Danbury United
Methodist Church
Pastor Karen Karpow
Trinity Sunday
May 30, 2010
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Pray
also for me, so that when I speak, a message may be given to me to
make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel. Ephesians 6.19
V V V
Today is
Trinity Sunday, an important holy day of the church. It’s not like most of the other holidays, when we focus on
an event in the life of Jesus or of the church. Trinity Sunday is about a doctrine of the church—one of our
teachings. But before we get into
that, let me tell you a story.
Moses,
Jesus, and an old man are playing golf.
Moses drives a long one, which lands on the fairway but rolls directly
toward the pond. Moses raises his
club, parts the water, and the ball rolls safely to the other side.
Jesus also
hits a long one toward the same pond, but just as it’s about to land in the
center, it hovers above the surface.
Jesus casually walks out on the pond and chips it onto the green.
The old
man’s drive hits a fence and bounces out onto the street, where it caroms off
an oncoming truck and back onto the fairway. It’s headed directly for the pond, but it lands on a lily
pad, where a frog sees it and snatches it into his mouth. An eagle swoops down, grabs the frog,
and flies away. As the eagle and
frog pass over the green, the frog drops the ball, and it lands in the cup for
a hole-in-one.
Moses
turns to Jesus and says, “I hate playing with your dad.”
Trinity means
three of something. Who or what is
the Trinity, anyway? Not Jesus,
Moses, and the old man. It’s
Jesus, God whom Jesus calls “Father”… and who is the third? That’s right—the Holy Spirit. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.
The Trinity is
a challenging concept to understand.
Christians believe in One God, the same God that Jews and Muslims
believe in. But we believe that
this One God is known to us in three Persons. This is not three separate individuals, and not three
different costumes for one being—both of those ideas were declared heretical
centuries ago. Somehow, we
believe, this One God is made up of three selves, all God, and all in
relationship to each other.
Of the three,
the Holy Spirit seems to give people the most trouble. God the Father and Jesus the Son seem
to be easier to get a grasp on.
But the Holy Spirit—what is that, exactly?
Whenever we
talk about God, we rely on metaphors, and when we talk about the Holy Spirit,
the metaphors diverge widely. Who
here has read The Shack? In this book, God the Father appears as a big black woman named
Papa, with Jesus as kind of a middle-aged Middle-Eastern hippie. And the Spirit, named Sarayu, is a
wispy, flitty Asian woman.
Other popular fiction depicts the Spirit kind of the way popular culture
imagines a ghost—there, but see-through, not tangible, and gone in the blink of
an eye.
The New
Testament gives us a couple of other images for the Spirit. One is from last week, the day of
Pentecost. Before he goes to the
cross, Jesus tells his disciples that he is leaving, but he will send them the
Holy Spirit to teach and guide and comfort them. Jesus says,
I will ask the Father, and he will give you another
Advocate, to be with you forever. (John 14.16)
Before his
death, Jesus promises his followers that God will be present with them always,
in a new way. After his death and
resurrection, as he is preparing to return to heaven, the last thing Jesus
tells his followers is to wait in Jerusalem until they receive this presence.
And see, I am sending upon you what my Father
promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from
on high. (Luke 24.49)
And ten days
later, whoosh! What happens on
Pentecost? That’s right—the Holy
Spirit comes to the church as a rushing wind and tongues of flame, bringing
gifts of power and spirit, like praying and preaching and even speaking in
languages the disciples don’t even know.
So, one thing the Spirit is like is wind and flame, uncontrollable,
warming, cleansing, necessary, and very powerful. That is one image the New Testament gives us for the Spirit.
The Spirit is
also present at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. In this instance, the Spirit is like a dove, seen descending
on Jesus when he comes up out from the water at his baptism, as his Father
proclaims,
You
are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.
(Mark 1.11)
At this moment,
all three persons of the Trinity are present—Jesus being baptized, the Father
speaking, and the Spirit descending upon Jesus. I had always thought of this as a rather gentle image for
the Spirit, until Friday morning.
I was walking into the parsonage, past the garden patch where the
strawberries are ripening.
Suddenly a dove exploded from the ground, flapping in my very startled
face. (Now I guess I know how some
of the strawberries got big holes in them.) So another thing the Spirit is like is a bird—riding the
wind, rising and descending, resting and nesting and bursting out unexpectedly.
In today’s
scripture we have another image of the Spirit, in Proverbs chapter 8. Here she is a woman, named Wisdom, or
Sophia. How do we know this is the
Holy Spirit? She tells us who she
is and where she comes from.
22 The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
23 Ages ago I was set
up,
at the first, before the beginning of
the earth.
This correlates
with what we learn in the very first sentence of the Hebrew Scriptures, in the
book of Genesis:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and
the earth,2 the earth was a formless void and
darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the
face of the waters.
(Genesis
1.1-2)
The word
translated “wind from God” is ruach, which means breath, wind—and Spirit. Hebrew has only one word for all three. The Spirit of God hovered over the
watery chaos, present at and participating in God’s creation. She was not simply a witness; she was a
master worker, co-creating with God the Creator. She tells us,
27 When he established the
heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of
the deep,
28 when he made firm the
skies above,
when he established the fountains of
the deep,
29 when he assigned to
the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress
his command,
when he marked out the foundations of
the earth,
30 then
I was beside him, like a master worker…
Wisdom’s fingerprints are
all over creation. Just as a
trained eye can see the architect in the building, hear the composer in the
music, so we can see Wisdom in what she has created and is creating. Look outside. What can we learn about the Spirit, and about God, from what
we see? Look at the trees. It seems that God delights in beauty,
and order, and diversity. Look at
those clouds—it seems that God is always moving. Albert Einstein’s quest to discover how the world really
works—the general theory of relativity—was fueled by a desire to penetrate the
mystery that is the mind of The Lord.
He called nature “manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most
radiant beauty.”
So we can learn
about Spirit by looking at what she has made. We can also listen to what she says. She seems quite bold to me.
Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her
voice?
2 On the heights, beside
the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand;
3 beside the gates in
front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she
cries out:
4 “To you, O people, I
call,
and my cry is to all that live.
Where is Wisdom
found? Not in the old musty book
in the back of the library. Not in
some secret chamber accessed with a code word and an insiders’ handshake or the
recitation of an ancient text. No,
Wisdom is out there on the street corner.
And not just any street corner, either. Not the corner by the church that she approves of. Wisdom stands by the gate to the town,
at the spot where nobody can get in without seeing and hearing her. Everyone goes through the gate. She calls to everyone.
Wisdom speaks,
and she has a lot to say. You can
read the whole book of Proverbs if you want to hear more from her lips. But Wisdom speaks in other places as
well—not only here in the scriptures, where she is quoted. She is in us. We all have wisdom.
We all have Spirit. Jesus
promised to send her, and she is here.
What does it
mean to be wise? I think it’s not
so much about what you know, but about how you are. Wise people know a lot, it’s true—but they also understand a
lot. They take the long view. They know when to be patient, and when
something must not be tolerated, when to be gentle and when to be firm. We can listen to Wisdom in ourselves
and each other. With practice, we
can get better at hearing her voice.
But Wisdom has other
characteristics that might surprise you.
Sometimes I think that a wise Spirit would be completely disgusted with
me for being such a dope so often.
But that is not the case.
She is full of joy and delight.
She speaks of the great fun she has with God the Creator:
…I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
31 rejoicing in his
inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.
Wisdom is not dour drudgery, but joyous laughter, dance, and
play. And Wisdom rejoices in
us! We do not worship a stingy God
who grudgingly doles out gifts and grumpily forgives us. The triune God is a joyous, dancing God
who pours out overflowing love, with gladness.
In Ridgefield,
there is a statue that used to stand out in front of the Stop and Shop. When they remodeled, it ended up around
on the side, by Kohl’s—you can go see it.
It is three huge bronze figures, dancing in a circle. They are holding hands, and it is
impossible to see where one ends and the next begins. They are moving, always moving, each making room for the
others. I don’t know what the
sculptor intended, but to me it looks like God. Spirit is there, dancing—dancing for joy and love and hope
and grace.
We are invited
to join that dance. Watch for your
invitation this week. It may drift
in with the trill of a bird’s song, or be extended toward you in the hand of
someone who needs your help—or the hand of someone offering help you have not
even admitted that you need. It
may arrive as a flash of light, with the realization that no matter how foolish
or frightened we are, we are not abandoned. Spirit does not give up on us. She doesn’t solve all our problems, or make our trials go
away—but she makes it possible for us to keep going—even to keep dancing.
The invitation
to dance may come when you think you are too tired to move a muscle…and then
you hear an irresistible song, feel God’s delight, and see such beauty that you
just cannot stay still another moment.
Join the dance.
Proverbs
8:1-4, 22-31
Does not
wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?
2
On the heights, beside the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand;
3
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
4
“To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that
live.
22
The Lord created me at the
beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
23
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
24
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
25
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth—
26
when he had not yet made earth and fields,
or the world’s first bits of soil.
27
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
28
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
29
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
30
then I was beside him, like a master
worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
31
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.