University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

IN LIGHT INACCESSIBLE

John 16:12-15

A Communion Meditation by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Trinity Sunday  June 3, 2007

(This meditation draws substantially, beyond the footnote,  from a paper by Chandler Stokes, presented to the January 2001 meeting of the Moveable Feast in Princeton, New Jersey)

            Today is a day when many preachers try to schedule the beginning of their summer vacations. Today is Trinity Sunday, one of those very few days in the life of the church when in words and music we celebrate a theological concept.  And a difficult concept it is, and the reason for the exodus of preachers to the mountains or the beach.  A task force of the Presbyterian Church spent five years wrestling with the idea of the Trinity before reporting to last year’s General Assembly. In their report, they sought to convey the way in which all language about God is metaphor, as well as the variety of ways in which Christians have talked about the Trinity over the years… from the familiar baptismal formulation we most often use (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) to more imaginative forms (“Speaker, Word and Breath,” or “Giver, Gift and Giving,” and my favorite, Augustine’s “Lover, Beloved, Love”). 

            In the end the report became controversial, in part because the secular press missed its nuances and reported broadly, and incorrectly, that the Assembly had abandoned the traditional Trinitarian language. But the clarifying corrections were lost, and cartoonists had a field day.  In Doug Marlette’s “Kudzu,” the Rev. Will B. Dunn lamented that the Presbyterians had forsaken Father, Son and Holy Spirit for “Rock, Paper, and Scissors.”  But more than ridicule was at stake. Presbyterian theologian Dan Migliore observed that “For many Christians, including many Presbyterians, the doctrine of the Trinity is not only dark and confusing; it is also without practical significance for everyday Christian faith and life.”[1]

            So, what shall we do? Shall we just discard the doctrine because we don’t understand it, despite the fact that it has been a central distinctive of the Christian faith for the better part of two millennia? Admittedly, it is a concept beyond our grasp, hidden from us, as the hymn writer suggests, “by light inaccessible.”   The best we can do is to try to hint at its truth. But the one and the three have been so long at the heart of the church’s understanding that we can not simply ignore their meaning.  One of the most helpful descriptions of both the dilemma and helpfulness of Trinitarian thought is offered by Barbara Brown Taylor; she says:

Believers throughout the centuries have tried to describe God, but very few have been satisfied with their descriptions.  Their words turn out to be too frail to do the job.  They cannot paint a true portrait of God, because creatures cannot capture their creator any better than a bed of oysters can dance Swan Lake.  The best any of us has ever been able to do is to describe what the experience of God is like – how it sounds, how it feels, what it reminds us of.  Whether the experience originates in the pages of scripture or in the events of our own lives, the best any of us has ever been able to do is simply confess what it is like when we are in the presence of God.

The problem is that it is rarely the same experience twice in a row.  Some days God comes as a judge, walking through our lives wearing white gloves and exposing all the messes we have made.  Other days God comes as a shepherd, fending off our enemies and feeding us by hand.  Some days God comes as a whirlwind who blows all our uncertainties away.  Other days God comes as a brooding hen who hides us in the shelter of her wings.  Some days God comes as a dazzling monarch and other days as a silent servant.  If we were to name all the ways God comes to us, the list would go on forever: God the teacher, the challenger, the helper, the stranger; God the lover, the adversary, the yes, the no.[2]

God is many, which is at least one of the mysteries behind the doctrine of the Trinity. That faith statement is our confession that God comes to us in all kinds of ways, as different from one another as they can be.  The other mystery is that God is one. There cannot be a fierce God and a loving one, a God of the Old Testament and another of the New.  When we experience God in contradictory ways, that is our problem, not God’s.  We cannot solve it by driving wedges into the divine self.  All we can do is decide whether or not to open ourselves up to a God whose freedom and imagination boggle our minds.… I do not know why we hold ourselves responsible for explaining things that cannot be explained.[3] 

            The doctrine of the Trinity wasn’t something Jesus taught.  It was not something the Bible taught. Today’s passage is assigned for Trinity Sunday only because it mentions the three persons of the Godhead. In truth, the doctrine of the Trinity evolved over hundreds of years as the church tried to come to terms with what God was like. And one of the key problems in that move toward discernment was figuring out what it meant to say that God was in Christ.  Many people had some sense of the transcendence of God, some awareness of God beyond them.  Many others had some sense of God within them, of the spiritual presence of God inside each human soul. What early Christians lacked was a language that took the God beyond and the God within and put them together with the God beside them, the God they had come to know in Jesus Christ, and yet was faithful to the commandment to worship only the one God.  Over time the church developed the doctrine of the Trinity as a kind of language to help folks do that, to help them understand how the God who made all things, who had moved across the face of the earth as Spirit, had now come to dwell among them. It was a lot to keep in balance. It still is.

            One of the hardest things for many people to absorb is the idea that God lives, breathes, and suffers. We find it easier to think of God as detached, as out there somewhere. But the God of Scripture enters into human life in the stark reality of birth and death: birth amid the stench of the stable at Bethlehem and death in the reek of Golgotha. Says Chandler Stokes,

In His life amid the stench and the waste, [Jesus] embraces every soul ever cast aside as less than human.  In His life he claims all flesh as His own. He comes into our flesh… [flesh] that gets beat up by disease and hatred, by ignorance and obstinacy.  He comes into our feeble form and suffers the gross rejection of a world that is content with alienation, callousness and greed.  He suffers the cruelty of a world self-absorbed and fearful. He comes into our world, the one we know, this very world, and he embraces it wholly – wholly from his birth in poverty to his death in shame. God comes into [our] flesh and says, “This, this very flesh is of ultimate value.  In the deepest identification it is as if God were to say, “This is flesh of My flesh and bone of My bone.”[4]

How are we to understand this God who is at once beyond, beside and within?  Let me offer two stories as a starting place. The first is a story told by Presbyterian pastor Tom Tewell about a family he knew. The focus of the story is the family’s three-year-old son, who was hospitalized with a very serious breathing disorder. As Tom came to see the family in the hospital, he found the young boy in an oxygen tent.  Tom spoke to the boy, whose name was David.  The parents wanted to fill Tom in on what they had learned from the doctors, but didn’t want to do so in front of David, and so they motioned to him to step out into the hallway.  Jane, the mother, said to David, “We’re just going to walk Dr. Tewell to the elevator; we’ll be right back.” They were walking down the hallway to the elevator, had only been gone a few seconds, when they heard horrible screams coming from David’s room. In the very short time it had taken them to walk a few paces down the hall, David had become worried and anxious, and had pulled out his I.V. and was flailing his arms and legs, trying to get out of the tent. In no time at all he had begun sweating and foaming.  The nurses for a moment seemed uncertain about what to do, but David’s mother calmly unzipped the tent, kicked off her shoes, and climbed into the tent with her arms open to David….  She wiped his brow, and he stopped kicking, and he soon fell asleep. 

In Jesus Christ, God enters into our lives with deepest compassion and deepest identity. “This is flesh of My flesh and bone of My bone.” And though we may be more comfortable with the idea of a God who is out there, beyond us, or with a sense of some divine spark within us, our Trinitarian heritage insists that God is also very much beside us… which brings us to the second story, one often told in twelve-step recovery programs; it is the story of a man who fell into a deep pit. A doctor came by the pit, and the man at the bottom cried out, “Can you help me?”  The doctor wrote out a prescription and threw it down into the hole.  Then a minister came by, and the man again cried out, “Can you help me?”  And so the minister offered a prayer, and then went his way. Then a friend came by, and the man cried out, “Can you help me?” And the friend, without hesitation, jumped into the hole with the man.  The man said, “Well, great! Now we’re both stuck down here.” To which his friend replied, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”

From birth to death, God embraces human life and blesses it. God enters into this frail, limited flesh and says, “This is flesh of My flesh and bone of My bone.”  And then with every word and gesture of his human life he says, “There is another way. A way out and beyond.  Let me show you a higher way to speak the divine in word and deed, to embody, to enflesh the divine.” And then, in the end the hand of the Almighty grasps His frail and broken body, His completely human life, and raises Him to everlasting life.

So, even though we may resist the notion of God’s entry into human flesh, in the end that entry into our flesh is our redemption.  We may still have a deep resistance to the notion of a suffering God. But our God, the Triune God, is a God who suffers.  This is our God, whose eyes are not gazing off into eternity, but instead are always upon us. This is our God, climbing into the tent with us, descending into the pit with us, claiming us with compassion, showing us the way.  This is our God, whose way may be a very fine balancing act, and who may be obscured by light inaccessible to our eyes, but who is surely the way, and the truth, and the life.