Incomprehensible

Trinity Sunday: I shall speak to you in the Name of God as we encounter and name God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You may be seated.

With Christmas six months behind us, and Christmas six months ahead us, what I’m going to say is unseasonal and untimely, but at almost 84 and doing as I DWP, I’m going to the Christmas Story anyway; and I trust that, with Ralphie Parker and his Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle, you will not go home and “shoot your eye out” in frustration that what I tell you is incomprehensible.

One thing I look forward to as a Christmas gift, is television’s "A Christmas Story" based on Jean Shepherd’s family anecdotes from his book "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash". I watch the movie at least twice or three times during its 24-hour marathon every Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

I love the time of American life it shows, the immediate post-World-War-Two 1940s (I can date the film even if you cannot, because I recognize the 1947 Chevrolet police car arriving along with the fire truck, to rescue Flick from his bloody tongue stuck to the frozen flagpole). All of which takes me home because I also was a boy then, and on cold mornings we dared other boys to lick the flagpole at Cove School (my classmate and lifelong friend Robert Padgett will remember that); and over those years I had several BB guns including the gun Ralphie wanted. I also had a BB glance off its target and hit me in the eye. And I remember the earthshaking challenge of a Triple Dog Dare - - a double dare and a double dog dare aside, you could not disgrace yourself and your family by the ultimate cowardice of backing away from a Triple Dog Dare. I love “The Old Man’s” 1937 Oldsmobile Six touring sedan, and I identify when, as narrator, the adult Ralphie remembers “my father was an Oldsmobile man” because in mid-life I also was an Oldsmobile man. I had several Oldsmobiles, and friends with Oldsmobiles. And still would drive Oldsmobiles, but GM shut them down fifteen years ago.

What brings me to this point though, is the vignette when the Old Man wins the “major award” that arrives in a huge wooden crate: it’s a pottery lamp, cast in the shape of a woman’s leg wearing a net stocking. The Old Man is thrilled and proud. Ralphie’s mother is appalled, “It’s the ugliest thing I ever saw,” she says after she “accidentally” knocks it off the table and it breaks in a hundred pieces. The Old Man is furious, and demands she bring him the bottle of glue so he can glue it back together. It turns out the household is out of glue, to which the Old Man irrationally fumes, “You ran out of glue on purpose.”

Which is where I’m going. This is Trinity Sunday, when the preacher is expected to clarify this peculiar and mysterious and incomprehensible Christian doctrine: no priest wants to preach on Trinity Sunday, including the Rector. If there’s a deacon or junior priest, we make him preach (and, buddy boy, I ain’t nobody’s “junior priest”). But it came to me, the realization that solely and precisely in order to get out of preaching on Trinity Sunday - - “Father Steve went to Jerusalem on purpose”.

With my mind still on “A Christmas Story”, it comes to me that both the movie and our Trinity encounter with God are about family, within the family. It’s Ralphie Parker and his little brother Randy and Mr & Mrs Parker against the world; against the hillbilly Bumpus family next door with “at least 785 smelly hound dogs”. It’s Ralphie, Flick and Schwarz against the bullies Scut Farkus and Grover Dill. It’s Ralphie and his dream against his mother and Miss Shields the teacher and Santa Claus at Higbee’s department store and the wicked witch all scoffing at Ralphie wanting a BB gun for Christmas, “You’ll shoot your eye out.”

Just so, "Onward, Christian Soldiers", it’s the Christian family versus the World, “I bind unto myself today, the strong Name of the Trinity”, God’s name is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, our family story. Over against Judaism, and Islam, and Hinduism, and Buddhism and Bahai, and Shinto and Sikhism and Zoroaster and the 4300 other religious families of the world, our Christian family has accepted y'VAH, Adonai, God of Israel, and encountered in God whom Jesus called “Abba, Father”, two more divine Persons, Son and Holy Spirit:

Jesus, the Son of God, God the Son, who not only comes down from heaven to show us created beings what Creator God is like and call us back to our godly image, but turns out also to be LOGOS, the creating Word, who in Greek philosophy was the force that brought the cosmos into being, the voice who in the Beginning sounded, “Let There Be”, and Big Bang, it was so.

C S Lewis has a fascinating take on this in his Narnia book “The Magician’s Nephew”, when the original Narnia children (long before Peter and Susan and Edmond and Lucy) caught in the pitch black darkness of absolute nothingness, Polly and Digory hear a song, the sound of singing, and as the singing continues, light dawns as Narnia comes into being, ASLAN, the Christ figure, singing the world of Narnia into creation in the Beginning. You don’t have to be a genius to realize what’s going on in Narnia as C S Lewis very subtly leads you to salvation in Jesus Christ.

Christianity is the family of us and the Trinitarian God: God the Father, God the + Son (Jesus, LOGOS, Word), and as of Pentecost, last Sunday, God the Holy Spirit coming into the church and filling each of us. Our (Western Church version of the) Nicene Creed (which we shall stand and say in a minute) says the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. In fact, Jesus says he’s sending the Holy Spirit as the comforter, our consolation after the Son leaves his earthly life and returns to the Father. So, the Holy Spirit comes: God who, from baptism, dwells within us, making us God’s hands and feet and voice, the face and love of God on earth today, YOU are the very Temple and Vessel and Being of the Holy Spirit who fills this room with God’s love every time you gather here. We gather in the Name of the Trinity, as family, to pray, worship, and break bread together. And going out, your work as a baptized Christian is to bring the Holy Spirit present wherever you are, that people see the Light of God every moment of every day as long as you live. Because, as my father used to tell me, “We don’t have a religion to die by, we have a religion to live by.”

The Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. Yet the Father is not the Son and the Father is not the Holy Spirit. And the Son, who is God, is not the Father and the Son is not the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit, who is God, is not the Father and the Holy Spirit is not the Son. The Father eternal, and the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal; yet they are not three eternals, but one eternal. Understand? Of course not, you’re not supposed to understand, God is not meant to be understood. By creedal definition, it’s incomprehensible.

I’m not asking you to turn there now, but I DO make it your homework for this week. Your assignment is to turn to page 864 in The Book of Common Prayer, and read The Creed of Saint Athanasius, the third great creed of the Church, as it struggles to explain the Trinity. In it, you will find a line that asserts 
The Father incomprehensible, and
The Son incomprehensible, and
The Holy Spirit incomprehensible. 
And yet, it goes on to say,
There are not three incomprehensibles, 
But one incomprehensible.

Incomprehensible: my vengeance on the Rector, who, solely to avoid preaching on Trinity Sunday, went to Jerusalem on purpose.

I have spoken to you in God’s Name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

++++++++++++++

Sermon on Trinity Sunday, 16 June 2019, in Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Panama City, Florida. The Reverend Tom Weller.

Text: Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, et al

Pics: selected and pinched online from googling trinity god pics