A Tale of Two Daughters (Mark 5:21-43)

Jairus: My name is Jairus, and I have a certain amount of power.  I say that not by way of a boast, but as a matter of fact—it’s not me, but the work of Adonai, the nameless one, Lord God of Israel.  I am what you would call a rabbi, a teacher . . . And a healer, a counselor, and sometimes even a midwife.  In this small town on the banks of the sea of Gennesereth—that you may know as Galilee—a man of the cloth must be also be a camel of many colors.  I am a big fish in a very little pond, I but I do have a certain amount of influence, a certain amount of power. . . But my little daughter, whom I love more than life itself, lies dying at my house.  And over that, I have no power or control.

The Woman: I have no name.  At least not one you would know or care to utter.  I was named Sarah at birth, after the mother of our people, but it has been twelve years since I heard it aloud. Sometimes, I can hardly recall it myself.  To you, and other passers-by, I am nameless, bleeding, unclean; not welcome in the company of my people, or any of the services and liturgies open to women of my class.  Former class, I mean . . . That, too, has been erased by my illness, just as surely as the wind crossing the sand erases tracks in the desert.   Over this, I have no power or control.

Jairus: I am at our tiny synagogue, pouring over a scroll, trying to bury myself in my work.  Perhaps I should be home with my family, my wife and dying daughter, but I just had to get away, if only for an hour.  A man comes running up, shouting something about a boat; I tell him to calm down, take a deep breath, and he says: “Teacher!  A boat just came ashore, and it carried Jesus of Nazareth!  He’s walking with his disciples this way!”  My heart lifts and I feel a stab of unaccounted hope: I have heard of this man and his deeds.
 
The Woman:  So…. Here I am begging along the road to town.  It is already hot, and there is no shade; perspiration runs down my arms and legs.  Flies buzz around me, no matter how often I wash at the well, I smell of coppery-sweet blood.  Further along the path, between me and the sea, people are gathering.  They move as one, in an ever-growing knot, toward where I sit.  I do not know what is happening, but hope builds: perhaps today I will get enough to eat.  I see the teacher hurry toward the crowd.  He is not a bad man, in his way: he sometimes throws me a coin and a smile from across the road. I know that he cannot do more, cannot come closer; I am after all unclean.  But I long for human touch.
 
Jairus:  As I get closer, I can see that there is a sizable crowd; I notice that there are many more people than are on our village and I wonder where they all came from.  They are roiling, noisy, it is a circus-like atmosphere.  Perhaps they expect him to perform some kind of a miracle or trick; the thought brings a small smile to my lips.  When I get to the crowd, it parts, and suddenly I am face to face with Jesus.  And I wish I could tell you what he looks like, but my eyes are drawn immediately to his, and that’s where they stay.  In them, I see myself, my life, and an infinite compassion . . . He knows all about me, and how can that be?  We have only just met . .
 
The Woman:  The teacher reaches the crowd, and disappears into it . . . from where I sit, it looks as if he is simply absorbed, with not even a ripple.  The crowd stops moving, I try to get more comfortable in the dust.  I sigh, resigned to waiting a bit longer to know whether or not I will eat.
 
Jairus:  Suddenly, I know what I must do: in spite of all my schooling, all my training, I must fall to my knees in worship, not of the Lord God Adonai, but of a man, of a human being.  And even as I do, something inside me opens up, it all becomes clear, and I hear myself saying: “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.”  And without a word, he gestures for me to rise, and lead the way.
 
The Woman:  Finally, they are moving again, before I know it, they are upon me, the crowd flowing around me, jostling one another, but not really coming near.  I am, after all, unclean . . . And then, I see him, in an instant, everything changes . . . My heart can feel him, feel the compassion radiating off of him like, like some kind of invisible aura.  I abandon all thought of alms, all thought of sustenance, because I know that if I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.  And that is what I do, I reach out and immediately, I feel the flow of blood stop, and I know beyond a shadow of doubt that I am healed.
 
Jairus:  We stop again, and I’m not sure why.  Jesus says “Who is it that has touched me?”  And immediately a disciple questions him: “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched my clothes?’”  But Jesus’ gaze lowers, and I see what he sees:  there, on the ground is a bedraggled woman, cowering like a beaten cur.
 
The Woman:  I am frightened beyond belief.  I thought I could touch him and remain unseen, just as I always am . . . But somehow, he knew it, he knew that I touched his cloak.  He must have felt it, felt the power leave him, just as I felt it enter me, and now I am well and truly lost.  Here I am, unclean, touching another person, and with that, I have made him unclean . . . And even if I hadn’t been ill, I—a Hebrew woman—touched a strange man, and an important teacher, at that.  Women have been stoned for less than that.
 
Nevertheless, I crawl until I am right at his feet and confess all.  I tell him about my past, how at 12 years of age, my flow began and didn’t completely stop.  How I have spent all my money, and all my parent’s money, until now I am reduced to this . . . how I know I did wrong but could not help myself.  I pour out my heart to him, as I never have to another, and he listens with compassion in his eyes, and maybe a tear.  But the strange thing is that I am sure that he already knew . . .
 
Jairus:  The woman prattles on, describing her circumstances, her sorrow, and I am not unsympathetic, really I’m not, but my daughter is still dying, and so I urge him in my mind to rebuke her, put her in her place as any Jewish male would do, so we can get on with my daughter’s healing before it is too late.  I look up and see my servants at the edge of the crowd just as Jesus tells her: “Daughter, your faith has saved you; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
 
The Woman:  He called me daughter.  He called me daughter! Again, I have a family, at last a place in the world.  I am the child of this amazing, compassionate human being, and I know that he’s done so much more than healed me, he has truly saved me. I am longer be alone, no longer forsaken—I know that by one person at least, I am loved.  As he moves on toward the house of the rabbi, I take up my mat and follow.
 
Jairus:  He called her daughter.  He called her daughter!  I am flabbergasted, amazed . . . What kind of healer is this?  What kind of master?  Not only does he make her clean, which only the priests can do, but he establishes connection, he establishes relationship . . . and I can see the joy, the gratitude in her face.  But I am not allowed to think upon what this means, because my just as we set out, servants tell me my daughter is dead.

The Woman: My heart goes out to Jairus, because I too know loss, but I also know that my father will not let this stand: the one who saved me, a broken child of the earth, will surely save an innocent little girl.  And sure enough, he says as much: “Do not fear, only believe.”  And he chooses three of his followers, together they head toward the rabbi’s house.  As for me, I settle back onto my mat, content to wait for my father’s return.

 
Jairus:  As we near the house, I hear loud, theatrical weeping and wailing, and realize my wife has already hired the mourners.  As we enter, Jesus says: “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.”  And the mourners laugh nastily and mutter about how they know a corpse when they see one, and each snicker and jibe sends a knife into my heart.  But Jesus doesn’t get angry, he just asks them to leave, and taking his disciples and my wife and me, enters the my daughter’s room.  As we see her frail body, only twelve years old, my wife breaks into tears, but Jesus takes her by her hand—and only later do I think upon the fact that he has touched another unclean thing—he takes her hand and speaks a gentle word of command: “Talitha cum.  Little girl, get up.”  And she does, getting slowly to her feet, unsteady at first, like a colt, and falls into her mother’s arms.  And he warns us to say nothing—as if we could keep quiet!—and bids us give her something to eat.  We are prostrate with gratitude and amazement.
 
The Woman:  At first, it is a whisper on the wind, a change in the air like the turning of the seasons.  Soon, I sense it, ripples of joy and wonder spreading out from the rabbi’s house like a stone thrown into a pond.  I smile then, and close my eyes, for I know that I have another sister in my family, another daughter of my father, Jesus.

Being Jesus (Mark 4:35-41)

      Sometimes, I think everyone's obsessed with the subject of “being,” of who they are, and who everybody else is as well . . . our TV ads play to it all the time . . . sometimes it's in your face – “be all that you can be” comes immediately to mind – but most of the time it's more subtle, if only just a little bit.  We see a model with a size 2 figure and chiseled cheek-bones and the implication is clear, if you buy this car, you’ll look just like her . . . if you eat this food, if you use this toothpaste, if you go on this Slimfast diet, you'll be a new person, and your life will never be the same.  And somebody's always telling us how to be – be strong!  Be silent!  Be safe and wise and smart.  Be all that you can be . . . but whatever you do, just be yourself.  And there was a whole movement of neurotic baby boomers – m-m-m-my generation – who set out to find themselves, to find out who they are.

      These days, of course, identity, who you are, is even more in the news, what with the latest celebrity transition—Caitlyn Jenner—and a woman who insists, all evidence to the contrary, that she really is black.  And while the two cases are only superficially similar, one thing they have in common is the question of who they are.

      And that’s what this passage is about, who Jesus is . . . the being of Jesus, what it means to be him.  Of course, these days we say . . . That’s easy . . . we know what it is to be Jesus, to be Jesus is to be . . . Son of God.  Match point, end of story, let’s go to lunch.  But not so fast . . . it may be easy for us to say, but it wasn’t so obvious in Mark’s day.  Such a thought – that a divine being took human form – was radical in those days, it was considered blasphemous by Jews and most Gentiles, but that was the claim of the early Christian community – that Jesus was – somehow – the Son of God.  Not just a child of God, like we all are through adoption, but Son of God in big capital letters.  And note that the question wasn’t “Was Jesus the same as God?”  The idea of the Trinity wasn’t developed until more than a century later . . . but the question was “Is Jesus somehow a divine child of God?”

      It was an important question to Mark’s congregation, to members of his Christian community who, after all, were living after the ascension, after Jesus had left this earth, physically at least.  If Jesus were just another rabbi, just another teacher, just another wandering miracle worker, then where would they be?  Who Jesus was – the being of Jesus – was important to their own identity as his followers.  Who Jesus was affected – some would say determined – who they were as his disciples.  But more than that, it affected how they lived out their lives, how they lived out their calling as God’s faithful children . . . how they stepped out in faith, how they faced the hardships a faithful life posed, the pain and the persecutions, all depended on who Jesus was and is.

      So this episode, for Mark, is more than just a gee-whiz, look-at-what-he-could-do miracle report . . . it went to the heart of Christian identity.  And it happened on the sea, the wild-and-wooly sea . . . the ocean had been a symbol of uncertainty, of Chaos, long before the Christian era . . . long before the Hebrew era, for that matter . . .  the sea signified instability, doubt, you couldn’t count on it, it shifted and rolled, never the same, calm one minute, a raging holocaust the next.  It wasn’t firm . . . if you stepped on it, it wouldn’t hold you up, you’d just sink down into the darkness, and who knew what was down there . . . who knew what ghostly-green terror scraped along in the depths?  Some of Jesus’ disciples – Peter and Andrew, James and John – were fishermen, and they knew this deep in their bones.  One day the sea provides for them, feeds their families, keeps the wolves from the door, and the next . . . it drowns you and washes you up in the sand.

      And the sea lay there, waiting for them, but when Jesus called, they went . . . he said let’s cross to the other side, and I wonder – did it give them pause?  Did they hesitate in even the least little bit?  Did Peter or Andrew, James or John look at the sky and harbor secret doubts?  There are other boats out there – fishing, undoubtedly, nobody went onto the sea for a little pleasure cruise – but our heroes no sooner get into the boat than things begin to go wrong.  A great storm arises, so great that even the fishermen – who thought they’d seen everything – even they are terrified, and they look out at the wind, they see the waves cresting over them, curling with foam along the top, and they look to the back of the boat, and there’s Jesus asleep, for Pete’s sake – could he not stay awake for just one hour?  They’re terrified, they’re distraught, they’re about to die, but Jesus is asleep, as if he were in his garden at home . . .

      And Mark’s readers, safely on dry land, remember a story from the past, from the books of the prophets, they remember Jonah sleeping in the hold of the ship to Tarshish, and a humongous storm slamming into them . . . the crew coming to Jonah, saying “What are you doing, sound asleep?”  And the sailors ask Jonah to pray to his God, so that God would calm the sea, but that’s not what happens this time . . . this time, Jesus himself rebukes the wind – rebukes it! – just like he does the demons – and speaks words of power, words of command – “Peace!  Be still!” And the storm is extinguished like a candle blown out, and suddenly there is a dead calm, as great and profound as was the wind not seconds before.

      And Mark’s readers – safely on dry land – have ancient stories, ancient myths tumbling around in their heads . . . pre-Israelite gods – Ba’al, Marduk, Tiamet – all battled and triumphed over watery confusion, over the dark and primeval sea – and at creation itself, at the beginning of Genesis, did not the Hebrew God blow across the waters, and form the earth from the formless void, creating order from the order-less, structure from the structure-less and everybody knows that only gods can do that, only those imbued with the power of creation can rebuke creation itself, and so Jesus – prophet like Jonah though he might be – is surely much more than that, is surely a divine Son of God like they proclaimed.

      But the disciples in the boat, wet and miserable and scared out of their wits, they don’t get it – and who can blame them . . . it’s hard to think when you’ve been thrown around against the gunwales of a boat, with bruised and battered bodies and limbs . . . but Jesus calls them on it anyway, and asks them “Why are you afraid?  After all you’ve seen, the healings and the exorcisms, and now the greatest thing of all, do you still have no faith?”  And the Greek word translated here as faith covers a lot of territory . . . ranging from intellectual agreement with a set of facts to Christian belief and dedication to Christ, but here it means “dependence, trust” . . . trust in Jesus to take care of them, to get them out of their sticky wicket, their dire straights . . . and the last line of the story, the last thing the disciples say to themselves tells the tale . . . Mark says they’re filled with great awe – literally, they “feared a great fear” – and they say – “Who then is this?”  After watching Jesus tame creation, after seeing the wind slink off before him like a cur with its tail between its legs, they still don’t know who he is.  They still don’t know he is the eternal one, the divine Son of the God of Creation, even though they should – after all, bossing creation around runs in the family.

      And my question is . . . who did they think Jesus is, if not the Son of God?  Did they think he was just another roaming teacher?  That is what they called him, teacher . . . but they’d seen him do signs, they’d seen him heal and cast out demons – he rebuked demons just like he did the winds – surely he wasn’t just some run-of-the-mill itinerant rabbi.  Was he a prophet like Isaiah or – more to the point – Jonah?  Was he sent to pronounce God’s judgment, did he speak as God’s mouthpiece?  He did he speak of the coming kingdom of God . . . but they’d seen him calm the waters, they’d seen him tame chaos and bring order to disorder . . . who then did they think he was?

      And Mark’s hearers – at a safe distance – would ask themselves that, and the question wasn’t by any means academic, because their whole ministry depended on the answer . . . if Jesus was just some dead teacher, just some half-crazed, wandering rabbi with delusions of grandeur, well . . . how could they boldly go out and proclaim the Good News?  And remember: they were hearing this at the time of a failed revolution, the time of the destruction of Jerusalem and its razing to the ground, how could they have the courage and the fearlessness to preach the Gospel to an increasingly hostile world?

      And of course . . . that’s exactly why the question is so important for us today, as our society – and the entire Western world – becomes increasingly post-Christian, as our culture becomes increasingly hostile once again to Christ.  It’s becoming increasingly apparent, especially where I just came from, in the great unwashed Pacific Northwest . . . a friend of mine, the pastor of a church in Eugene Oregon, tells the story of police eavesdropping in a confessional, and the judge thought it was OK, and the city thought it was OK, and my friend was asked to take part in a forum to defend the Christian position, the hitherto unquestionable right of privileged communication between a pastor and parishioner, and no one but he supported this, except one other person at the meeting – the local A.C.L.U. rep, God love him . . . talk about strange bed-fellows . . . but even in the sunny South, where that ol’ Bible-belt-Buckle still shines, shines, shines, Christendom is eroding . . . a few years before I went to Seminary, some of the kids in our Starkville, Mississippi church had to go to a soccer tournament in Mobile on Easter Sunday . . .

      And since then, it’s only gotten worse – in the wake of September 11, laws that protect our rights have been relaxed.  The “USA Patriot Act,” in particular, has eroded our rights of free speech and assembly.  Police were given broad new powers to wiretap and infiltrate meetings – such as this one – without getting a warrant or otherwise showing cause to a judge.  And remember: many of the laws overturned were put in place in 1972, to protect churches from government spying that was rampant in the ‛60s . . . the F.B.I. – on the pretext of protecting against domestic terrorism –does that sound familiar? – spied without benefit of search warrant on Southern churches, and in particular, churches where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. – a champion of non-violent resistance, mind you – was preaching.  And I won’t even go into the latest revelations about the NSA . . .

      And so the question of faith in the saving power of Jesus – saving from storms both spiritual and concrete – is becoming increasingly important, increasingly real . . . And that gets us back to the person of Jesus, who he is and was, it gets us to the being of Jesus.  Because if Jesus were just some schmo like me, some guy with a certain amount of skill at preaching – I know, I know, that’s a debatable point, but go with me on this – if he were just a beloved teacher or crafty healer, then where would we be, when the winds of apathy, when the gusts of disdain and animosity threaten to capsize us?  Where would we be when dissension and sickness and gossip and innuendo threaten to swamp our ministries, to poison our hearts and minds and souls, so that we are no longer able to function as human beings, much less proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ?

 

      Who Jesus is determines who we are, who we really are – We are followers of the Son of God, and at the same time his brothers and sisters, as Paul might say, through adoption, children of the same parent.  And that is – or should be – incredibly emancipating: we’re stripped of the illusion fueled by the Western marketing machine, freed from the expectations of others.  To our great and abiding and everlasting fortune, the one we follow is no mere mortal, no TV preacher or traveling evangelist or Presbyterian minister.  He is the Son of God, and since we are made his sisters and brothers through him, what does that make us? Amen.

The Nameless Name (Trinity Series)

      The last few weeks we’ve been talking about the Trinity, a foundational doctrine of Christianity that fell into neglect during the Middle Ages and stayed that way until the last century.  It was then that interest was reawakened by theologians such as Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar and, especially, Karl Rahner. Today, we’ll talk about some of the cutting edge ideas about the doctrine, and maybe see how it can enrich our own lives.

The thing about doctrines is that they are made up of words, and words are only approximations of what they describe, they aren’t the thing itself.  They are invariably pointers to what they are trying to signify, they are in fact signs. Take the word “tree:” when I hear or read the word “tree,” I think of a gracious oak with magisterial, spreading branches and leaves fluttering in the breeze. Another might think of a slender pine, or a silver birch.  A shoemaker, however, might think of one of those things you put inside a shoe to keep it from losing its shape.  It's only when two people see the same tree, when they experience it, that they know they’re speaking of the same thing.

Zen Buddhists have a sutra, a saying, about this: it’s like “a finger pointing at the moon.”  Don’t mistake the means for then end, the teacher for the taught, the doctrine for what the doctrine describes.  They would say “a doctrine is like a finger pointing at the moon,” it is not the thing it describes.  And yet, that is what has been done in the Church: we mistake words—in the Bible, in our confessions, in our doctrines, from our pulpits—for the thing they point to.

Back in the day—the day being the first few centuries after Christ—two ways of describing, two ways of pointing to, the Trinity arose.  The first was the so-called immanent Trinity, which is what we’ve been talking about the last few weeks.  It deals with the internal make-up of the Trinity, the Son begotten by the Father, the Sprit proceeding from the Father (and in the West, the Son) and the Father being neither begotten or made, preexisting from time immemorial amen, amen.

Then there was the so-called economic Trinity, which talked about what the persons did.  Thus, rather than concentrating on the make-up of the Trinity, and whether or not they were of one substance or whether the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son, the economic Trinity spoke of the salvation of the Son, the love of the father and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.  Or the God who creates us, the God who becomes one of us and the God who teaches us how to pray.  And it was more accessible to the everyday believer, because they could relate, it spoke of something they could experience.

But almost from the beginning, these two ways of regarding the same thing became separate, almost like they were describing different phenomena.  What’s more, the immanent Trinity, which named the members by their relation to one another—Father of the Son, Son of the Father, etc. — became dominant.  If you read most any theology text of the last century, you'll see the majority of space given over to describing the abstruse, angels-on-the-head-of-head of a pin nature of the immanent Trinity, and maybe mentioning the economic view in a page or so.

Enter German theologian Karl Rahner, who insisted that “the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity and the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity.”  In other words, you can’t talk about one without the other: you can’t talk of the Father without talking of creation and grace; you can’t describe the Son without reference to his saving, self-emptying sacrifice; and you can’t talk about the Holy Spirit without reference to its comforting, advocating support.  But wait . . . there’s more!  If one of the bedrock features of the Trinity is that all three persons are co-equal (even though nobody really believes it) doesn’t that make the actions of each one the actions of each of the others?  Doesn’t that make Christ the comforter as well?  The Holy Spirit the one who creates?  And—hold the phone, here!—doesn’t that also make the Father (upon whom the title of “God” was early-on conferred) doesn’t make God the one who was crucified?

That’s exactly the title of Jurgen Moltmann’s influential 1973 work: “The Crucified God,” and that’s when all you-know-what broke loose.  If God could die, could God feel pain?  Jesus did . . . but I thought God was supposed to be unmovable, never-changing, above all the human fray, and all that Neoplatonic stuff.  And the fourth-century structure of the Trinity began to crumble, and people began to remember what First John said, that God is love, which is a verb, an action, a deed, and wasn’t that kind of what Rahner was saying, that God is the same as what God does?  And so, some folks began to think of and study the Trinity as not this eternally unchanging, static thing, not in terms of substance, and indeed, not as “thing” at all, but as action in itself, as process.

Meanwhile, feminist theologians began to insist that that we put our money where our mouths are when we say that God is neither male nor female, or that God is both.  They began to insist that if we were all created imago dei, in the image of God, we should make more room in our representations of the divine for the majority of us, who just happen to be, you know, women.  Trinitarian thinking on this ranged from a preference for using exclusively non-gendered language—like creator, redeemer, comforter—to re-imaging the Holy Spirit as feminine—to completely reimagining of the God-head in feminine terms.

No one has been more influential is this respect than Elizabeth Johnson, the title of whose book She Who Is announced its “radical” intentions.  She begins by observing that over the centuries, male imagery for God has been used in an uncritically literal way, and that it has led to a form of idolatry.  Further, our experience of God here and now is in the person of the Spirit, God's continuing creative action and presence in the world.  Because the Spirit is the “first person” we encounter, she proposes that the Trinity be reimagined around her, whom she renames Spirit-Sophia.  Finally, she renames the other members and renames them to reflect this re-ordering: Spirit-Sophia, Jesus-Sophia, and Mother-Sophia.

Now, you all might remember the foo-for-aw that erupted over our denomination’s support of a conference where this was, ah, discussed, but I want to point out a couple of things.  First, Sophia is an aspect of the divine that is well-attested to in our Scripture.  She is the wisdom aspect that brings knowledge and comfort and practical help in our everyday lives.  Second, a theology that begins with God’s presence on earth, the wind that blows where it will, is potentially more relatable to folks in the everyday than some musty, largely incomprehensible doctrine that came about largely so we wouldn’t look like—gasp!—polytheists.

Johnson’s work illustrates a very important feature of the modern revival of the Trinity: it arises from below, from lived experience, rather than from above.  Orthodox Trinitarian thought began with God as unified and transcendent, unknowable and apart from us, and proceeded to explain how God could “come down” to interact with us.  Recent thinking begins with God here among us, in the persons of the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ, God who walked among us, and proceeds to explain how to go from there to divine transcendence and unity.  It begins with our experience of God as human beings, here on this earth, and abstracts it up to a universal, transcendent phenomenon.

Perhaps nobody did this with more sweeping vision than Spanish priest and theologian Raimón Panikkar.  He begins with observations in the world and constructs a multicultural framework in which the Trinity is the central structure of reality.  His primary interest was intercultural religious dialog, and while studying philosophy in Mysuru, India came to experience the strong Trinitarian underpinnings of eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism.  He found that configurations of three are important in many world religions, as in much of human experience, really—and came to believe that faiths of many cultures are grounded in a common intuition of the divine.  He names this the cosmotheandric intuition, that of a tripartite reality: heaven, humankind and the world.  Or cosmic, material and human.  This is so, he reasons—using a method that, trust me, you don’t want me to go into—because that is the nature of being, that there are divine, human and material components.

Further, based again in part upon his experience of many cultures, as well as the personal experience of Mystics of every faith, he posits that these components interpenetrate, that though not identical, they are not separate either.  Again, this is a feature of many faiths—in Christianity  it’s called perichoresis, in Buddhism pratītyasamutpāda, in Hinduism cosmic karma—and it describes the mutual indwelling of the three components of reality.

Because this intuition of an interdependent, three-part  reality underlies faiths across cultures, Panikkar believed that this view of reality, codified in a special way in the Christian Trinity, could be the basis of intercultural dialog and understanding in a world that is in increasingly dire need of it.

But global understanding aside, because this is a sermon, not a lecture, we always have to ask what impact all this has on us middle-class Christians, and I think that one answer is that a bottoms-up approach to our views of God helps us visualize the God-head in a much more personal level, and that’s always been a strength of our faith.  After all, although other religions feature gods come to earth, Christianity is in essence built around the notion that God so loved the world that God became part of it, part of  us.  And as the 21^st century wears on, more and more people distrust a God that doesn’t seem attached, or rather seems detached, distant from us.  Orthodox theology’s emphasis on the Neoplatonic attributes of an omniscient, omnipotent, transcendent God doesn’t fly with people who feel anything but, and who have seen—all too often at first hand—what all-powerful, all-knowing governments can do.

At the same time, a God that looks like only 49 percent of the population—no matter how we tell ourselves that we know otherwise—increasingly does not resonate in a world struggling for the equal treatment and rights  of the other 51.  If God is relationship, if the relationships in the Trinity are in some way those between human beings, are they only relationships between men?  Is the Christian God-head to be represented as one big bromance?

As I think of Raimón Panikkar’s work, that all of reality is Trinitarian, I think of what that implies about our humanity.  If he is right, and all of reality is made up of matter, humanity and the divine, all of being, then that applies to us as well.  After all, we are a part of that reality, we are beings within the whole of being, are we not Trinitarian at the core?  And if we are convinced of this, really convinced of the divine humanity in each one of this, how can we treat each other the way we do?  I don’t mean just on a macro scale, as in enslaving other peoples, but in our day-to-day care for one another and for the world, for the ecos.  There is a reason Benedictine monastics practice seeing the divine in everything and everyone.

Ultimately, I keep coming back to Jesus, and his own teachings of these kinds of thing . . . the kingdom of God is among you . . . The kingdom of God is within . . . and especially his assurances in John: I in you and you in me.  How more clear a description of perichoresis, of mutual indwelling do we need?  God is not dead, God has not departed, God is here, within each of us, within our neighbors, and within the world.  As I’ve said before, we just need to discover—or perhaps rediscover how to find God.  Amen.

A Difficult Light (Trinity Series)

Last week, we traced some of the history of the doctrine of the Trinity, emphasis on the word “some.”  The full history is tortuous and twisty, and we didn’t even talk about things from the Latin side . . . And I claimed that how we envision the divine is critical to our self-understanding—just precisely in what way are we created in God’s image?—and how we treat others, including how we live in community, Christian or otherwise.

We also saw that the doctrine was by-and-large set in stone by the end of the fifth century, and that as time marched on, it became increasingly marginalized, especially in the pews, where we tend to recite it by rote in worship (if we mention it at all) but don’t pay it no never mind anytime else.  It certainly doesn’t carry much weight in the minds of believers, at least not enough to be fundamental to our faith as a growing number of scholars believe it to be.

Why do you supposed that is?  Why have we shuffled it off to Buffalo and buried it beneath platitudes for so many centuries?  Why have we given such an important doctrine lip service for so long?  Could it be its just too tough a proposal to get our minds around, so hard to understand that we dismiss it as gobbledygook or declare it the province of pointy-headed theologians like Biblical scholars have tended to do?

To answer that question, we have to take a detour back into the mists of time—well, only about 800 years before Christ—to the beginning of what theologians call the “Axial Age.”  During this time, Western Philosophy was born, reaching its stride some 400 years later in Plato and Aristotle.  In particular, philosophical argument is based on three so-called “Laws of Thought” that can be traced back to Plato.  These laws are (1) the law of identity, or “whatever is, is”; (2) the law of non-contradiction, or “nothing can both be and not be” and (3) the law of the excluded middle, or “everything must either be or not be.”  And the Laws of Thought begat dialectical reasoning or argument, which Lo! has been the basis of rational thought ever since.  All our scientific advances, all our technology, our cold medicines and iPhones, our beliefs about what is possible and what is not, are based on dialectical thought and reasoning.

And fundamental to all this is the notion that a thing is either true or not true, either one thing or the other, but not both.  This is often called dualistic thinking, and we grew up bathed in it, trained in it, and so we all—almost subconsciously—think that way.  And so, right off the bat, something that violates these rules—as the Trinity surely does—is going to make us uncomfortable.

Can you see the kind of cognitive dissonance this sets up, especially among those who were raised in the church?  We’ve been told something is true, that it is part of our Christian faith, yet it violates our very way of thinking.  We can maybe accept that there is a great, all-powerful being somewhere else, but that’s separate, up-above, in a different place or sphere.  And that only violates some esoteric laws of physics and causality that nobody cares about, anyway . . but the notion that something can be two things at once?  Now you’re meddlin’ . . . that violates the way we see the world.  Where would we be if our cat was also our dog?  If a car was a polar bear?  If a man was a woman?  You can see what happens there in the story of Caitlin Jenner . . . We have to be able to count on things being one thing or another, or we couldn’t function . . Could we?

And there’s another, more fundamental notion that this violates . . . our sense of self, of identity, of personhood.  Very early on we learnt that we are not those around us, and that they were not us.  First, we separated our own identity from that of our mother—we learn we’re not-the-mama—then next, from everyone else.  In other words, we forge our own identity, we learn that I am not you and, by extension, that Jim is not Bob and Bob is not Carol.  That’s the way the world works: you’re either one thing or another, one person or another, and never the twain shall meet.

But in the Trinity, all of that goes by the wayside.  The Father is the Son.  The Son is the Father.  And they’re both the Holy Spirit.  Oy vey!  What’s a thoroughly modern Western thinker to do?

Well.  Back to the end of the second century . . . You remember that around that time, Christian theologians began to couch Christian theology in terms of Neoplatonic philosophy?  No?  Well they did . . . and in doing so, they used not only the form of reasoning of the Neoplatonists but their vocabulary as well, and a major problem was that if you asked three philosophers what a certain Greek word meant, you’d get four answers, the fourth coming after one of them thought about it overnight.  Thus, some of them — including Origen, the big guy of Greek theology — used the Greek word hypostasis in its older sense of “a single concrete being,” while his successors — whippersnappers that they were — understood it to mean more like “state” or “underlying substance.” Take another Greek word, ousia, which, depending on who you talked to, meant “being” as such (as opposed to a single being like my cat Chili) or “essence,” i.e., cat-ness, or what makes a cat a cat and not a dog.

Well again.  I didn’t pick those two particular words out of thin air, or because I like the way they sound—ousia . . . hypostasis—but because the fundamental definition of the Trinity, the one that came out of the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople, the one that has survived over the centuries to this very day—is that the Godhead is “three hypostases in one ousia” or “three beings in one essence” or “three states in one being” or . . . Well, you get the point.

To complicate matters further, Latin was becoming the lingua Franca of the Western Church, centered at Rome, the chief theological biggie of which was one Augustine of Hippo.  And the favored translation of hypostasis was persona (i.e., person) and the favored translation of ousia was “substance.”  Giving the overall definition as “Three persons in one substance.”  Of course, this is where we get the line in everybody’s favorite Trinitarian hymn:  “God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.”

Are we confused enough?  I know I am . . . So, let’s cut to the chase and I’ll give you my favorite rendition, and it's the earliest version: God is “three beings in one essence,” with essence meaning God’s basic God-hood, what makes God God, and being meaning “concrete being” or “example of a being.”   I don’t use “person” because today we think about it as an individual human being and that’s not what is meant by it.  Notice that this is nicely Platonic, or rather Neoplatonic, where the essential God-ness is a Neoplatonic ideal and the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are actual examples of that ideal.

Of course, that wasn’t the end, because they had to describe how The Son and the Holy Spirit came about.  The first one was easy, the Son was begotten from the Father.  Not made, you understand, but begotten . . . remember that thing with Mary?  The Holy Spirit, however, wasn’t so easy, and it took another Century and a half after the Nicene Council to come to an agreement:  the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (and the Son, in the West).  That “proceeds” is a participle, as in “proceeding,” indicating that the Spirit is a dynamic thing, always proceeding down into the world from the Father (and, in the West, the Son).

If you look at the first page of your handout, you’ll see a Medieval representation of the Trinity that captures many of the features of the doctrine.  It's called the “Shield of the Trinity,” and back in the day, variations were used in coats of arms and to embellish actual shields.  The lines between the entities represent their relationships: the Father is-not the Son, the Son is-not the Holy Spirit and so on.   They are all God, by dint of their ousia, their essence, which is represented by lines labeled “is.”  The Father is on the left, the Son on the right—at the same level—with the Holy Spirit below them, indicating, perhaps, that it processes from them.  In the West, that is.

But wait a minute: if the Son is begotten of the Father, and the Holy Ghost is proceeding from the Father, what about the Father, who is technically just another being who is God like the Son and Spirit?  Where did the Father come from?  Nowhere: the divine Father was neither begotten or made, said the fathers of the Church. and didn’t proceed from anywhere.  The Father, alone out of the three hypostases, the three persons, had always been there.  Thus, in a triad of supposed equals, the person of the Father was more equal, and his positioning at the top of the Trinitarian triangle in many representations—like the one on the second page of your handout—reinforced that feeling.

In fact, no matter how you slice it, in the doctrine of the Trinity, the Father looks superior to the other members, even though this is a big no-no . . . So big that it has a name, Subordinationism, and is considered a heresy.  In theory, the members of the Trinity are co-equal.  In practical terms, however, you can’t hardly get there from here.

And that has helped spark re-evaluation of the doctrine, among feminist scholars as well as others, exploring the relationships among the members . . . What does it mean to say that the Father “begets” the Son? What kind of relationship does that imply?  Can we abstract it to a “parental” relationship, or is there something uniquely “father-like” about it?  What does it mean that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son?  Surely that is a dynamic, ongoing thing, as implied by the participle . . . is the “begetting” dynamic and ongoing as well?  We’ll explore some of these notions next week, as we look at some of the leading edges of Trinitarian thought.

But for now, let’s notice that stepping back, one might say that God, or perhaps more accurately the “God-head,” is relationship.  And as Franciscan priest Richard Rohr puts it, that relationship is love.   After all, First John assures us that what God is, is love, so how could it be any different?  And we are made in God’s image, are we not, and if that is true, are we not love, at our very core, do we not share in the dynamic, life-giving nature and relationships—one in three, three in one, all in love— of the God-head?  And not only we as individuals, but we as community are founded on love . . . The relationships within us—body, spirit, mind—and between us are bound by, bathed in, comprised of nothing less than love.  Amen.