I’ve done a lot of work in interfaith dialogue, speaking candidly and openly with believers from other faith traditions. And one of the questions about Christianity that comes up most often from other monotheists (people who believe there’s just one God), especially Muslims and Jews, is “Could you explain the Trinity to me? It sounds so crazy, I must be missing something. Please, make it make sense.”
And imagine it from their perspective. Here’s this religion that firmly insists that it is a monotheistic religion—ONE GOD, not many—and yet they pray to and worship what looks to the rest of us to be THREE DIFFERENT GODS. The Creator God of Abraham we’re all most familiar with, and then Jesus, who was a flesh-and-blood human being, and then this third “person,” the Holy Spirit, who’s a little harder to define, but who shows up in various places as whispers in the night, or blowing winds, or descending doves, or tongues of fire, or the still, small voice within. That is a little confusing to people outside of the Church and, if we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s also a little confusing to some of us inside the Church. But I actually think trying to square the circle here is a bit of distraction. The mistake I think that we make over and over again as Christians is trying to intellectually define and understand the unchanging, eternal nature of what God is, who God is, what God has always been. There have been so many books and creeds written trying to diagram how it is that God is both one and three at the same time, and where the three persons come from, and how they relate, etc. etc. In some ways, all these attempts remind me of medieval bestiaries. In the old bestiary, you’d have an entry for a rhinoceros, but reading the entry it was clear that the author had never seen a rhinoceros, nor even met anyone who’d ever seen one firsthand. It was all hearsay, and legend, and imagination that bore very little resemblance to the actual animal—like a weird game of zoological telephone. The important thing about the Trinity is not to categorize God or exhaust God through explanation. It’s not important that it’s logical, or consistent, or inoffensive, or exactly as we have traditionally described it, the important thing about the Trinity is what it tells us that God is doing in our lives and in our world. This is a fascinating aspect of this to me. It is really hard to overestimate the shift in religious and spiritual consciousness that occurred when Jesus’ disciples (who were traditional “one equals one” monotheists) began to realize for the first time in human history that their understanding of God’s nature was holding back their ability to live into what God was showing them and doing among them. Jesus’ resurrection shifted the consciousness of the disciples from “God can only be this one thing” to “God can be more than one thing?! God can be God and Jesus at the same time?!” And eventually this seismic shift in consciousness was rounded out at Pentecost with a trinitarian understanding of God. This was a revolution in the making. God is doing something new with us and for all intents and purposes it looks to us from our perspective that God is changing. This idea that God could at once be unified and diverse and that our understanding of God should not be based on what has defined God intellectually in the past but should be based on what defines God in our experience right here and right now, this idea began to spread over the decades and centuries to the wider Greek and Roman culture. And the world freaked out and spent a lot of time and energy trying to put the genie back in the bottle, trying to convince everyone that, in fact, God hadn’t changed and that God had always been a Trinity and always would be a Trinity. And this carefully described and contained Trinitarian doctrine became the new intellectual knowledge and belief that everyone would be indoctrinated into, which undermines, at the very least, the experience of the total, ecstatic, wild and mysterious revelation that the disciples were offering to all of Western culture and beyond—as our experience of God grows, God seems to grow with us. As we evolve, God seems to evolve with us. The heretical implication, what all the creeds and diagrams and dogmas are trying to arrest here, is that as we continue to experience our faith, as we continue to grow, as we continue to evolve, God will also continue to grow, to respond, to evolve, and to change for and with us. Our understandings of God, by definition, will always be incomplete. Jesus was a unique person—a person who embodied in his life, in his ministry, in his teachings and healing, in his relationships, the potential for this shift in God consciousness within all of us. Jesus taught us that God in our loving Father, shifting us away from royal, kingly metaphors for God. A king sits on a throne, somewhere in a palace far away, far removed from ordinary people by orders of magnitude. But a parent lives with you in your own house. A parent is not just a distant symbol of order, a parent is close to you. You can know your parent personally. And as we discover, as we grow up, as we lose our parents to distance and age and death, your parent lives on intimately inside of you. And this is exactly where Jesus tells us to look for God and the “Kingdom” of Heaven—within us. And if God’s Realm is within us, then we, as Paul said in our reading this morning, “are being transformed into God’s image” from within, from the Spirit. And if God is within us, then as we change, then so too does God. This is not to say that we define God. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s God who is defining us, but in the process of defining us, God is also responding to us, growing with us. It's the Holy Spirit now who represents this inner reality, this dynamic and intimate connection with the divine. The Spirit is not some abstract concept or distant third wheel in the Trinity. The Spirit is the living presence of God moving within us, changing us, evolving with us. So, what would I say today to our interfaith friends asking me to make sense of the Trinity for them? I'd tell them the Trinity isn't some theological puzzle in need of solving, but a living, evolving relationship that must be experienced to be believed. The Trinity is proof that we can't put God into a box of our own definition and understanding. God will always be breaking open our boxes. And the Trinity, as we have traditionally defined it, is proof that we’re always going to do our best to stick God back in the box, once God has gotten out. But thank God, that is truly a hopeless endeavor. It may give us stability and security for a time as we adjust to the new thing that God is doing among us, but eventually, there will always be another new thing, there will always be another level, there will always be a greater consciousness. The Trinity as I understand it, is a narrative of change. God the creator was up in Heaven. But God decided to come down to earth and enter human existence in the person of Jesus. Jesus departed this earthly life for heaven, but showed us that heaven is no longer above us, it is within us. And from that inner relationship, we Christians experience the Holy Spirit transforming us from within and responding to our own growth and change and love and compassion. And as we change, and as we change the world around us, God too grows, evolves, stretches out with us to meet a new horizon, a new hope, a new way. So, to my interfaith friends, and to my Christian friends, too, I would say: The Trinity is a profound reminder that God is with us every step of the way, not a distant or static being, but a fluid, evolving presence that breathes change into the very essence of our lives and in turn, is changed along with us.
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Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong would often tell a story about the Ascension and the world-famous astrophysicist Carl Sagan. According to Spong, while he was at a conference once, Sagan approached him and asked him, “Do you know what the Ascension would have looked like to an astrophysicist?” Spong replied, “You know, I’ve never really considered it. What would the Ascension have looked like to an astrophysicist?” And Sagan tells him, “If 2000 years ago, Jesus had left the earth traveling at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), he still wouldn’t even have escaped our galaxy yet—and there are billions and billions of galaxies!”
For Bishop Spong, famously a very liberal reformer, this story was an illustration of the problem of taking our scriptures too literally. Did Jesus really literally physically fly off to heaven? If so, then according to Carl Sagan and Jack Spong, he’s still got a really long way to go. If Jesus didn’t go to outer space, where did he go? Where actually is heaven, anyway? Now we don’t have to go as far as the Enlightenment and science to find reason not to take the story of the Ascension too literally. Because even the Biblical text itself seems to advise us to hold onto this story with open hands and to try to let it breathe a little bit. There are actually two versions of this story. The first version is the final story in the Gospel of Luke. And the second version (which we read this morning) is the first story in the Book of Acts. And while both versions see Jesus floating off to heaven, other than that they’re very different tales. You wouldn’t know—believe it or not!—that they were written by the very same person (let’s just follow tradition and call him Luke). In a court of law, if you want to establish credibility and convince people of the truth of your story, you need to be consistent, right? If the details of your story change, that’s an indication that there’s something wrong with your memory or your honesty. But that doesn’t concern Luke. The last page of Volume One and the first page of Volume Two contain two different versions of the same story. The first version is a conclusion of Jesus’ earthly ministry, the removal of the human God, Jesus, from center stage; the second version is the beginning of our earthly ministry, the introduction of the Spirit God, the Holy Spirit, to the stage. Luke, without trying to hide what he was doing, without any worry that people would think it was funny, fully confident that he was playing by the rules of the game, changes the story to suit his purposes in each book. Luke is telling us: Jesus’ Ascension is not about a trip to outer space. Jesus’ Ascension is an encounter in our inner space. Like most miracles, the objective outer experience is less important than the subjective, inner effect it has upon those who are witnesses to it. So, naturally, the details of the story and the interpretation of the story change as our inner perspective changes. This is a double rejection of materialism. It rejects the materialist view that religion can’t be true because the physical details are impossible. And it rejects the fundamentalist view that the spiritual truth of religion can only be true if the physical details are facts. Both perspectives were utterly alien to Luke when he was writing. Something amazing happened! Let’s not get stuck on the pesky little details. Let’s talk about what this means! As if on cue, in the Acts version of the Ascension we read this morning, two new characters show up. Luke calls them men in white robes; you might call them angels. And they have a somewhat weird message. While Jesus is being carried away by a cloud, they ask the disciples, “Why are you just standing there looking up into heaven? Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” Even the angels are speaking strangely. It almost seems like they’re chastising the disciples a little bit for standing around and gawking. But it’s strange to do that while Jesus is flying away on a cloud. And it’s all the more strange to chastise them for looking up while admitting that Jesus will return the same way he left. I can only conclude that Jesus’ exit from this earth was a mysterious one and that his return to the earth will not be on a cloud from some physical heaven somewhere up above us but will be made manifest instead in this world through a spiritual process that cannot be accomplished merely by looking to heaven for answers or waiting for the inevitable apocalypse to come. I agree with Carl Sagan: Jesus’ Ascension was not a trip to outer space. It couldn’t have been a trip to outer space because heaven is not up in the sky. Now in the original Greek of Luke and Acts, there weren’t two different words for sky and for heaven. It was just the same word. The story of the Ascension acknowledges that linguistic limitation—that the world had not yet separated the idea of heaven from the idea of sky. In the cosmology of everybody everywhere at that time, heaven was UP. But the two angels enter this second version of the Ascension story to begin to challenge that connection. Why are you looking UP to heaven when heaven is not really UP? Jesus is not a trip to outer space, he’s on a journey to inner space, to source of everything, because as he literally told you, the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. And so if Jesus is to return to us, he won’t return from the sky you experienced him departing to, he will return from the Kingdom of Heaven that you make manifest within you and that you together express into the world around you. That is how Jesus will return—he will return from within you. As Jesus says in the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” Astrophysicists look up in the sky and they seek out the origins of the universe. And they’ve traced it back so far to “the Big Bang”: a singularity that exploded and stretched into the entire expanding cosmos. And that’s great. I love that stuff. I have no problem with looking up at that story. When astronomers say, “We’ve looked 46.6 billion light years away and still no heaven!” I can only agree with them, and it doesn’t cause me any concern whatsoever. Because I know there’s another direction we can go. We can look up for the origins of the cosmos, but to discover the source from which the cosmos arises and returns, to find the Alpha and the Omega of all life and all creation, to truly encounter and experience God in this body, we must travel within. But Christianity is not a religion of individual inner experience alone. It’s a religion of community, togetherness, fellowship, love, mission, forgiveness, transforming the world for the better. So, this is the story so far: God the creator is up in Heaven. But God decides to come down to earth and become the human Jesus. Jesus departs the earth for the heaven no longer above us but within us. And from that inner experience, we Christians express the Kingdom of Heaven into the world through the power of God, now within and among us as the Holy Spirit. And for those of you who want to hear more, I’ll pick up from here on Trinity Sunday in two weeks. For now, Beloved, just know that it’s true. Jesus is not moving at the speed of light through space. He’s moving at the speed of our faith and at the speed of our expression through all of us. Don’t look up. Look within, look to another, and then act together. And as miraculously as he departed, Jesus will come again. Right around the time we were setting the date for Church Music Sunday, Pam was digging around in the church archives and she pulled out an interesting piece of church history. It’s the first edition of The Church Window, the magazine of the Glen Ridge Congregational Church, published in May 1930. And one of the articles is entitled Is Singing Wicked?
Now, don’t worry, even in 1930 the answer to this question in our church was already a foregone conclusion, so the author, John Tasker Howard, who was a prominent music historian, was asking the question somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But he was right, in a sense, about needing to ask the question because he understood that the Christian Church’s relationship to music throughout history and right up to the present day has been full of disputes and controversy. So, this morning I’m going to follow his lead. On this Church Music Sunday, I want to know IS singing wicked? Is it? What are the arguments that support the contention that singing is wicked? (Other than a quick glance over my shoulder at the choir—you don’t look that angelic if you don’t have something to hide!) But if we decide that singing isn’t wicked, what does our tradition’s occasional mistrust of music tell us about the power of music? And what does the power of music tell us (we who love church music) about what we believe about God? We don’t know much about music in the early Church. We know that for Gentile Christians, they were trying to separate themselves from the world, and music was a part of the world—their old lives. It was associated with pagan ceremonies, theater, drama, and all kinds of sinful passions. Despite this we know that early Christians were singing together and offering spontaneous solos, but they did it without any kind of instrumentation. Singing was tolerated as long as it wasn’t accompanied. Even the chanting of the Psalms was controversial because the Psalms refer to musical instruments. There are all kinds of things in the Bible that might make you squirm, but some of the first Christians just couldn’t handle the mention of musical instruments, which shows just how strongly they felt about the potential for worldly music to be a bad influence. In the Middle Ages the Catholic and Orthodox churches developed chants as the central form of liturgical music. Again, no instruments. But the singing being done in church was now standardized into a specific form and carefully controlled. No more spontaneous solos. The chanting we’re most familiar with in the West is Gregorian Chant. Chants are austere without being easy to sing. They could only be sung by someone with training. They weren’t sung by the congregation. So, they were a cautious embrace of singing. In traditions that were very concerned with hierarchy and with controlling the access of the people to all things holy, the control of music tells us that they understood that music was a direct connection to the Divine that needed to therefore be tightly controlled. So, so far we have music as dangerous because it’s too worldly and music as dangerous because it can connect us directly to God. The danger of music can go both ways. Now with the Protestant Reformation came another split in opinion about music. The Lutherans loved music. They believed that music was a gift of God and an incredibly powerful tool for spreading the Gospel message. Lutheranism developed all kinds of congregational hymns and choral singing. Our church music program today would not exist if it weren’t for the Lutherans. On the other side of the equation were the Calvinists. The Pilgrims and Puritans (who eventually became the Congregationalists) were Calvinists. The Pilgrims had congregational singing but they only sang the Psalms and other pieces of scripture. No instruments. No musical notation. And they didn’t even try to make the Psalms singable. You just sang them straight out of the Bible without any kind of rhyme or meter to make it a more pleasant experience. Since tunes were passed down orally, they were slightly different in every congregation, and when different churches came together to worship as a larger group the sound was particularly terrible. That’s very fortunate for us, because it turns out that even the Puritans came to believe that bad singing is more wicked than good singing. They decided they needed a Psalm Book with translations that were singable and tunes that were standardized. And that led down the slippery slope to the pianos and organs and choirs and anthems and hymns and artistic expression and even (gulp) the clapping that have become a part of our church’s music program. So, is singing wicked? No, singing in church is a form of devotion and music connects us directly to God. Earlier generations worried that if the music and the singing were too good, they would distract us from worship. This led on the one hand to very beautiful, but very controlled (almost professional) chants. And on the other hand, to very accessible but very bad congregational singing. If you want music that is really accessible and really good, you need what our church music program provides: You need instruments, you need art, you need to teach everyone to sing and read music and play instruments, and (while you’re allowed to have musical tastes) you shouldn’t be overly concerned with the appropriateness of particular style of “worldly” music making its way into sacred music. Rev. James Cleveland, one of the greatest gospel musicians of all time, explained this to the crowd during the recording of Aretha Franklin’s live gospel album Amazing Grace. He said that it was OK to perform secular music in church because what you sing is only half the equation. The more important part, in fact, is “who you sing it to.” What we’ve come to believe in our church music program is that good music is not a hindrance to worshiping God. The better the music, the deeper the devotion, the higher the praise. That’s what we believe about the power of music. This also tells us something about the God we believe in. Our music connects us to God because it reflects God in a profound way: Our music program is full of talent, creativity, diversity, and harmony. Talent is wonderful thing because the gifts of talent come to us directly from our creator and are inspired and sustained by God’s Holy Spirit. When we express our talents in singing and music, we become an expression of the Holy Spirit among us. We become an expression of God. Our God is a creator God, who is always making something new. Our creativity in music and performance is a testament to who God is and to what God is doing in the world. Our music program teaches and performs music from a variety of cultures and backgrounds and styles, both sacred and secular, because our God is the God who is everywhere, who made and celebrated the great diversity of the heavens and the earth and human beings too. And when we make music, when we sing, when we pray, we make it sound good, because our God is a God of harmony and beauty, so our greatest devotion in art to God is to make our art really good art, not as a distraction from God, but as an expression of and a testament to who God truly is. Beloved, singing is far from wicked; it’s divine. As we continue to embrace and grow our church music program, let’s remember that music offers us a unique and profound way to experience and express our faith. Let us sing, then, not just with our voices, but (as we read from Ephesians this morning) with our hearts, with our souls, celebrating the God who has given us the gift of music. Because when we sing good, when we play good, we affirm that our God is good—a God of beauty, creativity, and endless love, whose presence is magnified in every note we sing, in every melody we play. So, let the Church sing—knowing that in every note, God is with us. |
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