The God of Love, Relationship, and Mystery Exodus 3:1-6, Psalm 93, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-16 Trinity Sunday, Year B, June 15, 2003 The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi Those of you who have been to our home have met or probably at least seen Diane's cat, Calli. I guess I should explain why she's Diane's cat and not our cat. First, Diane adopted Calli from her hairdresser with my reluctant acquiescence. Second, Calli and I have what one might call a toleration-relationship: as long as I don't have to clean the litter box and she doesn't keep me awake, I tolerate her; as long I don't interfere with her lap time with Diane, she tolerates me. Finally, Calli's welcoming behavior eliminates any doubt. Knowing the sound of each our cars, if Diane is home when I drive up, Calli stays where she is. If I am home, and Diane drives up, Calli paces at the top of the stairs offering Diane an enthusiastic welcome home. If neither of us is home, when Calli hears the car, she sits at the top of the stairs. If Diane is with me, Calli offers her exuberant welcome. If Diane is not with me, Calli gives a look that says, "Oh, it just you." and then returns to whatever she was doing. Despite this mutual toleration-relationship, Calli offers me insight in how we humans understand and relate to God. You see, Calli has never experienced the outdoors. In Vicksburg, she only had a couple of windows that from the top of furniture she had a limited view of the street or tree tops. Here Diane has arranged a chair in the dinning room and one in the breakfast room from which Calli has unobstructed views of the outside world. Starting in the spring, we began leaving the door open to our back deck which is too high for her jump and has no steps. From her chairs and from the deck, Calli experiences what she understands as the "rest of the world." A bird comes to the feeder to entertain her. Occasionally a squirrel sits just outside the window causing her to quiver with excitement. However, being out in the rest of the world is a different story altogether. Calli in her braver moments dashes out open doors. As soon as she is in the yard, she becomes terrified. She either flees under the house cowering in the security of the dark, or she gets under a bush, shaking in terror but refuses to be taken back inside. So how does Calli offer insight into human relations to God? Her behavior exemplifies what theologians refer to as mysterium tremendum - a simultaneous compelling desire to want to experience the wonder of God and the terror when confronted with God's awesomeness. Last week, Pentecost Sunday, Elizabeth in her sermon invited us to better understand God the Holy Spirit. Today, and, yes, today is Father's Day, and no, we're not going to focus on God the Father, because today is also Trinity Sunday, and invites us to think about God, to experience with Calli the mysterium tremendum as we ponder the awesomeness of the God we worship. It would seem that we should be doing this thinking about God all the time, but there is not a lot of evidence inside or outside the church that many of us really do that. This fact can, and perhaps should, cause us some anxiety, worry, or fear. The Trinity is at the very heart of Christian self-understanding: one God in three Persons: Father, Son, Holy Spirit - coeternally and coequally God; not three Gods; not three modes of God. However, the Trinity doctrine is a logic buster. Why do we need a God with three names? How can God be both three and one? Many have tried to offer simple metaphors of what the Trinity is like: apples (cut in half to reveal three parts: skin, fruit, core), water (the three phases of ice, liquid, and steam), a Three Musketeers bar (a blend of caramel, nuggets, and chocolate and, you know: all for one and one for all). But these attempts all fall far short of the Trinity, not just because they provide pale analogies, but because they shift our focus from what the Trinity is all about: God as Love, God as relationship, God as mystery. Even theologians who can answer all the technical questions of the orthodox doctrines do so in ways most of us do not fully understand. They are like some of my seminary classmates whom I describe as getting excited debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Just as an academic lecture on the psychological aspects of a marriage doesn't make one want to run out and get married, neither does a sterile academic definition of the Trinity endear us to the God of love, relationship and mystery. We probably would be better off if we left that whole subject alone, but if you have ever lain on you back looking up at a summer nights's sky full of stars then you know how hard that is to do. When we humans try to describe God we are like Calli trying to describe the world via her chair in front of the dining room window. We simply do not have the equipment to understand something so utterly beyond us, but that has not stopped us from trying. The best any of us has ever been able to do is describe what the experience of God is like - how it sounds, how it feels, what it reminds us of. Whether the experience originates in the pages of scripture or in the events of our lives, the best any of us has ever been able to do is simply confess what it is like when we are in the presence of God. The problem is that it is rarely the same experience twice in a row. Some days God comes as a lawgiver and judge, walking through our lives exposing all the messes we have made. Other days God comes as shepherd, finding us when lost and feeding us by hand. Some days God comes as a wind breathed over us, assuring us that all will be OK. So who is this God Yahweh, this I Am Who I Am, who spoke to Moses out of a burning bush, this God that we heard in today's Gospel and whom we frequently encounter just behind the goal posts at professional football games, this God who Paul says adopts us so that we too becomes heirs of this God, this God whom the Psalmist claims has established the world? Even our doctrinal names for God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit do not tell us who God is or how all this works, but only what it is like to experience God. While meant to portray that God is like a father who loves, provides and protects, the type of father we envision as we celebrate Father's Day, for some the exclusiveness of the gender language proves difficult and for others this is not their fatherly experience. A few weeks ago, Paul Ruffin in his Sunday column shared an experience of a hunting trip with his father who, after brutally kicking their aged pet dog because she was too tired to continue treeing squirrels, he aimed his last shotgun blast into her side, leaving her dying as Paul, his brother and his father made their way back to their truck. For some, God as father does not relay the understanding envisioned by Jesus when he taught us to pray "Our Father in Heaven. John Polkinghorn, quantum physicist and Anglican priest says, "Science tell us the how; theology tells us the why." If we don't take scripture or religion too literally, then we come to understand the Triune God as God of love, relationship, and mystery. Scientists tell us the how of the beginning - a force great enough to reduce density to a point where matter could move out in all directions resulting in the universe that we dimly see around us. Christianity tells us the why - this force greater than the immeasurable density of the matter that existed in that first trillionth of a second of creation, this God of relationship loved out of nothing all creation. This God breathed his own breath into that which she had created This God most profoundly revealed this essence of love in the Paschal Mystery. This God who is above all and beyond all, mystery inaccessible, also comes to us in specific time and space, making the invisible God visible by squeezing the divine essence into humanity, in Christ Jesus, to be like us, with us, for us. When this God had loved us literally to death, rather than leave us without an earthly presence, this God of love who had first breathed life into humanity then breathed the breath of the indwelling of God, the Holy Spirit, to ever draw us to godliness. Created in God's image means that we are created for love and relationship as well. We become whole persons only in relationship to one another and to God. For this reason, God keeps reaching out to us, revealing God to us in ways we can comprehend, without overwhelming us. Unlike Calli who must dart out the open door to more fully experience the larger world, God always takes the initiative. However, we stay so busy (no, let me take ownership and not accuse anyone else) I stay so busy sometimes I wonder if I would even see the burning bush until I was scorched by it. Though we too often ignore their significance, God in Trinity establishes communion with us for all time and eternity in the Sacrament of Baptism, the outward and visible sign that all of us, though irreducibly unique, exist together as equal partners in Christ in a relationship of mutual love, and in the Eucharist we gather week after week to "join our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven" to reaffirm our belief that God is eternally present with us, for us, by us, and in us as we are lovingly fed at the table. How we speak of God is much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Yet, when put together, we have no fierce God and loving one, no God of the Old Testament and another of the New. When we experience God in contradictory ways, it is we who have put the puzzle together wrong and not God. We cannot solve it by dissecting God as we would a frog in a junior high biology class (I guess junior high students still do so). F rom the very beginning of the church, from the very beginning of the writings of the Hebrew people, perhaps from the very beginning of time itself, people have made every effort to know and be able to describe this great and sacred mystery of God's love for us. All we can do is to decide whether or not to open ourselves up to a God whose freedom and imagination boggle our minds. None of our language for God is absolute and determinative of precisely and totally who God is. Please know this. Just as Calli remains brave watching birds entertain her on the feed, too often our images of God are of a predictable God, one who expects little of us. However, even our best attempts to describe, name, quantify, or qualify God are just that: our best attempts. Whatever terminology I use - Ground of Being; God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier; Father, Son, Spirit; Mother, Daughter, Wisdom, Higher Power - I always encounter the one God whose one-ness transcends my language. The good news is this one God loves the world beyond any human analogy and is deeply involved in the most ungodly realities of this world and in the crises and drudgery of our daily lives without ceasing to be God. We are not called to understand the Trinity but to open ourselves to the love of this mysterious relationship. Until we do, we will never understand. The Triune God is closer to us than our next breath and continues to penetrate all creation as a kind of primordial "hum" which we can almost hear when we are quiet enough. We have a choice, like Calli slinking under the house when she experiences the mass expanse of the greater world, or like Nicodemus sneaking to Jesus in the security of darkness and fearing being transformed, we can hide under our false securities, or we can answer the call of the Triune God and, like Moses, take off our sandals, stand on holy ground and make ourselves vulnerable to all the suffering, all the wonders, all the joys that come with being united to the eternal source of unity, love and mystery. Thanks be to God!!