Divine Calculus June 3, 2012 Trinity Sunday, Year B Isaiah 6.1-8

1 + 1 + 1 = 3, but 1 X 1 X 1 = 1

            And that is about as close as we are likely to get to making mathematical sense of the doctrine of the Trinity.

            Isaiah, however, has other things on his mind than making the sums work out correctly. “Woe is me, for I am ruined!” When perfect relationship meets sinful individualism, when triple-holiness meets utter uncleanness, when the Word meets garbled speech, bad things happen.

            “There comes a moment,” chuckles C. S. Lewis, “when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God’!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?”

Isaiah formulated no Doctrine of the Trinity; he reported what he experienced. The heat of a holy God, too hot for angels to handle barehanded, so sears his speech that his mouth pours forth incomprehensible riddles of reigning kings and suffering servants in patterns so arabesque that it takes a risen Christ the whole road to Emmaus to unravel them. (Lk 24.12f) He prophesies a theology never twisted but so artfully intertwined that a bewildered bureaucrat must halt his procession and call a dusty deacon into the back seat of his official limo to trace its path from Eden to Gethsemane. (Acts 8.25f)

The truth of Trinity does not arise from speculation but descends from revelation. It busts up logical logjams and breaks open linear prisons. God does not demand, “Here I am! Explain me!” but instead invites, “Here I am! Enjoy me!” For the point of the Trinity is not calculation but relationship: the Truth that lies at the core of reality is an ongoing dance of love.

And in the end, God offers Isaiah a set of steps in this great dance: "Here am I. Send me!” With bowed and bewildered heads, with burnt lips and burning hearts, we go forth understanding less than we know but loving more than we understand, to tell the world of the God who saves.

Welcome to the New Math,

Doug

Watch Your Language! May 27, 2012 Pentecost/Whitsunday, Year B: Acts 2.1-21

            Every two weeks a language dies.

            The National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages report that extinction threatens roughly half of the planet's seven thousand distinct tongues. As globalism and technology expand cultural interaction, bully-languages like English, Spanish, and Russian crowd out Magati Ke and Yawuru in Australia and Siletz Dee-ni in Oregon.

            The miracle of Pentecost is not that everyone spoke the same language, but that everyone heard the Gospel in his native language.

            Words aren’t just names for things; they shape us. An old story records that Frederick the Great (or James V of Scottland or Psamtik I of Egypt) kept two infants in isolation and forbade their nurses to talk to them so that he could see what language they would speak and thus discover the very roots of speech. They both died.

            When the Holy Spirit blitzkriegs the disciple band God does not zap their audience with some apostolic Esperanto so that a homogenized homily can celebrate sameness. Instead, the Lord conforms the speech of the preachers to fit the hearts of the hearers. “How is it that we each hear them in our own language to which we were born?” No infant believer should ever perish from a lack of the Lord’s praise in her own tongue.

            In Revelation 14.6 John beholds a barnstorming angel who streaks across the skies with a commission to preach the gospel to every tribe and tongue. If even one speaker of each of Australia’s two hundred and thirty one languages remains alive, she will hear the Good News in the code of her deepest heart.

            Maybe the true miracle of Pentecost is not that everyone could understand the church, but that the church learned to understand everyone. And maybe Whitsunday teaches us that the ideal flow of faith is not from the world into the church, but the other way ‘round. And maybe if the Spirit doesn’t miraculously wrap our tongues around the irregular verbs of a foreign dialect, the Spirit will instead wrap our hearts around the people who speak it.

Say What?

Doug

Grace Notes from the Second Fiddle May 20, 2012 Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year B Acts 1.17-26

            I recently received a coveted speaking invitation. I know it is coveted because I’m the one who did the coveting. The person who offered me the gig mentioned casually that they had booked another preacher but the deal somehow fell through. Perhaps I should feel insulted that I was not their first-round draft pick. In fact, I’m secretly glad the A-lister got the swine flu, or whatever.

            It’s a good idea to remember that nobody – least of all God – really needs us. If the Lord could use Balaam’s ass to preach down revival, all ministry must be grace.

            Matthias doesn’t have much going for him. He didn’t make the cut for the starting twelve. There is no Epistle of Matthias. He doesn’t show up again anywhere else in the Bible. Muddled tradition even mixes up his name and says he was either stoned and beheaded in Jerusalem or crucified by Ethiopian cannibals. His only claim to fame is that he rolled a seven in the ultimate ecclesiastical crap-shoot.

            But he was one of the men that have accompanied us from Jesus’ baptism to the resurrection. Matthias’ only real virtue was location, location, and location.

            Christian leadership does not rest in charisma, IQ or EQ, but in a life spent in the presence of Christ. The cautionary tale of Judas warns us that secular leadership in a sacred place can be a gut-wrenching experience. “Don’t count on the world to teach you leadership,” Brother Jonathan warns Harry Farra’s character the Little Monk. “Its goals are bankrupt.” Judas knew his way around a balance sheet and how to cut deals in back room politics, but he left Jesus two days too soon.

            Matthias came off the bench to bear witness to what he had seen. The understudy got the part mostly because the costume fit. The church let him in because the apostolic egg crate was one grade-A shy of a round dozen. He drew the high card in a random cut of the deck and got a job that Joseph could have done just as well. And he will eat and drink at the head table in the Kingdom, and will sit on one of the twelve thrones and judge the tribes of Israel. (Lk 22.30)

            If our talents are short, let our time with Our Lord be long. If our part is small, let our love of Christ be large. If our ministry bears much fruit, let us remember that another could have done it just as well.

Sweet Notes from the Second String,

Doug

BFF’s May 13, 2012 Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B John 15.9-17

            In his final words to his disciples, Jesus sets up a sneaky and rather sickening syllogism. Major premise: You are My friends. How wonderful! But then the Lord lands the sucker-punch. Minor premise: You did not choose Me but I chose you implies the uncomfortable downside that nor did we choose each other. Conclusion: This I command you, that you love one another. Apparently, friendship with Christ includes a call to friendship with other Christians - all of them. An old proverb has it that you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your relatives. Christians, however, can’t even choose their friends.

            As Charles Ryder, the fictional narrator of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, heads off for his first year at Oxford, his cousin Jasper gives him some sage advice: “You’ll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first.” This snake-skin shedding of outgrown pals is so common that the psychologists have given it a name: socioemotional selectivity theory. Like the chambered nautilus, we wall off outgrown acquaintances, sentencing them to solitary confinement in the sealed-off cells of our inattention.  

You are My friends. . . .You did not choose Me but I chose you. . . . This I command you, that you love one another.

Along with clarifying the external boundaries of friendship, Jesus defines the internal qualities: availability and vulnerability, both of which he demonstrates.

Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends. Calvary says that my life belongs to Christ who meets me in my friend. Laying down my whole life includes the trickier proposition of laying out my daily life in discrete parcels of seconds and dollars and deeds and words.

I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you. We shut out slaves from our vulnerable selves because you never know when the help might go blabbing to some tell-all biographer. Jesus didn’t dazzle the disciples with solutions to theological mysteries; he let them see his sweat-soaked humanity in the Garden of Gethsemane. Christian friendship demands the kind of honest living that shatters my marble façade and tells my sisters and brothers who I really am.

You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your relatives. Christians, however, can’t even choose their friends. To paraphrase Proverbs 18.24, When Facebook friendships are only a click away, un-friending is just as easy, but Christ calls us to a friendship that runs deeper than family.

Friends Don’t Let Friends Go Friendless,

Doug