A Sermon for Trinity Sunday
Sermon by Beth Downey Sawatzky on Psalm 8 and John 16:12
When Jamie invited me to preach some week this Summer, he sent me the full list of lectionary readings and dates to choose from. But I have to admit to you that when I sat down to work on this sermon and looked over the scriptures (which I distinctly remember hand-picking because of some exciting idea I had about them), I came up strangely blank. It was like I’d never seen them before. But all that goes to show is the scriptures, ancient as they may be, really are new every day.
Sometimes the two lectionary readings for a Sunday have obvious relationship, and drawing them into discussion together comes easily. Other times, maybe there’s an avenue of connection to explore but the beckoning of one passage is so strong, or some thread of it so timely that the choice of focus is obvious. And after all there’s always a next time.
In meditating on our passages for today, I felt at first that there was very little connection worth emphasizing between the two. And I was annoyed with the Psalm for being so beautiful, so immediately resonant--Look at the vastness of your creation Oh Lord, its incomprehensible mysteries even to outermost space! “What are human beings that you are mindful of them; mortals, that you care for them?”—and yet so problematic. “Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet…”
Now I just don’t know about that. Is it a conventional expression of the Genesis narrative concerning the relationship between human beings and God’s other creatures? Yes. Does it likely reflect Israel’s spiritual worldview at the time this Psalm was written? Yes. Today in the age of Climate Change, does it absolutely jar my preserves? You betcha.
This Psalm honestly strikes me as one of those passages that we ought now to read with extreme caution. We ought to teach it meticulously, with as much trepidation, and as many caveats and footnotes and cross-references as we now teach passages like those in Ephesians 5 and 6: Wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord, etc. Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and trembling, etc.
Obviously we do not read these passages uncritically. Obviously we don’t read them or preach them or teach them the way they often have been in the past (or at least we darn well shouldn’t), as justifications for the abuse of power over others of God’s sacred creatures. I don’t think we should teach Psalm 8 less than critically either. Nor, I must stress, is that an especially new idea particular to myself. But, in order to have brought you a fulsome, well-researched ecocritical homily—replete with Gerard Manley Hopkins, St Francis, William Faulkner, and everyone else who ought to be in there—well it would have demanded giving this passage my whole focus for the week, and I didn’t want to do that. Because our Gospel reading for this week was sort of calling to me, in a pretty direct and unnerving way. But in the end I hope my reflections on the two passages may have something to say to one another after all.
Today’s Gospel reading, this classic Pentecost passage, has Jesus laying out systematically to his disciples that the Advocate, or the Holy Spirit that will soon come to dwell with them (as Jesus had), this Spirit is as directly a part of, and an expression of Jesus, as Jesus was an expression of God the Father.
“It’s good that I’m going away,” he says to them, “because if I stayed, this limited embodiment of who God is would be all you could have. But if I go,” and he’s alluding to his coming death here, but also his resurrection—“if I go, then you will be able to experience a new manifestation of the always-vaster Yahweh.” I Am That I Am, or I Will Be As I Will Be.
“[The Advocate] will glorify me because it is from me that [they] will receive what [they] will make known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what they will make known to you.” Exactly as much as I am one with the Father, Jesus says, the Spirit (the Advocate) is one with the Father, and with me. We are all expressions of one another. Faces of the core.
At the beginning of this gospel John writes of this coequal relationship, this relationship of a single entity expressed in multiple persons, using a great deal of metaphor. (I’m not sure there is another way to talk about the Trinity, besides metaphor. Thought Lord knows there are more and less convincing ones out there. The best one I ever heard was that the Trinity is like water. Water can express itself in many ways—it can be liquid rain, it can be snow or ice, it can be steam, but it is always water.) In John’s case he calls Jesus “the Word of God,” present with God the Father from the beginning of time—one interpretation of the original Greek would be that John says The Word (Jesus) was with God in the beginning—“in the chest cavity”—of the Father. In otherwords, Jesus is the heart, or rather the heartbeat the heartspeak of God.
Then John says, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” At the start of everything, John is going to some lengths to lay out the mystical relationship of oneness that Jesus and Yahweh or God the Father (or God the Mother, if you like) share. That oneness is critical to the whole project of what John has to say. And here, when he arrives at today’s reading near the end of Jesus’ time on earth, he picks up that same theme, giving meticulous attention to Jesus’ words as Jesus explains how that relationship of oneness extends to include the new expression of Godself that the disciples are soon to experience in the Holy Spirit.
Sermons about the Holy Spirit tend, in my experience, to be pretty telling about the person who preaches them. Because the whole subject is sort of inescapably confessional. It is entirely possible to discourse about Jesus, or even the Old Testament Yahweh, in the context of the stories we read about them, without quite giving away one’s innermost personal beliefs. You can relate what the text teaches, even relate personal anecdotes as illustration, without ever really testifying, in a naked way, about how present or alive Jesus is in your day to day life, right now. What Yahweh means to you. How you experience Godself.
Not so about the Holy Spirit. In my own experience you pretty much can’t talk about that personage of God without giving away, in some measure, where you stand. Was the Holy Spirit, like Jesus of Nazareth, kind of a one-time special expression of Godself, active during the days of the early church but today basically dissipated? Is “Holy Spirit” just another name for the human conscience? Is it the force responsible for miracles, natural disasters, ESP?
I had a phone call this week with a very old friend of mine, the first in a while, in which he told me that outside of our friendship, he wasn’t sure he had ever experienced unconditional love. That, on the whole, unconditional love was a subject with which he felt ill acquainted, and that it seemed to him something like a miracle or a superpower. An exceptional occurrence.
That conversation really threw me. It’s not so much that I was surprised to hear him say it…but it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Because you see I grew up outrageously privileged. In many ways but in this way most of all: I grew up in the teaching and the example, the consistent vivid example from two parents, that all true love is Unconditional. That God is Love, pure, total, 1 Corinthians 13 unconquerable, always wins, unconditional love; and that that Divine love is the lifeforce of everything in the cosmos. It's the law that makes our cells work and spins the stars around and that can and will set every broken thing right somehow in the end. I grew up being taught that the pursuit of an ever-truer understanding of, and practise of unconditional love was the object of our earthly lives. Not to mention the straightest way to becoming most wholly ourselves. It is through loving as God loves that we discover who and what we really are. That’s what I was taught.
Now growing up I often heard it tossed around that to become a parent is, by default, to feel and understand, to be made capable of unconditional love. I’d go so far as to say I’ve heard it suggested, one way or another, that parental love is the most unconditional love human beings can experience—although usually there are some caveats or reservations about, so long as it’s biological parenthood. “Wait till you have your own,” people say, “then you’ll understand.” Anyway, while I think I do understand why these things are said, or implied, I am old enough now to know that they are simply not true. Isaiah 49:15 says “Can a mother forget the babe at her breast, or have no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you.”
That I, of course, is the voice of Yahweh.
As I read it… As I have experienced it, through the people who have loved me and through a variety of other sorts of events… the Holy Spirit is the mystical, living, active suffusion, the indwelling throughout all Creation, of everything Jesus embodied. God’s love. God’s justice. God’s creativity. The Holy Spirit—exclusively—is the absolute source and spark of Unconditional Love. So that as 1st John says, “Anyone who loves knows God and is in God, but whoever does not love does not know God.” I might suggest, “whoever does not love does not yet, or does not in this moment, know God.”
To experience the Holy Spirit—that source and spark of Unconditional Love—it can be transcendent. The kind of thing that flattens you or lifts you almost out of your skin, or submerges you for a time in mysterious encounter. But it can also be so earthy. Quiet, gentle, infused in moments or interactions so small and so normal they’re almost luminescent in their ordinariness.
From the vantage point I have such as it is, at 28 years old, I do think that unconditional love here in this world is rarer than I had previously realized. Rare and terrible, and even more important than any of us can ever imagine. And perhaps as my friend suggested it is supernatural, but I contend still that it is at the same time fundamentally natural. Like everything else, I suppose, the truth is replete with paradox. Unconditional love is a grace: not something we do—at least never at first—only something we submit to, something we receive and then to transmit to others. It is grueling and effortless at the same time. A daily discipline but also, not even a choice. To learn it is to feel and to find our way home.
Within ourselves, with the land, with each other—human and non-human creatures--and perhaps most ultimately in death. I don’t know for sure. But Pentecost makes me think.
Amen.
