The Trinity ... and "The Runaway Bunny"?!

 Trinity Sunday, Year B

Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29 or Canticle 2 or 13
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17

Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity: Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

I’ve never met a preacher these days who doesn’t worry over what to say on Trinity Sunday. “It’s so complicated!” we moan. “Almost anything that I say is bound to turn out to be some kind of heresy.” Throwing all of the complex theological concepts together in one sentence, Catholic theologian Bernard Lonergan is said to have quipped, “The Trinity is a matter of five … properties, four relations, three persons, two processions, one substance … and no understanding.”[1] I imagine, though, for all of my fretting, the problem for most of us in the pews, is not how to understand the Trinity in all of its intricate complexity. I imagine that the issue going through many minds today is instead: Why bother? What does it matter to my faith how a bunch of theologians try to define God? Does it change my relationship to Jesus? Does it change how I love God and my neighbor in my everyday life? Why don’t we just sing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” have a baptism, and go eat cake?

          Kids and kids at heart, maybe you can help us answer that question today. Who knows the wonderful children’s book, Runaway Bunny, by Margaret Wise Brown? This classic, first published in 1942, was one of my children’s favorite books when they were little, and it was one of my favorite to read to them, too. Here’s how it goes:

Once upon a time there was a little rabbit who wanted to run away. So he

said to his mom, “I’m going to run away!”

“If you run away,” answered his mom, I will run after you. Because you are

my little bunny.”

After that,  the story takes off, page after page, as the rebellious little bunny

 dreams up all kinds of whimsical places to which he can escape, and his mother plays along, dreaming of all the fanciful ways that she will follow him. He threatens to become a fish and swim away in the river, until she says that she will become a fisherman and catch him up in her net, with a carrot for bait. He threatens to become a boulder high on a mountain peak, a crocus in a hidden garden, a bird with wings, a sailboat on faraway seas, and then a trapeze artist in the circus. Every time, she counters with the way in which she will change herself to stay with him. The cute illustrations show them transformed into their imaginary characters, yet still looking like rabbits: a sailboat with rabbit-ear sails blown home by a mama-bunny cloud. A tree shaped like mama rabbit holding out arm-like branches for her baby-bunny bird.

Finally, out of ideas, the little bunny huffs, “Then I will become a little boy who runs into a house.”
          “If you become a little boy who runs into a house,” answered his mom, “then I will be your mother, and I will take you in my arms and give you a big hug.”
          “You know,” said the Little Rabbit, “I would probably just as well stay here and be your little rabbit.”

          And that’s what he did. “Here, have a carrot,” said his mom.

          The books ends with a picture of the two rabbits together in their warm, round underground burrow, snuggling and eating carrots.[2]    

          OK, cute, you might well ask, but what on earth does this have to do with the Trinity?

          Let me be clear, I am not making an analogy here. I am not saying that God turns Godself into a Father, and then a Son, and then a Holy Spirit in order to follow us around like mama bunny. Besides sounding silly, that would reflect the heresy of modalism. (See, I told you that heresies abound today!) God is always Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, all at the same time. God doesn’t morph from one mode to the next in any kind of sequential way.

Instead, what I want you to notice with this story is its playful, circular, dancing quality, and the poignancy of the deep relationship that it reflects. Why does this story matter to generation after generation of readers? Because Love practically bursts from the pages. We remember this little book because of the powerful, undeterred, and active love of the mother rabbit. It’s the playful way that she shows her child that he belongs with her. It’s the dedication with which she goes out of herself to join in his world. It’s the open welcome that she offers him when he decides to return home. The mother rabbit teaches her son about the profound love that she has for him by revealing it to him in the way that she presents herself. This story leaves us knowing that, no matter where the young bunny goes or what he does, he will always be in his mama’s lap. In the chaotic hide and seek of relationship, we are always found by the one who loves us.

And so it is with God’s Love. Love cannot exist without a beloved. As David Lose points out, there is no love that is not shared.[3] If God is Love, then, within God, there must be relationship. On our own, we don’t comprehend how God’s love works any more than the little bunny understands his mother’s love. We, too, play with it. We pull away. We seek it. We brag that we don’t need it. In order to experience God’s life of love, God has to reveal it to us. And God reveals it as a living relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We look at Jesus on the Cross; we look at God pouring Godself out in Creation; we look at the Holy Spirit bringing joy and transformation; we watch Jesus embrace sinners; we see miraculous healing; we taste forgiveness. No matter where we go or what we do, God shows us that the life of God is love, love that constantly reaches out in relationship, drawing us in. In today’s Gospel, it’s almost as if Nicodemus, questioning Jesus in the dark of night, is like the little bunny, both running away and seeking Love at the same time. It’s almost as if Jesus is the Mother, showing how the living Trinity looks when it is poured out into the world, poured out in order to gather in all of her wayward children.

If you wonder how the Trinity relates to your life, think about the baptism that we will witness in just a few minutes. As I pour water on the heads of Daniella and Dalida, I will baptize them in the Name of the Trinity, in the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Why don’t I just baptize them in Jesus’ name? After all, isn’t it Jesus’ Body that they are joining through baptism? I could say, “Daniella, I baptize you into the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.”That would surely be OK, wouldn’t it? Preacher Tom Long answers best: “To be baptized is   … a rebirth into a new way of life, into God's own life.”[4] In Baptism, we are not just changing the way that we think of ourselves. We are joining the very life of God: the active, loving, powerful, playful, and undeterred love that churns between and within Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And like the little bunny, safe within that circle, we realize that it is in that Love that we have always belonged. 

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[1] Quoted by Jennifer Anne Herrick, “1+1+1=1: Making Sense of Nonsense: The Concept of the Trinity at the End of the 20thCentury,” found at http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/SSR/article/viewFile/137/158.

[2] My only copy of this book is the French version, which I used to read to my French-speaking children. The above translation is my own. Margaret Wise Brown, Je vais me sauver! Trans. Catherine Deloraine. Paris: Flammarion, 1985.

[3] David Lose, http://www.davidlose.net/2015/05/trinity-b-three-in-one-plus-one/

[4] Tom Long, Day 1, “The Start of the Trail,” http://day1.org/3823-the_start_of_the_trail

A Spirit of "Reconciled Difference"

The Day of Pentecost
Acts 2:1-21 
O God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The foreign language enthusiast in me looks forward to Pentecost for the languages! I love to listen to the familiar words of Scripture fly through the air with strange and exotic flair. Maybe one year we will even sing the Gloria in Spanish and read in multiple languages at once, giving ourselves over entirely to the chaotic babble of the first Pentecost?

 Or maybe not. Often we think of the diversity of languages at Pentecost as representing the wild commotion caused by the boundary-breaking presence of the Holy Spirit. We see the scene in Acts mainly as an image of hearts and tongues being set on fire for God. But my study of Acts this week caught me up short. I realized that the miracle on Pentecost was not all about the languages! The miracle on Pentecost was even greater. It was about a community of “reconciled difference.”[1] Let me explain:

All of those Judeans gathered in Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of Pentecost shared a common ethnic identity. They were all Jews. They might have been born—or had parents or grandparents who were born—in far-flung regions of the Mediterranean world. But like the disciples, many of them likely understood both Aramaic and Greek. Aramaic and Greek were common languages learned throughout the region for the purpose of trade and commerce. Gathered on Pentecost in Jerusalem, the disciples could have just spoken Aramaic to the crowd, and all of those Phrygians and Cappadocians would have understood them--no big deal. If the problem that day were one of mere comprehension, there was no need for a miracle to turn the disciples’ words into Arabic or Syriac in the ears of the gathered crowd. More than comprehension was at work here.

 While they could understand Aramaic, these Jews would also have had “birth languages” that they spoke at home, less well-known idioms for use among their families and friends. It is these “birth languages” that they heard coming from the lips of the disciples. In monolingual America, this is difficult for us to understand. In the high mountains of the Swiss Alps, however, I have seen how each small valley has its own language, spoken and understood only by the inhabitants of that valley. Everybody learns German at school, and TV shows and newspapers might be in German, but that is not the language spoken with pride at home. Today, too, Obadear just read to us in Swahili, which is a common language used in parts of East Africa. He can also read to us in English, which was a language imposed upon the people of Kenya by the British colonizers. But I bet that he also knows a “birth language,” the tribal language that he learned at home from his parents, a language that is probably very dear to his heart and soul, a language that is part of his deepest identity.

I’ll never forget the night that I was called out to the scene of an accident in order to speak someone’s birth language. I was living in France when our neighbors’ teenage son committed suicide one night, running the family car straight into a tree. My husband and I were needed to drive the grieving parents out to the accident site to meet the police. I remember standing in the dark, staring at the ambulance lights flashing in powerless circles around the wrecked vehicle, when the boy’s father collapsed onto my shoulders with the weight of grief. I was young and overwhelmed and could only stammer in English a weak, “I’m so sorry.” To my shock and surprise, this Frenchman answered me in perfect, American-accented English. “Thank you, thank you,” he whispered, his voice filled with profound meaning that escaped me in the moment. It was only later that I learned that this grieving neighbor’s mother had been an American. He later told me that what he needed at that awful moment more than anything in the world was to hear his mother’s voice. He felt my few, pitiful words as a gift from God. Though this young and clueless foreigner, the Spirit was speaking his birth language to him in his time of need.

In the same way, when the Judeans in Jerusalem began to hear and to speak God’s word in their birth languages, God was speaking to their inmost being in the languages that were theirs from the womb. Unlike the many Christian missionaries who went over to Africa and said, “You had better learn our language and follow our cultural patterns if you want to know God,” the Holy Spirit was bringing the Good News to each small group, celebrating and amplifying their diversity by using their birth languages. After the miracle at Pentecost, the identity of Parthians, Arabs, and Elamites does not depend on their ability to speak Greek or to share one culture; instead it is based on the Spirit gathering them as a diverse Christian people under the Lordship of Jesus.[2] As Jurgen Moltmann writes, “[When we are in the Holy Spirit] we feel and taste, we touch and see, our life in God and God in our life.”[3] The Spirit unites us in Christ, across any distances of culture or language that our world might create.

           Today we were supposed to have two baptisms. Ortance had asked me last Sunday if I would baptize her two youngest daughters. I was delighted! First, I was excited to have baptisms on Pentecost. Second, I realized that our French-speaking friends from the Congo would fit nicely into our multilingual service today.  What a way to show how the Spirit brings us together in diversity! Cool! So I rushed everything along, urging her that this was the perfect week for the baptism, orchestrating everything to fit my brilliant plan. I learned late in the week, however, that Ortance’s friends and the girls’ godparents could not attend a baptism held today. Embarrassed, she asked if we could postpone it. While I told her that next week would be fine, I was so disappointed! “The bulletins will be all messed up,” I whined to the staff. “And I will lose my Pentecost illustration of unity! And we already planned to have a cake and special fellowship for them…”

         As I listened to myself grumble, I slowly realized that, not only was I trying to control the Holy Spirit with my liturgical maneuverings, I was also trying to fit Ortance and her daughters into our system here at St. Thomas. I was not speaking their “birth language.” I was not giving them time to invite their friends from outside the parish to join them. I was assuming that they would want cake at St. Thomas, rather than traditional foods with their own community. I was not honoring their culture in making them part of this body of Christ. Proud of myself for showing off a diverse congregation on Pentecost, I was not, in my heart, witnessing to Jesus’ love for all people, just the way they are in their own cultural particularities. I was not preparing for the Holy Spirit to enter into this place in order to make it a community of truly reconciled difference.

          On this Memorial Day weekend, I do have a story of reconciled difference to offer, though. Historians don’t agree on the origin of this national holiday, which did begin right after the Civil War. One very early celebration seems to me to be the most filled with God’s reconciling Spirit. It took place in Charleston, South Carolina at an old planter’s race track which had served as a Confederate prison during the Civil War. In that prison, African-American slaves and prisoners had died gruesome deaths, and had then been hastily buried there. In 1865, soon after the War, a group of freed slaves gathered to build a fence around the haphazard cemetery, cleaning it up and putting it respectfully in order. Then, on May 1, a group of local school children, their teachers, Christian missionaries, black pastors, and townsfolk both black and white, former slave and former master, gathered at the spot with songs and armloads of flowers.[4] In speeches and sermons, they acknowledged the evil that had happened there, speaking to one another in their “birth languages,” doubtless astounded to find themselves standing together and singing praises to the Lord in this once-cursed place. A community of reconciled difference. A community of peace. A community filled with the Spirit of Jesus Christ. A community of witnesses to the powerfully transforming Love of God.

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[1] Aaron J. Kuecker, “The Spirit’s Gift and Witness: Communities of Reconciled Difference,” in Christian Reflection: Pentecost, edited by Robert B. Kruschwitz, (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2015). I am indebted to this article for my interpretation of this passage.

[2] Ibid., 15.

[3] Jurgen Moltmann, quoted in Jill Dufield, Presbyterian Outlook, “Looking into the Lectionary,” http://pres-outlook.org.

[4] http://www.snopes.com/military/memorialday.asp

A Celebrity Meets a Priest on Derby Day

Easter 5, Year B

Acts 8:26-40
Psalm 22:24-30
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8


Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the way that leads to eternal life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

 On Derby day in Louisville, private jets roar overhead as movie stars, sports stars, and TV personalities flock to our city for the renowned horse race. Limousines of the rich and famous crowd the streets.

Out on foot to pick up some Saturday morning groceries at Paul’s, I noticed a traffic jam at the railroad tracks on Breckinridge Lane. There, in the passenger seat of a bright yellow Lamborghini convertible, I saw Bruce Jenner stopped at the train crossing. Hair in a pony tail, head bowed over his Kindle, Jenner was engrossed in reading something. He didn’t even notice the other drivers who were starting to pull out their phones to take pictures of the controversial star. He didn’t hear their sniggers or react to a couple of rude shouts, either, although I saw his driver roll his eyes and glare.

          All of a sudden, I found myself crossing the street to stand alongside his car. Yes, shy little me: the one who would never approach a stranger unbidden. Yes, judgmental me: the one who scorns all fame-seekers and low-life reality TV stars, the one who remains unimpressed with famous athletes, the one who struggles to understand transgender issues. Somehow, though, as if propelled by the Spirit, here I was, walking up to Bruce Jenner in his Lamborghini.

          My lips moved on their own. “What are you reading?” I blurted out.

          Jenner looked up without surprise, smiled, and responded, “Oh, I’m reading some beautiful poetry from the prophet Isaiah. I downloaded this Bible last night in my hotel room for kicks and just can’t put it down. This is fascinating stuff, but it doesn’t always make a lot of sense.” He frowned and slowly shook his head back and forth.

          Now the train had passed, and the crossing gate was lifting. Soon I had to jog along to keep up with the car, which was starting to roll forward in traffic. People started honking at us.

          “I know what you mean,” I panted. “I’m a priest who has to preach every week, and I struggle to make sense of scripture, too.”

“Wow, a priest!” gasped Jenner. "Hey, traffic is moving here. Why don’t you jump in and teach me something?” He patted the small seat next to him and scooted over to make room.

I stared. I didn’t want to get in a car with a strange stranger. Who knows where I would end up? Besides, people were taking pictures. How embarrassing. I wouldn’t want to end up in the tabloids. My colleagues would think that I was showing off.  Who knows what the Bishop would say? Or the Vestry? I don’t have the answer on transgender issues. I don’t have the answer on lots of things. How could I guide Jenner?

But I found myself squished into the little front seat, anyway. Much too close for comfort.

“Listen,” said Jenner, poking me. “Here’s what it says: ‘As a sheep led to slaughter, and quiet as a lamb being sheared, he was silent, saying nothing.  He was mocked and put down, never got a fair trial. But who now can count his kin
since he’s been taken from the earth?’[1] What does it mean? Is Isaiah talking about himself? Hmmm. ‘Led to the slaughter. Mocked, no fair trial’ …Is he talking about the mess in Baltimore? It sounds like God should intervene.”

Before I could say anything, Jenner kept going: “Man, I sure have felt like a lamb being sheared, silent, afraid to speak. I know about being mocked and put down. I sure would like for my suffering to mean something. Could the scriptures be talking about me ….” Jenner grew silent and pensive.

I wanted to start telling Jenner about first, second, and third Isaiah, that the book wasn't really written by one person. I wanted to explain that these "Suffering Servant" passages are very complex, and that we don't really know who the prophet was referring to. I wanted to teach him how Christians can't just appropriate the Hebrew Scriptures for our own purposes. But instead, I heard not my words but the words of the Johannine School coming from my mouth:  “'God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him … There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment… We love because he first loved us.' Jesus said, 'Remain in this love. Remain in me as I remain in you.’”

          We were winding through Louisville during this time, taking a short-cut through Cherokee Park. As we passed by Hogan’s Fountain, Jenner told the chauffeur to stop the car. “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” Jenner cried with enthusiasm.

“Lots of things,” I thought glumly. “First, like the fact that I don’t know if you have already been baptized. You can’t just go baptizing people over and over in the Episcopal Church. We have strict rules about this kind of thing.  Second, like the idea that I don’t have my Prayer Book on me, and I might screw something up. Third, like the issue that you haven’t been properly prepared with classes. I can’t just jump into Hogan’s Fountain and start baptizing people like some wacky evangelist.”

Yet, amazingly, as I was still listing stumbling blocks, there I was with Bruce Jenner in Hogan’s Fountain, up to the knees in murky water, naming the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, while babies in strollers gaped, and melting ice cream ran over the hands of astounded children, and incredulous parents rolled their eyes.

Until, of course, I woke up. Goodness, I must have fallen asleep on my patio while I was taking a rest from trimming vines in the sun. “What a crazy dream,” I mused, rubbing my eyes with profound relief. Whew, I would never get myself in a situation like that one in real life. To lose control over a situation like that? No way! To be able to preach love to a stranger, to lay all of my judgments totally aside? No, that wouldn’t happen. To evangelize like some TV preacher instead of following the proper Episcopal way of doing things? No way, I thought with a shudder.

I wonder, though. Does loving my neighbor in the way that God loves us involve acts of will on my part--deliberate, thoughtful plans … Or does it involve living my life connected to the source of the love, in Jesus? And giving that love the freedom to bless those whom I encounter on the road?

My eyes drifted over to the pile of branches that I had just cut from my blackberry vines before I fell asleep. They had already wilted in the hot sun. The thirsty, dying leaves had collapsed onto the pavement. No longer attached to the vine, the life in them was fading fast.

“I am the true vine,” Jesus said in the passage that I had quoted to Jenner in my dream. “And my father is the vine grower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit … Apart from me you [all] can do nothing.”

I stopped pruning, and began to pray, instead.

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[1] Acts 8:32-33, from The Message, by Eugene Peterson.