Notes on Readings

SUNDAY 30th May, 2010 TRINITY SUNDAY

Sentence
Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? The Lord created me at the beginning of His work, the first of His acts long ago. Proverbs 8:1, 22

Collect
Father we praise You that through Your Word and Holy Spirit, You created all things; You reveal Your salvation in all the world through Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh; through Your Holy Spirit, You give is a share in Your life and love; fill us with a vision of Your glory that we may always serve and praise You, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen

Old Testament Lesson Proverbs 8: 1 – 4 & 22 – 31

Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: "To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live.

The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth-- when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world's first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.

PSALM 8
O Lord our Governor: how glorious is Your name in all the earth!
Your majesty above the heavens is yet recounted: by the mouths of babes and sucklings
You have founded a strong defence against Your adversaries: to quell the enemy and the avenger
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers: the moon and the stars which You have set in order
What are we, that You should be mindful of us: what are we, that You should care for us?
Yet You have made us little less than gods: and have crowned us with glory and honour
You have given us dominion over Your handiwork: and have put all things in subjection under our feet
All sheep and oxen: and all the creatures of the field
The birds of the air and the fish of the sea: and everything that moves in the pathways of the great waters
O Lord our Governor: how glorious is Your name in all the earth!

Epistle Romans 5: 1 – 5

Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

GOSPEL John 16: 12 – 15

Jesus said, "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

© New Revised Standard Version of the Bible
Copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the
Churches of Christ in the USA, and used by permission. All rights reserved



NOTES ON THE READINGS

Old Testament
You are free to charge me with ‘cooking my cabbages twice’ or even a few more times over, but I ask you to ponder what is being said here, for it really does echo the greater part of the Biblical revelation. Just as John in his Gospel focussed on the ‘logos,’ the word and reason for existence, here the far more ancient author focusses on ‘wisdom.’ In other words it is the reiteration of the fact that the Biblical Faith has to do with sense, and not with some sort of spiritual idiocy. The Biblical Faith is rational, sound, sensible – it is not weird or oddball; nor was it ever designed to so silly. Sure there are parts and passages where one wonders what the writer expected people to believe or understand; but there is not a lot that comes across as incredible or unrelated to sense. In fact, the Hebrew faith evolved as people looked at life and experience, and drew their perceptions from real life.

Mind you, there is a distance between what the Hebrews understood by ‘wisdom,’ and how the Greeks tended to see it. For Hebrews, wisdom tended to relate to common sense and matters easily established by reference to people’s experience. For Greeks, it was a rather more intellectual exercise, open for debate but more often than not, irresolvable. It was something to debate, with little or no expectation of coming up with any answers. Indeed, this passage from Proverbs was an appeal to the common experience of people, high and low, both levels of which could nod their heads in agreement to the sentiments expressed.

Most of all, it is fascinating to notice that the old author operated under the premise that this was the way it was always intended to be. Wisdom was no late starter but as the Genesis author(s) indicate, Wisdom/Spirit was there from the very beginning, before the creation, so to speak..

This has important ramifications in the understanding of the Faith. And with all due respect, it disqualifies all that is oddball, ridiculous and weird from any connection with the ‘faith once delivered.’

Psalm
Here is another line of exploration of life and God, from the Hebrew perspective. One can learn quite something about God from observing nature, and particularly from the perceived position of humanity in that wide-ranging experience of (all) life. Part of the Jewish genius was to ponder the ‘reason for existence’ but taking all possible factors into consideration. And there is no other legitimate path to travel, surely.

Epistle
First of all, please note the connection in this brief passage, with Father, Son and Spirit. For those who may still complain that ‘Trinity’ is not a Biblical word, they must still recognise that it is an attempt to express in a single word what is the accumulated information from Scripture and people’s experience of God. Note also, that this may well be no easy path, but that the process is a valuable and worthwhile one, for maturity is a by-product of the process. And that can hardly be a bad thing, eh!

GOSPEL
And here is another example of John expressing the same sort of thing that Paul did in his Roman epistle. Note the clear connection, as well as that process involving a concession to the sheer human business of needing time to absorb what may be called the theology of life and of God.

NOTES FOR A SERMON

I have become quite impatient, over the years, at people outside the Faith who continue to charge us with putting dogma before common sense. It is a charge I deny and have done for decades, having long discovered the failure of dogma to compete with reality. The Faith, Hebrew and Christian, is far more virile than that. Dare I say it, that the Faith evolves, or at least my understanding of the Faith evolves, just as I do as a human being.

So when we talk about “Trinity” what are we on about?

I recall – many years ago now – having a new family join the congregation where we were then living. They had moved to our town and were looking for a Church to belong to, and were going through the tasting process: and we had four mainstream Churches there. They chose us to belong to, and began attending our Bible Study Group, which was great. He had come from a Jehovah’s Witness background though he had rejected that when he was young. I was not surprised when his first and major question of me was about the Trinity, that factor being almost a swear word where he had come from.
We talked several times at some length, not attempting to prove or disprove anything, but it did not meet him where he was. So I suggested that he leave the issue alone for a while, and simply allow life and faith to surround and support him. I think I surprised him somewhat when I suggested that – with the passage of time, and prayer and thought, the issue may well address itself, and his answers come. I also suggested that, if it did not, then we talk again.
It was some years later that he ‘complained’ to me that I had never followed him up. I reminded him of the terms agreed to, that he raise any further questions, and asked why he did not. He laughed and said, ‘I have come to understand why you suggested what you did. As I watched and pondered, the answers came, and I had no need to ask further.’
Apart from theological dimensions, the answer for most people is really rather simple. ‘Trinity’ is an attempt to put into words what can describe and delineate something of human experience of God. It would take a long sermon to cover many of the possibilities, but the fact that there are theological ‘limitations’ is because we do have a long history of rather strange and oddball theories.

It is interesting to note that, as a surprise to some people, that business of the Holy Spirit is not new to the New Testament, but rather goes back to the Biblical beginnings. And one needs to understand Old Testament statements and parallels to ‘spirit’ – and there are several. Wisdom is one of the alternative ‘names’ and the Wisdom Literature of the OT underlines the importance seen by Hebrews of the God Who speaks through one’s own spirit.

Obviously, with the Genesis stories of creation, there is another way God speaks to people, through the very life and world which has been given them. Those old story-tellers are matched quite nicely by some of the Psalmists, who point to a remarkably vocal natural universe, open and available to anyone who cares or dares to listen. On top of that, the Prophets, a remarkable and unique group of people, illustrated quite constantly the way in which God spoke to them and through them to the populace at large.

And now God has spoken to us in His Son. Why some people get stirred up about evolution always escapes me, for that is the process of revelation through the Scriptures. Like any development, it had to start where the people of the time ‘were at’ as the expression has it. And Abraham would have started his pilgrimage with a huge amount of baggage from his past. We are no different,) It was no accident that the process of development took all of the 3,000 years from Abraham to Christ, for in my experience, people do not change in five minutes. Nor in five years or even five decades. Notice, importantly, that those 3,000 years of exploration and discovery did not come from individuals isolated as hermits, but it all took place in the quite ordinary vicissitudes of daily life. And that is where each person discovered, understood and then related to God. And if the faith they developed did not ‘fit’ real and ordinary life, then it was discarded as irrelevant. It is a lesson we need to re-learn, do we not!

So with the arrival of Jesus, the Word made flesh, incarnated, came the apex of revelation. And it was, once again, into ordinary, unvarnished living that He came. In other words, Jesus continued the clear and vital understanding that the Faith would have to prove itself in real life, or it would disqualify itself. If the Jesus ‘experiment’ failed, then the whole faith would collapse. Mind you, one needs to ponder quite what Jesus was doing, and why as well as how, for here was no charade to9 be gone through, but a huge test on the real and powerful stage of everyone’s life.

So, in the final analysis, what ‘Trinity’ is saying is this: that God is encountered, or there to be encountered, in three ways. One, is through the world in which we live, or these days, the universe vast beyond our imaginings. One needs to remember that it was because of the clear perception of that day, the science grew in Western culture on the very grounds that as there is one God, there must be sufficient order in the universe to be able to explore and find sense.

Another factor is what we spoke about last Sunday, and the God Who speaks even to kids having brawls with their parents. One needs to be honest and fair dinkum about the way conscience ‘doth make cowards of us all’ sometimes, for there is that inbuilt sense of truth and justice – unless we turn out backs on it, finally, utterly and wilfully. And then came Jesus: the example par excellence that all of Israel’s discoveries of truth and justice, integrity and love are valid, and even necessary if life is to be lived at its true fullest. Peace will never come without justice, whether between nations or even individuals.

So in the final analysis, ‘Trinity’ is not theoretical or even doctrinal. It is experiential. And how is that for a grenade to be dropped in your lap?