Month: May 2009

We are coming up on Trinity Sunday in a few weeks.  At least in our tradition, Trinity Sunday is one of those days that experienced preachers try to palm off onto seminarians.  How on earth is one supposed to make sense of the Trinity in fifteen minutes?  How does one comprehend the incomprehensible?  Yet Trinitarian is what we are: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that’s how we understand who God is.  Most Christians take that so much for granted that the underlying doctrine seldom comes up.  It’s just part of who we are and how we think of God.  To others, it’s just plain nonsense.  

Muslim acquaintences complain that there is no way we Christians can avoid talking about three gods, and the idea that God Almighty might deign to take on the mantle of human nature is repulsive beyond words.  Several rabbi friends have allowed that they can wrap their heads around Messiah, even if they are certain we have the wrong one, but the personification of the Holy Spirit is what defies comprehension.  Most individual Christians seem inclined to go with one of the three as their personal favorite but not all three as one.  Just because some of us recite the Nicene Creed each Sunday does not lead to understanding.  Let’s be truthful, the idea of the Trinity doesn’t make much sense in any ordinary way regardless of what Augustine wrote.   

Nevertheless, we Christians afirm that God is one yet present to us in the persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  It’s not a doctrine articulated in scripture, but there are signs.  If we cannot comprehend, we can at least apprehend.  For instance, in Jesus we can see and experience all of God that can be seen or experienced in human form.  Having said that, I don’t very much care how that might get explained through some early church argument about the true nature of Christ.  It’s enough for me to know that God is uniquely and fully present in Jesus, and that Jesus freely expressed his relationship with God as one of father and son.  I don’t think he meant that metaphorically.  I think he meant that in the same way that my father lives in me as much as my mother lives in me, not as memories but as the reality of my genetic being.  

God’s Spirit, however it might be defined, is presented to us in scripture from the very begining as something that has tactile reality in the lives of people.  Abraham, Moses, David and the prophets all experienced that presence in very physical ways.  The record is clear that God has been and is now with us without the need of corpreality.  What is different for us as Christians is the outpouring of that Spiritual presence flooding over and into the lives of many and not just a few.  Just as I am unwilling to engage in an argument about the nature of Christ with third and fourth century church fathers, I am also unwilling to engage in argument with those who demand demonstrations of signs and gifts of the Spirit as evidence of true belief.  God is not bound by their standards, and neither am I.  

The point is that we Christians have come to understand and experience God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit in very important and particular ways.  This we know.  How God might be experienced or known in other ways, this we do not know.  We have neither warrant nor ability to put boundaries around God.  Having said that, we are also bold to claim the sure and certain truth about God that is given to us through the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  That means that however else God might be made known to humanity must have some consistency with what we believe to have been made surely and certainly known through them.

As for me, I tend to think of God as God. I hardly ever think of God as Father.  I find God most fully illuminated in Jesus and never tire of probing deeper into how he lived and what he said in a life bracketed by a miraculous birth and bodily resurrection from the grave, but I don’t often speak of Jesus as God.  God’s Holy Spirit is a reality in my life, but one I can frequently take far too much for granted, and I’ve always been skeptical of those who claim particular gifts of the Spirit as their own.  No doubt there is a serious heresy in there somewhere.

None of this is intended to nail down the Trinity in a few blog paragraphs.  It’s only intended to open a path for conversation.

Credit card companies are much in the news these days.  The administration is trying to talk them into redressing some of the most blatant consumer abuses, but I suspect that the cudgel of legislation will be needed in the end.  Over the last few days we have had our own little experience with one of them.  American Express, it seems, is interested in customer service only if there is some profit in it for them.  Otherwise it is impossible to get through to anyone who can do something other than read from a script.  That script, always written in helpful tones, has only one purpose, and that is to justify and defend whatever it is that American Express chooses to do.  In our case it was not a very serious matter, but it illuminated for us what it must mean for those whose lives are seriously impacted by a corporate ethos that, regardless of what the ads say, cares very little about ordinary consumers.  I will readily acknowledge that I have had extraordinarily fine customer service from other credit card companies, notably Bank of America Visa, so I don’t want to paint an entire industry with one brush.  

At the same time, I’ve done a little Internet probing on the websites of companies whose products or services we have in our home and have found several fairly common threads.  One is that locating how to contact customer service is not always easy.  It’s always there but sometimes buried in places requiring some diligent searching.  Likewise the ‘contact us’ tabs frequently lead to a large variety of FAQ dead ends through which one has to wend one’s way in order to get to phone numbers or e-mail addresses that may or may not provide an avenue for satisfying contact.  The point is that many consmer product and service corporate sites are deliberately set up to give the illusion of customer care while well contrived to repel and defend against the consumer, who seems to be treated more like the enemy at the gate.  In fact, it is all but impossible to use a corporate website to find out who the top executives are or how to contact them.

I wonder if the current economic environment combined with public unrest at he level of ordinary citizen will force any change.  As it is, some part of the far right hysteria aimed at protecting American free enterprise against the onslaught of Socialism appears to be a well crafted and coporate backed strategy to block any change they are not willing to ‘voluntarily’ adopt as vaugue promises of some future corrective action.   Oddly enough, they have been quite succesful in recruiting entusiastic pawns from among the ranks of those most abused by their power.  Go figure! 

We too seldom study or enjoy the books of the Apocrypha, and it deprives us of some worthy counsel.  I thought of that this morning while reading the portion of the Wisdom of Solomon shown below.  It reminded me of some friends so stuck in a Newtonian universe that they simply will not admit to any event that cannot be explained by the ordinary standards of cause and effect as they understand them.  At the same time, I’ve read a few pieces by respected scientists who admit that they are awed by the mysterious fecundity of nature but are unable to atribute it to anything other than random chance as a first cause.  They are, I believe, still stuck with Newton in a way.  Chance and randomness are, after all, just additional forms of cause and effect that can be measured, analysed and, in some ways, predicted.  Maybe it’s just that nobody wants to get tagged as a creationist out of what, fear maybe?

Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to scientist theologians such as John Polkinghorne who are not out to prove anything, but just want to rejoice in the delight of seeing God’s hand at work in so many new, wonderful and mysterious ways.  For them, and for me, questions such as Intelligent Design are all but irrelevant.  Whatever evolutionary forces may be at work, and whatever moments of random good luck may happen, are but brief sparkles in the life of the universe that amaze and delight us.  Whatever new knowledge we gain is, in truth, not much more that a timid wading up to our ankles in the gentle surf on the shores of an eternal ocean of unknowable depth.

For your reading pleasure, an excerpt from Wisdom:

For all people who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature; and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know the one who exists, nor did they recognize the artisan while paying heed to his works; but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air, or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water, or the luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world. If through delight in the beauty of these things people assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them. And if people were amazed at their power and working, let them perceive from them how much more powerful is the one who formed them. For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator. Yet these people are little to be blamed, for perhaps they go astray while seeking God and desiring to find him. For while they live among his works, they keep searching, and they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful. Yet again, not even they are to be excused; for if they had the power to know so much that they could investigate the world, how did they fail to find sooner the Lord of these things? (Wisdom 13.1-9)

We are coming up on a part of the Christian year that I like very much.  We will be reminded that Jesus gave his followers a new commandment, to love one another as he loved us.  Soon after will come his post resurrection departure and the outflowing/inflowing of the Holy Spirit.  The church will then enter into a long season of immersing itself in the gospel stories for the primary purpose of learning more deeply how it was that Jesus loved us and how we might apply those lessons to our own lives.  

There are many commentaries on each book in the bible, and more than a few historical or archeological tomes explaining their times and people.  But have you ever wondered how a particular book was received by those first readers?  Take the gospels for instance.   You can read any number of explanations about who the writers probably were, something about their intended audience, and more than a little about their imputed theology, but what was the impact of their first publication?

I figure that Luke, more than the other three, was tremendously controversial.  I imagine that his first readers were both scandalized and mesmerized.  It must have been the sort of book they had to hide under the mattress so that others wouldn’t see it, just as I hid From Here to Eternity under mine, and I’m sure that you had something hidden under your mattress also.  The other gospels certainly sniff around the edges of the social scandal with their casts of prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners of various kinds, but Luke dives with lusty delight into a life with Jesus who seemed to know every sinner up close and personal and was enthusiastically willing to violate every social norm and barrier he came across.  It’s hard to imagine a religious leader, much less the Son of God, having such low standards of propriety considering the crowd he hung around with. 

I imagine that early readers of Luke’s gospel must have read it in disbelieving awe that lured them into a sense of freedom and fulness of life they never new existed, and I imagine that many new Lukan Christians appeared to others as unrepentant rebels who had no respect for traditional standards of morality.  They certainly couldn’t fit into traditional Jewish ways, nor were they very acceptable in Hellenistic communities.  Who knows what the Romans thought.  I also imagine that it was this very new found freedom from traditional social constraints that could have led them astray.  Failing to integrate the teachings of Jesus about a higher righteousness into their thinking and practice, they could easily have become first century versions of Haight-Ashbury hippies.  Perhaps that is what Paul’s many admonitions and correctives are all about, and maybe that’s why the pastoral letters are so intent on restoring some of the discipliine of traditional mores.  

The point is that it’s very hard for our modern eyes to read Luke, or any of the gospels, with a full appreciation of how radical they were and how accurate were the words of the Pharisees when they accused the early Christians of turning the world upside down.   Time and again, the adults in my bible studies have considered these words with teary eyed sentimentalism that, I believe, deprives them of the full power of Christ reaching out to us in our own day and time.

So what do you think?

Today is the National Day of Prayer.  Over the years I have been to many National Day of Prayer assemblies and have always been struck by two things.  First, they generally seemed to be a gathering to worship The United States of America with a thin patina of God talk to make it look like prayer.  Second, most of those in attendance were assertively self-satisfied with all of it.  As the years went by I also noticed that, at least in the gatherings I attended, it began to take on a very conservative, almost fundamentalist, political and theological flavor that I found quite repulsive.  And so, on this National Day of Prayer I will not be attending our local event but will meditate instead on Psalm 115 and pray that the leaders of our nation may be guided in the ways of justice and truth. 

I’m going to present a little one hour (maybe longer) introduction to ethics for my firefighters on Friday, and again on Monday and Tuesday to cover all shifts.  It’s a subject I once taught, at a very basic level, but it’s been more than a few years ago.  To freshen my mind and memory, I dug into a pile of old notebooks to discover an unfinished book length manuscript I wrote in 1991 on the subject of ethics for association executives.  I was surprised to find myself reading it as if it had been written by someone else and really liking it.  I wonder why I never finished it?  My guess is I figured no one would ever want to read it so why bother.  I don’t think that’s just my problem.  I bet there are a lot of us who have done, are doing or could do some really good work, but never bring it to completion out of fear, and fear is what it is.  It’s fear of rejection, of being unqualified, of not being as good as we think we are, of humiliation.