"Things Your Pastor Would Totally Avoid Preaching About Were It Not For The Lectionary," Part I: The Trinity

Our scripture readings for this first Sunday in the season of Pentecost (also called Ordinary Time) are Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Psalm 8, and Matthew 28:16-20. The very brief epistle reading from 2 Corinthians is also worth your time. You may read them all here.

For some reason, the liturgical calendar which we follow in our year together as a church and which shapes the lectionary of scripture readings we follow designates the Sunday after Pentecost each year as "Trinity Sunday." It's the one and only day that celebrates not a particular person or scriptural event, but a doctrine of the church--for, though the three-fold phrase of "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" does show up occasionally in scripture (our New Testament readings for today being the case in point), the actual word "Trinity" never does--it's a term that did not come into mainstream Christian use until late in the 4th century. It emerged from a series of arguments among early theologians as to how we can understand God the Father/Creator/Almighty, Jesus, and now the Holy Spirit given to the church at Pentecost as all being the same God. The answer, which was given to me in seminary in the form of this nifty diagram, is this:

Well...that clears is all up, now doesn't it?

Any time I try to explain or, in this case, diagram the Trinity, my head wants to explode. My greatest fear, when I met with my ordination council that was going to examine me to see if I was ready to be an ordained minister, was that they would ask me something like, "How would you explain the Trinity to children?" I spent the whole day before my ordination council pouring over my notes from my Church History and Theology classes in case this question came up, trying to come up with a simple answer, with some insight into this mystifying diagram which somehow left me cold, and came to only one conclusion: I can't explain the Trinity to myself, let alone to others.

And maybe that's the point. Maybe this Trinity Sunday is here not to take us back to fourth century controversies, but to help us encounter the present-day God as expansive, multifaceted, and utterly unexplainable. To encounter God as One (or Three-in-One) who is always shifting, always moving, yet always present.

A diagram--well, depiction--of the Trinity that I've come to like a lot more than the one I was given in seminary is this one, painted by Jan Richardson, which will also grace our bulletin cover on Sunday:

I love this image--one of touching, of movement, of wholeness, of invitation, of equality yet distinctiveness. It's an image of the Trinity that comes from the Celtic tradition, and Richardson speaks of it this way: "In the Celtic triple spiral, there is a space where the three spirals connect. It is both a place of meeting and of sheer mystery. Its vast, vibrant emptiness reminds me that, in this life, we will never know all the names of God. Even as the Trinity evokes, it conceals. We will never exhaust the images we use to describe the One who holds us and sends us, who enfolds us and impels us in our eternal turning."

The Trinity may be something I don't particularly want to attempt preaching on; and who knows, the word Trinity may not actually show up a lot in my sermon on Sunday. But I hope that, not just on this Sunday but on every Sunday, this sort of Trinitarian God will, indeed, be present to us: a God of evoking, concealing, inexhaustible mystery, a God who "holds us and sends us, who enfolds us and impels us." Join me as we place ourselves amidst this spiraling sweep of our God this Sunday.

Fill in the Blank

On this Pentecost Sunday--the day when we welcome the gift of the Holy Spirit to all people as Christ's enduring presence in this world--our scripture lessons are Numbers 11:24-30, 1 Corinthians 12:3-13, and Acts 2:1-21. An alternate story of the gift of the Spirit can be found in John 20:19-23. You may read all these passages here.


I am not usually a fill-in-the-blank sort of theologian; this may be part of the reason why I never made it through the Experiencing God study back when it was so popular a year ago, nor have I ever made it through a Beth Moore workbook. Today, however, I am going beyond my usual tendencies and offering a fill-in-the-blank question as food for thought. Ready? Complete the following sentence:


The Holy Spirit is _____________________.



Here's my theory about this blank: If we had begun the sentence "God is" or "Jesus is", though we would have gotten a diversity of answers, there would have been some standards that popped up consistently: "Good", "Our Creator", "Our Father", "Our Savior", "Lord," "The Son of God," "Love." An answer of some sort would likely have come to mind pretty quickly. It is my prediction, though, that it's entirely possible that each of us completed the sentence above differently, and that an answer was probably not immediate. This is because, for some reason, our knowledge of and ability to describe the Holy Spirit seems chronically more ambiguous; this was true even for the writers of the early church creeds that many traditions still recite as their confession of faith each week. The Apostles Creed has several clear things to say about God: "The Father, Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth." It has even more to say about Jesus: he is/was God's Son, our Lord, born to Mary, suffered, crucified, died, was buried, rose, and ascended, just to name a few. But all it says about the Holy Spirit (other than it was how Jesus was conceived) is this: "I believe in the Holy Spirit." Boom. That's it. No elaboration...no explanation...no fleshing out, no filling in the blanks.

I think it's okay that we continue to be a bit confounded by the Holy Spirit, because it was confounding on the first day it made its full appearance as well. The crowds listening to the disciples could understand the different languages the Holy Spirit was leading the disciples to speak; they could not, however, reach a consensus on what was happening. "What does this mean?" is the poignant question many asked. "They are drunk" was the somewhat comical explanation others offered. Others scoffed. Others were amazed. Only one thing was for sure: according to The Message's wonderful translation of this text, "They couldn't for the life of them figure out what was going on."

"What does this mean?" This is Pentecost's enduring question to us. It's part of the reason why, though the day of Pentecost is one single Sunday, the Season of Pentecost in our worship lasts a full five to six months every year--we need that much time to even begin to approach that blank, to even begin to find a way to articulate this new and powerful presence of God among us and within us.

Be with us on Sunday as we welcome this Spirit again in all of its mysterious fullness, and be sure to wear red for the occasion (I have so much respect for whoever created that video).

Happy Ascension Day!

The readings for this Sunday are the end of Luke's first volume--Luke 24:44-52--and the beginning of Luke's second volume--Acts 1:1-11--with a little Ephesians (1:15-23) thrown in for good measure. You can read them here.

Happy Ascension Day!

Yep...that's right, if you didn't know it, today is a major day in the life of the post-Easter church! 40 days after Easter Sunday, and 10 days before Pentecost Sunday, comes Ascension Day. This day is ripe with theological and missional significance--it is the day Jesus ascended to sit at the right hand of the Father, taking his place of rightful authority over all creation (see Philippians 2:6-11 for a wonderful theological interpretation of this!). It is also the day Jesus commissioned and blessed his followers for the work they would carry on in his bodily absence. It was a day of looking back at what God had done, and of looking forward at what God was yet to do; a day of looking up to heaven and out to the ends of the earth. Falling where it does in the church calendar, however, often means that it falls right off of our radars, being as it always lands on a Thursday. Hold these realities together and, as Sean White put it in Feasting on the Word, we might find that "no other festival in the Christian year is more important and less emphasized than the ascension of the Lord."

So the question I pose today is, what meaning does the ascension hold for modern Christians? Is it a day worth emphasizing more than we do? What does it teach us about our God, our Christ, the Spirit we wait for, ourselves? How do we need to be reminded of Jesus' lordship and our callings on this holy day? What does ascension teach us not just about the world beyond this world--whatever world that was that Jesus' body ascended into--but, I think much more significantly, about this world we are in and its connection to something so much bigger than ourselves?

As you reflect on these texts and these questions and the many others that your celebration and contemplation of this day will undoubtedly bring about, I leave you with a prayer that our Wednesday night meditation group spent some time with last night which opened up my thinking about the ascension in some new ways. We talked about whether this is actually a prayer (written by Walter Brueggeman in his book Prayers for a Privileged People) or more of a theological reflection, but I would encourage you to take its words and try praying them as a prayer of confession. Even though we, as Baptists, do not offer the creed each week, we are familiar with this language of ascension, most likely, but only vaguely so--not personally. I think this has the power to be a prayer that might open us up to the power of this holy day we have long neglected as we gather around these texts on Sunday. Blessings upon us as we do so.

"Candidates for Newness"
by Walter Brueggeman

We live in the long stretch between
Easter and Pentecost, scarcely noticing.
We hear mention of the odd claim of ascension.
We easily recite the creed
"He ascended into heaven."
We bow before such quaint language and move on,
immune to ascent,
indifferent to enthronement,
unresponsive to new governance.

It is reported that behind the ascending son was
the majestic Father riding the clouds;
But we do not look up much;
we stay close to the ground, to business and
to busyness,
to management and control.

Our world of well-being has a very low
ceiling, but we do not mind the closeness
or notice the restrictiveness.
It will take at least a Pentecost wind to
break open our vision enough to imagine a new governance...

Until then, we stay jaded,
but for all that,
no less candidates for newness.

One Small Step for Jesus' Disciples, One Giant Leap for the Early Church...

Our readings for this sixth Sunday in Eastertide come from Acts 17:22-31 (though I would recommend expanding this to include verses 16-21 and 32--we will do this on Sunday!), 1 Peter 3:13-22, and John 14:15-21. They can be read here.

It doesn't take much for us to jump from last week's Gospel reading in John 14:1-14 to this week's in John 14:15-21; in fact, in our last Bible study at church I heard one person express frustration that these passages were divided at all--like much of John's Gospel, they flow into one another and need one another to be fully heard! John 14:15-21 continues Jesus' farewell discourse to his disciples, giving them another reason to trust him--that another Advocate will be sent to them so they will not have to journey alone even after his imminent bodily departure from them. It's a nice appendix to Jesus' words of reassurance from last week.

The Acts reading, however, requires a giant leap of time, imagination, and context for us to enter into. Last week, a man named Saul approved of the death of Stephen, outside of the gates of Jerusalem; this week he stands in Athens, Greece, with a new name and a new mission--to take up the work of proclamation for which Stephen had been killed. While all of our other readings from Acts this lectionary year come from chapters 1-7 this one randomly propels us all the way to chapter 17. While all our other stories from Acts the past few weeks (and in the next two) took/will take place in Jerusalem, this one puts us nearly a thousand miles northwest of there. Previously the Gospel has been proclaimed to Jews or, at least, people who knew Jewish ways; now we find the Gospel being proclaimed to Stoics and Epicureans, to people who fill their marketplace with idols to every imaginable God, for whom Socrates was more familiar than Moses. We have leaped forward with the Gospel into a whole new world, one that's far from the home base out of which we've been operating.

Since we'll be operating in a new cultural landscape with this portion of Acts this week, I thought we could have a quick lesson on some of the strange terms in this passage which help us understand where Paul wasas he carried the news of Jesus somewhere it had likely never been before. So, here's a quick vocab lesson (I am indebted to the New Interpreter's Bible for much of this info):

Among those Paul meets in Athens are “Epicurean and Stoic philosophers." Who were these guys? Here are a couple of incredibly oversimplified intros:

Epicureans believed that the avoidance of pain and suffering is the true aim of this life. They felt that a personal, provident god–a god who could make a practical difference in the outcome of a happy life–simply does not exist, so religious devotion does not matter as much as living a life of simple pleasures. Epicureans would not have thought much of all the idols in Athens, most likely, since they didn't expect any of these gods was expected to intervene and make a difference.

Stoics, meanwhile, were guided by their analytical observations and careful reasoning. They sought to live in harmony with the cosmos because they believed the deity was in all things--the "live and move and have our being" reference that Paul drops would have made them cheer and nod in agreement, it probably came from one of their writers! Yet the idea that God could be personalized in someone like Jesus would have been deeply troubling to them and, like the Epicureans, the idea of any life beyond this one seemed a ludicrous concept.

Paul's encounter with these groups led him to the Aeropagus--an elevated, open-air site just to the west of the acropolis in Athens (see picture at right--anyone want to join me on a field trip?). The Areopagus was the equivalent of a city assembly or council that would hear public debates and give verdicts. Paul may well have been taken there to determine whether he has the credentials to bring his “strange teaching” into a place as sophisticated and learned as Athens, where he wanders as a strange curiosity but not necessarily one with any credibility.

Paul's trip to Athens is a bit overwhelming, especially when it takes us so far out of the context we've been in before, into a world of strange new terms and unfamiliar settings. It makes me wonder how Paul's engagement of this whole new context might challenge us as Christ's church to not just move in logical, linear ways, but be willing to immerse ourselves in places totally foreign to us--to deeply encounter and hear what our neighbors think, to open ourselves up to their judgment rather than passing judgment on them, to speak with conviction what we believe even if people look at us like we've grown approximately seventeen heads. To continue our "Growing up" theme from last week, where might this text challenge us to move from tentative baby steps to giant leaps for the sake of living out Jesus' commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves?

The Way

For this fifth Sunday of Eastertide, as we continue to consider the implications of a risen Christ for our life together as God's people on this earth, the passages that will guide our reflection come from Acts 7:55-60 (though this is among the lectionary's more absurd choices; you really need to read the whole of chapters 6 and 7 to have any sense of what these 6 verses are about!); 1 Peter 2:2-10; and John 14:1-14, which can be read here.

There are about 1,000 things I either want to say or feel need to be said (or, at least, discussed) about this Sunday's Gospel reading--parts of which are among the most familiar things Jesus ever said, parts of which sound like they are still in the original Greek and lacking a clear translation for all the sense they make. After spending some time last Sunday dwelling in Jesus' beautiful image provided in his statement, "I am the gate," however...I wondered if it would be more fruitful this week to continue a visual approach to the Gospel and to consider what we picture when Jesus offers another of his "I am" declarations here: "I am the way."

I did a Google Images search for pictures that come up when you type in "I am the way, the truth, and the life", and the myriad pictures of different ways that came up were fascinating to me. You got a lot of pictures that are similar to this in genre and content:

A lot of words are added to Jesus' declaration in this picture...loaded words, interpretive words....words which may not have been Jesus' intention in offering us this image. Yet other accounts offer a similar theological interpretation without words. I found this one particularly interesting...and disturbing, the more I look at it:

Bridges seem a common motif to depict "the way," whether starkly photographed or whimsically imagined:



Artists have been captured by this description of Jesus, finding a wide variety of ways to sketch and paint representations of the way:

Then there's this, a way that looks like there is within it, ironically, no way through at all:
There are some images of the way that look common enough that they could be found in our neighborhood, even in our own backyard:



And then there are some ways that take a different shape than any road or path we've ever thought about before:


As I scrolled through all of these and many more images, looking for a concept of what it might mean to think of Jesus as "way," (which can also be translated "road" or "path", in case you wondered!), I found some interesting, but none that were like, "Yes! That's it!" So my question to you is...based upon what YOU know of Jesus...if you were to photograph, draw, or depict what sort of way you think Jesus is...what might you contribute to this series of images? Which images draw you in, if any? Which appall you, if any? Is there only one way to picture this way, or many?

A picture does indeed paint a thousand words...or, in this case, at least, those ten vivid words shared by Jesus: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." May we all enter into the mysterious imagination of the fullness of what those rich words might convey and invite us into.

Does Jesus Really Know Us?

Our scripture texts this week are Acts 2:42-47, 1 Peter 2:19-25, and John 10:1-10, which you can read in full here.

The fourth Sunday in Eastertide is traditionally "Good Shepherd Sunday," a time for us to contemplate the idea of the risen Christ as "the shepherd and guardian of our souls," as Peter's epistle describes him, or as the One who calls the sheep by name and leads them out that they may find pasture, as John's Gospel describes him.

Our Wednesday night prayer and meditation group spent some time with the Gospel text last night, and though this is a text I have read innumerable times (because I find John 10:10 one of the most significant and mystifying verses in all of scripture), I was struck by something I had never been struck by before. I'm still turning it over in my head this morning, so as I shared it with the group last night I will share it now with you:

In verse 8, Jesus says, "All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them." This is in a similar vein to the claim Jesus made back in verse 5 about his sheep: "They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers." I read this last night, and alarms began to go off in my head for what now seems a ridiculously obvious reason: Um, Jesus...I don't know if you've noticed or not, but we listen to thieves and bandits constantly. We run after strangers like it's our job, if it seems like they'll lead us somewhere that will satisfy our needs. So how can you say we have not done this in the past and will not do it in the future? You claim to know us...but these two verses make me wonder if you really do.

So what is Jesus doing here? Is this the power of positive thinking? Does Jesus think that if he plants seeds of a different way in our minds, we'll begin to realize there is another way and live into his words? This makes sense for the passage about our future...but what about what he said about our past? Is this a statement of forgiveness--that Jesus is just not even going to remember that we listened to the thieves in the past, is giving us a fresh start, clean slate, new way to live?

What do you think? I really am intrigued by this. I'd encourage you to read another blog post I ran across last night that asks some of these questions at The Hardest Question, a lectionary site whose honesty I really appreciate. Then join us on Sunday as we seek to know better this Shepherd who claims to know us intimately, to figure out how to shape our futures together in a way that reflects His character in our community...no matter how wayward and misled we may have been in the past.

Wondering Again

On this third Sunday in Eastertide--the season we have been given in which to continue to celebrate the resurrection and to enter into its mystery, trying to figure out what a risen Christ means for the life we live NOW--our texts are Acts 2:36-41 (though I will be including 32 and 33, just for context), 1 Peter 1:17-23, and Luke 24:13-35. You can read them here.

A couple of months back, I wrote in a blog about the power of "wondering" questions--questions that do not have clear-cut answers but that invite us deeper into the mystery of the story. I find this week's stories full of mystery--a mysterious companion on a journey, a mysterious disappearance, mysterious languages spoken that draw a crowd that by some great mystery hears truth and joins the fellowship of Jesus' followers. So it seemed like this might be a good time to offer some more "wondering" questions about our passages.

Though I will be focusing more on the Acts readings than the Gospel readings in this Eastertide season (though, as Jeremy pointed out last week, this will be with the intention of seeing how the early church was shaped by these resurrection Gospel stories--so really we'll be reading the stories in conversation with one another!), it is Jesus' mysterious appearance in Luke that makes me wonder most this week:

• I wonder why the two travelers were headed to Emmaus. It seems like the messages from Jesus on that Easter morning were either to head to Galilee or to remain in Jerusalem...what are these folks doing heading to this random village that we know little about besides the fact that it was seven miles from Jerusalem?
• I wonder why we only learn the name of one of the disciples on the road to Emmaus...and why this is a disciple we have never heard from before, nor hear from after.
• I wonder why, even though they can tell the story of Jesus' death and resurrection with accuracy and clarity, the two on the road remain sad even as they speak what is good news.
• I wonder what Jesus said to interpret the scriptures from Moses to the prophets to the recent events in Jerusalem...wow, don't you wish we'd gotten than conversation recorded??
• I wonder why Jesus walked ahead as if he was going on...did he really intend to continue, and if so, to where? If not, I wonder why he made it look as if he was going on?
• I wonder why the two disciples were so intent on forcing him to stay...the verb used here means literally "to twist one's arm."
  
• I wonder why Jesus vanished as soon as they recognized him...and where he went!

A couple of wondering questions from Acts as well:

• I wonder what the "many other arguments" were that Peter used that brought about such an incredible change in that crowd gathered in Jerusalem, that turned them from mocking the disciples to joining their ranks?
• I wonder why it was Peter--the one who denied Jesus!--who gave this first sermon of the church, who could speak with such conviction and certainty.

As we wonder, may we find our hearts burning within us in the days to come as we consider the wonder-fullness of the resurrection story and the ways it reshapes the story we live this day.