it from afar. Or, indeed, God as a kind of superlative friend whom we call on when we need to be bailed out of a difficult situation. We need different ways of seeing God.

Denise Levertov, another modern American poet, in her collection The Stream and the Sapphire, has a lovely poem called “In Whom We Live, and Move, and Have Our Being.” In the poem she asks whether the wind, the current of air that carries the birds that she sees, is God’s breath. In the poem she responds, “No, not breath of God, / it seems, but God / the air enveloping the whole / globe of being. It’s we who breathe in, out, in, the sacred. . .”

It’s we who breathe the sacred. God, not an addition to our lives, not an optional extra, to be taken on or not depending on our particular philosophical position at the time. In the first letter of John in the New Testament the writer talks about this. The writer says, “God is love, and those who dwell in love dwell in God, and God dwells in them.” Levertov takes that concept and widens it and ends her poem in this way, “But storm or still, / numb or poised in attention, / we inhale, exhale, inhale, / encompassed, encompassed.”

Encompassed by a God of love, and it is this which takes us to our third point of our three point sermon this morning. Our third Holy is the religious one, h-o-l-y, the Holy Trinity. Holy because it takes us into a mystery.

Leonardo Boff, the liberation theologian, in his book “Trinity and Society,” says, “When we think of this mystery, it’s not a logical mystery,” not an arithmetical conundrum, “but rather a saving mystery.” What does he mean by “saving mystery?” I think Boff is talking about the amazing and incomprehensible assurance that we are reconciled to God and to each other in our baptism in the name of the Trinity. Our broken relationships are restored, our sins are and will be forgiven. Listen to Boff’s words, “The Trinity has to do with the lives of each of us, our daily experiences, our struggles to follow our conscience, our love and joy. . . our struggle[s] against social injustice, [our] efforts at building a more human form of society.” And the Trinity affects us at all these levels because it is how God’s one loving nature is revealed to us where we are.

I had an email this week, a little moment of grace, from a member of this congregation who is a professor in an English department. He and I meet and talk occasionally about issues of life and faith and literature and literary criticism, and he sent me an email, because he knew I was reflecting on the Trinity. I want to share some of the things that he wrote because he has insight into this. He says, “The Trinity might best be understood not as a thing, a noun that defies our system of rational thought, but rather as a form of action, a verb one might say, a continuous process by which God creates and nurtures God’s relationship with people.”

He goes on to talk about identity; how the Enlightenment concept of identity was very much about the individual being a whole person with individual right. He claims that postmodern thinking, more recent thinking, is suggesting that we are not just one individual identity but that we have many identities. Our identity, perhaps, as a child, and as a parent, as a friend, as a lover, as a Cubs supporter, all different identities. And perhaps, he suggests, “. . . the same thing can be said about God. Maybe God becomes apparent to people in three distinctly different ways, as a creator or parent, as a sustaining spirit, and as the one who shares our humanity,” Jesus Christ. “Not because God is three separate entities, but because we humans need at different times and for different reasons to experience God in these distinct ways. Considered in this way the concept of the Trinity becomes not some complex paradox about the nature of God, but a form of action, a demonstration of divine love.”

The Trinity as a demonstration of divine love. Holey, Wholly, and Holy. So let us, when we go from here, continue faithfully to contemplate the moon in a bowl of water, knowing that in the end, perhaps all we can do is say with the psalmist, “Oh Lord, our Lord, how excellent is your name, how glorious throughout the earth,” and all the time feeling and knowing the encompassing grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.