John 16:12-15
The trinity is so hard to explain. Yet on this Sunday we seem to want to box it up and present it to our congregations. All nice and neat, and there it's done for another year. It's not that easy though, or that precise. Trying to explain the trinity is like trying to catch water in your hands and hold it. Didn't you try that as a child? To scoop up a big bunch and hold it, and all it does is flow through your fingers.
Maybe this is why we are still in John's great discourse. The last words Jesus says to the disciples and yet it is like trying to grasp water some weeks. Last week especially, I am in the Father, the Father is in me and I in you and then I'll send another. By the end we've lost track of whose in what and we wonder if we'll ever fully understand the other. Then today, today Jesus wants us to understand there are other things which are too hard to bear that he can't explain. I thought we were already there? Isn't that much like the trinity though?
Our best efforts can't explain it, it gets all foggy and then to explain what the trinity does by assigning it something for each person only confuses it further because the trinity never plays by the rules we make for it anyway. It's like trying to understand the meaning of life, or how the fireflies now communicate through their blinking. What it does to is open to us mystery. John's gospel does this for us if you have ever attempted to sit down and read this full discourse in it's entirety. Through that you will find it opens up mystery, especially if you stop trying to understand it and pigeon-hole it.
Calling stories certainly highlight this, even today. When I was a chaplain for the Husson College students a Muslim young man came to me one day. He was concerned about how to communicate to his family this wonderful calling which had been placed on his life. He had gone to a speaker panel on interfaith dialogue and he knew God had called him to this work. Working with other faiths, gaining understanding and cultivating relationships beyond our barriers. This is not a work his parents agreed with though. You're supposed to get a great paying job and make more money for a family, to contribute to projects like this, but how would he support himself. For him God had opened up the mystery of faith. Now he was trying to get his parents to understand that mystery as well. They couldn't bear it.
In Youth Specialties magazine there were sometimes articles about this with young people who were involved in youth ministries. The youth leader would write in about a young person's call to a ministry and how the parents wouldn't understand it and then go to the youth leader and ask why they had lead their son or daughter to this dangerous conclusion, why had they been led astray. This is what happens when we can fully engage mystery.
Sometimes it comes as the still small voice nagging us in some way about something that needs to change in us. Or maybe its some belief we have clung to most of our lives and we are being asked to consider if it must change. See I don't believe it's just one arm of the trinity which does this. It's the whole grouping, the whole oneness, united. It drives home what needs to change, what we are called to, what we are doing, believing, creating and it comes through all arms. Taking hold of us and not wanting to let go until we have one day realized something new and different coming to life within us.
So the trinity is not something we can tame by explaining it and laying it safely within the confines of understanding. The trinity is not some dead tame thing. It is more like water slipping through our hands which flows forth on a journey we never see. It takes us and reminds us when we need to open the mystery of our faith. The mystery of divine love come to live among us and explain it to us in this cryptic language of John. Showing us words cannot contain this mystery and maybe this us the best we can hope for.
The trinity is so hard to explain. Yet on this Sunday we seem to want to box it up and present it to our congregations. All nice and neat, and there it's done for another year. It's not that easy though, or that precise. Trying to explain the trinity is like trying to catch water in your hands and hold it. Didn't you try that as a child? To scoop up a big bunch and hold it, and all it does is flow through your fingers.
Maybe this is why we are still in John's great discourse. The last words Jesus says to the disciples and yet it is like trying to grasp water some weeks. Last week especially, I am in the Father, the Father is in me and I in you and then I'll send another. By the end we've lost track of whose in what and we wonder if we'll ever fully understand the other. Then today, today Jesus wants us to understand there are other things which are too hard to bear that he can't explain. I thought we were already there? Isn't that much like the trinity though?
Our best efforts can't explain it, it gets all foggy and then to explain what the trinity does by assigning it something for each person only confuses it further because the trinity never plays by the rules we make for it anyway. It's like trying to understand the meaning of life, or how the fireflies now communicate through their blinking. What it does to is open to us mystery. John's gospel does this for us if you have ever attempted to sit down and read this full discourse in it's entirety. Through that you will find it opens up mystery, especially if you stop trying to understand it and pigeon-hole it.
Calling stories certainly highlight this, even today. When I was a chaplain for the Husson College students a Muslim young man came to me one day. He was concerned about how to communicate to his family this wonderful calling which had been placed on his life. He had gone to a speaker panel on interfaith dialogue and he knew God had called him to this work. Working with other faiths, gaining understanding and cultivating relationships beyond our barriers. This is not a work his parents agreed with though. You're supposed to get a great paying job and make more money for a family, to contribute to projects like this, but how would he support himself. For him God had opened up the mystery of faith. Now he was trying to get his parents to understand that mystery as well. They couldn't bear it.
In Youth Specialties magazine there were sometimes articles about this with young people who were involved in youth ministries. The youth leader would write in about a young person's call to a ministry and how the parents wouldn't understand it and then go to the youth leader and ask why they had lead their son or daughter to this dangerous conclusion, why had they been led astray. This is what happens when we can fully engage mystery.
Sometimes it comes as the still small voice nagging us in some way about something that needs to change in us. Or maybe its some belief we have clung to most of our lives and we are being asked to consider if it must change. See I don't believe it's just one arm of the trinity which does this. It's the whole grouping, the whole oneness, united. It drives home what needs to change, what we are called to, what we are doing, believing, creating and it comes through all arms. Taking hold of us and not wanting to let go until we have one day realized something new and different coming to life within us.
So the trinity is not something we can tame by explaining it and laying it safely within the confines of understanding. The trinity is not some dead tame thing. It is more like water slipping through our hands which flows forth on a journey we never see. It takes us and reminds us when we need to open the mystery of our faith. The mystery of divine love come to live among us and explain it to us in this cryptic language of John. Showing us words cannot contain this mystery and maybe this us the best we can hope for.
Comments
Post a Comment