June 24, 2012

The 4th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 7

The Rev. Jo Miller

Greetings on this beautiful June morning. You may want to keep Psalm 107 in mind as well as the Gospel reading for this morning. There is an interesting parallel to the two readings.

For several years while I was working in Bandon I participated with the Bandon Ministerial Association at the Blessing of the Fleet.  This would be the fishing fleet and all the casual fishermen who cross the bar into the huge Pacific Ocean.

This meant boarding a Coast Guard Cutter and going out across the mouth of the Coquille River where we would say prayers for those lost at sea, prayers for those who ply their trade in the water, and prayers for the families. Wreaths would be tossed into the pulsating waves. For all the years Ted and I lived in Reedsport, walked the docks of Winchester Bay, played on the Dunes, I never got on a boat to go across the bar of the Umpqua River.

The young men of the Bandon Coast Guard gave us life jackets,  placed us in secure places on the cutter and gave us a ride. As we crossed the bar the waves mounted up to heaven, they went down to the depths, my courage melted away as I hung tight to a railing. I felt as though I reeled and staggered like a drunkard. The cutter idled twenty to thirty yards passed the mouth. We were out there oh maybe 15 min.  That was long enough for this landlubber. I don't watch the TV program the biggest or deadliest catch either. It makes my stomach queasy.

Much of Psalm 107 is left out, it skips over the other woes – not mentioned are the homeless who are without food and water, the prisoners, and the sick. We are commanded to give thanks to the Lord for he is good and his steadfast love endures forever. This love in Hebrew is call hesed. It does not lend itself to an easy one word translation. Steadfast love is a good try but as some commentators put it,  "It seems tame compared to the determined, unrelenting love of God that will not let go.

Jesus makes reference to having faith in this unrelenting love. In the Gospel of Mark we will hear and read Jesus saying "oh you of little faith, or have you still no faith." And yes if our faith was the size of a mustard seed oh the things we could accomplish for the good of human kind.

BUT.....and it is that really big but than can hang over so much of our life. So many of us Christians or Moslems, or Hindi would rather cling to our tight religious doctrines, dogmas, and institutional cannons because they feel safer, more secure, more controllable than faith.

As we heard earlier this month in Mark a number of the Pharisees and Scribes were already fearing a power coming from Jesus. Their religiosity took over. They had the power to insist on the law and so they did. However, writings from rabbis of the time indicate that many did not hold so rigidly to many of the Sabbath regulations. For the Pharisees it was about control and power.

We do not like to feel out of control and powerless. It causes fear and fear is the way those who have power can control others. 

The men in the boat with Jesus felt fear. The waves were beginning to sink the boat. Their fear was legitimate.  I use to think that they should not have responded the way they did to the storm and waves. Most of them were fishermen who understood how to manage boats in storms. That was until I went across the bar in Bandon and felt the power of five to six foot swells. I have looked at the story differently.   I have also read commentaries on the psalm 107 which helped me widen my vision.

The narrative describes a violent storm at sea. The magnitude of the rolling waves and the ship is emphasized by the distance they travel through the swells; up to heaven and down to the depths. They were not six foot swells. The experienced sailors are helpless. Their seafaring skills fail; they are left to flounder. None of their attempts to save the ship can bring it under control, so they cry out to the Lord. Immediately, the Lord rescues them and made the storm a whisper.

In our very modern age of science and reason we are often buffeted by the wild waves of controversies, fears of the chaotic world economies, and the earth's strange and frightful changes in climate and weather. A tornado was spotted near Venice Italy, unheard of.

Where do we go now??. .The hard truth is that fearsome things are very real: isolation, pain, illness, meaninglessness, rejection. Jesus did not say to his disciples who, as the Greek says, experienced Hobos megas (geat fear). Jesus did not say, "There is nothing to be afraid of."  Rather he asks, "Why are you afraid?" We can often give many good reasons why we are afraid. Mostly we feel we are alone in our storm tossed boat and that the God of the Universe is not with us and does not care. These are very real feelings of Hobos megas.

The disciples were not alone in their storm tossed boat and neither are we. Faith can teach us that even though there are real and fearsome things in this life, they need not paralyze us, they need not have dominion over us, they need not own us, because we are not alone. A community of faith means we are a phone call away from a reassuring voice. We are a person away from a reassuring hug. Even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death we are not alone. Faith sends the comforter, faith asks for healing, faith is a mystery that gives us courage, strength, and hope. Hold tight to the railing.

June 17, 2012, Third Sunday after Pentecost

June 17, 2012

Third Sunday after Pentecost, Year B (Proper 6)

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

            Well, there is nothing like a week in Manhattan to make one appreciate the quiet of Eugene and the vast open spaces of the American West.  Goodness.  I was back East at an amazing roundtable discussion convened by the Bishop of New York on the intersection of food, farming and faith.  It was quite a gathering, a couple of prominent bishops, executive chef of a fancy New York restaurant, three radical nuns (one Roman Catholic and two of ours), a suite of academics working in bioethics, Christian social ethics and theology, some folks from the national church and a couple of local farmers.  I was kind of in between the academics, the farmers and the priests; definitely the coolest place to be.  We did not really “do” anything.  We produced no mission statement, no next-steps, not even a next meeting is planned yet, but it was one of the most productive days and a half I have had in recent memory.  We talked about the state of agriculture, of the uncertain future of family farms, and of rural communities.  We spoke of food, and how we eat in this country and why and how churches’ relationship with food are so potent.  And we spoke about faith.  How the creation is the first revelation of God, how God calls us to serve and how religious communities can be a force for truth and righteousness as well as a center of compassion and nurture.  It was a good week.  Thank you for the time to go and participate in a national conversation like this. And it is great, that after spending a few days thinking deeply about the earth and farming and the condition of the Creation that we find ourselves in the midst of some of St. Mark’s seed parables…

            “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.  The Earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.  But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”

            These parables are so fabulous because we can make so much meaning from them.  The traditional interpretation of this parable is that the development and revelation of the kingdom of God is neither obvious nor controllable.  Seeds are planted, they grow, we “know not how,” and then it comes time for harvest.  The vocation of followers of Christ is sowing, propagating the Gospel, the word and work of God, not, as one theologian writes, to “provoke the harvest (for that happens ‘of itself).”  That is backed up by the parable that follows this one, the mustard seed.  Such a teeny-tiny seed, yet from it such great things happen.  It makes for, “the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in the shade.”  Our work, the little tiny bits of God’s work, the day in/day out kindnesses, compassions, supports and loves we do, and the monumental efforts, terrible risks and plain old martyrdoms we face striving for justice, all of that works collectively we “know not how,” moving us ever closer to the kingdom.  Each act, no matter how small, is at least a baby step towards the kingdom.  And that’s good.  That’s the Gospel, Amen. 

            But coming home from this conference with my farmer hat not all the way hung up in the closet, that interpretation bothers me slightly.  I have yet to know a plant that you can sow, and sleep and rise, night and day, go about your business and one day, poof – it is ready to harvest.  (The possible exception is tomatillos).  It makes me think of the parable of talents where the poorest of slaves tells the master that he reaps where he did not sow, and gathers where he scattered no seed.  Yes, in the parable seeds are scattered but no effort is exerted.  Does anyone have a garden like that?  You plant and then a couple of months later you harvest?  No.  Of course not.  Gardens, farms do not work that way.  It takes work, hard work to grow things, right?  Well, maybe…

            One of the things we talked about at the conference was this very issue.  And we spoke about it through the work of one of the most important agriculturalists of the 20^th century, a Japanese plant pathologist names Masanobu Fukuoka.  His book, The One-Straw Revolution, described what he called “Do nothing” farming.  In light of Mark 4:26-34, we could call it parabolic farming.  Fukuoka grew buckwheat, rice and Mandarin oranges on his ancestral farm in Japan.  What he observed was that plants know what to do.  A buckwheat plant is the only organism that knows how to make buckwheat.  A rice plant rice, a Mandarin orange tree Mandarin oranges.  And when left to their own devices they will do just fine.  The problem is, that a Mandarin Orange tree’s idea of doing just fine might not agree with our desires and needs, so we need to come to some compromise.  So what Fukuoka spent his life doing was trying to facilitate the conditions that these plants evolved to thrive in, because if we honor the true nature of the tree and satisfy its needs, it will produce beautifully, even though we “know not how.”

            A metaphor that I use is that I cannot make a tomato.

Don’t get me wrong, Windy and I used to grow tomatoes.  A lot of them.  In our last season at the monastery farm we had something like 200 heirloom tomato plants that produced 400ish lbs/week at the height of August.  We were pretty good at heirloom tomatoes, growing big fat, get-all-over-everything-in-the-kitchen juicy ones, Brandywine and Pruden’s Purple.  Fabulous.  We were good at growing them but truthfully, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make a tomato.  My body doesn’t work that way, my DNA does not code those proteins.  My will in not divine enough.  No one is that good at chemistry to confect food from nothingness (we’ll just skip over the unnatural nativity story of Twinkies).  But, following the wisdom of Fukuoka-san, what we can do is make things possible for that tomato plant to be the best it can be, the most tomatoey it can be.  We can create the conditions for those plants to do the work they have been given to do by God with a bit of human encouragement, which is of course to make tomatoes.  How does a tomato plant do it?  We “know not how,” but we do know what conditions tomato plants evolved to thrive in and about that, there is quite a bit we can do.

            We need to respect the treeness of trees; the tomatoness of tomatoes.  I heard Joel Salatin speak a couple of years ago, he’s the famous farmer from Omnivore’s Dilemma, and he talked about giant agribusiness’ lack of respect for life, particularly in regards to the horrible conditions of commercial livestock production in CAFOs, (concentrated animal feeding operations).  And he asked, “if Smithfield (the largest pork producer in the world) won’t respect the pigness of a pig, why do we expect them to respect the Jimness of Jim or the Maryness of Mary?”  That is a good question and the answer quite obviously is that they do not.  They do not respect the nature of pigs and nor do they respect the nature of people, be it their employees or neighbors, nor us, the eaters of these animals.

This is where the whole idea of the path of least resistance comes from.  If we let things be the way they are supposed to be, it is going to be OK, it is going to work out.  If we let pigs be like pigs, let them live like pigs are supposed to live, we’ll have happy and healthy animals who yield sustainable and nourishing pork or who just live good piggy lives.  If we let a tomato plant be a tomato plant, we’ll have tomatoes.  Juicers.  Mr. Fukuoka let his Mandarin orange trees be Mandarin orange trees, lo and behold, he had massive yields of what we would now call nutrient dense Mandarin oranges. 

            The same is true with the kingdom of God.  What is it, this Kingdom of God?  I don’t know, I guess it is like if you scatter seed and then one day, Whoa!  Look at all this grain.  You know the kingdom is here because you know it when you see it.  The kingdom of God is revealed when things are as they are supposed to be.  It is the world when people are who they were born to be; where plants grow as they evolved to grow; where love flourishes where it is meant to flourish, that is in the being of every creaturely thing that was, is and is to come.  We, human beings, are blessed with the uncanny ability to do two things; we innately know, really know deep in our hearts how things are supposed to be, how good food really tastes, what meaningful work really is, what true love and genuine happiness really feels like.  And we also have the ability to deceive ourselves, to convince ourselves that McDonald’s food tastes good and doesn’t make us feel sick, when in fact it doesn’t and it does.  We can convince ourselves that we are satisfied with our jobs, when we are bored.  That we are healthy when we are sick, that we are happy when we are miserable, that things are OK at home when they are not.  Our charge is to recognize the world and our place in it for what it is, and with fear and trembling be what we need to be in relation to our God and our neighbor.  That is what the kingdom of God looks like.  That and a garden full of tomatoes in August.  AMEN

             

June 17, 2012 Occupy Sermon

June 17, 2012

Year B, Proper 6

Occupy 

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

Mustard seeds… I had a Christian social ethics professor who talked about revolution and social change. She was pretty revolutionary herself, a black, lesbian Baptist preacher now in an endowed chair at Yale.  She taught about mustard seeds in a class called the “Political economy of Misery.”  She taught that the biggest threat to revolution, to radical change in society, to movements striving for justice was the expectation of spectacle.  “Don’t expect spectacle,” she would say.  She meant exactly what Jesus meant in today’s Gospel. 

If we expect every march to be a million x strong; if we expect if we expect every training to be brilliant and draw a hundred converts to the cause; if we expect every reasonable and good hearted person who hears the truth we speak and teach and live and hope for to understand what you are talking about, we are going to be disappointed, disheartened, and even defeated.

Expect mustard seeds.  Mustard seeds are steps to the kingdom of God.  Each conversation is what counts; that is the victory.  Each glimmer of hope that is sown is a blessing.  Each mind opened, made even a teeny-tiny bit more aware of the moral corruption and structural violence of late stage free market capitalism, the closer we are to the promised land.

Expect mustard seeds… sow mustard seeds.  This is our charge.  This is what Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ taught His disciples. Curiously, this is what Gautama Siddhartha, the Lord Buddha taught his, too.  Sow mustard seeds in your lives with others, in your work for justice, in your struggle against tyranny of all forms.  We are all here people of faith. Faith in God, or some teaching or practice, we have faith in humanity or that the moral curvature of the universe does bend towards justice or simply faith that things must be, that things CAN be better than they are.  In this and every merry band of people of faith, sowing the day in/day out seeds of peace and change, of revolution and justice making, not expecting spectacle but doing what needs to be done, change will come because, duh, God is on our side.  AMEM

June 10, 2012, The Second Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 5

June 10, 2012

Year B, Proper 5

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

            “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin....”

I love it when Jesus gets all fired up.  And here, today, we are at the climax of the first act of Jesus’ life as told by St. Mark.  Or as Ched Meyers, a noted Catholic Bible scholar calls it, the climax of Jesus’ “first direct action campaign.”

            Mark is fantastic.  He starts out bang – bang – bang.  Jesus is baptized by John, starts calling disciples, and begins healing and preaching.  His popularity grew and soon throngs of people crowded around Him wherever he went and whenever He taught.  (Remember the paralytic being lowered through the ceiling because they could not get to the door?  That is in Mark 2.  He was popular.)  His popularity was such that the Pharisees, here called the “Scribes” had gotten wind of Him, and came to challenge Him; first about eating while others fasted, then for healing the man with the withered hand in the Synagogue on the Sabbath.  After that healing the text reads, “the Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.”  Right off the bat, the pressure was on, and rising.

            So in this heightened state of anxiety, Jesus makes his way home and we are in our passage for today.  First, his family comes.  They had heard people saying that he had “gone out of his mind,” and they wanted him to come home.  Imagine if your son or sister or cousin, whatever, went from being a mild-mannered, I don’t know, carpenter maybe, to being the messianic leader of an apocalyptic anti-imperial cult?  The end is near, repent and believe.  There were a lot of these guys running around at that time, messianic figures, prophets and holy men, revolutionaries (like Barabbas).  We might appreciate their words and admire their leadership, but no one wants to be related to a religious wacko or a revolutionary.  It messes up family systems.  I can imagine His family saying, “For God’s sake, please come home with us before you get yourself in real trouble.”

            Then the Pharisees come…  The stakes get higher.  And they accuse him of being possessed, a grave accusation because it never works out well for those accused of demonic anything.  This climax reveals the truly revolutionary Jesus.  The non-compliant Jesus.  The breaker of convention.  The bringer of things new.  With political acumen that is the envy of Karl Rove, Jesus turned everything on its head.  Attack the strength, right?  Isn’t that the Rovian way? At the end of this first act, two strengths were apparent that stood in the way of Jesus fulfilling his vocation: family and Temple.

It was a kinship society.  Everything was based upon family and familial networks of relationships. Your ability to survive in that society was based upon family.  I am not going to get too deep into the kinship aspect of this passage today.  It is Father’s day next week and it seems imprudent to preach on family loyalty as an affront to God between Father’s and Mother’s Days, though E.O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Man should be put in conversation with this passage.  In any case, we are off of kinship and back to kingship.

What the Temple (and the kingship it represented) did was provide the framework (the law and ritual) within which family systems and the entire civil society operated.  The Romans knew this. They were smart imperialists and let Herod and the Sanhedrin continue to rule as client governments.  They let the Temple operate in almost al of its splendor.  Unlike we Americans who summarily dismissed the entire Iraqi army when we invaded, leaving an embittered, highly trained and unemployed (read immanently available) foe to contend with, the Romans kept their friends close and their imperial conquests even closer.  In this passage in St. Mark’s Gospel, Jesus takes both of these forces on, saying no: kinship and kingship are not what is most important, God is.  (This is exactly, exactly what Samuel said in our Hebrew Bible passage for today). 

            Kinship and Kingship.  This is what Jesus faced.  Both potential sources of tyranny.  Both with real power in everyone’s lives.  And this brings us to the heart of this morning’s passage.  The “house divided” stuff… Jesus is being an aggressive debater.  The Pharisees said that He cast out demons by the authority of demons and Jesus pointed out that that is silly; demons don’t cast out demons.  And binding the strong man?  Jesus was alluded to as the stronger man by John the Baptist, and the stronger man needs to contain, bind the householder, the Temple, and do what needs doing.  But unforgiveable sins?  Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit?  What is that all about?

            Literally, what Mark put together here was a declaration that those who oppose Christ, who speak against His message, who equate His ministry with the work of Satan, are guilty of an unforgiveable sin.  If the Word and Work of Jesus were the work of the Holy Spirit, then to say “He has Beelzebub…,” that his work was demonic in nature… that is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.  “Do not doubt me little men,” is what he is saying, “I speak for the Holy Spirit and to speak against that is unforgiveable.”  In that moment, in that specific exchange this is what Jesus is talking about, “Do not doubt me,” but right here and right now, how does this matter to us?

Mistaking the devil’s work for God’s? We do that all the time.  And the devil is not pitchfork and horns; by “devil” or “Satan” we mean the dark side of human nature, willful distance from God and light and doing what is right.  And constantly we are deceived (or deceive ourselves) that we are doing what is right when its not.  I think of the rhetoric around tax cuts for the wealthy, the rising-tide-lifts-all-ships malarkey… sounds good, divinely compassionate even, but it is a lie, it is the work of the evil one that convinces us that the most privileged among us reneging on their social contracts is good for the whole.  We constantly mistake Satan’s work for God’s; but of course we do, that’s how Satan works, trickery, appealing to our self-interest, laying out false paths of least resistance, tempting the lesser angles of our nature.  But mistaking God’s will for evil, calling the movement of the Holy Spirit the work of the Devil, actively working against that which is actually a right and a good and joyful thing… now that is blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, that is what tells us is unforgiveable.

Knowing what is right and doing the other thing; this is the primary site of sin against the Holy Spirit.  And this is not so much an individual issue:  “I know I should not have a third cupcake, but…”  It is not that. If it were, Heaven would be empty and somewhere else would be standing room only.  But rather I think of the bus tour that a group of Roman Catholic nuns just launched to make a case of heath care for all.  Pretty revolutionary: everyone should have medical care when they need it.  Well, they drew the attention of the Holy See and have been officially censured, being directed to spend more time working against contraception and abortion and less time working for the poor.  As one nun said, “it is a badge of honor to be accused of working too hard for the poor.”  And the Holy See has again earned a very different sort of badge. 

Why is this kind of blasphemy so bad, unforgiveable, even?  Well, look back to the scene.  Jesus would have been surrounded by a mass of people.  Rough people, by most standards.  He was always surrounded by rough folks, the subaltern: the diseased, the homeless and destitute, the possessed (by demons or mental illness), prostitutes, traitors and collaborators, every sort of person living on the fringes of society, every sort of untouchable.  They approached him with open eyes and ears and hearts to match their open hands and empty stomachs.  And they approached Him as a friend, teacher, a Messiah.  The ones who stood outside, though, on the edges throwing barbs and accusations, claiming expertise on things religious, denying the power of His work… the clean, the educated, the empowered… the inability, or more even, the unwillingness to know or learn the difference between the Holy Spirit and the demonic, the unwillingness to even try to discern the will of God; that is the problem.  That is the unforgiveable sin. 

If it gives life; if it heals; if it makes children genuinely happier and healthier and helps big people get along better, to love more and deeper and more complexly; if it leaves only footprints and takes only memories; if it does no harm… you have to, you have to pay attention.  If it does otherwise, you can bet it did not come from God.  To think that war can be holy or even just, to deny the changes afoot on in our Earth systems, to even claim the justice of austerity that doesn’t demand the greatest sacrifice from those who have the most to give as well as are most to blame… all I can say is that unforgivablity leaves marks that lasts a long time. 

I will end with a poem by the great Jesuit ere-do-well, Daniel Berrigan:

    For every 10,000 words

there’s a deed

   floating somewhere

head down, unborn

Words can’t make it happen

They only wave it away

  unwanted

            Yet Child, necessary one

            Unless you come home to my hands

            Why hands at all?

Your season  your cries

  are their skill

            their reason

AMEN

Trinity Sunday, June 3, 2012

Trinity Sunday, June 3, 2012

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

          “Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony.  If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?”

          Nicodemus, Nicodemus, Nicodemus…  This is a man we here, at Resurrection specifically, can learn from.  And deeply.

          Who was this man?  He was a Pharisee.  That means that he was a teacher and leader in the Jewish community.  He was a member of the Sanhedrin, a council of elders.  It was a religious-governmental body that advised the house of Herod and the Roman prefect, administered the laws and collected the taxes.  Nicodemus was highly educated and was comfortable economically.  He was in religion/education/civil service work and probably had a nice public employee’s pension to look forward to.  He was a good man, an upstanding citizen, a taxpayer.  I can imagine getting along well with Nicodemus.  I can imagine him finding a comfortable place here among this gathered body.

          Our friend Nicodemus, however, found himself in a dilemma.  He was of the establishment.  His livelihood, his family, his entire social network, his standing in his community was all wrapped up in his station in life, which was as a Pharisee, a Rabbi.  Then along comes this Jesus, a Nazarene peasant-prophet-revolutionary-muckraker and Nicodemus is pretty taken by Him and his teaching.  It was not supposed to be that way.  He was the establishment and They were not supposed to be taken by the likes of this Jesus rabble.  It would be like southern Democratic senators taking up with SNCC leaders in the 60s or Wall Street bankers falling in with Occupy protesters right now.  This won’t do; it is not supposed to be that way.

          Now when St. John wrote this Gospel, the Jewish community was in a very fragile period (as of course was the Christian community).  With the temple destroyed in 70, Judaism transitioned to a Rabbinic structure, meaning that the civilization was no longer carried in the rituals and traditions of the temple but by the Rabbis in the scripture and its teaching.  Belief and thought was at the fore of this developing Jewish existence, so obviously ideas of heresy were very important.  As of at least year 80 CE, anyone professing faith that Jesus was the Messiah was banished from the synagogues.  Evangelizing Jews, particularly leaders, Pharisees, was quite difficult.  It was high stakes religion. St. John, in his whole Gospel and in particular his story about Nicodemus, was writing to people with one foot in the synagogue and one foot in the Gospel.  These people were following the normative path, the path they were born into, AND they were learning about a different way, the Jesus way.  It was a risky thing for these folks. If Nicodemus “came out” as a Jesus follower, his life as he knew it would be over.  He would loose everything that his culture had taught him to value and appreciate. 

          Does this sound familiar to anyone?  Finding yourself invested in a career, a way of life, a system of beliefs that always worked or seemed right and then it begins not to?  In this Great Recession, how many millions of people, people who had always done what they were supposed to do, had invested in the education they needed, had been loyal to companies, had literally bought into the American dream, and then find themselves with millions of others, pink slip in hand and no discernable way to continue the path they were on.  It is graduation season, and I think of all the kids graduating with record setting and future crippling student debt and no real prospect for meaningful work.  Something like 60% of 20 – 25 year olds live with their parents; 40% of 26 – 30 year olds…  They have done what they were told to do, what our society expected of them and they are being left high and dry.

          What Jesus is telling Nicodemus in this story is so spot on exactly what so many of us need to hear right now.  Today, even.  What is Jesus telling him and us?  Well, Nicodemus is intrigued with what Jesus has to say.  I can imagine them talking late into the night, discussing deep meaning, rolling scripture around and around between them, considering the state of Judaic spirituality.  All of the intellectual stuff, I suspect Nicodemus found very gripping, but the praxis, the rubber/road intersection, the-give-up-everything-and-follow-me stuff, the this-is-my-mother-and-father stuff, the walking away from jobs and roles and networks and friends and families part… Nicodemus was not quite there.  In fact, he was very secretive about it.  Nicodemus’ friends did not know that he was curious about Jesus.  When did Nicodemus come to talk?  By night.      

And here is Jesus saying that the Kingdom of Heaven is right here, available to those who are ‘born of water and Spirit.”  The born again that Jesus is talking about is not the baptized, that would be simplistic.  Jesus is telling Nicodemus that the Kingdom of Heaven is open, is real to those who give it up to God, those who give up the notion of control, who open themselves to the movement of God in themselves and in the world.  Rebirth in the spirit is not a human doing, is not under our control and cannot be reconciled with what we know or think we know about the world around us.  These are very difficult things to grasp by people like Nicodemus, people used to having control, used to having influence, used to being listened to, rewarded, respected, admired, even envied.         

          If there is anything scary in the world to people used to being in control it is the thought of losing it; control that is.  Here is Nicodemus wanting to learn about holy, heavenly things, and he is ignoring the primary lesson Jesus is teaching him right in front of his face:  it is not about you, it is not up to you, it is not on your time or your schedule.  Jesus teaches that it is God’s doing in God’s time.  “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born in the spirit.”  Control is in the hand of God Almighty.  This is a tall order for the controlling among us.

          The answer to the immeasurable greatness of God’s power, Paul’s final Ascension question to us, is found precisely here.  We are promised time and time again that the last will be first and the first will be last, that the lowly will be lifted up and the rich will be sent away empty; this tale of Nicodemus demonstrates how it works.  Because Nicodemus cannot or will not walk away from what he has known to what he now knows, he may be lost.  Nicodemus cannot grasp the heavenly because his investment in the earthly is too large.  He puts things of the flesh: wealth, status, influence, position over and above surrender to the God and following the will of his own heart.  His heart pulled him to Jesus.  His head kept him firmly in the grasp of conventional wisdom.

          This is such a fitting story for today.  What are we celebrating today?  Trinity Sunday.  Today we “acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of God’s divine Majesty worship the Unity.”  Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer.  Ground, Word and Life.  Three Persons of One Substance.  It is fitting because we daily are called to live in the faith that the seen AND the unseen reconcile with each other.  That the Earthly and the Heavenly align.  That what seems random is from a God’s-eye-view part of a very elegant and inwardly simple pattern.  I defy anyone to make any compelling sense out of this doctrine, yet it is one that I proclaim daily as a Christian and a priest.  I’ll preach the Trinity ‘til the cows come home but I won’t claim an understanding of the prime Mystery of Being. 

          The doctrine of the Trinity is a notion, an inkling, a scent, an imagining of the inner economy of God.  The Trinity is not a doctrine set in stone, it is much more organic than that.  It is flexible, active, fluid, somehow.  It is analog not digital.  The organic, fleshy movability of this doctrine gives God one more path into our hearts.  It gives God in Christ with the Holy Spirit one more opening to reach us.  One more chance for a discerning heart to discern the will of the Almighty.  One more opportunity for God to reach through the temporal clutter, over the roles and wealth, past the status and position, beyond respectability and conventional wisdom and to the inner child of God within each and every one of us that knows right from wrong, that knows what we are supposed to do, what we are supposed to be.

Jesus was right there and Nicodemus could not stretch as much as he needed to sense the Mysterious totality of God. I shutter to think how many times I have missed such chances, such close encounters with the Living God.  Maybe some of us, if not most of us have passed by the second coming of Christ on the street and did not recognize Him (or Her).  Maybe we are too invested in our worlds and interests and collars and churches and jobs and retirements and the rest of it to sense what is actually important; what is actually of God; what is meant in the Mysterium Tremedum of the most Holy Trinity.  Maybe we are too close to being like Nicodemus for our own comfort, our own good, or the good of the world.  Keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God and of God’s Son, Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit: Father, Son and Holy Ghost; Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer;  Ground, Word, Life.  AMEN.  AMEN.  AMEN.