Trinity Sunday and Memorial Day

This sermon was delivered May 30, 2021, at United Lutheran Church (Wartburg Chapel), Mount Vernon, N.Y. It is dedicated to all the women and men who served their country in uniform, especially the Rev. Dr. John P. Irwin, who never asked me to explain the Trinity.

This Memorial Day Sunday I find myself – probably like you – thinking of loved ones who wore the uniform of our country and are no longer with us.

I think of my father and two uncles and a beloved pastor who served in the Second World War. And, because it was his 104th birthday yesterday, I think of President John F. Kennedy. Dad and JFK served at the same time in the same theater of operations, though if they happened to run into each other, neither thought to mention it.

Today is also Trinity Sunday, and JFK’s words come to mind. Maybe he said it and maybe he didn‘t, but he gets credit for it on coffee cups sold at the JFK library:

“There are three things that are real, God, human folly, and laughter; the first two things are beyond our comprehension, so we must do what we can with the third.”

It’s an above average thought for your morning coffee. It also works for Memorial Day and Trinity Sunday.

God the incomprehensible. 

Folly the impenetrable.

Laughter the consoler.

Trinity Sunday was devised by the church fathers (I use the patriarchal term advisedly) as a counterpoint to Pentecost Sunday, when the Holy Spirit gets top billing. It’s our liturgical opportunity to think of God in Three Persons:

God the Creator.

Jesus the Redeemer.

Holy Spirit the Advocate.

The doctrine of the Trinity is a basic component of Christianity. A church has to be “Trinitarian” to qualify for membership in the National and World Councils of Churches, and the notion goes back to the fourth century.

The Nicene Creed, which sprung up in the east around 325 C.E., put it like this:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, of things visible and invisible.And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the begotten of God the Father, the Only-begotten, that is of the essence of the Father. God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten and not made; of the very same nature of the Father, by Whom all things came into being, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. Who for us humanity and for our salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate, was made human, was born perfectly of the holy virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit …. We believe in the Holy Spirit, in the uncreated and the perfect; Who spoke through the Law, prophets, and Gospels; Who came down upon the Jordan, preached through the apostles, and lived in the saints.

The Trinitarian notion recurs in the Apostle’s Creed around 390 C.E.:

I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit … I believe in the Holy Spirit.

The creedal language is metrical and beautiful. It makes you feel good to repeat it.

But understand it? Please. When was the last time you had to explain the Trinity to someone?

We’ve heard the sermons. The Trinity is the way we describe the three basic components of our relationship to God: creator, redeemer, advocate.

For 17 centuries, preachers have been devising ways to explain the Trinity to simple-minded heathens. St. Patrick, with no snakes to drive out of Ireland in the fifth century, is said to have used the three-leafed shamrock to explain the Trinity to locals. If so, he didn’t write about it, nor did anyone else until about 1726, so the legend appears to be as dubious as the analogy is weak.

If shamrocks don’t work, there is the classic cliché about the various roles we play in life. For example, I am a father, I am a son, I am a spouse – three different roles that call for three distinct presentations. Yet these roles do not require a trifurcation into three distinct Persons. The analogy doesn’t really help us understand the nature of the Holy Trinity.  God in three persons? Why not one God with three personalities? That might work if all three personalities were spirit, but one is flesh. That factor tempts one to haiku (which tend to be more fun too write than to read):

Can corporeal

blend incorporeally

as one in the same?

That’s where the concept becomes a conundrum, and because there are no instruments with which to take God’s true measure, the enigma deepens.

I was blessed, growing up, with three excellent pastors who succeeded one another in the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y. None of them held me accountable for comprehending the Trinity.

That was fortunate because I’ve never been able to fully figure out God or even ask an intelligent question that might bring me closer to an understanding.

I must have been 10 or 11 when I first wrestled with the concept of infinity. I put the question to my mother: “When did God begin?”

I’m sure Mom narrowed her eyes and squinted at me. She always squinted, in part because she loved questions like that and because by 1957 she was legally blind.

“Why don‘t we ask Mr. Irwin?” she suggested, referring to our pastor, Jack Irwin, whose intellect Mom respected.

Jack was an extraordinary pastor in what I once regarded as an ordinary hamlet in Central New York. During his pastorate in Morrisville he was preparing for his doctorate in philosophy at Syracuse University, so he probably thought of God in Kantian or Kierkegaardian terms, seasoned with occasional Nietzschean aphorisms.

But all he said to me, when I was 11, was, “God always is. There has never been a time when God wasn’t, and there never will be.”

That is one of two full sentences I can remember from 1957 (the other being a headline from My Weekly Reader that was almost as un-packable as the concept of the Trinity: “Welcome to the International Geophysical Year!”) so it clearly had an impact on my youthful brain.

As I said, Mother thought Jack was an intellectual marvel, which he was, but Dad often said Jack’s sermons went over his head. From my point of view in junior high and early high school, Jack was a matchless communicator. The Youth Fellowship highlight of every year was Halloween when we’d prop desiccated corn shocks in the corners of the Grange Hall, turn out the lights, and sit on the floor in the dark to listen to Jack’s scary tales. In a quiet Philadelphia-accented voice, Jack would combine menacing elements of urban legends with his own chilling adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe themes and scare the bejeezus out of us. His stories, which I am sure he made up as he went along, were amplified with spine-tingling details that placed horrific images in our heads for the rest of our lives.  The three-dimensional zombies of modern cinema do not compare with Jack’s terrifying stories – which, incidentally, were an effective though atypical evangelical tool. Youth Fellowship became an essential place to be for the cooler Morrisville teens.

I’m dwelling a bit on Jack because he is one of the war heroes I remember on Memorial Day. It didn’t occur to me to wonder where Jack got all those frightening Halloween images. Then in 2002, he published a memoir about his World War II experiences (Another River, Another Town, a Teen Age Tank Gunner Comes of Age in Combat – 1945) that included sobering tales of combat and his eyewitness accounts of the liberation of the Nordhausen Concentration Camp. No doubt his accounts of horror in the old Grange hall paled in comparison to the horror in his head.

One of Jack Irwin’s hobbies was astronomy and Morrisville, with its northern exposure and dark winter nights, was ideal for telescopic stargazing.

One Sunday night, Jack showed the Youth Fellowship slides of planets, galaxies and nebulae he watched through his lenses. We watched transfixed as he showed us Saturn, 794 million miles from earth … the sun, 93 million miles from earth … Alpha Centauri, the closest star, 4.365 light years from earth … and galaxies so far away it would take a beam of earth light millions of years to reach it.

When the show was over and the lights were turned on, Jack leaned back in his chair and looked into our blinking eyes, one by one.

“How many of you,” he asked without drama, “have a concept of God that is as big as outer space?”

We answered with silence. Thanks to Jack, God the Creator suddenly seemed bigger to us than the white-bearded patriarch in the Michelangelo painting. In fact, God the Creator was suddenly beyond our intellectual grasp.

And that’s only one Person of the Trinity. What about the Second Person?

“He was in the beginning with God,” writes John. “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. (John 1:2-3).

Here we are talking about Jesus. And the fact that Jesus was human just like us makes John’s observation as inexplicable as the God of unfathomable light years.

How difficult it is to ponder the humanity of Jesus? Take the Ignatian approach of imaging yourself walking with Jesus. Imagine one sweltering Palestinian day you walk from Jericho to Jerusalem with Jesus. The sweat trickles down your cheeks. You and Jesus drink deeply at each waterhole on the journey, belching loudly as the cooling liquid soothes your gullets. And soon you and Jesus are stepping behind cedar trees to hoist your skirts and relieve yourselves. When you sit in the shade of an olive tree to rest, your robe sticks wetly to your back. Pungent underarm odor is rife, and it’s not only you; it’s radiating from Jesus, too.

If this seems a little sacrilegious, keep in mind that these are inescapable essentials of the human condition – and human is the modus operandi of the Incarnation.

Even so it’s not easy to sit next to stinky Jesus and think of him as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.

John F. Kennedy was correct when he said God – like human folly – is beyond our comprehension. When you try to figure it all out, perhaps the best analgesic is to simply laugh. It is simply beyond the capacity of our human brains to grasp the nature of the creator of universes, or to comprehend the infinite love with which God assumed mere human flesh as a device for human atonement. Thinking God’s thoughts is simply beyond us.

Thank God, then (so to speak), for the Third Person of the Trinity – the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that relieves us of the burden of trying to figure it all out.

“The Spirit of God is like our breath,” said Henri Nouwen. “God’s spirit is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves. We might not often be aware of it, but without it we cannot live a ‘spiritual life.’”

The Holy Spirit does not vest us with answers or give us special insights into the mind of God. Yet it is the Person of the Trinity that dwells within us so intimately that it connects us intimately with God the Creator and God the Redeemer.

“It is the Holy Spirit of God who prays in us,” Nouwen writes, “who offers us the gifts of love, forgiveness, kindness, goodness, gentleness, peace and joy. It is the Holy Spirit who offers us the life that death cannot destroy.”

Just how the Creator God did it is not for us to know. And just how our brother Jesus, who shares all our glands and bunions, was present at Creation is not for us to understand.

But the Holy Spirit who dwells within each of us is the perfect connector that binds our hearts and souls (and occasionally our minds) with the Triune God.

And perceiving that, as Brother Thomas Merton said, does not require intensive brain power.

It simply requires us to be silent until, in the intimacy of our solitude, the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit will write its wonders on our hearts.

Damned to hell?

 

It must be an ecclesial form of the Stockholm Syndrome that crowds will flock to prophets of the wrath to come.

One of modern literature’s most vivid preachers of doom is Amos Starkadder, patriarch of a seedy Sussex farm in Stella Gibbons’ book Cold Comfort Farm. 

Sigmund Freud was still alive when Gibbons wrote the novel in 1932, but Freudian analysis is not required to know Amos is angry because he is trapped in a dead-end existence on a depressing piece of sod. He is held captive by his invalid mother who took to her bed decades earlier because “I saw something nasty in the woodshed” and holds family members hostage to her angst.

Amos sublimates his anger by serving as pastor of a surprisingly large congregation called the Quivering Brethren. Asked how the congregation got its name, Amos explains the people quiver when they think about where they will spend eternity.

Amos’ sermons are virtually identical each week:

You’re all damned! Damned! Do you ever stop to think what that word means? No, you don’t. It means endless, horrifying torment! It means your poor, sinful bodies stretched out on red-hot gridirons, in the nethermost, fiery pit of Hell and those demons mocking ye while they waves cooling jellies in front of ye. You know what it's like when you burn your hand, taking a cake out of the oven, or lighting one of them godless cigarettes? And it stings with a fearful pain, aye? And you run to clap a bit of butter on it to take the pain away, aye? Well, I’ll tell ye, there’ll be no butter in Hell! 

Amos’ congregation, which fills the church, quivers but remains glued to their pews, in abject submission to the bad news. Later in the book (as in the 1995 film starring Kate Beckinsale and Ian McKellen), Amos does escape the farm and takes his quivering message to the United States, where it continues to attract large crowds. Hell is obviously a popular concept.

Modern theologians debate whether Hell, a place of eternal punishment for bad souls, actually exists. Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton of the Evangelical Lutheran Church raised eyebrows recently when she was asked if there is a hell. “There may be,” she said “but I think it is empty.”

But according to pollsters, including Pew and Gallup, most Americans believe in Hell. Gallup notes an interesting political angle in that 83 percent of Republicans say they believe in Hell as opposed to 69 percent of Democrats. Clearly most Americans think there is a Hell, and most would like to avoid it.

If you grew up in the evangelical or Pentecostal traditions, you may be familiar with this hermeneutic. I once attended a World Council of Churches conference on Pentecostals and Orthodox in Costa Rica and met a Church of God professor named Tom. Tom dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and was shaggy haired and bearded like Jerry Garcia, but it was clear he was a highly intelligent academician. Even so, his fellow Pentecostals spun tales about Tom’s rebellious youth.

\“When Tom was a teenager he’d sit in the back of the church,” said one woman, now a Pentecostal pastor. “When the preacher started talking about Hell, Tom would hide his hands behind the pew and light matches. After church, people would grab the pastor’s hand and say, ‘My goodness, Preacher, your description of Hell was so vivid I thought I could smell the phosphorous!’”

Many traditions, indeed, depict Hell as a lake of fire with no butter to take away the pain. John the Baptist, in his own efforts to attract the attention of quivering brethren, refers to “unquenchable fire” (Luke 3:17).

Sometimes Hell’s punishments are assumed to correspond with sins committed during life. The actual punishments would depend on the imagination of the demon in charge, but one can envision slave masters condemned to an eternity of slavery and whipping posts, tabloid editors forced to endure an eternity of pillory and humiliation, the ill-begotten rich damned to shiver forever in squalor and hunger, or proof-texting preachers fated to listen to endless sermons – perhaps their own – devoid of points, poems, and exegesis.

Other traditions depict Hell as cold. Tibetan Buddhists, whom I suspect endure cold weather for longer periods that many of us, believe in a cold Hell. Dante’s Inferno describes the innermost ninth circle of Hell as a frozen lake of blood and guilt. It is in that frigid ring to which persons who never take a moral stand are sent, belying President Kennedy’s assumption that “the hottest places in Hell are for persons who maintain their neutrality.”

Each of us has an image of Hell in our minds, just as we try to imagine what Heaven is like.

NBC’s The Good Place, an entertaining and often thoughtful comedy series, imagines an afterlife so skewed that every human being is consigned to the Bad Place because no one is good enough to win entry into the Good Place. One character, Chidi (played by William Jackson Harper) is a professor of philosophy who examines the views of every known ethicist to learn how to lead a good life. He falls short of the Good Place because he can’t decide which value system is the best. It’s too bad Chidi didn’t read Saint Paul who said everyone falls short, or Martin Luther, who said every one is simultaneously a saint or sinner.

These are useful mental exercises because they keep us focused on important things, particularly gospel message of repentance and salvation. No one knows if John the Baptist had any special insight into what Hell looks like or whether he was depending on a common tradition, but his promise of deliverance comes with a terrifying threat of scalding punishment: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” (Luke 3:17)

Luke adds: “So, with many other exhortations, John proclaimed the good news to the people.” (Luke 3:18)

If you read that too fast, it sounds like John is demanding a choice between salvation and unquenchable fire.

Put that way, it seems more like extortion than good news.

But the message of John is more like the mission of first responders in any disaster: a rescue operation to deliver us from the fire, and open our hearts and minds to the coming of the Messiah.

\Each Christmas my soul is lifted by the music of artists no longer living: Bing Crosby, Nat Cole, Rosemary Clooney, Gene Autry, Ella Fitzgerald, Perry Como, Eartha Kitt, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley. Each of these great talents sang wonderful old chestnuts, and I sing along with them when I am alone. I rejoice for all these wonderful talents who were such a powerful presence in my youth but are now gone. What dynamic lives they led, what vibrancy, what joy they gave to so many listeners (and what fortunes they made selling their albums).

But in darker moments I wonder: what happened to them when they died? Were they simply extinguished? Did their sentience, their personalities, their talents disappear as if they had never been? And what about the rest of us who don’t leave behind electronic recordings of our faces and voices? Do we pass into oblivion as if we had never lived?

These pensive moments brought me face to face with my own concept of Hell: not unquenchable fire, not frozen lakes of blood, not eternal pillories. Hell is that moment when all that we love, all that we know, all that we are, disappears. Hell is when our consciousness ceases to be, just as was the case in those years before we are born. Hell is when all that we are in life is erased as if it had never been.

Some people say there is no need to be afraid of non-existence. I disagree. Non-existence is Hell to me. Hell is the end of awareness of those we love, a total separation from the God of love who made us and loves us beyond our ability to comprehend it.

That must be the Hell John is talking about.

But John is not pointing to Hell as a threat. John is offering us a way out of Hell.

Of course John tells us to be good and to act justly; he tells tax collectors to take no more money than required of them, and he tells soldiers to be just to others and be content with their wages.

But John is also pointing to a way that goes beyond good behavior, where no lists are made of those who are naughty or nice, where the way out of Hell is wide open and available to every person created and loved by God.

That way out is offered by the Jesus the Messiah whose coming John foretells, and it comes with no conditions, no entrance exams, and no inquisitions. And no quivering.

It is a wide-open door that never closes.

And all that is required of us to escape Hell is to walk through the door of grace.