sermon preached
at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA
by the
Rev. Josh Hosler, Associate Priest for Adult Formation
Trinity Sunday, May
27, 2018
This
sermon will be about three things at once. I pray that the three topics may be
one, acting with the same intention, mysterious but not incomprehensible, and
not going on too long. This sermon will be about the Trinity, about the
difference between flesh and spirit, and about the royal wedding. Of course.
But I
want to start with our Psalm today, Psalm 29. There’s a verse in it that’s very
strange. The Book of Common Prayer has
it, “The voice of the LORD makes the oak trees writhe and strips the forests
bare.” But if you really dig into the ancient Hebrew text, it could just as
easily read, “The voice of the LORD brings labor pains upon a doe and causes a
mountain goat to give birth prematurely.” We don’t know which is correct. But what
if the psalmist intended to say both things at the same time?
This
is why I love the Hebrew language, and this is why Psalm 29 is my very favorite
psalm. What better poetry could there be than poetry that offers not one
meaning, but many? What better faith could there be than a faith that is poetry
and not just rote teaching? And what better text to speak to such a faith than
the Bible we have, such a curious conglomeration of texts written by multiple
authors over more than a thousand years—texts that alternately delight and
horrify, relieve and confuse? What a weird thing this is, this faith that has
been handed on to us. And is there any weirder inheritance of ours than the
doctrine of the Trinity?
Is
the Trinity in the Bible? Well, yes and no. No, if you mean a semi-cohesive
theological formula by which 1+1+1=1. That would come later, in the era of the
early Christian councils of the fourth and fifth centuries. But within the
Bible, we do find God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
Spirit—sometimes in surprising places and situations. The author of the Gospel
of John declares that Christ always was—begotten, not made, working with God
the Father at the very beginning. And we find God the Holy Spirit in Genesis 1
as well: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth
was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind
from God swept over the waters.” Wind: Ruach
in Hebrew. Ruach also means breath,
and the spirit of life. Ruach shows
up in the psalms, and in Isaiah, and in other places in the Hebrew Bible. We
find the Wisdom of God in several books, usually represented as feminine, as
the divine Sophia. She could be equated with Christ or with the Holy Spirit, as
could “the voice of God” in that wonderfully weird Psalm 29.
Paul
talks about God’s holy Spirit today in the Letter to the Romans: “For those who
are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a
spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of
adoption.” So then, according to Paul, the Holy Spirit frees us from bondage to
fear and replaces that fear with belonging. We see this clearly whenever we
baptize someone, as we baptized Lucy, Finn, and Alice last week. Oh, the joy on
their faces! We baptized them with water as Jesus instructed his apostles, in
the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Well,
the Trinity is all about threes. But we find today in our readings that both
Paul and Jesus are talking in twos, in a duality of flesh and spirit. Now, I
think this is one of the most dangerously misunderstood areas of Christian
theology because of the unconscious biases we carry in our own times. When we
think of spirit, we think of that which is invisible, incorporeal, elusive—and somehow
less than real. The Holy Spirit is more traditionally referred to as the “Holy
Ghost,” and unfortunately, that makes me think of spooky haunted houses more
than the fiery love of God. And when we think of flesh, don’t all our minds
automatically go somewhere in the area of sex, and even to some sort of
condemning of sexual desire as somehow dirty or at least less than holy?
So
first, understand that in ancient Hebrew thought, there wasn’t much of a
differentiation between our bodies and our souls. Our ancestors in the faith never
would have thought of human beings as souls trapped inside a troublesome and
limiting body. Indeed, without your body, your soul could not be, and the
notion of an afterlife had only partially developed by Jesus’ time. We have the
Greeks to blame, and primarily Plato, for our body-soul dualism. The Hebrew differentiation
of flesh and spirit is not, as it turns out, a parallel.
Rather,
when Paul differentiates the flesh from the
spirit, it’s a matter of where we choose to put our focus. The flesh will
always demand certain things, and it is right to do so. We cannot stay alive
without eating and drinking. But when we limit our focus to these things—to
mere survival, or to satisfying the present, immediate need—we are remaining
“of the flesh.” This can be selfish, such as when we say, “Well, I’ve got mine,
so that’s all that matters.” Or it can be as good and as innocent as taking
pride in a personal accomplishment. There are many perfectly appropriate matters
“of the flesh.”
To become “of the spirit” means to set a
higher standard for ourselves that is beyond our instant gratification. Some
people aren’t able to do this, because they’ve never felt secure enough “in the
flesh” to go beyond it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being “of the
flesh,” just like there’s nothing inherently wrong with being a child. It is a
phase of the journey, and it is leading somewhere, all in God’s good time.
Furthermore, we are never fully “of the
spirit,” but we also must attend to the needs “of the flesh.” When we say, “If
I don’t take care of myself, I won’t have any energy to give to others,” we are
setting healthy boundaries, and this is a matter “of the flesh.” But this
taking care of ourselves serves the parts of our lives that are “of the
spirit.”
One of the ways we can remain stuck “in the
flesh” is to remain enslaved to our most irrational fears, and it is to this tendency
that Paul addresses the Roman church in today’s reading. Paul is saying, “God
has adopted you into the only family that matters. Relax. You belong to God,
and God will not let you fall.” But, he warns, living “according to the flesh” happens
when we let our fears run wild, when we try to seize control over our lives in
every way we can. It happens when we have no qualms about hurting others to
protect ourselves.
Likewise, Jesus urges his potential disciple Nicodemus to relax
into God’s love and to be born anew. As we age, we find ourselves burdened with
fears that, it turns out, are unfounded once we understand how eternal God’s
love for us is. Being “born again” means letting God put our fears to death and
starting over.
 |
| The Most Rev. Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church (image from express.co.uk) |
A week ago Saturday, our presiding bishop Michael Curry preached
at Windsor Castle at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, and he
brought the house down! Bishop Curry preached about love—not a surprising topic
at a wedding. But here’s the shocking thing: church weddings are not primarily about the couple. Weddings are about
God—about what holy things God is accomplishing through the couple as they
publicly declare their commitment to each other for life. When Bishop Curry
quoted Song of Solomon—another Spirit-rich Hebrew text—and said that love is a
fire, I could only think, “Wow! Pentecost came a day early in England!”
Indeed, the love Bishop Curry points to is a fierce, fiery
love—the love by which God pursues us. This joyful love catches us up in its
playful embrace and then sends us outward. Wherever that love spreads, God’s work
is accomplished, and that’s Good News! This is why Bishop Curry quoted the
Hebrew prophets to point out, during a wedding, that God’s vision is for an end
to poverty, and end to violence, and end to exploitation. No wedding is only
about the couple, because one of the most important ethical values of
committed, sexual love is that it provides energy that the couple can then turn
outward on the world.
Furthermore, as I looked at the shots of stony-faced congregants
at that wedding, and also at those who occasionally let slip a smirk or a
smile, I thought: “Bishop Curry is pointing to a love that can free us from
fear. It can burn up all our stuffy,
anxious self-consciousness and free us to love joyfully and with abandon!” This
love also burns up all our self-righteous bigotry
... all our gross ambitions for power ... all our selfish lusts for that which
we cannot control ... all the ways that we do live according to the flesh. This
burning, consuming fire of the Spirit is what God's Judgment is. It may hurt …
a lot. But I say, bring it on! I want to be free to live according to the
Spirit—God’s Holy Spirit.
Bishop Curry will be with us at St. Paul’s for a brief
time on Friday, June 15, at 3:30 p.m. We’re not giving out tickets, so show up
early and save seats! It won’t be a church service—just a public address with
some question-and-answer time. But I bet that Bishop Curry will make us feel
like we’re in church—not dry, stuffy church, but spirit-filled, fiery church!
We are the Church, and when we love God, love one another—and while we’re at
it, love ourselves—we can help God to change the world.
This is beautiful. Thank you!
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