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It's Trinity Sunday again, "God Sunday" as a friend of mine calls this first
Sunday after the arrival of the Spirit on Pentecost, this Sunday on which we wonder how it can be that God
is one, but three -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The little girl in Sunday School class knew just how to approach the matter. She was happily
painting away with all the colors at her disposal when her Sunday School teacher came over and asked her
what she was painting. "I'm painting a picture of God," the little girl said. "But Susan," her teacher
replied, "no one knows what God looks like." "They will when I'm finished," the little girl said.
I don't have quite that same aplomb or self-assurance, but I do know that last week we heard St.
Luke tell us something about what God is like -- that on the Day of Pentecost, fifty days after the
Resurrection, when the followers of Jesus were all gathered together, all of them Jews from Galilee, they
were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak different languages as the Spirit gave them
utterance.
And there were others there as well, Luke says. Also there were devout men from every nation
under heaven, and when all of these from other lands heard what was happening to the disciples, they were
bewildered and amazed, for each of them heard them speaking in his own native language. The Parthians
heard the disciples speaking Parthian, the Medes heard them speaking the language of the Medes, the Arabs
heard and understood them proclaiming the Gospel in Arabic, and so on.
But this group of pilgrims at Pentecost was not only a diverse ethnic gathering with strange
sounding names like "Phrygians" and "Cappadocians" and "Elamites" and "Medes," it was also an historically
impossible gathering. The Medes who were there at Pentecost would have had a tough time getting to
Jerusalem, not only because they had to travel several hundred miles, but because they had to travel a
couple of hundred years as well. Because the Medes had been extinct for at least two hundred years, and
the Elamites were lost to the past as well.
Those at Pentecost, you see, those who that day received the empowering and redeeming presence of
the Spirit of God, were a gathering of people not only from the north and the south and the east and the
west, but also from the living and the dead, from the past as well as from the present.
It is a gathering of all the redeemed, that gathering promised by God through his prophet Joel:
"In the last days," says the Lord, "I shall pour out my spirit upon all flesh, upon all humanity. Your
sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young people shall see visions and your old people dream
dreams, and all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved."
All indeed! All from the east and the west and the north and the south, and all from the past,
the dead as well as the living, and all from the future as well. All of us were there gathered at
Pentecost, just as all of us were there being led to freedom through the Red Sea hundreds of years
earlier.
Pentecost, this wonderful moment of the Spirit of which Trinity Sunday is a part, is not a time in
the past when a few specially chosen people received some special gifts reserved just for them. Pentecost
is part of the Easter event, that action of God through which all God's children are redeemed and brought
home. Pentecost, as we saw last week, is the reversal of Babel, the pouring out of the Spirit of God upon
all flesh, so that those from east and west and north and south, the living and the dead, the past and the
present and the future, those who have been at enmity with one another, those who have been confused about
one another because of the confusion of languages and cultures and colors and creeds, Pentecost is part of
the Easter event through which all these, all flesh, receive the Spirit which enables us to find and enjoy
and be nourished by that deeper unity and understanding and fellowship which binds us together in Shalom,
in the peace of God.
And so, when one of us who was at Pentecost was asked, "You have received the Holy Spirit. Why do
you not speak in tongues?" she replied, "I do not speak in every tongue, because I am in the Body of
Christ, the Church, which speaks in every tongue so that all might hear and understand and enjoy that
fellowship with one another which is available in Christ."
All of us are here today hearing the Good News of God in our own tongue, some of us from the north
or the south this morning, some of us from the east or the west, some of us from the past, some of us from
time that is yet to come. And each of us bears the inheritance of a vast memory, a large recollection, a
past that clings to us. Some of that past is positive and life-giving. Some of it negative and
destructive.
Some of us bring with us to church this morning an ability to love that was created by a special
childhood friend who was always there for us. Some of us bring a deep sense of gratitude that was born in
our relationship with a mother or father who made great sacrifices so that we might have an education and
opportunities they never dreamed of for themselves. Perhaps some bring with us this morning a sense of
resentment bred by our perception of a brother or sister who always got his way, and always got away with
everything, while we never did. Perhaps some bring a deep-seated shame or guilt born out of too many "I
told you so's" or out of events that violated us in our childhoods.
"Most of what we do in psychotherapy," writes one therapist, "is to try to keep people's past from
killing them." And much of what we do in diplomacy is the same. George Will once described the war-torn
Balkans as "a part of the world which has produced more history than it can consume." For a while the
Soviet Union kept the lid on in that part of the world, but when communist power evaporated the unredeemed
memory and resentments of the past led Serb and Bosnian Muslim once again to start slicing each other's
throats. The same might be said about the Middle East, that it too has produced more history than it can
consume.
But cannot the same be said about us as well? After the first Gulf War, President Bush announced
that "at last we have exorcised the demon of Vietnam." As if we can now just forget Vietnam, since we
once again won a fight. We wish! No painful past, either national or personal, can be gotten rid of that
way. Nor should it. Remembering is part of the healing, part of the unity, part of the growth that is
possible when we take our pasts and our ancestors, and our futures, seriously. It is only in recollection
and remembrance that our history can be redeemed. Including Vietnam. Including Iraq. Including
September 11.
And including our own balkanized personal lives. Including our own families, who have produced
more history than we are able to consume and which have produced more resentments or perceived injustices
than we care to swallow. Is it not the same here, in our own balkanized personal lives, that our history
can be redeemed, not by our ignoring it, but by our remembering it and accepting it, and by our standing
with it to receive the Spirit of God who can lead us to a future that is redeemed by a deeper, healing
unity in God?
Christ died to reconcile the world to God. This is the truth of Good Friday and Easter, and the
truth of Pentecost. Christ's is not just a reconciliation of those of us who are alive today with one
another. His is also a reconciliation of us with ourselves, and within ourselves, and with our past, and
with all who shared in the creation of our past and present. His is a reconciliation of all flesh with
God, a reconciliation of all flesh, which includes times and flesh that are yet to come as well.
I'll bet there are some here today who know what I'm talking about when I say that there is much
in your past you need to do business with. I'll bet there are also some here today who know what I mean
when I suggest that there is much in your future you need to business with.
Have you noticed that the world has changed in the past thirty or forty years? David Brinkley's
death this week reminded me that just forty years ago fifteen minutes of news a day was all we got, and
even then that was often more daily history than we could consume.
But, you know, the world has always changed a bunch, and there has always been a lot of history to
consume. The world changed a bunch for Peter and Paul, too. It changed a bunch for Peter and Paul, who
experienced more history than they could consume as well, and who had a lot of personal failure, and a lot
of personal history, and a lot of personal future to do business with by the time the Spirit of God got
around to doing business with them. "Have you noticed, Paul," asked God, "that the world is not what
you've always thought it was? Have you noticed that God's Spirit is being poured out on foreigners and
sinners? Have you noticed," Peter, "that some of the things and some of the people you've always called
unclean, God calls clean? Have you noticed how things are different with God from the way you've always
thought them?"
And have we noticed the same?
Have you noticed that the expectations you had for your family, or for your neighborhood, or for
your children, or for yourself, have not been fulfilled in quite the way you imagined or hoped they would
thirty years ago? And, like Peter and Paul, you're having a hard time with that, and you're having a hard
time with your anxieties about even greater changes that loom large in the future.
How are we to be reconciled with a world that is increasingly more different than we ever imagined
it might be? How are we to be reconciled with a world that is larger and more complex than our childhoods
lived in the 1950's at 215 Oak Street in Topeka or our adolescence at Central High School in Amarillo ever
prepared us for? How are we to be reconciled with generations to come who will build a world and homes
and families that will look very different from ours?
Judy and I grew up in the provinces, in Texas. Yet we don't even speak Spanish and have never
been to Mexico. But in just thirty to thirty-five short years, our sons have traveled the world and
speak the languages of Asia and Europe, and they have met or married young women from Africa who are now
part of our family. That's a long way from growing up in Dallas in the 1940s, or in Sioux City or
Colorado Springs in the 1950s, and marrying the boy or girl next door, and going into Dad's insurance
business, and sitting in the same pew when your grandchildren are baptized that you sat in when your
children were baptized and where your parents sat when you were baptized when Uncle Sam sat on top of the
world and only men were priests and families were mom and dad and three perfect children, all of whom were
good looking, and divorce was a scandal. How are we to meet and be reconciled with a future that is
speeding toward us faster than most of us ever imagined it could?
We will be reconciled with it in the same way that we will be reconciled with our pasts, by
remembering that at Pentecost the Spirit of God was poured out on all flesh, redeeming sinners, not
saints, redeeming not only the present, but also the past and the future. We will be reconciled and
redeemed by our noticing that all of us were there, not only the apostles and the Galileans, but also the
Elamites and Medes from history. And Uncle George was there, too, the one who used to drink too much and
embarrassed the whole family at every Thanksgiving dinner. And Aunt Sophie was there, Aunt Sophie whose
love and grace gave us more blessing than we can ever consume. And Cousin Roger, who was an odd ball then
and is an odd ball now, Cousin Roger was there. And you and I, we, too, were there, we who are someone
else's odd balls.
And also there at Pentecost was the son-in-law not yet known to you, because your own daughter is
only in grade school. And also there was the grandchild not known to you yet, because he or she has not
even been conceived yet. And there at Pentecost as well were all the failures and successes, and all the
disappointments and dreams that are yet to come, because they are only now being born.
There is much in our past we need to do business with. There is much in our future we need to do
business with.
Are there memories within you too painful to remember? Are there names and faces you haven't
thought about in years, because you are afraid to break free from their hold on your life? Are there
expectations or hopes for the future that will crush you if they don't happen the way you imagine them
now?
Then invite them all here to church with you today. Take your history, and take your present and
your future, take all the pain and shame and guilt of your past, and all the joys of your past as well,
take all your embarrassment about Uncle George and all your love for Aunt Sophie and all your resentment
over Cousin Roger, take all your delight at the birth of your daughter and all your grief over your son
who was born but did not live, and take all your grief over your child who is chronically ill and over the
marriage that did not last, and take all your disappointment with your daughter who became pregnant and
eloped with the man she met at college when you'd had your heart set on a proper church wedding, and take
all the hopes and dreams you have for the future, all the hopes and dreams you have for yourself and all
the hopes and dreams you have for your children and your grandchildren whom you don't even know yet, and
lay all of it on God's altar on this "God Sunday" as the best you have to offer today. And ask God to
pour out his redeeming Spirit on it all and then to give it back to you, remembered and redeemed and
blessed.
And ask God to give us all the power to transcend the Babel of our differences of language and
culture and color and creed and to redeem us with that unity of his Spirit that is beyond all language and
geography and time and culture and creed.
C. S. Lewis says that we shouldn't wonder if we find this Spirit to be somewhat vaguer or more
shadowy in our minds than the other Persons of the Trinity. It is because we are never looking at the
Spirit of God the way we can, in a sense, look at the Father and the Son. Instead, the Spirit is one who
is always acting through you.
The little girl said that we'll know what God looks like when she's finished. Perhaps it's
something like this: Think of the life you are painting with the years God has granted you as the
mysterious opportunity God has given you to experience the wonderful gift of love. Take the years God has
granted you as the mysterious opportunity God has given you to experience the wonderful gift of loving
those whom God has made present to you, and of being loved by them, regardless of circumstance, regardless
of the anxieties of change. This opportunity includes the opportunity to love Uncle George, who
embarrassed you, and to love Aunt Sophie, who loved you, and to love Cousin Roger, whom you've always
resented. It includes the opportunity to love your neighbor next door, and all the Samaritans in Baghdad
and all the sinners in Washington and across town as well.
If you can imagine the Father as God who created you for this experience of love in the beginning,
and if you can imagine the Son as God who came to live among us to show us all how to love, then perhaps
you can imagine the Spirit as the one within you, the one who walks beside you to help you do it, the one
who acts through you to help you to bless as Jesus blessed and to love and heal as Jesus loved and healed,
even in the ever-changing world we live in.
Then, when you are finished, or when the Spirit is finished with you, we'll know more about what
God looks like.
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |