What Is Mine

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.26.13;  Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 16:12-15

We have such a strange way of connecting and communicating these days.

This last couple of weeks, I’ve been reconnecting with the blogosphere, that endlessly churning mess of words that come pouring out of countless eager writers in countless basement offices around the country.   Does anyone actually read these things?  As a regular blogger, I do wonder this, but for me, blogging is much more about keeping an online journal, writing for the purposes of writing.  It keeps the mental pump primed, and lets me record whatever random thought seems fascinating to me at the time.

I think of it like having extra memory, a big old shared external hard-drive of concepts and reflections.  This is unlike the journals that sit in a box downstairs, the ones I used to keep in high school that tell me everything I was thinking back in 1987.  I didn’t want anyone to read them then, and Lord have mercy, do I not want anyone to read them now.  Some things are better forgotten.

But as I write, I also read.

I’ve re-established my blog feed, which now daily assembles those writings for me as a neat and tidy set of articles, sorted by area and interest.  With a book...or at least an eBook...coming out, I’m trying to stay more or less current with what is the bleeding edge of Christian thought out there.  Who is thinking exciting things right now?  How is the great global conversation of faith moving right now?

What I find is, well, sometimes a bit disheartening.  

Like, say, this last week.  Following the tornado that tore it’s way through a suburb of Oklahoma City, the Christian blogosphere was filling my feedreader with...well...what?

There were prayers, of course.   But those got little traffic.   What got buzz and excitement was fighting.   In response to the disaster, a theologian and author posted a tweet, a one hundred and forty word quote from the Book of Job.  An hour later, a prominent blogger criticized the tweet, following which defenders of the theologian blogged their angry dismay at the blog that criticized the tweet, which then other bloggers then blogged about, and which was then tweeted.   

And the entire point...sympathizing with and supporting a community that has just been devastated by a terrible disaster...somehow gets lost in that tangled mess.  Hello?  People who lost their homes and lives and children?  Can we focus on that for just a little bit?  Maybe?   Lord have mercy.

What matters, it seems, is tension and conflict and disagreement.   The purpose of online writing is to draw attention to oneself in the right now, to pitch a challenge to the world as aggressively and intensely as possible.   Here we are, in an era when our ability stand in relationship with one another has been radically transformed by new technology, and we find ourselves consumed by thumbtyping angry missives at one another.  And I’m not even sure I can talk about it without becoming it.  

I mean, how can you criticize the act of being critical?   “You know, the problem with you is that you’re too critical” is the kind of sentence that should just self destruct before it even works its way out of your mouth.

But still.  This obsession with opposition feels off, inexplicably off, as if we have somehow failed as a species.  There’s not a single reason I can figure out why we shouldn’t be able to genuinely grasp the struggle and suffering of other human beings, to cut one another a bit of slack instead of cutting into one another, and to focus our energies on grace and reconciliation or at a bare minimum just not making the world more of a mess than it already is.  

It seems so simple, so easy, so very profoundly basic.  Now, we have these amazing tools, these ways of sharing knowledge and speaking about ourselves to one another, and yet we use them to howl at one another across the cybernetic void.

This is not how we are meant to be.   We fall so far short, and by “we,” I mean me too.

This inexplicable incapacity of ours, this failing to grasp the most basic way we human beings are meant to interact, this plays oddly across the core theme of today’s text from the Gospel of John.

It’s Trinity Sunday today, that day in the Christian calendar that most pastors dread.   Here we are obligated to make some effort to crunch our way through what is assumed to be the most impossibly convoluted theology in all of Christendom.   Three is one thing, and one is three?   That seems to violate some pretty fundamental kindergarten programming.   Do we deal with the complexities of Aristotelian categorical thinking that guided Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers in the third century Trinitarian disputes?  Do we talk about the concept of substance, which was the inverse conceptual reflection of Platonic formalism, as Aristotle radically inviduated being over and against Plato’s cascading hierarchy of forms?

Aaah.  These things made our heads hurt in seminary.  We really have to explain this?  Can we just hide?  Hiding is easy, and if you stay behind the pulpit long enough and make awkward squawking noises, eventually people will go away.

Some will argue that it’s best to just abandon the effort, to just set it aside as pointless blabbering.

But as complicated as the Trinity can get if we go deep into it, the essence of it is astoundingly simple.  John’s Gospel gets to that with simplicity, in its own way, as it always does.

The sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel, like much of the rest of that Gospel, evokes a seemingly similar interweaving.   Words repeat and cycle and repeat again.   Concepts in the text swirl and connect and reconnect.   Chapter sixteen falls smack in the middle of John’s summary of everything Jesus has taught.  The sequence of seven signs that defines the heart of the narrative for John has been completed.  The teachings about the Holy Spirit and community that are Christ’s final summation to his disciples are underway.  That summation, which is called the “farewell discourse,” has fills chapters fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, which chapter seventeen acting as one long benediction.

What is being offered up in today’s short excerpt from that much longer passage is something very different.  Jesus is in the midst of describing his relationship with God, and in doing so, he does it in terms that are radically and basically Trinitarian.  Here, in a handful of verses, we have a passage that presents God as Father, Jesus himself, and God as son.  He’s talking to his disciples about what it will mean to participate in that relationship too.

What that relationship is radically not is selfish.  In that way that John has of weaving things together and blurring the lines between things, we hear about how God has given everything to Jesus, and how Jesus is giving everything to the spirit, and how the spirit will offer everything up to us.  

It’s a deeply generous thing, this offering up.  And for all of the complex ways that we have come up with to try to describe it, it is most radically participatory.  Meaning, we are being given a gift by the Spirit, the gift of knowing God as Jesus knew God.

Jesus understood himself, particularly as John’s Gospel presents him, as being both different from and radically a part of the God he called Father.  Everything that comprised him as a person, all the matter, the flesh and the bone and the blood, all of that was part of Creation, which is God’s self expression.  And that self, that soul, that spirit, that life within him, that self knew that it was also a part of God’s self-expression.

What he asks of us, again, is to know that we share Christ’s calling.

But how?  How do we get anywhere near this?   Talking about it is fine.  But how do we make this real and a part of us?

The first and most essential step is listening.   That is also the hardest thing for us to manage.  In a culture of hyper-competitive self-promotion, just making ourselves still and letting ourselves hear goes against everything our gut has been taught to feel.  We tweet and we blog and we shout ourselves into the world, but if we’re shouting about ourselves and shouting at our neighbor, we’ll never for a moment hear that still small voice whispering God’s love into us.

And the second step on that listening path is to do so through prayer.   There are many forms, and many ways to pray, but some of the strongest are those that give us space to hear.   These are the prayers that turn us outward, the simple prayers for others and for illumination.   Prayers for others, because in our remembering others before the one who created us all, we open ourselves to loving them.   Prayers that ask not for God to give us this or to do that, but that recognize that in our times of deepest need, we often don’t even know what to ask for.  

Listen, and let your listening draw you up into connection with our Creator.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.