The Rap on Jeremiah

I have just begun teaching a nine month Bible study on one of my favorite books, Jeremiah. The prophet lived at a time of great political, social and religious upheaval, most notably the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 586 B.C. I find Jeremiah has much to say about our time, as we experience great cultural and social shifts in Western society. He answers the question--albeit in a nuanced and challenging way--of how does one live faithfully to God in a time of faithlessness and chaos? As anyone who has read Jeremiah can tell, it is far from chronological in its order, which can make it a challenge to comprehend. I've put together the following short poem, which includes all the critical names and dates to understand the immediate context of Jeremiah and hopefully make it meaning and message more apparent to our current challenges. I hope this silly poem might since ignite the curiosity of some readers to revisit this treasure of a book.

Jeremiah prophesied in 626,

When Josiah was trying the religion to fix.

Pharaoh Neco came out and put him down;

To Jehoiakim the son he gave the crown.

King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon

Made the two kings his own pawn.

Then Jehoiakim thought he had a plan,

Free the nation and rebel against the man.

Dying suddenly his son Joiachin

Was sent into exile with the rest of his kin.

This all happened in 597,

False hope ran high, as high as heaven.

Zedekiah the uncle became governor.

Jeremiah was then a frank messenger.

To an end it all came in 586,

When Nebuchadnezzar made Jerusalem sticks.

The land turned to chaos and murder and strife;

Jeremiah went to Egypt for the rest of his life.

A sermon on reality TV & conversion of the heart

 
Gospel Lesson:  St. Mark 7:1-23

One of the major trends in the reality tv movement of the past two decades has been the makeover show. The same storyline runs through virtually all of them. They start with a person, family or group who are somehow deficient or in need of real help; then enters the expert or experts at whatever difficulty they are facing; the right cure is applied. The conclusion of the show is meant to convey dramatic resolution as the subject has been transformed. These shows point to a fundamental human hunger for salvation. It is remarkable that there is a vestige of the Christian account of the salvation of sinners in the genre of the makeover show. Of course, the problem with these shows is the transformation and salvation offered is purely on the level of externals. A material or physical medicine is applied to what are mostly emotional and spiritual maladies. Take for example, one of my personal favorites for a number of years: Clean House. Each episode introduces a new family who is burdened by clutter. It is clear that many are suffering from more than just an inability to throw things out. But the experts arrive, sell everything at a garage sale, and transform the house from clutter to haven. But the emotional and spiritual issues that caused the chaos are often overlooked or minimized. You see, there is a relationship between one's external circumstances and one's internal state, and an external salve alone will not heal an internal problem.

This is precisely the point our Lord Jesus is making in todays Gospel lesson. The passage begins with a legal dispute brought by the Pharisees and scribes who were the authorities on the application of the law found in the Torah, the first books of the Bible. These Jewish leaders ask Jesus why his disciples do not wash their hands before they eat. It was not a question of sanitation but of ritual purity. You see, according to the traditions of the scribes, hands must be washed prior to eating. There are two problems with this: the first is that it is a very vigorous interpretation of the law. The custom of hand-washing was based on law of ritual washing for the priests prior to entering the temple and offering sacrifice. The tradition was trying to say that even eating a meal is sacred—not, of course, a bad sentiment—but on the other hand, to claim divine authority from the Torah for this custom was more than a stretch. A second and more important problem has to do with the nature of the inquiry made by the Pharisees and scribes. For Jesus it is evident that they are far more concerned with externals than than with internal considerations of motive, will and love. For our Lord it would be far too easy to fulfill all these external customs but have no love for God or for one's neighbor, and this, he says, is fundamentally hypocrisy. He quotes Isaiah as characterizing their hypocrisy: This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

Our Lord is not saying that externals are bad or unnecessary. That would be bad news for us Episcopalians because externals are among the things we do best: good music, beautify liturgy, and well-ordered worship. But as we learn from our Lord's response to this line of questioning, we have to begin with internal and allow the external to be manifestation of that. In the discourse following he says, “There is nothing from outside a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.” He then goes on to list those evils that begin in the mind and in the will and are the source of defilement. By the way, ritual defilement, uncleanness or impurity are those thing that disrupt one's relationship with God meaning most importantly, if you were unclean, you could not enter the temple for worship. Our Lord touches the man with leprosy and is touched by the woman with the issue of blood—both leprosy and blood were causes of ritual defilement. This woman and the leper would have been like untouchables because the defilement was contractible—if one touched them one would be unclean. By touching them, Jesus shows that this notion of defilement is not to be worshiped above love for neighbor, but he also remarkably restores them to society at large and to temple worship and even to God. The point our Lord is making in this lesson is summarized very well in another discourse with the Pharisees where he says, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also” (Matthew 23:25-26).  Cleanse first that which is within.

Again, I do not think that Jesus is saying externals are unimportant. Later Christian thinking would come to the conclusion that ritual law had been superseded in the New Testament, but our Lord is not rejecting ritual law in our passage. He is saying that religion, if it is to be true, has to be first a religion of the heart. A religion of the heart then can become the basis for the externals of religion. Those externals then are a manifestation of the internal, religion of the heart. In fact, the external becomes the natural complement to the internal aspects of faith. This is something we already realize instinctively. There are many Protestant versions of Christianity where the religion of the heart never expresses itself externally: these tend to produce churches that market a highly subjective faith which results in chaos and volatility. A further complication is when the religion of the heart is not supported by external structure, it often depends on emotions to maintain itself; emotions inevitably turn and can cause spiritual shipwreck. The opposite extreme of well-ordered externals but an absence of internal religion is a temptation for the mainline and Catholic denominations, and this of course is the problem of the Pharisees and scribes. External religion isolated from internal faith results in a sterile and cold religion that we have all witnessed and perhaps even practiced. When our liturgy, traditions and worship become more real to us than the living presence of Christ, we are worshiping a pious myth rather than the living God.

In looking at our lives, we have to start with our hearts and not with externals. Consider this fact that flies in the face of our consumerist culture: material goods are rarely if ever transformative. I promise the desired thing will not bring lasting happiness or joy. Our Lord indicates that our hearts need to be clean if we to be ritually clean, that is, in right relationship with God. Consider again the fact that our hearts are the moral center of our person. St. Augustine said that before Adam and Eve ever ate of the fruit of the forbidden tree, before the serpent ever tempted Eve, Adam had a bad will, a will to sin. Sin is clothed in lots of forms: it can be blatant and uncloaked, it can appear in altruistic guise—after all if you are giving to the poor just to stroke your own ego, how do you think God reckons this act?—and sin can even appear in a religious guise. Think of the Pharisee who went up to temple only to pray to himself about how much superior he was to others. But the matter is even more stark: traditional theology says that if you have the will to sin but not the occasion to sin you are still guilty of the sin.

But how, you might ask, can we ever begin to change our own hearts? It is the heart that seems to be most out of our control. The prophet Jeremiah says of the heart: The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? And in the succeeding verse he answers his own question: I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins (17:9-10). It is God who knows our hearts and intentions, our wanderings even better than we do. But he also wills to change our hearts. The Lord speaks through the prophet Ezekiel, “Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean. . . A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. (36.25-26). A changed heart is not something we can manufacture, it is something that only God can give us. I love this imagery: He can change our heart of stone for a heart of flesh. Again you might ask: how does he do this? What is it that can soften a stoney heart? Brothers and sisters, it is love. Love is the only thing that can transform the heart. Ezekiel prophecy finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Look at the cross, where God's love embraces all of our sin and brokenness. Even as our arms were crossed in antipathy to God, Jesus extends his arms in love. The love of God removes our stoney hearts and gives us a new heart of flesh. Isn't it self-evident that once we accept that we are wholly loved by God, we become free, free to love others not of obligation or self-interest but in the freedom of self-giving and self-sacrificial love, and thus, in our own small way, to be vessels of God's heart-changing love. As we come to this Altar, we remember once again the love of our Savior given in his precious Body and Blood. May we ever be nourished, renewed and transformed by this love given for each of us and indeed for the life of the world. 
 

An invocation for a men's civic supper club

Almighty God, the God of righteouness, of truth and of love, the author of peace and giver of every good gift. We thank you for the manifold blessings of this life: for true and unassuming friendship, for affectionate and loving family, and for a strong civic community. We give you thanks not only for the light but also for the darkness: for trial, tribulation and adversity which have called us out of ourselves and into the brotherhood of love. We give you thanks for sparing us from trial that we did not have strength to bear, for delivering us out of many present troubles, and for the hope of our final deliverance in your kingdom. We remember before you our nation. Deliver it from selfish ambition, idle sloth, vain strife and shallow materialism. As we turn to you and order our lives according to your Word, may the civic virtues of respect for authority, thriftiness and universal charity flourish. We pray to you for all young people. Infuse in them a passion for truth, save them from the sins of blind youth, and deliver them from the heedless pursuit of the pleasures of this life. Finally and above all, we give you thanks for the gift of your Son, Jesus Christ. In him, our elder brother, representative and head, the door of forgiveness and new life is always open. It is in his name that we pray. Amen.

A sermon on the occasion of a Baptism

[31] And again, departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis.[32] And they bring unto him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech him to put his hand upon him. [33] And he took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue; [34] And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. [35] And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain. [36] And he charged them that they should tell no man: but the more he charged them, so much the more a great deal they published it; [37] And were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.
                              - St. Mark 7:31-37

The Gospel lesson today relates our Lord's healing of a deaf and apparently mute man. In fact, the Greek word indicates that he could speak, but only with great difficulty—hence the translation in the King James, he had an impediment in his speech. The fact that he could speak tells us that he was not deaf from birth, but rather, his loss of hearing must have been from an accident or disease. In the beginning of our lesson, our Lord ventures into a predominately Gentile region: Tyre, Sidon and Decapolis, but we cannot say for certain that the deaf man was a Gentile as there were communities of Jews living in those areas. Note the important fact, that nowhere do we have a record of the deaf man asking to be healed. In fact, it seems to be on the impetus and initiative of the those who bring the deaf man to Jesus, that our Lord heals him. In nearly every healing Jesus performed, an individual had faith. In this case, as in several others, it does not appear to be the faith of the one healed but of those who bring the afflicted person. We have here a picture of the goodwill and pity our Lord has for broken and hurting people. There is much here that is true of our own lives. None of us came to faith in isolation. At a certain time—the fulness of time—our first encounter with the Lord was probably as a result of being brought to the Lord by someone else. Perhaps a mother, or a godparent or a mentor. We must remember that even the small faith we offer to God is not our own; it is the gift of God and it has been nurtured by others. If we understood this, then there would truly be no room to cast aspersions on the apparently unbelieving or the faithless.

In this Gospel narrative we have a picture of infant baptism. Allow me to explain. The faith needed for our Lord to work, as I've noted, is probably not the faith of the deaf man but of those who bring him to Jesus. If someone asked you how to become a Christian what answer would you give them? On the day of Pentecost, Peter gave this one. After our Lord's Ascension, Peter filled with the Holy Spirit preached to the crowds of Jesus the Messiah. Just a few months earlier, a similar crowd gathered for a Jewish feast had called for the crucifixion of Jesus, and now Peter tells them that this Jesus whom they crucified is Lord and Christ. The response of the crowd is immediate: “Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Peter's answer is a wonderful summation of entry into the Christian life: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.” (Acts 2.37-38). Repent and be baptized. Christian initiation is twofold, repentance and baptism. Repentance itself is a twofold action: a turning away from sin and self and a turning to God in faith and obedience. From Peter's words, it is evident that baptism and faith go hand in hand. If you only had one or the other, that is, baptism or faith, one would have a truncated Christianity. Well, you might ask, how does an infant have faith when baptism is administered? The faith comes from those who bring the child to baptism to be touched by the Lord, just as those men brought the deaf man to the Lord to be touched by him. I think it would be a reasonable conclusion that the deaf man believed in Jesus after his healing. In the same way, parents, godparents and the local church are to nurture faith in baptized children so that the faith becomes that of the child and not only of those who brought the child to be baptized. And just as our faith is not a static reality but something that grows or diminishes as it is fed by prayer and the Scriptures so too baptism cannot be merely a past event. Fr. Bright likes to say that baptism is the greatest gift one will ever receive, and it takes one's whole life to open this gift, this ever-flowing fountain of grace. We are always in need of returning to those two great pillars of our initiation: repentance and baptism. These are not to be simply past events, but on-going realities.

I mentioned earlier that the condition of the deaf man indicated that he had a speech impediment. In fact, the Greek word used to describe this disability is nowhere else used in the New Testament. The evangelist probably employed this somewhat unusual word in order to allude to an Old Testament passage that has strong messianic overtones. Listen to this passage from Isaiah 35 as the prophet describes the work of the Lord: “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall hear; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of stammerers shall be clear.” The tongue of stammerers. Notice the close verbal parallel between the last verse of the Gospel lesson and this passage from Isaiah. For Mark, it is evident that Jesus is the fulfillment of this prophecy. And, of course, Jesus quite literally healed the blind, the deaf and the lame. But Isaiah's prophecy and our Lord's ministry of healing have spiritual implications as well. According to the Bible, every one is a little bit blind, a little bit deaf, a little bit stammering in their speech. For this reason, our Lord says repeatedly, he who has ears to hear, let him hear. There are of course many reasons for this spiritual condition. One reason is out of sheer laziness in that we can and do live unexamined lives. Think of the person raised in one place who has no love for the geography of that place; in nearly all cases, he will have to leave home before he can see and appreciate the beauty that has always surrounded him.  Another cause of spiritual blindness is the fact of our creaturely limitations. We are born into certain epochs and ages, a certain society and culture. It is difficult to think about what is already assumed in one's culture. How many white Americans who lived at the formation of our nation and who were otherwise moral human beings did not recognize the immorality of owning another human being? It is very difficult to be objective about one's received culture and even family background. A third cause of our spiritual blindness is, of course, sin. Life, true life, is meant to be dynamic and growing, but sin is deadening and ossifies all that it comes into contact with. We easily fall into the cycle of transgression, guilt & shame, superficial repentance, and finally sin again. Before long, our senses are numbed to God and to the world around us. We cannot bear to hear the message of God's love; we cannot see the beautiful world he has given to us. I am convinced that the more we empirically examine the world around us the more we will see these conditions of being deaf, blind, lame and of stammering speech. Our Lord's ministry of healing evidences his pity for such as these.

Allow me now to read the sentences following in the passage from Isaiah: Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall hear; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of stammerers shall be clear, because water has broken forth in the wilderness and a gully in a thirsty land; the dry place shall turn into marshlands, and in the thirsty land there shall be a spring of water (NET LXX Isaiah 35:5-7). The message and promise of baptism is that water has broken forth in the wilderness. Our physical, emotional and spiritual infirmities are like a wilderness in which there seems to be no life sustaining water, and there is not as long as we are focused on my trial, my difficulty, my adversity. Our baptism is like a fountain that will never cease to flow. It is a fountain of grace in the wilderness of blindness and sin. Whether we are facing trials from outside or our own inner demons, we can always say—like Martin Luther when he was assailed by guilt—I am baptized. I am baptized. May we ever find our baptism to be a solace in trial and a well of grace. 

Toy Dog

I've just finished this toy dog for my children. I won't share how long it took from start to finish since it is kind of embarrassing (lived in another house when I started it). Nevertheless, I'm pleased with how it turned out. The design comes from a vintage Playskool toy from the 50s or 60s. I used native Oklahoma cedar given to me by a friend so the project cost virtually nothing. . . about $1 for the metal studs for the ears and $1 for dollar store jump rope to use as the pull. All the pieces were turned on my lathe; afterwards I was able to make the ears and head by splitting off the rounded edges of my turning, planing those edges flat, and then using a coping saw to cut out their shapes. I had originally intended to mimic the color scheme of the original, but after I had made all the pieces, I decided the cedar looked so nice that I would just use a natural finish of sanding sealer & paste wax. As soon as I brought it in last night from the shed, I took pictures of it: the pictures reflect what it looks like before Isaiah gets his hands on it!

The Original Playskool Toy

'In any man be in Christ, he is a new creature', Trinitytide Sermon

Epistle Lesson: 2 Corinthians 5:14-21
Gospel Lesson: St. Mark 4:35-41 / St. Mark 5:1-20


The Gospel lesson begins with the rather ordinary phrase, “let us pass over unto the other side.” There is no foreshadowing of what is about to come upon their ship. It is as if he said, let’s grab a bite to eat or let’s go for a walk. Our lives too are characterized by the mundane, the ordinary, the quotidian details of life. But, of course, our lives also are seemingly interrupted by accidents and catastrophes. We never know what sort of wind, what sort of driving rain will come upon us unexpectedly. The disciples’ reaction to an accident of nature is fear. They believe their lives to be in jeopardy by a storm. Fear makes sense in a world of freak accidents and blind justice. In such a view, storms—both literal and figurative—are the playthings of chance, and we are all victims of a god who is more like a capricious child than a loving father. But God of the Bible is a loving Father. In the opening chapter of Genesis, God’s Spirit broods over the waters, transforming the chaos of the unformed world into an ordered and good creation. The Book of Psalms says—and this is unsettling for an Oklahoman—“Praise the LORD from the earth. . . Fire and hail, snow and vapours, * wind and storm, fulfilling his word” (148.7-8). Jesus teaches that his Father sends rain on the just and on the unjust; he makes his sun to rise on the good and on the evil. From the standpoint of faith there are no accidents. God is not asleep at the wheel in the storms of this life. Jesus chastens his disciples for their lack of faith. Now, what Jesus does not say is that we will always in all situations know and understand why something has befallen us. Or why we have come into the heart of a storm with our master seemingly asleep? As a man, I would like to know why hail hit our church and my home, but as a Christian, I have to trust that God is working everything together for his purposes, mysterious as they may seem to us. I can assure you that this view is much better than the alternative of seeing ourselves in a chaotic and purposeless world. My favorite image of God’s providence is that in this world, God’s good providence appears to us like the back of tapestry with unsightly knots and a rather chaotic pattern, but in the world to come, it will be as if that tapestry were turned around and we will understand how even the unexpected worked together in God’s great design. From the standpoint of this faith, we can trust that Jesus is in the storm with us, and he has power to deliver us because he is God. This passage puts before us one of the most compelling images of our Lord’s divine nature, as he calms the water and the storm in a way reminiscent of God as Creator in the book of Genesis. From the standpoint of faith, we can move from being victims of life’s storms to realizing that in Christ, we are children of God, children who know that nothing of this life—not even death—can separate them from his love. 


But we can see more about our lives. Yes, our outward lives are often assailed by storms. In fact, we seem to move from one storm to the next, and are in a relatively constant state of chaos. We know storms and catastrophes but there is also another power working in this world: the power of sin and spiritual evil. While outwardly we are assailed by storms, inwardly we are assaulted by our own inner demons: addiction, self-hatred, anger, greed, malice towards others. All these kill us and others. Notice in the second part of the Gospel lesson what the swine do when the demons from the possessed man are cast into their midst: “the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea. . . and [they were drowned] in the sea.” The demonic is self-destructive, as is sin. We think sin will make us happy or at least will not harm us, but on another cognitive level we are usually aware of how unhappy sin makes us and how sin robs us of spiritual joy. Clinging to that rage will kill you. Ask any doctor, and he will tell you that the stress of anger increases blood pressure and the rates of heart attack and stroke. Ask any Christian, and you will be told that anger roots out joy and peace. And yet in a kind of insanity we cling to that rage and anger. Addiction to alcohol or pornography will do the same thing: driving one to self-destruction. Part of the nature of sin is that it causes self-destruction. St. Augustine makes a profound statement on this point. In explaining what it means to love yourself in the command to love your neighbor as yourself, he says that to love yourself is to have compassion on yourself; to have compassion on yourself is simply not to sin because sin is that which kills us. Our Lord saves the disciples from storms, but he also delivers those who are afflicted by inner demons. In this miracle, the kingdom of God breaks into human existence. In the kingdom of God, there is liberation for the captive, freedom for the possessed, joy for those who are cast down by sorrow and despair. Listen to this beautiful succession of actions attributed to God in the Psalms: “He upholds the cause of the oppressed, and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free, the Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down. . . the Lord watches over the foreigner, and sustains the fatherless and the widow.”  Our Lord’s ministry is the manifestation of these works of God, exemplified in this miracle. Our Lord reveals God’s dominion over every spiritual evil in his coming kingdom. If our Lord delivers the man who cuts himself with stones, he will deliver you too from your self-destructive behavior. Your deliverance may not come overnight—the implication is that the man has been possessed for years—but seek the Lord in prayer of the heart, gather together in Christian fellowship, study in the Bible to hear God’s word to you—and your deliverance will come. As a young man out of university, I went through a period of debilitating depression; in a situation like this, it is so easy not to see beyond the present feelings, and to let the despair become the only thing that seems real. The God whom we worship, revealed perfectly in Jesus Christ, wants to deliver us from every demon, addiction and sin. We are his children, and our self-destructive behavior grieves him as much as a young person’s self-destructive behavior grieves his parents. 


Here is the good news. In the epistle lesson, Paul writes—in one of the most profound statements in any of his letters—that, “we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead” (2 Corinthians 5:14). Jesus died. He died in an ignoble, humiliating way. But remembering his death is not simply a recitation of a profound and moving tragedy. Rather, we believe and confess that he died as our representative and as the representative of all mankind. When he died, he took away the sting of death, and as our representative, we are freed from the fear of death. “one died; therefore all are dead.” Why is this so profound? Because the whole complex by which the world defines and divides humanity—male, female, white, black, rich, poor—has come crashing down in our Lord. Henceforth we know no man after the flesh, that is, we don’t think primary in terms of man, woman, white, African, or Jew. He is not saying that there are not real differences between men and women, Jews and gentiles, but that differences are of a secondary order when compared with the fact that all humans are those for whom Jesus died; in him, those distinctions that are the source of prejudice, oppression, violence and war are undone. The biggest difference between people is that there are those who know Jesus died for them and those who do not yet know this. All are brothers for whom Christ died. “If one died for all, then all are dead.” In that we have died with him, Paul can make the profound assertion—which words might have echoed the man delivered from a legion of demons: “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” As a new creature, we do not need to fear the literal or figurative storms of this life because we trust that in the words of the Bible, “all things work together for the good of them who love God”. As a new creature, we are delivered from every spiritual and oppressive evil and have died to self-destroying sin to live a new life of spiritual joy and love. As a new creature, we know the gathering of Jesus Christ crosses political, ethnic and economic lines; in the kingdom of God, there can be, there is no “us and them,” only the brothers and sister of the one who died for all. 

Trinity Sunday Sermon

Today is the Feast of the Holy Trinity. It is not the day in which the doctrine of the Trinity should be reduced to palpable images or figures. No doubt you've heard of the ice, liquid water, and water vapour image as a metaphor for the Trinity. In a children's book on the Trinity I came across this week, the author states that the Trinity is like an apple which has a peel, flesh, and core with seeds. But when we speak of the three persons of the Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—we are not speaking of different parts of God, or in the case of the water metaphor, of changing states or masks of God. One of the most helpful phrases on the doctrine of the Trinity comes from what is called the Athanasian Creed which historically, together with the Apostle's and Nicene creeds, was considered to be the basis of Christian confession. The Athanasian Creed states in part, “the Catholick Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons : nor dividing the Substance.” To confound the persons is to blur the distinctions between the three persons of the Trinity and their role in salvation history. That which makes them distinct is their relation to one another: the Son is begotten of the Father; the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. On the other hand, to divide the substance, is to emphasize the differences of the persons to such an extent that the result is a belief in three gods. The Tri-une God is one Lord, one Almighty, one Being that is not created, one Being that is eternal. This one phrase uproots most of the images of the Trinity that will be heard from pulpits today: “we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, Neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance.”

The purpose of the feast day becomes more when we consider where it falls in the course of the church year. The church year begins with Advent around the first of December. Advent anticipates the second and first comings of our Lord Jesus. His nativity is celebrated at the end of Advent with the 12 days of Christmas. Epiphany—the manifestation of Jesus as both God and man, especially to the wise men—follows in January and February. In the next season Lent, we recollect our Lord's temptation—in which he faced and overcame all the temptations common to man. The climax of Lent, of course, is Holy Week and the commemoration of our Lord's last days, his crucifixion and triumphant resurrection on Easter Day. Forty days after Easter Sunday, we remember that Jesus ascended into heaven where he intercedes for us and from where he sends his disciples the Spirit. Ten days later on Pentecost—last Sunday—the church gives thanks for the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles and church. From Advent to Pentecost we remember the events by which we confess that God entered into history to save humanity from sin and death. The crown of these successive events is Trinity Sunday. Do we have Trinity Sunday now because we are turning from events to ideas or philosophy? Not at all. Trinity Sunday follows this yearly re-telling of salvation history in order to remind us that our belief in a Tri-une God is shaped and formed by God's self-revelation in these saving events. For example, we confess our Lord to be God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, because we are confronted by the reality of Jesus, a man, yes, but a man so unlike his contemporaries, so unlike us, that he stands out in the Gospel narratives—from birth to crucifixion to resurrection—as more than perfect man, being perfect God as well. Even the best of men do not claim to have power over spiritual evil, to heal and raise the dead and even to forgive sins. This man Jesus also claims that God is his Father in a way unique and exclusive to him. If untrue, this is the worst kind of arrogance or perhaps insanity, but if true, we have to reckon with this man, this perfect human who is also the only-begotten Son of God. We also confess the Holy Spirit to be the third person of the Trinity because we are confronted by the Holy Spirit. According to the Bible we know the invisible Spirit because we have a desire to love God and others and because we have a desire to do that which God commands. The Spirit leads us to Jesus, transforming us into disciples of Jesus. The Spirit can speak to us in a still small voice in our hearts or be manifested in powerful and dramatic ways as the book of Acts witnesses. All this leads one to conclude that the Spirit is not it, but thou, a personal presence even as Jesus was personally present with his disciples. So, you see, the doctrine of the Trinity is not really the speculation of philosophers who have discovered something new about God; the doctrine of the Trinity is the natural and logical result of reflecting on  the saving events we've commemorated over the past six months.

This begs the question: why does the doctrine of the Trinity matter? Isn't it enough simply to believe in God? A hymn that is often sung on Trinity Sunday is known as St. Patrick's Breastplate—it's hymn 268. The text traditionally attributed to St. Patrick is a statement of faith in God as a sure protector from all the evil that we encounter in this life. The words are a figurative breastplate for the Christian who devoutly recites them. The hymn opens with these words:
            I bind unto myself today
            The strong Name of the Trinity,
            By invocation of the same
            The Three in One and One in Three.
Each today, when we wake up, we do not know what will to happen to us. Some days, maybe even many days are predictable, but there are a lot of days that are filled with twists and turns, interruptions and accidents, at least from our limited perspective. Each day can often feel like an obstacle course. The conviction stated in St. Patrick's Breastplate is that we can face this obstacle course through the strong name of the Trinity, and here is where we come to the reason why the doctrine of the Trinity is so important. The doctrine of the Trinity is important and the Trinity is invoked in the Breastplate of St. Patrick because the doctrine of the Trinity, that God is a trinity of persons, Father, Son and Spirit, recalls for us the saving events wrought by the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that God the Father so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. The doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that Christ has given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour. The doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that our Lord has ascended into heaven and has sent to us another Comforter to lead us into all truth and to bear witness with our spirit that we children of God. The Trinity is invoked in St. Patrick's Breastplate because we are to live our lives in the context of these saving events, our Lord's incarnation, baptism, and temptation, his passion, crucifixion and resurrection, and the coming of the Holy Spirit. We are to see the birth of a precious child in the context of the birth of God's son in a stable in Bethlehem. We are to see our awakening to the things of faith in the context of Jesus' baptism as he opens the way for our new, spiritual birth; we are to see our temptations and failures in the context of our Lord's temptation and his victory over that temptation, a victory that we share in, in as much as we belong to him. We are to see our death and mortality and the death of our loved ones in the light of the cross of our Lord Jesus, who by his death has taken away the sting of death. We are to see our hope for a future, greater life, in the context of our Lord's triumphant resurrection and his ultimate defeat over sin and death. It is, thus, no surprise that the second verse of the Breastplate continues with these words:
            I bind this today to me forever
            By power of faith, Christ’s incarnation;
            His baptism in Jordan river,
            His death on Cross for my salvation;
            His bursting from the spicèd tomb,
            His riding up the heavenly way,
            His coming at the day of doom
            I bind unto myself today.
The alternative to seeing our lives in the context of the saving events worked by the Holy Trinity is startling: without his blessed passion and precious death, without his mighty resurrection and glorious ascension, without the coming of the Holy Ghost, our lives become unmoored, a meaningless sequence of events that tend toward chaos, decay and destruction;  sorrow after sorrow we move from amusement to amusement in order to anesthetize our loneliness and spiritual emptiness. On the other hand, our lives find their true purpose and meaning in the life of the Trinity and in the light of the redeeming work of the Trinity. In our confession of the Trinity, we embrace and find our lives in the life of the Trinity and in the confidence of this faith in overcoming every trial, temptation and evil of this life.
            I bind unto myself the Name,
            The strong Name of the Trinity,
            By invocation of the same,
            The Three in One and One in Three.
            By Whom all nature hath creation,
            Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
            Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
            Salvation is of Christ the Lord.