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Trinity Sunday (a) June 15, 2014
Night Diving
Genesis 1:1-‐2:4(a) Matthew 28:16-‐20
When I graduated from high school more years ago than I care to admit, my parents agreed to buy me a reasonable gift of my choosing. My father emphasized “reasonable” because he knew I had a friend whose parents were foolish enough to buy him a Corvette. So, I decided on something less expensive but only slightly less dangerous: scuba diving. That summer I enrolled in a scuba certification program with the understanding that, once I had passed the class, my father would help buy me some basic gear. I enrolled in a small class that met twice a week for two-‐hour sessions at the local YMCA. It was a very serious and methodical course. No horsing around. We had to read portions of a training manual in between sessions and would be tested on such things as the decompression table. We started off training in the deep end of an Olympic-‐sized pool, learning basic maneuvers with only a mask, fins and snorkel. Eventually, we started going on lake dives with a tank, regulator and wet suit. We were outfitted with top of the line equipment that included an adjustable weight belt and buoyancy compensator vest. The weight belt would make your descent quick and easy. Once your depth gauge registered thirty feet, you would push a button attached to a hose on your tank to inflate the vest just enough to hold you at zero buoyancy. You would then undergo a short compression rest, deflate the vest and descend some more. Each time we were taken to slightly greater depths. At the end of the summer would be our check out dive, a sort of final and comprehensive written exam followed by a one-‐on-‐one dive with the instructor that would be at night. I’ll never forget the night of my checkout dive. I met my instructor at Percy Priest Lake, inspected my gear and loaded it into his boat. He had the coordinates for a deep part of the lake several miles away. Being a night dive, we descended with powerful waterproof flashlights. Unlike the crystal clear waters of the Caribbean, Percy Priest is a huge manmade mud hole with extremely limited visibility. Each of us needed a light to keep from losing touch during the long descent. Everything went according to plan. I observed three rests and soon made it to the
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70-‐foot point. There was plenty of lake below us, but that’s a far as we went. Then I responded to a command that had been discussed in great detail, but never executed. I made sure that I was hovering at zero-‐ buoyancy, which meant that I was neither ascending nor descending. Then, with my instructor counting backward, “three, two, one,” we turned off our lights and began to spin head over heels for about a minute. All it took was a minute at that level of depth and absolute darkness to simulate what it would feel like to be weightless in outer space. NASA was known to use this method in the training of astronauts. There was no sense of what was up, down, left or right. Unable to see my compass, I couldn’t determine north, south, east or west. It was drilled into me, “you’re going to become disoriented, so for God’s sake don’t panic!” I knew I had plenty of air. I wasn’t going to drown. I had an experienced instructor who assured me that every student of his made it back to the boat alive. I had no reason to fear, but fear was beginning to grip me tighter than my wet suit. Suspended in the dizzying darkness, my breathing grew more shallow and rapid. Just when I was on the verge of clicking on my light to “see” my way out of this predicament, an intuition came to me out of nowhere… it calmed me and showed me what to do. As I exhaled bubbles through the vent in my regulator, I placed my hand over and around them and felt, from the depths of my blindness, where this stream of air was leading. It was leading up! Air rises! I didn’t need my light after all. I could feel—rather than see—my way to the surface! Under different circumstances that flash of insight could have saved my life. I didn’t know that I needed to know what I needed to know until I needed to know it. Funny how that works! I passed my checkout dive. This experience, etched in my memory, came to mind when I read today’s lesson from the Genesis creation story: In the beginning…all was formless and void…darkness covered the face of the deep…a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. The word for “wind” that brooded above the waters of creation is ruach, translated as the Spirit of God. Ruach was known to the ancient Hebrews to be the breath of creation that animates all living things. It both animates and illuminates with a quality of knowledge that is greater and deeper than mere intelligence. Some would call it wisdom. And as our children and grandchildren live to remind us, wisdom isn’t entirely learned or earned. Some are wise beyond their years. Like the Holy Spirit, given at Pentecost, it is a gift that rushes in from the outside
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and also bubbles-‐up from the inside. As the psalmist (Psalm 139) so eloquently put it: 7 Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. 9 If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, 10 even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. 11 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” 12 even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you. In my late teens I was drawn to a band of Pentecostals who gave themselves to the ecstatic speech of the Holy Spirit, or “speaking in tongues.” As a novice, I was asked one night at a revival if I had the gift of tongues. When I said “no,” a dozen or so of the church’s “prayer warriors” laid hands on me and urged me to “work” with them until I possessed the gift. After two hours of intense praying I limped away, without the gift and bewildered. As I made my way up the aisle toward the vestibule, I was approached by an elderly, old-school Pentecostal woman (with a long dress, no makeup or jewelry, and a “beehive” hairdo). I had never seen her before or since. She took me aside and said something that completely changed my outlook: “young man, don’t give up…the Holy Spirit isn’t anything that you can possess…it is a power that already possesses you…you may not know the Holy Spirit…yet…but the Holy Spirit knows you…and that is all that really matters.” I didn’t know that woman’s name, but she became my spiritual night diving instructor. In retrospect, maybe she was the Holy Spirit who came to me only after I had prayed and prayed and felt completely exhausted of all my resources. At the time I didn’t have the theological language to express what I learned that night, but it was revealed to me in an instant—like air bubbling through me and beyond me to the surface of the lake: God is more like a verb than a noun. God is not an object “out there,” but is radically subjective at the heart of everyone
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and everything. As an anonymous thirteenth century philosopher so famously put it, “God is an infinite sphere—the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.” I decided to begin this morning with a few personal testimonies, by sharing stories about night diving and praying with Pentecostals. I believe that biography precedes theology. Life stories that hint at epiphany experiences are the only meaningful way I know to talk about the mystery of God…if we must talk about the mystery of God in the first place. I’ve been a minister for over thirty years and, to be honest, I am increasingly wary, and even frightened, by the audacity of preaching. As I get older the words of Lao Tzu haunt me: “He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks does not know.” Because this is Trinity Sunday, preaching on such a subject is confounding and audacious. Trinity Sunday has been the curse of preachers for hundreds of years. This morning’s gospel concludes with Jesus telling his followers, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” While the triune nature of God is implied by the Great Commission, it would be centuries before the doctrine of the Holy Trinity would be developed, debated and articulated ad infinitum in tomes of theological writing. Too often church theologians, with the best of intentions, have sought to illuminate mystery only to further obfuscate it. The Creed of St. Athanasius, found in the Book of Common Prayer, begins by saying: “we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the substance.” St. Athanasius digs himself into a deeper hole as he continues, “The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, and the Holy Spirit uncreate. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible….And yet…there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated, but one uncreated and one incomprehensible.” George Bernard Shaw used to mutter, “The whole thing is incomprehensible.” The theologian Karl Barth understood this dilemma when he said, “writing theology is like trying to paint a bird in flight.” All of our words fall short, are provisional at best and never capture the complete beauty and grace of the bird in flight. By this I don’t mean in any way to disparage theologians. To the contrary: All believers are, for better or worse, called to be theologians. Most of us don’t have academic credentials or teach at a university, but our lives, faithfully lived, seek to
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express the inexpressible according to the gifts and talents that come our way. Some of us may use words, but most wisely explore mystery through music, art, architecture, medical science and other vocations and avocations. Some of today’s science is discovering that what theologians have been writing about for centuries and, quite ironically, are inspiring new theologians. Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, one of my favorite contemplative writers, says this: One reason so many theologians are interested in the Trinity now is that we’re finding both physics (especially quantum physics) and cosmology are at the level where the sciences in general are affirming and confirming our use of the old Trinitarian language—but with a whole new level of appreciation. Reality is radically relational, and all the power is in the relationships themselves! Not in the particles or the planets, but in the space in between the particles and the planets. It sounds a lot like what we called the Holy Spirit. No good Christians would have denied the Trinitarian Mystery, but until our generation none were prepared to see that the shape of God is the shape of the whole universe! Great science, which we once considered an enemy of religion, is now helping us see that we’re standing in the middle of awesome Mystery, and the only response before that Mystery is immense humility. Astrophysicists are much more comfortable with darkness, emptiness, non-‐explainability (dark matter, black holes), and living with hypotheses than most Christians I know. Who could have imagined this?1 Lessons learned from night diving, both in lakes and among Pentecostals, has confirmed in me this same insight about the Holy Spirit and the mystery of the Trinity that we celebrate today: there is deep truth that we can never learn in any conventional way. Call it wisdom, call it ruach, call it anything or better yet nothing at all. Whatever “it” is, the wisdom of the Creator invariably it takes shape in the midst of our lives, especially in the predicaments of our lives, through relationships of trust that tip us, ever so slightly, beyond the edges of our assumptions. It is only then, only after we turn off our searchlights of certainty in the dark abyss of a muddy lake that we, like the Magi, will find our way home by a different path. Amen. 1 Richard Rohr, Yes, And…Daily Meditations Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 2013, p. 151
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