Eat My Body, Drink My Blood

Sermon prepared for St. Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, N.Y. August 25, 2024.

Today we continue our examination of the “staff of life,” on the fifth Sunday of what Martha calls “breadtide” and what Father Tim Schenk calls “breadapalooza.”

I’m tempted to begin my meditation by declaring – in the words of the awesome Oprah Winfrey – “I like bread!”

Bread has been on our dinner tables or baked at our camp fires since the dawn of human history.

Bread accompanied the life-saving meals of the soup kitchens during the Great Depression. My mind goes back 70 years (would you believe it?) to my staple diet of Wonder bread smeared with generous globs of peanut butter. 

Who has not enjoyed the fragrance of baking bread in near-by bakeries or in our ovens? 

Perhaps we sample bread so often that we no longer notice its specialness. Sometimes we deliberately avoid bread as a weight-loss tactic until we miss it too much. The longer we avoid bread the more we want it and the more we enjoy it. I remember my father’s reaction to plain white bread after he returned from three hardtack years in the World War II Pacific Theater: “It tastes like cake,” he said.

Jesus’ reference to himself as the “bread of life” is one of many biblical references to bread.

According to one source (which I have accepted arbitrarily because sources differ), the word “bread” is mentioned 361 times in the Bible; 280 of those references are in the Old Testament; there are 81 references to bread in the New Testament – and 62 of those references are found in the four Gospels. 

When Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty,” he was talking about our souls, not our stomachs. But he was not suggesting that coming to him was a solution to physical hunger. There are still hungry people in the world, and Jesus cares deeply about them.

As often as bread is mentioned in scripture it becomes clear that as metaphor, bread has multiple meanings. It fills our stomachs. It nourishes our souls.

All that seems plain enough. But in the Gospel lesson this morning we see many of Jesus’ disciples – we don’t know how many – can’t wrap their heads around this message. “This teaching is difficult,” they grumble. “Who can accept it?” (Jn 6:60)

When John uses the term, “disciples,” he of course doesn’t mean the twelve Apostles but the many people who follow Jesus from town to town.

These disciples have a tendency to take literally every word that Jesus speaks. They are “inerrantists” who are confused when Jesus tells stories about events that are filled with truth but didn’t really happen. They miss the deeper meaning of what Jesus says. They would probably be disappointed that the Good Samaritan was a character in a morality play, not a real person.

So when Jesus tells them that “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them,” they can neither understand nor accept it. And off they go, these poor pigheaded people who no longer want Jesus in their lives.

The divine nature of the bread and the wine take on an even deeper mystery in the long history of the church.  The question is, does the bread and wine symbolically represent the body and blood of Jesus, or does it become the flesh and blood of Jesus?

In my Baptist days we regarded communion as a reminder of what Jesus did for us. We served communion once a month and the elements were carefully carved squares of white bread and grape juice. That didn’t mean we didn’t take the Lord’s Supper seriously. Years ago, when I was editor of The American Baptist magazine, I was looking for a cover illustration for World Wide Communion Sunday. I chose a loaf of Wonder Bread and a bottle of Welch’s Grape juice. Judging from the letters to the editor I received, readers were incensed and thought I was commercializing the Lord’s Supper. That was not my intent and, in point of fact, most Baptist churches used unwrapped Wonder Bread and uncorked Welch’s grape juice to prepare a service which symbolically represented the body and blood of Jesus.

Some Baptists, and I might have been among them, believed our practice of communion was God-approved, as well as our practice of waiting for people to become born-again adults before they were baptized.

We didn’t pause to think how heretical those practices were in the long history of the church.

I’ve just finished reading a series of novels by the late C.J. Sansom about a crookback lawyer in Tudor England. The novels follow Matthew Shardlake as he negotiates the hazardous rip tides of Henry VIII’s religious reforms. He solves crimes, offends the King and other exalted nobles but avoids the Tower. I recommend the series if you, like Martha and me, enjoy church and Tudor history. Sansom describes the social divisions, the rough-hewn pubs, the foul smells of London, and clothing styles of rich and poor so vividly that I’ve felt like I’ve been a time traveler in Tudor London.

But the series is a disquieting glimpse of what it was like to live in England when Henry VIII was vacillating between conflicting and confusing religious views. In order to divorce his Catholic wife and marry Ann Boleyn he declares himself head of the Church of England, endorses Lutheran reforms, encourages the reformers, destroys Catholic monasteries, and declares followers of the old way to be heretics. Common people and aristocrats struggled to follow the King’s new rules for worship so they can avoid being burned at the stake.

But Henry keeps changing the rules. Toward the end of his reign he declares he no longer believes the Lord’s Supper is a mere symbolic representation of the body and blood and orders that his subjects believe that the bread becomes the actual body and the wine becomes the actual blood of Christ during the mass. The penalty for not believing is a hideously painful death.

Sansom introduces us to people who actually lived in Henry’s England, including Anne Askew, a young reformer who embraced, when it was safe to do so, the view that the wine and bread were merely symbolic. When Henry changed his mind she refused to go back to the old belief. Sansom’s vivid description of Anne being tortured in the tower and being burned at the stake is horrifying. I came away with a sobering view of what our ancestors lived and died through, and how blessed we are that we are free to decide what our faith and our practices will be.

The nature of the body and blood of Jesus are the very issues which confused the disciples in our Gospel this morning. And it must be said that it’s very hard to hear that we must drink Jesus’ blood and eat his flesh. It wasn’t only these literal-minded disciples who found it hard. The early Romans were appalled by what they believed was the “cannibalism” of early Christians. Even today, if you try to explain Jesus’ words to unbelievers they accuse you of being followers of Count Dracula.

In every time and place, Jesus has been misunderstood and his faithful have been ridiculed and often martyred for their beliefs.

Dr. Peter Claver Ajer, associate professor of New Testament at Bexley Seabury Seminary in San Francisco, writes that the drinking and eating of Jesus’ blood and flesh are “metaphors (that) best express oneness, intimacy, and the best way to be part of Jesus’ life.”

“The expression ‘feeding on Jesus’ (his flesh and blood) best captures the itimacy in the relationship,” Dr. Ajer writes. “To feed on Jesus is to absorb his teaching, his character, his mind, and ways; [and to] appropriate the virtue in him till his mind becomes our mind and his ways our ways; till we think somewhat as he would do if he were in our place, and can be and do what without him we would not be or do; and this because his power has passed into us and become our power.”

When we understand that Jesus is speaking to us in metaphors, much of the mystery of the miracle of the bread and wine is clarified.’’

But we will never understand the full meaning of this miracle. Nor should we.

I love the teaching of Professor and Orthodox Bishop Kallistros Ware.

“We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.”

So let us relieve ourselves from the stress and burden of trying to figure these things out. Let us rejoice in the mystery and the wonder.

And let us never forget the full meaning of what Jesus did for us and what Jesus expects us to be.

Pastor and theologian Henri Nouwen sums it up nicely:

“For Jesus, there are no countries to be conquered, no ideologies to be imposed, no people to be dominated. There are only children, women, and men to be loved.”

Beloved, Jesus is the bread of life. And God is love. Let us allow ourselves to be loved and to love one another and know that God’s love for us is unconditional and eternal.

And that is all we need to know.

Breadapalooza

Sermon prepared for Trinity Lutheran Church, White Plains, N.Y., August 4, 2024.

As a Christian layman, I’ve followed with interest the comments of many pastors on their preaching experiences.

One pastor says, “I have come to realize that most of us have only one really good sermon in us. We preach variations on that sermon all our lives.”

For pastors who are struggling to think of a new take on their foundational sermon, today’s scripture presents a special challenge.

Father Tim Schenck is rector of the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-sea in Palm Beach, Fla. His gentle church humor appears regularly on Facebook and Threads, and he is co-founder of “Lenten Madness,” an annual internet game in which participants get to vote on their favorite saints.

Father Tim writes:

“This Sunday begins five weeks of gospel readings from John 6 focused on Jesus’ statement, “I am the bread of life.” Some preachers dread the seeming redundancy of this every-three-years Breadapalooza aka Bread-tide. Some of us go on vacation to avoid … But here’s the gist of it in condensed form. Just to save you some time…

“Jesus said, ‘I am the bread of life. Again, I say to you, I am the bread of life. Let those with ears to hear know that I am the bread of life. Verily I say unto you, I am the bread of life. Would you like a side of bread with your bread of life? My bread and butter is being the bread of life. Better bread than dead. I’m the best bread of life since sliced bread. You know where your bread of life is buttered. I am the bread of life.’”

Maybe this is a bit too dismissive, considering how important bread – “the staff of life” – is to our lives. 

Bread has been on our dinner tables or at our camp fires for many millennia. Bread accompanied the life-saving meals of the soup kitchens during the Great Depression. My mind goes back 70 years (would you believe it?) to my staple diet of Wonder bread smeared with generous globs of peanut butter. Who has not enjoyed the fragrance of baking bread in near-by bakeries or in our ovens? Perhaps we sample bread so often that we no longer notice its specialness. Sometimes we deliberately avoid bread as a weight-loss tactic and we miss it. The longer we avoid it the more we want it and the more we enjoy it. I remember my father’s reaction to plain white bread after he returned from three breadless years in the World War II Pacific Theater: “It tastes like cake,” he said.

Jesus’ reference to himself as the “bread of life” is one of many biblical references to bread.

According to one source (which I have accepted arbitrarily because sources differ), the word “bread” is mentioned 361 times in the Bible; 280 of those references are in the Old Testament; there are 81 references to bread in the New Testament – and 62 of those references are found in the four Gospels. As Father Tim says, the bible is a virtual breadapalooza.

When Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty,” he was talking about our souls, not our stomachs. But he was not suggesting that coming to him was a solution to physical hunger. There are still hungry people in the world, and Jesus cares deeply about them.

As often as bread is mentioned in scripture it becomes clear that as metaphor, bread has multiple meanings. It fills our stomachs. It nourishes our souls.

In Exodus, bread does both. The hungry, kvetching, unruly Israelites are angry at God and angry at Moses. They have been wandering through the wilderness for too long and are asking Moses, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” They are bored and hungry. They are beginning to wonder if things were really so bad under Pharoah. At least they had bread to eat every day because Pharoah needed to keep them strong and healthy to do his work. This monotonous shuffling through the desert sands is going to kill us all, they say. And it’s all Moses’ fault.

Moses is in a mood like our fathers’ on a long road trip when the kids are quarreling in the back seat and Dad shouts, “Don’t make me stop this car!” 

Moses is particularly frustrated because he knows that when the people are angry at him they are actually angry at God. And that, as our dads might say, is a very bad choice.

But God has not abandoned the people and God has Moses’ back. The Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you.”

Then one morning a layer of dew fell around the camp. 

When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the LORD has given you to eat.  This is what the LORD has commanded: Gather as much of it as each of you needs, an omer per person according to the number of persons, all providing for those in their own tents.” The Israelites did so, some gathering more, some less. 18 But when they measured it with an omer, those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage; they gathered as much as each of them needed.  (Exodus 16:14-18) (An omer, according to Wikipedia, is about 3.64 litres.)

The biblical record even tells us what manna from heaven is like: “it was like white coriander seed, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.” (Exodus 16:31)

“And the Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a habitable land.” (Exodus 16:35)

This form of bread feeds the bellies of the Israelites, just as it brings them closer to God who provides for them. 

Last Sunday the bread-centric scripture told of the feeding of the five-thousand with loaves and, incidentally, fish.

The five-thousand persons on the hill point to Jesus’ readiness to use his moral authority and divine power to serve persons in need. 

I'm curious what we would learn if we could organize the five-thousand into demographic categories. Except for the boy with the basket of food, we don’t know the age or economic classes that were present that day, although we can deduce they were all male. Even the most open-minded gospel writer would not have seen the need of counting the women present. When both genders are factored in, it’s possible Jesus fed ten-thousand that day.

Whoever and how many they were, we know beyond doubt that Jesus never turned his back on any one in spiritual, mental, or financial need. 

And we can be certain that, because society in Jesus’ day was organized much like ours – that is, 1 percent of the people held most of the wealth – Jesus’ primary concern was for persons living in poverty.

In that sense, the five-thousand were a microcosm of the world we live in today. The difference is that today, when we ask ourselves how we are going to feed hungry crowds, we’re facing millions, not thousands.

We tend to put those millions of hungry persons out of our thoughts because we don’t see how we can help them. We take comfort in Jesus’ observation that the poor will always be with us because it almost makes poverty seem like an acceptable reality. We share Philip’s despair as we count all the mouths to be fed and wonder where the bread was coming from.

But God had a way then. And we must believe that God has ways to feed the millions who are hungry today. In practical and realistic terms, the United States and the rich nations of the would have the means of eliminating hunger world-wide. That we allow let the complications of domestic and international politics to get in our way is a reality that makes Jesus weep. Because if Jesus is the bread of life – and he is – our souls should be so perfectly nourished that we would respond to Jesus’ call to feed the hungry, provide clean water for the thirsty, provide shelter and clothing for the destitute, and seek justice for those in prison.

“Where is this bread of life, this heavenly manna to be found?” asks Richard Futrell, pastor of Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church in Kimberling City, Missouri.

“It’s as near as the manna on the desert sands in the wilderness,” Pastor Futrell writes. “It is as near as your Bible; open it and read it. It is as near as the Church, where the Word is preached; come and listen. It is as near as your baptism. It is as near as the pastor who absolves you. It is as near as the Lord’s Supper of bread and wine, Jesus’ body and blood.”

\Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” (John 6:35)

With the bread of life in our souls we become intimate with Jesus. With the bread of life in our souls, we hear the words of Jesus with utter clarity:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

    because he has anointed me

        to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

    and recovery of sight to the blind,

        to set free those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” -Luke 4:18-19

With the bread of life in our souls we know beyond doubt that this scripture has been fulfilled in our hearing.

And we will never be hungry again.

Life giving and soul healing fish and bread

Sermon prepared for Grace Lutheran Church, Scarsdale, N.Y., July 28, 2024.

Millions of sermons have been preached over thousands of years about the feeding of the five-thousand. Most of them stress how utterly miraculous it is to feed five-thousand hungry people.

Naturally we are in awe of the man who could instantly multiply a few crumbs into a banquet. For the rest of us, that requires strategic planning and a substantial fortune, as anyone who has planned a wedding reception or a bar mitzvah knows.

Few sermons ask why the crowd was hungry. Why did so many people leave home that day without adequate provisions for snacks? Was it an epidemic of poor planning?

And even fewer sermons ask why people are hungry in the first place. Of course, Jesus was concerned about the poor and hungry and he talked about them all the time. But when Jesus stuffed his sizable congregation with loaves and kefelta that day, was he also making a point about endemic poverty and systemic hunger?

That’s an interesting question. Some will say no. At the same time, when the sermon of the loaves and fish is preached in Christian churches this Sunday, worldwide hunger will be the specter at the feast. As we meditate about the careless five-thousand, 795 million persons live on the edge of starvation. 

Many of those persons live in South Sudan. According to World Vision as of today, more than 25.6 million people are facing crisis levels of hunger. Both sides in the on going civil war in Sudan have restricted aid delivery, and both sides are accused of using starvation as a weapon of war.

Save the Children reports that 75 percent of children are now going hungry each day.

Writing in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof painted a chilling picture of one woman dying of hunger. 

As I was driving into this city, a woman was lying inert on the road. She was Nyanjok Garang, and she said she hadn’t eaten for three days. She had set out to look for work, maybe washing clothes, in hopes of keeping her two children alive. After a day of fruitless walking she had collapsed. “My children are hungry,” she said. “I’m hungry. There’s not even a cent left to buy bread.” Her husband is a soldier in the government forces fighting in South Sudan’s civil war, but she doesn’t even know if he is still alive. So she left her children with a neighbor and set out in hopes of finding work — “and then I blacked out.” 

Multiply that woman by five-thousand, and are we closer to the point Jesus was making when he multiplied loaves and fish?

What should we be thinking about as we read these 21 verses in John 6? Many puzzling passages are included, beginning with the fabulous feeding and climaxing with Jesus’ flamboyant feat of walking on the rolling waters of Galilee.

Some theologians speculate that the walking-on-the-water scene appears out of chronological order, that it is more likely something that happened after Jesus’ resurrection. Their reasoning is that this feat of aqua-levitation matches the abilities of Jesus’ post-corporeal body, which walked through walls. 

Regardless of when the disciples witnessed this astounding event, it is certainly a tale they would have told and retold for the rest of their lives. Theologians speculate that evangelists writing about Jesus three centuries on, looking for ways to illustrate his godliness, may have dropped the story into their narratives without regard to its context.

Interesting. But the pleasant thing about theological speculation is that no one really knows for sure and everyone gets to do it.

That goes, too, for the miracle of the feeding of the five-thousand. Again, millions of sermons attempted to offer miraculous or logical explanations for the event.

One possible explanation, of course, is that Jesus caused the existing bread and fish to replicate miraculously. This is the theory my Sunday school teachers embraced, and it is heartwarming to imagine: mundane food stuffs replicating supernaturally as hungry people stuffed their mouths. One of my favorite writers, Father James Martin, is among the scholars who believe this was an out-and-out miracle.

Other theologians look for a more practical explanation. In their view, people in the crowd were so moved by the generosity of a little boy who offered his lunch that they followed his example. As Jesus blessed the food and offered the meager helping of bread and fish, a handful of people pulled out extra morsels from their own packs and offered them to their neighbors. Soon scores followed suit, then hundreds, then thousands were sharing their lunch, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

That explanation does make logical sense, but this level of impulsive generosity would require a miracle far greater than supernatural fish splitting. In the long history of the world, the miracle we humans have failed to accomplish is the miracle of sharing our wealth so no one will starve. 

Many have tried.

One of the stranger events at the outbreak of World War II was the formation of a Federal Council of Churches commission aimed at preventing war from happening again. The Federal Council’s Program for a Just and Durable Peace called for a democratic redistribution of power and wealth to guarantee future peace. The program called for a controlled international bank to make money available worldwide “without the predatory and imperialistic aftermath so characteristic of large-scale private and governmental loans.” 

The Just and Durable Peace Program also called for worldwide freedom of immigration, the elimination of tariffs and quota restrictions on world trade, and a universal system of money controlled to prevent inflation and deflation.

Any one of these radical proposals could have prepared the framework for a program to eliminate world hunger.

But the proposals were too radical for most, and it’s tempting to wonder what kind of left-leaning socialists could offer such sweeping proposals in the dark opening days of global conflict. Surprisingly, the chair of the conference was an active ecumenist and Presbyterian layman named John Foster Dulles – the same who, a decade later, would be named Secretary of State by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Other members of the conference were Harvey Firestone the tire manufacturer and John R. Mott, Methodist layman and future winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s no surprise is that the Just and Durable Peace Conference was a failure. The New York Times and TIME magazine excoriated the conference and suggested it was both unpatriotic and socialist. There was no impetus then or now to reorganize the world’s governments or its economies to provide greater safety, justice, and opportunity for all people. 

If the five-thousand of Jesus’ day were fed because every heart was opened to share with others, that was a greater miracle than the Justice and Durable Peace Conference could manage. No one will ever know if its ideas would have made future wars less likely.

But still the world asks: will the miracle ever happen?

Both the five-thousand persons on the hill and the dramatic walking-on-water scene point to Jesus’ readiness to use his moral authority and divine power to serve persons in need. 

I'm curious what we would learn if we could organize the five-thousand into demographic categories. Except for the boy with the basket of food, we don’t know the age or economic classes that were present that day, although we can deduce they were all male. Even the most open-minded gospel writer would not have seen the need of counting the women present. When both genders are factored in, it’s possible Jesus fed ten-thousand that day.

Whoever and how many they were, we know beyond doubt that Jesus never turned his back on any one in spiritual, mental, or financial need. 

And we can be certain that, because society in Jesus’ day was organized much like ours – that is, 1 percent of the people held most of the wealth – Jesus’ primary concern was for persons living in poverty.

In that sense, the five-thousand were a microcosm of the world we live in today. The difference is that today, when we ask ourselves how we are going to feed hungry crowds, we’re facing millions, not thousands.

We tend to put those millions of hungry persons out of our thoughts because we don’t see how we can help them. We take comfort in Jesus’ observation that the poor will always be with us because it almost makes poverty seem like an acceptable reality. We share Philip’s despair as we count all the mouths to be fed and wonder where the bread was coming from.

But God had a way then. And God has ways to feed the millions who are hungry today, assuming we don’t let the complications of domestic and international politics get in our way.

In 2000, for example, most of the nations of the world signed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of the United Nations to among other things, eradicate extreme poverty and hunger worldwide. The eight MDG set specific targets on poverty alleviation, education, gender equality, child and maternal health, environmental stability, HIV/AIDS reduction, and a “Global Partnership for Development.”

The Millennium Development Goals, though tacitly supported by the U.S. Government, never made it to the mainstream of presidential and congressional campaigns. Candidates tended to champion the needs of the struggling middle class, where the votes are, and ignore those who dwell in extreme poverty.

The Millennium Development Goals did make some progress. The goal was to end extreme poverty in the world by 2015 but by then the goal was only partially achieved.

The target of reducing extreme poverty by half was reportedly reached by 2010, namely the target of halving the proportion of people who lack dependable access to improved sources of drinking water.  Conditions for more than 200 million people living in slums were ameliorated—double the 2020 target.

So we know it can be done, but so what? Sadly, no one seems to be talking about the MDG these days. Even the United Nations official website for the goals has been frozen at 2015.  The current surge of nationalistic tendencies in the U.S. and elsewhere have virtually eliminated any altruistic impulses of eliminating poverty. Only a miracle can revive them, and it will take the kind of miracle Jesus effected on that long gone Palestinian hillside.

The feeding of the five-thousand was the result of a management miracle by the God of Love and the Prince of Peace, working through the Holy Spirit to convince single persons in a crowd that they are intimately connected to the individuals who surround them. 

The feeding of the five-thousand illustrates the power of the Greatest Commandment, to love God with all our might as we love our neighbors the way we need to be loved.

The feeding of the five-thousand is a timely reminder that though the poor will always be with us, God doesn’t expect us to ignore them.

And the feeding of the five-thousand is the scriptural impetus to keep pushing ourselves and our politicians to end the poverty that kills throughout the world.

It’s tempting, always, to share the despair of Philip and Andrew, to look at the enormous needs of the world and the small basket in our hands, and ask, “But what good is this for so many hungry people?”

Jesus’ plan is as workable now as it was then.

The end of killing poverty throughout the world is an achievable goal.

God grant us the faith and the will and the political courage to make it happen.

Sodom and Gomorrah

Sermon prepared for July 14, 2024, at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Rye Brook, N.Y.

Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulphur and fire from the LORD out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back and she became a pillar of salt. – Genesis 19:24-26.

Last week I advocated the Ignatian approach to bible study, which involves using our imaginations to immerse ourselves in the biblical story, to imagine ourselves in the very midst of the action.

Well, here’s a passage I’d rather stand back from.

Sulfur and fire are raining on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. People are running and screaming and being reduced to ash heaps. Buildings and city walls collapse on the crowds as the cities are incinerated. The sulfurous rotten egg smell is right out of hell. Only the virtuous Lot and his family are allowed to escape so long as they turn they turn their backs on the cataclysm. But Lot’s wife, for obscure reasons, looks back and is turned into a salt lick.

I don’t wish to let these horrific images into my head.

But, as I think about it, the images are already there.

Perhaps you saw the sizzling carnage so graphically displayed last week on House of the Dragon, a prequel on MAX to the popular Game of Thrones. This is science fiction but the climactic scene last Sunday may even have equaled the pyrotechnics of Sodom and Gomorrah. The exceptional computer-generated images and roaring Surround Sound make you want to cover your ears and eyes. Instead of angels, fire-spouting dragons descend from above, immolating the screaming humans below. In one scene that will live long in my head, a survivor touches the armor of a knight and the armor collapses and spills the ash that was once a man.

Watching this, I began to wonder why Hollywood had never made a movie about Sodom and Gomorrah. Violence and destruction are always popular themes and you’d think such a film would be a box office hit.

And indeed as I scanned through IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, I discovered that this movie had actually been made in 1962, directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Stewart Granger as Lot. If you never saw the movie you haven’t missed anything. The response of critics was  universally negative and the New York Times said it was an “obvious but feeble imitation” of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. But the film did have acceptable special effects of buildings collapsing and violent infernos.

And raining sulfur and fire are among the reasons we find the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah so compelling – and so horrifying.

But does it make sense that a loving God would periodically destroy God’s own creation, and with such violence?

We must ask. Did it really happen? Or is it a metaphor? 

In his book, Who is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions About the Historical Jesus, Professor John Dominic Crossan writes, “My point, once again, is not that these ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

So did it really happen? Or are the ancients writing symbolically about God’s attitude toward sin? And if it did happen, is that why are no traces of Sodom and Gomorrah today?

We are free, of course, to form our own conclusions as God lays the question on our hearts.

But there are some historical suggestions that the cities were really destroyed. But by an earthquake, not angels.

Wikipedia summarizes the views of Jean-Pierre Isbouts, author of The Biblical World: An Illustrated Atlas (National Geographic Press), as follows:

“One such idea is that (the cities were) devastated by an earthquake between 2100 and 1900 B.C.E … (unleashing) showers of steaming tar.”

Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t. But what is the point of the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah?

The story has, of course, been used by biblical literalists as evidence that – as the deluded minions of Westboro Baptist Church have proclaimed –  “God hates gays.”

This kind of bizarre inductive reasoning provides one of what Father Jim Martin calls “gotcha passages,” a biblical “proof text” that LGBTQ persons are condemned by God. It’s the same kind of biblical myopia that enables bigots to conclude that the bible denounces it when a man sleeps with a man, but blesses it when a man is owned as a slave. 

Those of us who have been blessed with God’s grace know that God is love, God loves everyone, and God has made each of us the way we are. As Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg told homophobic Mike Pence, “If you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me – your quarrel, is with my creator.”

So what was the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah?

The prophet Ezekiel writes (16:49-51):

“This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the. Poor and the needy. They were haughty and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it.”

Grant Hartley, a freelance writer in St. Louis, notes that our view of Sodom and Gomorrah must be seen through the lens of love as expressed by Jesus: 

“Jesus makes it clear that what is done for ‘the least of these (his) siblings,’ is in a real sense done for him. (Mt 25:40) Our faith demands hospitality, especially toward the poor, the needy, and the stranger.”

Hartley suggests that “if one were trying to relieve oneself of this passage’s radical demands of hospitality, twisting the story to focus on gay people would be a convenient strategy.

“Using the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to suggest God’s wrath against gay people makes it rather easy to avoid its actual demands to open up our wallets, homes, and hearts to people in need. How many times,” Hartley continues, “has misunderstanding, empowered by hatred of the other, led some to use the passage to sanction everything that made Sodom guilty: kicking children out of their homes, refusing to serve certain people, discriminating in housing and jobs, breaking families apart, fighting against civil rights?”

I think it’s tempting to remove ourselves from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Rather than immerse ourselves in the passages, we try to look at it objectively. Those nasty people were selfish and inhospitable haters who squandered their resources and got what they deserved.

But a lot of those failings sound uncomfortably familiar. Our media, whether FOX News or MSNBC, are showing us very disturbing images of ourselves. Contrary to God’s command to love and welcome the stranger, so many of our citizens would restrict immigration or even endorse deporting 11 million unregistered immigrants to God knows where. So many of our citizens would be happier living in white-only enclaves. So many of our citizens ignore the poor while the vast gulf between haves and have-nots gets larger and larger.

Are we in the same boat as Sodom and Gomorrah. Are we systematically destroying ourselves without benefit of sulfur and fire?

Rev. Kelty Van Binsbergen, a pastor from Comax, British Columbia puts it starkly:

Our present lifestyle in North America and Europe is not sustainable from an economic justice point of view. We have most of the resources, most of the money. Eventually that's going to crash, one way or another. The planet is running out of resources, we can only grow so much food, poorer countries will rebel. Poorer people within our own rich countries will rebel, are starting to rebel, at the injustice and inequities. We're a lot like Sodom & Gomorrah, bringing about our own destruction. Like Lot's wife, it's hard not to look back, reluctant to embrace a new way of living that will be harder, and when we look back instead of forward, we end up frozen, like a pillar of salt, unable to do much.”

Van Binsbergen would make us feel a little awkward if we disparaged the selfish, bigoted, opulent people of Sodom and Gomorrah because they didn’t have the moral strength to change their ways and avoid destruction.

For us, the only way to reanimate this frozen pillar of salt is to remind ourselves of the grace of our calling. 

To recommit to our ministries: Our motto: God's work. Our hands. Our mission: Together in Jesus Christ we are freed by grace to live faithfully, witness boldly and serve joyfully.

And to do what the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah would not or could not do for themselves:

Revel in the grace of the great commandment every hour of our waking lives:

To love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, and souls; and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

For it is in God’s love that we may come together in peace, and it is in God’s love that we may do what Sodom and Gomorrah could not: save ourselves from destruction.

Oldth

Sermon prepared for St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church, Rye Brook, N.Y.

This week the news has a lot to say about old people. Usually transfixed by youth, now the media are obsessed with oldth. 

The question is, how old is too old to manage complex and multifarious entities, such as a major city or a country?

As anyone who follows the news knows, there are no clear answers.

Konrad Adenauer was 75 years old when he became chancellor of Germany in 1951, and he served until 1963 when he was 87. Throughout that time it did not seem he was too old to run a country, even if his fellow citizens called him “Der Alte,” the old one.

As we look around at other men and women who are chronologically gifted, we find no clear answers to the age-old question, when is old too old?

Pope John Paul II fought off Parkinson’s disease for years until he was unable to walk and struggled to keep going until he died in April 2005 at the young-for-popes age of 84.

Pope Benedict XVI was 85 when he decided he was too old to keep going and resigned the papacy in 2013. He lived nine more years in seclusion in the Vatican.

Pope Francis is 87 and, despite resorting to a wheelchair because of bad knees, continues to be robust and says he has no intention of stepping down until God calls him.

Personally, as a 77-year-old man who feels I am too old to be president, I take great heart in watching my contemporaries and seniors continue to dazzle.

In the last couple of years Martha and I watched octogenarians Paul McCartney and Ringo star show their tireless vigor in two separate concerts that were three hours long. Last week we watched 76-year-old James Taylor command the stage at New Bethel, singing and occasionally hopping to the beat for three hours.

When it comes to who is old and who is not, I remember the words of Mark Twain, who said, “You’re only as old as you feel.” And then he put a cigar in his mouth and said, “Run along, son.”

Today’s reading of Genesis 21 complicates the question of age even further.

Sarah was childless until she was 90. That’s not too old for matriarching, but nine out of ten gynecologists agree, it’s too old for birthing. The very idea moved Sarah to laugh out loud.

But God was not kidding.

“Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age … Abraham was a hundred years old … Now Sarah said, ‘God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.’” (Genesis 21:1-7)

One almost wants to pause now to feel Sarah’s joy. But there were complications.

Sarah, Abraham, and Isaac are not a one-tent family.

Remember Hagar and Ishmael?

Let’s take a quick look back at Genesis 16:

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian maid whose name was Hagar, and Sarai said to Abraham, “Behold, the LORD has prevented me from having children; go in to my maid; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai … And he went into Hagar and she conceived, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress.” Genesis 16:1-2, 4.

So this stunning departure from Biblical Family Values was Sarah’s idea in the first place. Not that it matters. In today’s reading, Sarah has a different point of view.

But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” Genesis 21:9-10.

What is really bugging Sarah?

Some scholars point to the “play” that is happening between the newborn Isaac and the teen-age Ishmael. Is Ishmael playing too rough for the baby? Does the difference in ages make Sarah question whether he might usurp God’s promise to Abraham? After all, both Ishmael and Isaac are Abraham’s sons.

But for some time now, life around Abraham’s tent has not been entirely happy. Sister wives Sarah and Hagar have been at each other’s throats for years and their discord has wearied the old man. Sarah hates Hagar. Hagar despises Sarah. Sarah beats Hagar and bans her from the tent whenever she can. This is not the domestic paradise envisioned by Joseph Smith when he posited that polygamy was Heavenly Father’s will.

As today’s bible story opens, the years of discord have come to an explosive climax and Sarah uses her authority as senior wife to demand the  expulsion of Hagar and her child from Abraham’s luxurious tent. What follows is one of those heart-wrenching scenes that dominate the saga of Genesis: 

So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. Genesis 21:14-16.

Happily, God intervened - and not a mere deus ex machina either.

Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation out of him. Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. Genesis 21:18-19.

And thus begins the story of the great Arab nation, the Ishmaelites.

But how could Abraham and Sarah be so cruel? 

The back story offers some clues. 

Abraham was 75 when God ordered him to move to Canaan where, God assured him, he would be the primogenitor of a vast nation. God said “jump” and Abraham jumped, pruriently winking his pretty wife, Sarah, to tell her they’d better get started. 

But years went by and the nation-starting business was going nowhere. There’s reason to suspect Sarah was tiring of her husband’s sweaty efforts to make God happy. Looking around, she saw her beautiful Egyptian servant, Hagar, and presented her to him as a gift. “She’s all yours, dear.” Abraham dutifully accepted and continued his feverish endeavors to please God. 

Looking back, Sarah must have wondered what on earth she had been thinking. Naturally, Abraham continued his feverish endeavors to please God by sowing his patriarchal seed. And because it was (and continues to be) the practice of men, he cared little which woman was the holy receptacle. 

Hagar is one of the biblical models for Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which details both the dangers of a literal interpretation of scripture as well as the natural enmity between the barren and the nubile.

Sarah, initially relieved that her vigorous husband was occupied elsewhere, soon became exasperated by Abraham’s sacred enthusiasm and threw Hagar out of the tent. Hagar, heavy with child, was filled with contempt for her mistress. 

Years passed and God – still working on an early draft of a commandment forbidding adultery – decided Abraham’s nation-building tasks needed to continue with Sarah only. Sarah thought she had retired from that job because she was far past the normal age of child bearing. But after years of watching her husband embrace her hated rival and her rival’s son, Sarah gave birth to Isaac. 

Finally with a son of her own, Sarah knew her position as senior wife had been re-established. When she saw Hagar’s son playing innocently with her baby, she snapped.

“Cast out this slave woman with her son,” she ordered her husband. “For the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” Genesis 21:9-10.

What a mess. What a great soap opera. As our neighbor Rabbi Goldberg has pointed out during one of our joint summer bible studies, the story of Abraham and Sarah is told with raw honesty. No effort is made to spin the story to make the founding fathers and mothers look better. 

Genesis is a library of allegories, metaphors, and myths. The stories are fun, and they are a lot more fun when you believe the events are literally true.

Most scholars believe Abraham was a historical figure. But if he was a myth who evolved to explain the origins of the twelve tribes of Israel, he was a captivating myth. His story is a soap opera of betrayal, greed, lust, jealousy, and mass murder. And unlike other protagonists of most sagas, he had 175 years of life to get it done.

Typical of soap operas, it was Abraham’s sex drive that kept getting him into trouble. The teller of his story seeks to make the point that God has decided to build a great nation through Abraham’s seed and Abraham was faithful to God no matter how many obstacles God put in his way. The main obstacle was Abraham’s little Abraham, which was not getting any younger. And, as the bronze-age macho storyteller tells it, God and Abraham pursued their goals by compelling women to graciously submit to their male will.  

This part of the myth is true. Bronze-age men used women as means to their own ends and they never doubted that was God’s eternal plan. We know that is true because it’s still true. Gender equality is a relatively nascent phenomenon and men still hold most of the power in business and the church.

That is changing because only the most insulated and closed-minded persons still believe the genders are intellectually, spiritually, and physically unequal. Unfortunately, insulated and closed-minded people, though dwindling, have been gerrymandered into our social structure. Hopefully our daughters – and sons – will live to see the time when they have passed from the scene.

In the meantime, our bible story should also be a cautionary tale.

Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar are familiar characters because they all believed a male God had ordained male patriarchs to use females as unwilling vessels of nation building. Such people did exist in 1800 B.C. and such people exist today. 

But we don’t need prophets like Margaret Atwood to see how such beliefs can be harmful. Such beliefs were an underlying cause of misery for Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar.

This much we know to be true: great nations arose in the fertile crescent of the Middle East, and they bore common witness to the One God, sometimes called Yahweh, sometimes called Allah. These great nations have a common origin and proclaim themselves children of Abraham.

The Abraham of Genesis is a patriarch who believed God wanted him to sow the seeds of nationhood using his wife and her handmaid as inferior vessels for the task.

That part of the myth is true because that is what men have believed for thousands of years.

But the pain that accompanied that belief, meticulously detailed in the Genesis story, remind us that inequality breeds misery for all concerned.

The story also impels us to remember that God is not a God of misery. Our God is a God of love whose metaphorical arms embrace all persons, all races, all ages, all creeds, both genders, and all sexual orientations. 

And that is no myth. That is most certainly true.

Twelve

 

Sermon prepared for Grace Lutheran Church, Scarsdale, N.Y., June 30, 2024.

I have five daughters.

Perhaps this fact invokes for you Tevye’s sad but accepting lament from Fiddler on the roof.

“I have five daughters.” (Deep Sigh.) Daughters.

Naturally, as an early twentieth century Russian Jew, with. his life dictated by ancient tradition, Tevye would have preferred sons. Not that he doesn’t love each of his daughters dearly. But, dear God, a son would have been such a blessing.

In that case, I am more richly blessed than Tevye. I have five daughters – and a son! 

All of the six adults in the blended family Martha and I celebrate are wonderful, caring, responsible adults, and we could not be prouder of each of them.

Looking back on the drama of their adolescence, however, I have to marvel that all eight of us – with some slight guidance from therapists and pastors – got through it unscathed. 

I was the first-born of four brothers and a sister and, looking back, I realize my first family was a useful model of family dynamics. So was the experience of relating as pater familias to five daughters and a son. Perhaps you’ve heard the generalization that adolescent girls are subject to emotional chaos while adolescent boys exhibit physical chaos. But I look back on all this with serenity because most of our offspring are now dealing with these issues themselves, as parents or teachers or both.

One thing I remember is that our daughters tended to decide for themselves when they reached full adulthood with all the rights and privileges thereof.

Usually this happened when they were 12.

I would, of course, hide an indulgent smile because 12-year-olds are indisputably children. (No offense to any 12-year-olds within the sound of my voice.)

But it would be wrong to laugh at 12-year-olds who sense they are adults because that is what their adolescent bodies are telling them. They are experiencing physical and hormonal changes and in many cases 12-year-old girls look like an adult.

And as we know, some cultures regard a 12-year-old girl as old enough to marry and old enough to bear children. Some Fundamentalist Mormons allow men to marry girls that age, although if they are caught they will be prosecuted for child abuse. You may have read about the pastor of one of the nation’s largest megachurches who confessed to having an affair years ago with a “young lady.” The woman in question went public to declare she was 12 at the time. Horrifying. 

But make no mistake: a twelve-year-old, whether a girl or a boy, is a child. God calls on parents and adults to love them, guide them, nurture them, encourage them, and protect them from the evils of the world.

No matter how tall or developed they look, a 12-year-old does not have the gray cells to make responsible decisions about how to use their bodies. Doctors know that the cerebral cortex, the frontal lobes of our brains where logic and decision assessment are lodged, is not fully developed until about age 25.

I look back on some of the irresponsible or dangerous choices I made as a late teenager and I know this is most certainly true.

And I know that when I was 12, I was a child.

And all of my offspring and all of yours were or are, at 12, children.

Looking at our Gospel passages this morning, it’s notable that Jairus thought of his daughter as a child. He calls her, “My little daughter,” and he pleaded with Jesus to save her from death. Jesus thought of her as a child when he took her by the hand and said, “Talitha koum, Little girl, get up!”

One of the reasons I’ve been talking about the number 12 is that the Gospel writer is also talking about it.

Mark writes, “And immediately the girl stood up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age).”

Earlier in the Gospel, Mark tells the story of a woman suffering from a chronic hemorrhage who, desperate for relief, reaches out to touch Jesus’ garment.

“Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my cloak?’ And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’”

But Jesus knew. Jesus always knows. Although the woman collapsed in fear, Jesus told her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be healed of your disease.”

Mark, not known for using unnecessary words, added that the woman had suffered “for twelve years.”

As a Jew, Mark would not have overlooked the significance of the number twelve.

We think immediately, of course, of twelve disciples.

There were twelve tribes of Israel.

Solomon had twelve administrators.

In Hebrew, twelve signifies God’s divine order.

Twelve can refer to completeness of the people of God.

Twelve is the number of lunar months in the year.

And, a bit more obscurely, in numerology the number twelve represents growth from the physical to the spiritual realm, and vice-versa.

But we can delve more deeply into the significance of twelve after we rise from our afternoon naps.

For now let it be enough that for Mark, the appearance of twelve was not a coincidence and it was always worth noting.

The Gospel readings before us are extremely powerful.

Let’s employ the Ignatian bible study approach of imagining ourselves within the story being told.

We see ourselves standing by the sea as Jesus dismounts from the boat.

We see a desperate man approaching Jesus, Jairus a leader of the synagogue. Jairus is weeping and falls to his knees in front of Jesus, pleading and pleading: “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live.”

A father fearing the loss of a child. Is there anything worse? Perhaps our eyes fill with tears and we are glad to see Jesus following Jairus.

We join the growing crowd. We are bumped into and jostled by this sweating, smelly, surge of humanity. Is Jesus also having trouble keeping his balance as arms and shoulders press against him?

Jesus stops suddenly, and people in the crowd who can’t stop fast enough bump into each other.

“Who touched me?” Jesus asks. And we smile at each other. “Is he kidding? Who isn’t touching him?”

But a pale woman, used to hiding in dark corners, feels a bright light shining in her face. She has just committed a terrible taboo: she has reached out in public to touch a man, to tug on his garment. Terrified, she falls on her knees.

Trembling, she says, “I thought if I touch your cloak, I will be made well.”

In that moment she senses the hemorrhaging has stopped.

“Daughter,” says Jesus, “Your faith has made you well.”

At that time some people from the synagogue confront Jairus with bad news. “Your daughter is dead.”

Oh, no. Please no. Can you feel your eyes brimming with tears?

But Jesus continues to the synagogue. There a crowd of people – I suspect professional mourners – are weeping and wailing.” They must have been professionals getting paid for their grief because when Jesus says the child is not dead, only sleeping, they laugh derisively.

But Jesus took the child’s parents into the child’s room, took the child's hand, and said, “Talitha koum.”

“And immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around (she was twelve years of age).”

And we are overcome with amazement – and gratitude. Thank you, Jesus!

What are the lessons Mark would have us learn?

Certainly we all know chronically ill people whose cure eludes medical science. I interact with dozens of people on Facebook and Threads who are exhausted by chemotherapy, experiencing the degeneration of their nerves or muscles, facing the aggressive reoccurrence of a cancer they thought was long gone, and confronting an uncertain future.

I’m also in touch with people whose children could not be saved by doctors or who succumbed to other tragedies. One woman on Threads writes under the name, “This Grieving Life,” which offers companionship and shares words of comfort with other parents who, like her, lost a child to one of the school shootings that are a pandemic in our country.

Certainly illness and death and violence will always be with us.

But in this dramatic passage in Mark we are reminded that in the shadows of our lives God is present. Whether or not the miracles we seek will come, God is always with us, crying with us, laughing with us, mourning with is, sitting with us, dancing with us.

More than anything else, the cure of a suffering woman or the rescue of a dying child are stories of hope. They remind us that, despite all, Jesus loves us and God loves us unconditionally.

Let us pray that we will feel the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as if it were air in our longues, and may the Spirit always remind us that the loving God is intimately near to us.

And this week, whenever you see the number 12, let that remind you that miracles still happen and God never leaves us.

The Word in Three Easy Lessons

(Sermon prepared for St Paul's Lutheran Church, Rye Brook, N.Y., May 26, 2024.)

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 his 107th birthday is this week, 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 admired.

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 begonias 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 teens in Morrisville.

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 sweaty 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.