Go Humbly

Text: Luke 10:1–11, 17–20

Marshal McLuhan, a thoughtful philosopher of modern culture, wrote that the medium is the message. The delivery vehicle of the message conveys the message at least as much if not more than the content. At the time, this was a radical idea. That was fifty years ago. Now everyone knows this; the idea goes without saying. But it is not really a new idea. In the story we just heard in the Gospel of Luke, the point is at least as much about the messengers—the medium—as it is the news they bring.

Jesus sends out thirty-five pairs (or maybe thirty-six; it depends on which source you use)—pairs of apostles, sent out into the towns. Their mission is clear and explicit. They are to depend on the hospitality of others. They take only the clothes on their backs.

But more important, they offer a kind of hospitality of their own. They make no judgments. They come only when invited. They eat what is put in front of them, sharing whatever the family eats, whether or not they like it. They heal the people who come to them. They make no demands, they have no interest in exploiting the good will of their hosts. They do not try to find the best accommodations. They are content with what there is and what comes their way. Besides all that, they announce good news about the nearness of God’s kingdom. Of which their actions are examples.

What they do not do is berate people, convince people, try to sign them up for something, make them join something. They carry with them a kind of power invested in them by Jesus—an apostolic authority, you could say. But that authority is not to boss folks around or manipulate them or to enlist them. Nor does it demand that people respect them or even pay attention. The authority gives them the power to heal people and the courage to freely reside with people without disapproving of them and the willingness to be vulnerable and take risks. All great gifts.

The disciples are sent to prepare the way; they are not the way itself. It is not about them. They are not proud. They represent Jesus and the new world that he brings. A new way of being. At best, they are the signs of that world. Signals. They therefore do not rejoice in their own good fortunes or the thrill of power. They are happy that have been given the power to heal people, freeing them from the demons that inhabit and control them. The disciples can walk among snakes and scorpions. But Jesus cautions them. They are not to rejoice in their own ability to accomplish great things. They are known in heaven—not meaning that they will get their just rewards someday, but rather that God knows them and their deeds already. They are quiet saints. Servants, as it says elsewhere, and as Apostle Paul often writes.

These 70 (or 72) disciples are humble, modest, and obedient. These are tough words for us. Even though they sound nice, we rarely long to be humble, modest, or obedient. We do not aspire to these things, nor admire them in our social models. They sound weak, for one thing.

These are words that describe relationships in which we are equal to others, or even in which others are greater than we. They are not about relationships in which we excel, dominate, prevail, control, or determine. They are words which seem to call us to deny our selves. Something Jesus talks about at length elsewhere. Approvingly.

Compassion, central to the Christian life, grows from humility, modesty, and obedience. To be compassionate requires a recognition of the suffering of others. To empathize. To recognize that the suffering of someone else is no less than our suffering is. That all people suffer exactly as we do. We have no special authority therefore to inflict suffering on others. And we do have special obligation to relieve the suffering of others.

Saying that the disciples are saints does not imply that they are special in some innate way. Humility, modesty, and obedience are not character traits—inborn, immutable, unattainable abilities. They are skills. As skills, they can be taught—that’s what Jesus did and does. As skills, they improve with practice. They are important and effective even when you do them poorly.

This story appears only in Luke. Of the four Gospel writers, Luke is the most interested in the mission of the early church. And of the four, Luke is also the most interested in social and economic justice. The Magnificat of Mary is in Luke, at the very beginning. The good news that she feels carrying Jesus is the prospect of the restoration of the kingdom of God. Things will be ordered differently; better—less vertical, more horizontal. The peace that the disciples offer, and the announcement they bring to the towns, is shalom—the peace of things that are now out of kilter being once more in line with God’s intent.

Perhaps what the disciples do seems trivial, or only marginally effective. But what they do is the message of Christianity. When people are most moved by Christianity, it is because they sometimes see in Christians generosity, compassion, and persistence in the face of fear. What we do as Christians is the message.

The disciples—who as always stand for us—are getting lessons in humility, modesty, and obedience. They take great risks. They come back overjoyed. They are coached in their tasks. They are not required to find their own way to follow Jesus. They are given instruction and guidance.

Their mission is not to make more Christians. It is to heal and offer modest hospitality to all. And to talk about a new world.

We in this age are in the middle of a moral crisis. People feel they have authority to inflict suffering on others. They do not feel a special obligation to relieve the suffering of others. This is not a new crisis, but it seems to me more urgent. Our arrogance and self-satisfaction are not safe.

Jesus announces a new way. But the message will be heard only if it is lived out in the lives of the messengers.

Peter Paul and Many

Text: John 21:13-19

Feast of Peter and Paul

Christianity is a faith that sits in the moment, acknowledges the past, but has a preference for the future. Its vocabulary is full of words about restoring what is broken, renewing what has decayed, resurrecting what is dead. It is not an accident that all these words begin with “re-”, along with many other ones like reconciliation, restoration, rebirth. The prefix means “again” or “back.” They are all about finding something that has been lost—rediscovering it—or getting back to the right path after having wandered, or being cleansed after being corrupted.

In all these words, there is a turn, a change of direction. We acknowledge the past but head on out into the re-formed future. Repent—another such word—means to make a turn. Forgiveness—an essential word but this time without the prefix—lets us grieve the past but importantly releases us from it so we can step ahead in freedom.

As a consequence, we are open to big surprises and changes in our lives. We are taught by example and doctrine that that is how God works. Words like calling, commissioning, and conversion are all about being pulled into the future. We say that we accept God’s call, but sometimes it feels like we really have little choice in the matter. Often the result is that we are comforted in unexpected ways. Other times we are distressed. But we are usually at least a little amazed.

Today we celebrate the ministries of Peter and Paul. They did not have much in common. Peter was an ordinary fisherman. Paul was a privileged and educated Roman citizen. Though thrown together in the same stew by God, it seems that they did not like each other much. Peter supported Paul in his ministry to the gentiles, but Peter had big doubts about the plan until a vision set him straight.

Peter was much more involved with the fledgling church establishment than Paul was. Peter was careful. Paul was impulsive and exuberant. Peter does not mention Paul much, but Paul refers to Peter disdainfully, as he does in today’s second reading, by including Cephas—Peter’s name in Aramaic—in a dismissive list.

But Peter and Paul did have in common Christ’s call to them. Both were recruited directly by Jesus, Peter at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, Paul on the road to Damascus after the Resurrection. They were both renamed by Christ—Peter was Simon, Paul was Saul. They were both founding leaders of what was to become Christianity.

But most of all, they both had their lives totally turned around by Jesus. A new direction. Neither of them anticipated what they would become. Neither one of them could have imagined, given their backgrounds, inclinations, or prospects, what would happen to them.

Of the two, Paul’s story is the simpler. He is called once, through dramatically, and after that seems to apply the same energy and commitment to strengthening Christianity as he did attacking it before, and he seems pretty happy with his lot and his vocation.

But Peter’s story is more complicated.

Peter is one of the first disciples called to follow Jesus. He becomes a good friend of Jesus. They were buddies, companions. Peter was an enthusiast. It is Peter who wants to build booths at the Transfiguration. It is Peter who wants Jesus to wash his whole body, not just his feet. It is Peter who tries to walk on water. It is Peter who so confidently acclaims Jesus as messiah. Peter is a doofus.

But something happens to Peter. First, he denies Jesus three times. And the death of Jesus, his friend, is a harsh blow. The Resurrection confounds him. In the Gospel of John, Peter is the first to enter the empty tomb. According to other accounts, Peter is the first person to whom the risen Christ appeared. Yet he responds by going fishing; his job before he met Jesus.

The conversation today between Jesus and Peter is a turning point in Peter’s life. One of those change-in-direction events. By the time it is over, Peter is a new person. A different person. No longer a fisherman, Peter has a new role given to him by Jesus. A more difficult role. A more responsible role. From now on in the Bible we will hear no more goofy stories about Peter. He stops being exuberant and playful.

Jesus had before nick-named him Rocky, which is what Peter means in Greek. At the time, Jesus said to him: On this rock—on you, Peter—I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. Now Peter understands the seriousness of this commission. In the course of one conversation Peter goes from a care-free flaky sidekick to a reliable but troubled leader. From outlier to administrator. From rebel to mainstream. It is Peter who has to worry about infrastructure while Paul gets to be the flashy marketeer. Peter agonizes about the admission of gentiles; Paul just goes out and signs them all up.

Do you love me? Jesus asks Peter. Feed my lambs, tend my sheep, Jesus tells Peter. Be a good shepherd to them. Not just to nourish them, but to do all that a shepherd does. Both Paul and Peter nourish God’s people. They have that in common. But it is Peter who has to make sure that the fences are set, the hay in the loft, the lambs attended to.

When Jesus asks about Peter’s love for him, he is not testing Peter’s character. This is not a job interview. He chose Peter long ago. Jesus knows that Peter’s job will not be glamorous. There will be tough going. He will be taken places he does not want to go. Danger lies ahead. Peter’s call to lead God’s people is not a consequence of his love for Jesus. His love does not compel him.

Rather, it is his love for Jesus that enables him to respond to Jesus’ call. It is a job that he cannot do without his love for Christ. Jesus is not saying, if you love me, then tend my sheep. It is not a condition. He is saying, since you love me, you will be able to tend my sheep. The work is hard. But because you love me, you will be able to do it.

Peter and Paul are long gone, but the work of attending to God’s people continues. It is now we who are called to nourish each other in body and spirit.

It is not likely that we will be called upon to create a whole new religion. But it is likely that there will be big changes and surprises in in our lives. That we will on occasion be amazed. And that we will be called sometime to make a sharp turn into a new future. In those times, we trust that we be sustained and guided, as Peter and Paul were, by our love for God in Christ.

Of One's Right Mind

Text: Galatians 3:23-29
Other texts: Luke 8:26-39

We are each one of us a person of a thousand voices. In each of us: Clamoring and soft. Disagreeing, disagreeable, seductive. Each voice making requests, making demands: each seeing the world in a different way, each telling a different truth, each trying to prevail. A thousand thinkers inside of us. Some always present, some lying low in wait for a more opportune time.

Not demons, exactly, but maybe demons. Not usually sending us off to caves, not usually making us tear off our clothes, but sometimes, some people. Not usually leaving us locked up in chains, but sometimes, yes. Or sometimes it feels like we are.

The demons come out of the man into the pigs. How do all those demons agree enough to send all the pigs into the sea at one time? Why don’t they run this way and that, like our own demons do?

There are a thousand voices in the man. More than a thousand, really, since a legion was 6,000 soldiers. The man had so many voices in him that there was no room anymore for his name. What is your name? Jesus asks. “Legion” is my name, someone answers. The man was so fragmented that there was no more person left. Just the many voices left.

Jesus heals the man by driving all those voices out of him. Maybe when all were driven out a new voice emerged. The voice of the man as he was, as God created him before he was occupied by every other voice.

The voice of the man in his right mind, it says. It means of one mind, one heart. Being restored to one mind, one heart, the man is made whole. That is how Jesus heals him.

The purpose of the law, Paul writes to the church in Galatia, the purpose of the the law was to tutor us. The word tutor is unfortunately translated in our Bibles as “disciplinarian,” a word with difficult connotations. Disciples are students, and what guides and forms students are disciple‑formers—that is, teachers, tutors. The Message, a free Bible translation, has Paul saying: The law was like those Greek tutors, with which you are familiar, who escort children to school and protect them from danger or distraction, making sure the children will really get to the place they set out for.

The law was guide, a path to the right place. It was healing in the way that Jesus healed the man in Luke’s story. It formed a right-minded community out of a legion of diverse directions and desires. It scripted a single voice that could be spoken by the many people of the community. That guide, says Paul, though still good, is no longer necessary. Something about Jesus makes another way possible.

We are unified in the body of Christ—or maybe here we should say “family of Christ,” since Paul in this letter says that in Christ we are all children of God. One family. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of us are one in Christ Jesus, as we heard and as we pray here every Sunday.

Before we talk more about this, which we will do in second, we should remember how strange this by now-familiar reassurance was. And is, in practice. It is a fine thing to talk about the unity of Christ, and to imagine that unity extending to all Christians and to all people, as we do. But if you look around the world, you do not see much unity. You see a lot of fighting and biting. Maybe we want to be Jew and Greek. Maybe we do not want to be united. Maybe we do not want to be equal but rather we want to be better than the rest. Unity is fine as long as I get to be at the top. We value cooperation only when either it does not matter or when it helps us—our group—to better compete. You might wonder whether we got to where the world is now because we actually have wanted it that way.

Paul has a vision that he presents in all his letters but especially here. The approval and blessing of God that was once available to only one group of people is now, through the presence of Christ, available to all. We are brothers and sisters of Christ and therefore children of God and therefore brothers and sisters of one another. We are clothed in Christ, Paul says. We are all wearing the same outfit. We are all wearing outfits made out of Christ-cloth. Christ-suits, so to speak.

Because of that, no one can tell whether we are Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. This does not mean that everything and everyone is the same. It does mean that none of those things that differentiate people are significant. They do not signify anything. They are not signs that give us—or give God—clues about how to treat them. They do not convey important information.

But:; this clothing of Christ is really more like anti-clothing. It is like a disguise, but in reverse. It is as if we were stripped of all the manufactured decoration—which like high fashion marks us out as better, richer, meaner, cleverer—as if we were stripped of all the surface skins with which we have adorned ourselves. And then stripped of even our features and shape. The Christ-suit is no suit at all. And that all that is left is our divinity and our humanity.

If we are all so clothed, then it changes the way we see one another. This is not so supernatural; it is common. It is what happens to you when you see your friends. All your friends are great-looking. Right? How did they get that way? Especially since when you first met them they were so funny-looking. But you no longer see at all those attributes that seemed so obvious about them. You no longer can see their decorations, their presentation. You see them. One like us.

Paul argues that through Christ we are able to see all others that way. As beautiful to us as our friends are. That we can even see those who used to be invisible to us, like our enemies, or strangers.

The promise of Abraham of which Paul speaks is a promise of favor by God: blessing, peace, abundance, companionship. A special relationship with God. Now this relationship is available to all. Paul sees a division in the discordant world that is repaired by the healing work of God in Christ.

Christ does for the world what Jesus did for the man. To restore to us our true names. Our true names: brother and sister.

Very Risky

Text: Luke 7:35—8:3

You might call it balanced: our need for stability and our longing for adventure. You might see timidity, caution, and prudence as virtues that promote our survival—and they do. But we cannot stand in one place for very long. We cannot walk without propelling our bodies forward precariously.

We want to protect and conserve what we have. Risky moves are threatening and cause anxiety. But the things that give us the most pleasure are the most risky. Having a child (or another), leaving home for school or changing jobs, starting a new venture. And in our faith lives, too: entertaining a contrary notion or a unfamiliar practice, praying in the shadow of deep doubt, serving unlikable others, being extravagantly generous.

But while we try to maintain a balance in our lives between security and risk, Christianity is not so balanced. In its commitment to the kingdom of God, Christianity has at its core a preference for risk. We follow a man who risked his life for others and who has called his followers to risk theirs.

The story we heard today from Luke appears in all four Gospels, a rare and sure sign that something in it was at the heart of the experiences of the first Christians. In all the versions, though least in Luke, the act of the woman is considered extravagant. She brings an alabaster jar of perfume, which is sometimes described as worth a year’s salary, and anoints Jesus with it.

This is an outrageous endeavor. In every story, she is uninvited—you might say she barges in—and in Luke’s version she is evidently an outcast because of some publicly-known behavior. In every story, the invited and upright citizens (or authorities) condemn her. In every story, Jesus reprimands them. What the woman has done is good, he says. He celebrates her actions as a joyous event.

The critics in the different versions of this story object to what the woman does for various reasons. But they all boil down to the same conclusion: what she is doing is unexpected and disruptive and hard to figure out. Simon the Pharisee objects because the woman is a sinner who risks ridicule or worse and who appears disturbingly among what Simon implies are a crowd of non-sinners like him—as if there were such persons.

In response, Jesus tells them a parable. A creditor in the parable forgives two debtors. One owes a lot of money and the other owes a very lot of money (about $50,000 and about $500,000 in today’s dollars). In any case, more than either can pay.

One way to look at this is to compare the extremely different amounts. That is how Luke sees it. But there is something odd about that view. Luke presents this parable as a story about people’s response to being forgiven. A great sinner is forgiven more and therefore responds more energetically. But in fact both debtors are forgiven completely. And the complaint Simon has is not so much with the woman—though he does not like her—as it does with the welcome that Jesus gives her (“What kind of prophet is this guy,” he asks under his breath).

It seems, therefore, that Jesus is telling us—as he usually does in his parables—telling us less about the ingratitude of Simon and more about the nature of God. He is telling us that God is as extravagant with forgiveness as the woman was with her perfume.

The woman has a freedom that Simon does not. It is customary to imagine that she is poor, and that for that reason her actions are amazing, but not so helpful to us. She has less to risk, by this reasoning. Unlike Simon who has much. As some of us do. A kind of: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” But that sentimentalizes and trivializes a difficult choice that she makes. There is no reason to assume that the woman is not just like us. With conflicts and responsibilities and a need to be frugal. She just isn’t frugal at the moment. We can imagine her making the same kind of decisions we make when considering risky undertakings.

What gives her—or us—freedom to take risks is not that we have nothing to lose. It is that we are able to deny power to what we do have. It is not that we have nothing to bind us, but that the loss of those things is no longer determining. It is not that we will not mourn for what we give up, but that our grief—though real and powerful—does not paralyze us.

Jesus forgives the woman neither as payment for her actions nor as a cause of them. That is, her gift of expensive perfume was not a fee to buy his forgiveness, nor was it a consequence of his forgiving her. The relationship in time between the two events is ambiguous in the text. He forgives her for the same reason that the creditor in the parable forgives the debtors—Jesus’ and the creditor’s forgiveness are gifts. Given for no reason at all. Or rather, just because that is the nature of God revealed in this moment in Jesus.

Free forgiveness for no reason at all is risky behavior. To forgive another risks being made a fool of. You might be exploited. You might reward the undeserving and unrepentant. You might weaken—as we talked about a couple of weeks ago—the controlling power of shame that you hold. You might have to give up resentments, regrets, and reasons that explain how things are with you right now. Yet, it is Christian behavior.

We are followers of Christ. He is our teacher and example. He has taught us how to forgive others. And he has taught us how to take risks in life, to act bravely for justice and peace, to deny the powers of authority and property. A tall order.

Yet we are able to take these risks and to forgive others because Jesus has shown us how. We are compelled to because he has commanded us to. We desire to because of the joy it brings us. And we are free to do it because we are promised that nothing can separate us from the love of God.

A Powerful Imagination

Text: Luke 7:11-17

Preacher: Paul Stansifer.

A while ago, I watched an episode of a goofy defunct television show that struck me as weird, even weird in comparison to the kind of goofy defunct television shows that I tend to like.

Usually on TV, the person who’s in trouble this week has been designed to be totally sympathetic. But the focus of this episode was a sour, ungrateful, whiny teenager, who has been confined to a wheelchair and a life of misery by a bad heart. A cheerful – Oh, and he’s a bit of a poser, too. A cheerful and energetic employee of the “Wish-A-Wish Foundation” has been assigned to make him happy, which turns out to be a completely futile task.

I’ll skip past the murder and the raising from the dead of a couple of insurance adjusters and ruin the ending for you: a van driven by a pet monkey runs over the Wish-A-Wish Foundation employee, and in accordance with her wishes, the teen gets her heart as a transplant.

I kind of liked the episode, because it made a happy ending out of saving the life of a completely unlikeable person.

The story that Luke tells is weird in the exact opposite way: unlike most of the people that Jesus helps, the widow of Nain is surrounded by a crowd of people who already sympathize with her.

When the widow’s only son died, her life was essentially over. In her society, a woman without a household had no work, no income, no purpose in life. The crowd of mourners knows this. They know that the scriptures repeat over and over again how despicable it is to cheat or deprive widows and orphans. And they also know that it gets repeated because people disregard even that. She couldn't have been a more heart wrenchingly helpless victim.

When Jesus walks into the story, and raises up the widow’s son, the crowd immediately celebrates and declares Jesus to be a prophet, and says that God has come to save his people. They are correct.

But it is rare for Jesus's actions to receive universal approval this way. Jesus tended to get a lot of flak for working his miracles. He did them on the Sabbath, he did them to people who deserved their illnesses, he put lepers and lunatics back into a society that didn’t know what to do with them.

When a miracle of healing occurs, those onlookers who who see the recipient in a abstract, dispassionate way are able to stand around and have a debate about details of the law. But the people who before the miracle were weeping over the tragedy now feel an overriding joy.

And so, the mourners ignored minor issues such as the fact that Jesus became ceremonially unclean when he touched the boy's coffin (contact with the dead was the most serious form of uncleanliness). Did Jesus is properly purify himself afterwards? The widow could not possibly care, and, as for the crowd, they gave up their chance to be sticklers for the law when they joined her in mourning.

I'm not trying to say that all actions taken to comfort someone who's suffering are necessarily good actions. The murdered insurance adjusters in that television episode would probably argue, with good reason, that murdering an insurance adjuster is wrong, regardless of whether it might cheer up a wheelchair-bound teenager.

What I am trying to say is that Jesus viewed the suffering of the people he met as a legitimate crisis regardless of the form that the suffering took, what caused it, or who the sufferer was. You could say Jesus has a powerful form of imagination called "sympathy". The people Jesus meets in the Gospels, and the people Jesus meets today, are often alarmingly deficient in their ability to imagine how others are feeling. This miracle was an easy test, and the people pass it. But usually, we don't do so well.

A few verses later in Luke, Jesus will be criticizing the people who fail to accept John the Baptist as a prophet, because John shuns worldly things and lives alone in the wilderness, and who fail to accept Jesus as a prophet, because he eats and drinks with dishonorable people. Jesus says “They are like children sitting in the marketplace. One group shouts to the other, ‘We played wedding music for you, but you wouldn’t dance; we sang funeral songs but you wouldn’t cry.’” If those people could have imagined the urgency of carrying a message from God, it would have seemed perfectly reasonable to them to either separate oneself and stand as a beacon in the wilderness, as John did, or to go and seek out the people most in need of the message in their native habitat, as Jesus did.

The Pharisees Jesus is talking about have a lot of the same beliefs as Jesus, but as long as they see him as a freak, as someone they don't have to sympathize with, they will never learn anything from him.

To fail to sympathize with someone—to fail to regard their feelings as legitimate—that is the fast track to getting on with one's life and not learning, not helping, and not caring.

I like to think that the crowd in today’s story won’t be making that mistake any more. They’ve fallen into Jesus’s trap. He showed up when their compassion had rendered them completely vulnerable to his compassion. Now, when Jesus drives the demons out of the man who called himself “Legion,” they’ll see past the disruption caused by the death of all the pigs, and try to see the man, and feel his relief not to be hurting himself any more.

I don’t feel like I’m very skilled at mourning with those who mourn; it's pretty easy for me to think about the suffering of other people as a problem to be solved if the cost is not too high, rather than as an offense against the humanity of someone who might as well be me.

But Jesus is thinking about the sufferers. In order to make them well, by the end of time or sooner, he is trampling all over cute notions and pure principles. He's making a mess of things for those of us who are already doing fine.

But let us look at this a different way: blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted! Those who suffer and those who mourn with them understand the oppressiveness and evilness of pain. In an instant, that can become a full-hearted commitment to the joy and the goodness of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Mindful God

Text: Psalm 8
Other texts: Proverbs 8:22-31

It is partly a question of scale.

In the scheme of the universe, from the very largest, oldest thing we know, to the very smallest, most ephemeral thing we know, we are somewhat closer to the smallest than the largest. Yet the range and quantities above and below us are incomprehensible. There are sextillion stars in the universe. And there are a thousand times as many atoms in a human body—that’s one octillion—than that.

So we wonder with the writer of the psalm: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses, what are humans that you should be mindful of them?” How can God even know about tiny us?

But mindful is more than being aware of. How can a God who created all things—galaxies and stars and atoms and quarks—understand our thoughts? The taste of coffee, a comfortable chair, fear of thunder, remembering the smell of the soil where we grew up, knowing that a friend is safe, picking tomatoes in the summer. Plus grief at bombings, tornadoes, factories in Bangladesh, warehouses in Texas, and fears of war and poverty.

We know so much more now than when the eighth psalm was written about how big the universe is and how small its parts. Even if God can comprehend it, we cannot. And even if God can comprehend our worries and pleasures, how can we be more than one piece of data in a huge store of it?

Yet we understand that God can, and does. We understand even more—that God is near us, with us. Even more—that God comprehends us because God exists in Jesus, a human being on this earth. And that God inhabits us in the Spirit, breathed into us, breathing life into us, and praying our secret prayers.

The Trinity is often considered to be a way to characterize God. God is three-in-one, God is triune, God is inherently relational, and so forth. When we start doing that, we get into arguments about proper ways of thinking—and talking, and praying—and generally get tangled up at some point. But we should always be suspicious of statements that begin “God is …” God is such and such. Even when it is we who are saying them. It is hard to know whether we ever have enough information to make “God is” statements.

But we can say what God is for us. Especially for us individually, but also things we might agree with others about (which sometimes thus becomes dogma). In this way, the Trinity is not about the nature of God, but about how God seems to us. And about how the universe that God made seems to be. We can speak then with authority. And we can use all the sources we have that reveal God to us, including scripture and Jesus and the Spirit felt within us.

And we can also use ourselves as sources. The delight we take in things, our appreciation of beauty, our love for others. This is all useful information. So is our urge for justice and peace. We can see these things as our nature—in God’s image—or as gifts from the creator, or the presence of the Spirit within us, or fortified by our trust in Jesus.

It seems like there are a few portraits—three, what a coincidence!—that people paint of the world in which we live.

First, the world is created. You do not have to imagine God’s fingers actually forming the world out of clay piece by piece to see it as organized, beautiful, and awesome. There seems to be order in things, rules that we are learning about. Amazing structures seem to emerge from first principles. It is majestic. At the same time, it is incredibly complicated—maybe even beyond our knowing (how smart can we be, after all?)—and very mysterious. It is an object of and occasion for wonder.

Second, the world is intimate. Or maybe personal would be another word for it. Though we seem to ourselves to be independent entities, we also know that we are fundamentally interconnected. That is, we cannot exist physically or spiritually without the amazingly elaborate network of things—maybe even the network of all things—of which we are a part. So in one sense we are just one of many. But in another sense—in our own sensations—it is all about us. Individual humans matter. The universe creates more than humans in general. The universe creates me. God is not vague. God comes in a particular person unlike any other but connected, as all are, with others.

And third, the world is lively. Everything moves. Matter is waves. We are not all one blob of universal stuff, because objects zoom around suns and particles zoom around (or wave around) nuclei. Locally, all this motion seems inevitably to produce life. Things love to grow all over the place. Bacteria and plants in the sidewalk and tubes at the bottom of the sea. Nothing is static. No Platonic inanimate perfection.

God is not, as one person said, a “nondescript sustainer.” The world is spirited. Life-bringing. Full of wind and fire, moving us this way and that, we not knowing where to next. But forward, it seems to us. Not progress, necessarily; not purposeful, necessarily; but in a direction. God is not timeless, meaning only that the God we know lives in time, too. God to us is a story that has unfolded over time and that we are convinced continues to unfold. God is a god of memory and of hope.

We can say that the lively, intimate, creator God is different faces of God, or manifestations, or elements, or appearances, or persons. But we cannot—we do not—say that they are three separately-wrapped gods. The God we see exposed in the universe, from tiny to tremendous, from impossibly far away to intimately within is, is a continuous person, with a continuing memory of creation, and a willingness to be affected by things and therefore open to surprises.

The God we know—and we can say nothing about the God we do not know—the God we know is a kind of ongoing tale which we read about in the Bible and which we experience in our lives in the world.

What we mostly know from this tale is that God really likes us. As it says in the first reading from Proverbs: God rejoices in his inhabited world and delights in the human race. The creation of the world—which is described in that reading and also in the psalm—is closely connected with that delight. Proverbs seems to say that the nature of the world is a result of God’s joy in it and, amazingly, in us. God is mindful of us.

The Trinity is therefore primarily an expression of grace, praise, and gratitude resulting from our observation of what God is. For us. It represents thanksgiving for our existence, for wonder and awe; thanksgiving for being intimately connected to each other and to God through Christ; and thanksgiving for the vitality of a universe in motion. And an acknowledgement that all this is so because of the love of God.

Sweet Abiding

Text: John 17:20-26
Other texts: 1 Corinthians 12

Regarding unity, Paul wrote to the churches in Corinth: “The body is not one part but many. … If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? If they were all [the same] part, where would the body be?”

It is the absurdity of the metaphor that makes it effective—imagine a body made up only of ears, a body made up only of eyes. There is a unity among the people of God—just as there are many parts, Paul says, but one body. But unity does not mean we are duplicates.

Yet we are not independent. The ear, Paul says, cannot complain that, because it is not an eye, that it is not part of the body. There is no ear that is not part of a larger body. A body is not a democracy. A body is not a federation. A body is one thing, made by God. This making, this creation, defines us, and it also defines God. We are creatures. God is creator.

We just overheard Jesus pray in the Gospel of John. This passage is the last part of a long section called the Farewell Discourse. Jesus is trying to prepare his disciples for the time when he will leave them. A time coming soon for them, for in the next passage in John, Jesus is betrayed and arrested. And he has prayed for them, that though they are in the world, they may be cared for by God. Now he prays that his followers might be one. Not just his disciples, but all those—meaning us—all those who through the word, the story, have come to follow Jesus, that they—we—might be one.

This sounds nice. In a kind of sentimental way, we all think unity is good. Yet this powerful petition by Jesus to God the Father has been used to argue on the one hand for increased ecumenism and cooperation among faiths and on the other hand for increased isolation and the erection of barriers between faiths. Evidently it is not clear to all what or whom Jesus is praying for.

What makes us one? Do each of us feel at one with our neighbors in these pews? We do not share doctrinal unity here. Even in a small community—Faith, this single church—is a church of disparate views on God and Jesus. On the way we are called to serve in the world. On how we enact Jesus’ teachings and commands. Is that OK? Can we still say that we are one?

Who makes up the “them” that Jesus talks about? “I pray,” he says, “on behalf of these”—meaning his followers at the time—“but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word.” How wide a net is Jesus casting? All Christians? People just learning about Jesus? How about baptized people who have recently become full of doubts? How about Christian denominations with which Lutherans are in theological conflict? My energetically evangelical sister once prayed that my other sister—who is a pastor, a Lutheran pastor—would become Christian. Did her wish conform to or conflict with the spirit of Jesus’ prayer? Maybe “be one” really means “be like us.”

Who is the judge of Christian unity? Perhaps it is the various Christian institutions. Perhaps it is God. Perhaps it is the people whom Christians serve, people in need and suffering who receive God’s grace from followers of Christ. Or who are denied it. Is our declaration that we are Christian sufficient to make that so? Or is it that our actions as declared Christians confirm or refute our claim to be?

Jesus calls for unity of some sort among his followers over all time. If we are in fact one, as Jesus hopes, what distinguishing characteristics would enable someone to know that? That is, how could they tell whether one of us is like another? To be one, to be unified, there must be something we all share. Do we, and if so, what is that?

There is. And we do.

Jesus describes in today’s reading what we might call a chain of spirit. A series of links. Or maybe a conduit of spirit. Or maybe better an ecology of spirit. Which relates and connects God the Father, Jesus, and us. There are two aspects to this.

First, God is in us. God abides in us, as John says throughout his Gospel. You, Father, are in me, Jesus says. And I, Jesus, am in them, my followers. The glory that you gave me, Father, I, Jesus gave to them. The love of the Father for me is in them.

It is clear that people saw God in Jesus. He spoke with the authority of God, he forgave sins, he hung around with the prophets, demons recognized him. It was more than that Jesus was a good, charismatic, powerful personality. It was that God was clearly in Jesus somehow. When you know me, Jesus said, you know the Father. God is in all of us, but God was more revealed in Jesus. Jesus was transparent. You could see through Jesus to see God inside of him. Theologically, we say that when we see Jesus do something we see God. Jesus, as one scholar said, draws aside the curtain to reveal God.

Jesus is in us as the Father is in him, he says, so that—for this reason—we may be made one in the same way that Jesus and the Father are made one. I do this, he says “so that they be one, as we”—Jesus and the Father—“are one.”

So, the first way that people might tell that followers of Jesus are in unity—are one, share some special characteristic in common—is that they are transparent to God that is in them. More or less, we have to add, because we are rarely if ever as transparent as Jesus was. This is not such an odd concept. You know that when you see someone who is especially compassionate and self-giving—saintly, you might say—that God seems visible in them (and working through them).

You might have known, also, when it seems like God is in you and working through you.

The second part of the ecology of the spirit is that we are in God. You, Father, have given them to me. May they be with me, Jesus says. They are in us, Jesus and the Father, he says.

So the second way people might tell that followers of Jesus are one is that they are not alone but with other people. And as important, that they act as if that was true.

We are all part of the body of Christ—as Robin said the other week, this is more than a metaphor. We make up the body of Christ in the world. People not only see Christ within us, but the image, the character of the Christ they see is revealed by the followers of Christ, by us.

We are each one of many. We share the habitation of God. We are not just individual souls being spiritual, or even being good. We are no less connected, being parts of the body of Christ, than the eye that Paul talked about is from the ear, the hand from the foot. We are none of us more valuable than the other. We are no less responsible for one of us than for another.

The unity of Christians is an ephemeral gift. We are sometimes opaque to God in us and it is therefore sometimes hard to see God in us. That does not mean that God is not there. We sometimes act as if we could do without our sisters and brothers in Christ. We are sometimes mean and indifferent. That does not mean they are not in God with us. Our unity is sometimes fleeting, but it is persistent.

Paul finishes his instruction to the Corinthians saying this: The eye cannot say to the hand, I do not need you! And the head cannot say to the feet, I do not need you! … If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

Because God is in us. Because we are in God. Because we are one.