Author Archives: Neil

Means of Perception

In her insightful survey of Romantic philosophy’s concept of the imagination and the 20^th Century critique of that concept, Mary Warnock arrives at the conclusion that, “Imagination is our means of interpreting the world, and it is also our means of forming images in the mind. The images themselves are not separate from our interpretations of the world; they are our way of thinking of the objects in the world.” (Warnock, 1976, p. 194) The journey with her throughout the study was full of realizations, but what I want to focus in on was a leap I made from her final conclusion to think more about these interpreted images that form in our memories and worldviews and ideas. At this point this is an intuitive jump that may be played out in more recent philosophy and science and it bears further investigation, but one of the processes of discovery is stating an idea and seeing if it remains true under further dialogue and observation.

Philosophers like Hume and Kant would point to the concept of imagination which allows us to realize that objects continue to exist and are indeed the same object when we encounter them at a later point, but this level of imagination is exhibited very early in life and by the time a child surpasses 12-18 months and has a sense of object permanence to use Jean Piaget’s language our imaginations have already become far more intricate than Hume and Kant would suggest. If imagination is involved in the ‘image making’ in our mind it is also responsible for the interpretation of these images, and these images are not like pictures, nor are they merely like ideas-perhaps a better word is they form interrelated constructs. When I encounter a person, for example, I don’t just take a mental picture of that person and store it in my memory, not even a three dimensional portrait, I take in much more information than that. I also am taking in the environment that I meet this person within, I am making value judgments about this individual, I am interpreting who they are within a web of relationships, I am interpreting their communication (not just spoken words, but also body language, tone and many other ways of interpreting the meaning of their communication) and I am placing them within a narrative or story. In even the simplest interaction there is far more data around me than my eyes and mind can possibly interpret so my mind has to know how to filter and pay attention to what is important. In a familiar environment we tend to pay less attention to the objects within that environment unless something changes, we filter out noise to be able to pay attention to a particular conversation and we decide what types of things from an interaction might be worth remembering. Yet with all this data we are not just passively acquiring information, but we are constantly interpreting and seeking meaning within the data. Even our most basic interpersonal interactions require a huge amount of creativity as we try to understand and interpret what another person is thinking and how they might interact with us next. For example, in the context of a job interview the person being interviewed is probably observing how the person conducting the interview is responding to the answer they are given since it will probably impact whether they are offered the job or not. At the same time this same person is attempting to make inferences about what it would be like to work with this person and make a value judgment if this is a job that they want. In interpersonal interactions this is what had been referred to as theory of mind (the realization that the other person has thoughts, feelings, intents and desires and that are distinct from one’s own thoughts, feelings, intents and desires, combined with the ability to interpret and predict those feelings).

Yet, while imagination is certainly involved in interpreting and giving meaning to the communications and the images or constructs within the appropriate environment, time, story, etc. it also must be involved in much more. For our imagination is able to take these communications and constructs which have been stored in our memory and continue to manipulate them. Sometimes this manipulation will be within a normal frame of reality and may be as simple as replaying an interaction either for further interpretation (did they really think this) or for continued learning (if this happens again I would do/say this) and sometimes we place or manipulate objects and transform them into new things in a different reality.

If we want to imagine an unreal creature or an unreal world we, by necessity, start with the world we know. For example if we were to imagine an imaginary creature like a dragon, we would in this case have many other people’s images of dragons in many media, but if we were to create a new dragon we would probably begin with creatures we are familiar with, like a lizard or a bird and continue to modify it in a way that fit that new reality. Or if you were to design a life-form for an imagined world, or the landscape for an imagined world you would start from the world you know and modify it based on some creative leaps. We can also imagine interactions with people that have never happened but are intelligent guesses based upon previous interactions.

I’ve quickly moved into the realm of speculation, but I wanted to get some of these thoughts down so that as I continue to encounter some more recent work on imagination and experience I can test some of these ideas.

The Father’s We Seek

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Saint Joseph the Carpenter, Georges de La Tour (1640)

On Mother’s Day I wrote about women being more than mothers, and on Father’s Day I’m going to take a different angle because I think men struggle with a different issue and that is in society they are at best fathers only after they are whatever other role they have. To understand why this is I’m going to approach the male concept of shame, which is different than shame for women. For women shame comes from the inability to fit into the expectations of perfection defined first by looks and second by motherhood. Shame for women comes from how others view you and how you view yourself. Shame for men comes from being perceived as being weak or a failure. For men the societal expectations are: emotional control, primacy of work, pursuit of status and finally violence (the ability to take or protect that which is yours). Yet in relationships men are expected to put these things aside and be vulnerable, to share in the nurturing of children, to show restraint (it is very easy for a man to injure a child just due to the strength differential and the preponderance of rough play that is sought from fathers by boys and girls alike), and to enter into a world that is still defined by women’s expectations in the home. Just as women have struggled with the predominantly male expectations of the world of work, men have struggled with the very different set of expectations within the home.

Just as there was a time when a woman’s worth was tied to her ability to bear children, a man’s worth is still tied to his ability to provide security in terms of protection, shelter, food and comfort. Men are still primarily viewed as producers in society, and some of this is reflected in the way that employers view men taking time off for their family’s needs. Men do not give birth, but frequently they are expected to be back on the job within days of their wife or significant other giving birth. Men are looked upon as not having their work priorities straight if they take time off to be with a sick loved one, and this also can extend to women as well-but the societal expectations are not as strong (although the expectations of perfection that women in the workplace put on themselves may be).

Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are important and should be celebrated, but I get the impression that of the two holidays Father’s Day is viewed as the lesser of the two. Perhaps this is because for men fatherhood is a secondary identity, second to their ‘real’ identity in the world of work. In the past couple generations while the role of men as fathers has changed the expectations in the working world have not decreased, nor has their compensation increased and like women they find themselves trying to live well between the worlds of word and home. As the workplace is learning to value women for who they are and the gifts they bring (and I understand that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done here), so in the world of the home as men become an increasing part of the world at home it will mean that the expectations in this world will need to begin to shift as well to be able to account for the gifts that men and women can bring.

I know I am leaving the issue of single parenthood unaddressed, which I definitely sympathize with being a single dad, but on Father’s Day I hope I was able to help us think about how we might help our young men be the fathers we hope they will be.

The Glorious Freedom of Creative Mistakes

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We are limited beings who do attempt to make sense of our world and we have the gifts of perception and communication which help us to do that. Our perception allows us to see and experience the world and communication allows us to learn from the experiences and intuitions of others and our minds are not machines. We cannot, like Descartes wanted to do many years ago, separate our mind from our bodies and senses-they are real, the mind and body are integrated and even if a sense doesn’t work, for example in the case of a person who is unable to see or hear, we find other ways of perceiving and communicating about the world around us. We make a lot of assumptions and inferences about the world around us and we try to set up closed systems to make everything fit, but combined with this comfort that comes from certainty is the joy that comes with discovery. As we encounter the world and interact with others there will be times where we discover new connections and have to expand our system to make sense of the new ideas or images we encounter. Sometimes these new paradigms come from outside us, when we through communication or observation come into contact with another person’s or group’s way of explaining something. So for example a person who encounters Newton’s physics in high school which would explain gravity in terms of the attraction between two objects may later in their life encounter relativity theory where gravity is explained very differently and in a way that makes more sense given what we know about the universe and perhaps sometime later would encounter a completely new explanation. Yet, we don’t magically jump from one explanation to another on our own, the road to discovery is paved with numerous failed attempts and creative mistakes.

Jacob Bronowski uses the example of a chess player when he says:

“Why does one chess player play better than another?”The answer is not that the one who plays better makes fewer mistakes, because in a fundamental way the one who plays better makes more mistakes, by which I mean more imaginative mistakes. He sees more ridiculous alternatives. (Bronowski, 1978, p. 110f)

Yet, as a person who knows the rules of chess but has never studied the strategy of chess, I would not play a challenging game to a chess master because I don’t have enough information to make new imaginative mistakes. There is something to understanding the systems that are already existent and then being able to manipulate them, experiment with them and see where there may be new places to discover. In the process of manipulation and experimentation we come up with possible explanations or visualizations which most of the time are not true. This is not just in the realm of science, but also in the realm of art where it is true that there are more bad works of art than good ones. It takes a lot of attempts to become good at any art, and in the midst of the attempts we learn. Every great imaginative construct, whether it be in science or art, begins as an exploration of past errors. One of our greatest freedoms is the ability to learn from our mistakes rather than being defined by them.

The Gift of Self Reference and Necessary Imaginative Constructs

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As I mentioned at the beginning of the post Metaphors of Reality we try to make sense of ourselves, the world and (at least for those who think in spiritual or religious terms) God. But one of the struggles we have is that we never have a ‘God’s eye’ view of reality and that our view is always provisional. Unlike in the gospel stories which sometimes have an all seeing narrator (who for example sees what is going on in the temptation of Jesus) we are limited to the things we have experienced through our senses, the creative leaps we have made through our imagination and the constructs we have learned from our conversations with others. We take all these pieces of reality as we perceive them and try to decode our world and experiences “by a highly imaginative, creative piece of guesswork. But we finish with something that is only a gigantic metaphor for that part of the universe which we are decoding.” (Bronowski 1978, 70) We attempt to make sense of things and we construct systems that seem to make sense of the world with some things we are fairly certain of, others less so, and some just our best guess at the time. Sometimes there are things we believe that we cannot prove, that doesn’t mean they are not true-just that they cannot be proved. That is the reality of living in which our perception and knowledge are incomplete and bound by constraints and self reference.

One of the vanities of the modern (note I am talking modern as a category, not necessarily in terms of recent) philosophy that emerged in the 18^th century in the wake of the Enlightenment was that it believed that it could penetrate reality and get to absolute truth. That for example if you could peel away the encrusted layers of tradition you could actually get back to the real history of what happened-and while there were many useful insights gained from this dedicated effort to get back to the facts as well as the dialogues that came out of different interpretations of the same data, but we never are truly free of self reference. For a lot of people this is looked upon primarily as an issue to be apologized for, but I want to suggest this is one of the things that allow creativity to thrive. In contrast to a computer which understands its inputs in terms of its coding and programming that when it encounters a novel experience that doesn’t fit within the world of its programming either creates an error or the computer ignores the anomaly, humans are able to integrate experiences in creative ways into their worldview. We are not limited by one set of constructs which we make sense of the world; instead humans are constantly experiencing and growing in our interaction with others and the world around us.

We need the imaginative constructs, the language and systems and science we learn from others to make communication possible, so for example within linear mathematics we can feel confident that 1 + 1= 2, or that in speech the letter ‘c’ will make certain sounds, or that in the world of Newtonian physics every action will have an equal and opposite reaction. We need laws, theorems and systems to make sense of the world, but these laws, theorems and systems are not absolute because there are times when we will experience things that do not make sense within the constructs we may have accepted. As Bronowski alludes to when he states, “The fact that we are content, when running into this kind of difficult, to reanalyze the system, to seek a new consistent formulation, is terribly important.” (Bronowski 1978, 87)Without the ability to seek a better system that makes sense of ourselves and our world we would be limited in our understanding to the knowledge and systems that were handed on to us. The experience is always in reference to the self, it is using our senses and our intellect to interpret that experience within the memory of our previous experiences and knowledge, and yet because of this self reference we are able to challenge external references and experiences. We seek consistency, we want things to make sense, but the experience that does not make sense for many is actually an exciting process of discovery. Let’s say, for example, that we had received a way of evaluating others passed down from our parents that, “blondes have more fun.” So long as our experience of people having blonde hair being fun people to be around holds up we might assume this random piece of a world to be true. Yet, once we encounter a person who has blonde hair who is not fun to be around we have several options of how we might proceed: we might challenge the assumption (are blondes really more fun?), we might wonder if this person is an exception to the rule (and the ability for there to be exceptions is also an imaginative leap), we might wonder if blonde is really their natural color (providing we understand that people can change their hair color) but the reality is that we will attempt to make sense of a disparity we have encountered. This is the way for example that prejudices may change when a person has experiences that challenge that prejudice, or new scientific discoveries are made when data doesn’t fit the previously assumed construct, or a new challenge presents itself based on technologies not previously available. Our ability to take in new challenges and experiences and in light of our knowledge and memory to make sense of them in a new way, even if it is only a creative piece of guesswork, and then see if this piece of guesswork seems to hold true is a part of the experimentation that opens new horizons in the imagination.

Church in a Risky Environment

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I had the privilege to be a part of a pair of lectures by Diana Butler Bass last weekend at my synod convention which really helped me get a better view of the spiritual climate change going on within the country. There has been a lot of press given to the decline of the mainline denominations, which includes the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America which I am a pastor within, and there have been a number of ‘self-help’ approaches to the problem trying to create better programming, better worship experiences, better outreach, better stewardship and the list can go on and on. It is not that the people doing ministry today are less skilled than people doing ministry in the 1950s and 1960s when many congregations were experiencing their peaks, but the reality is that they are trying to be church in a risky and changing environment. This first post will deal with some of the more depressing information, but be patient-I actually found a lot of hope in the midst of what I learned.

Over the past five decades the percentage of the population that identifies itself as Christian has gone from 97% to 73% with the largest drop being among white Protestant Christians, which have dropped from 66% of the population to 48% between 1960 and 2012. Most people would assume that when you split the Protestants into Mainline Protestants (typically more moderate to liberal including the United Methodist Church (UMC), Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA), Episcopal Church, American Baptist Church, the United Church of Christ (UCC), Disciples of Christ and the Reformed Church USA) and into Evangelical Protestants (which are too numerous to mention but for the purposes of study included groups that identified as Evangelical, Fundamentalist, and Charismatic) were declining at the same rate. This seems counterintuitive since there are most mega-churches are evangelical in their leaning, but the reality is that they are predominantly absorbing members from other congregations. Another surprise was the fastest declining denomination was the Southern Baptists, which in the current culture should not be surprising, but nobody has been talking about the Evangelical decline until fairly recently. Catholics are holding steady, primarily because of immigration and black or Hispanic communities of faith are either holding their own or growing as a percentage of the population. This has also been the time where the ‘nones’ which include atheists, agnostics, nothing in particular and spiritual but not religious went from registering as roughly 1% of the population to 20%, 1 in 5.

One of the most common reactions to changes in the environment around any person or group is fear, and fear has definitely been a driving force for many Christian groups in the recent years. There is almost a militant reaction against the current culture by some of the more conservative religious organizations and individuals. Especially after the last Presidential Election Campaign was complete there was a lot of evidence (which I will share in the next presentation) that they no longer were the decisive block that could determine who would remain in power, and as they look at the manner in which their cohort is aging the news gets worse. Sometimes this has even turned to rhetoric claiming that they are being oppressed for their religious viewpoints because not everyone will concede that their viewpoint is correct, when the reality is that they are now one within a much more varied religious landscape where there is no clear majority and no one group has a monopoly on defining religion and spirituality within the current culture. For some people what I have shared today is incredibly bad news, as will be some of the information I share in some upcoming posts, but it also represents an incredible possibility to re-imagine the way we are church in a changing culture and how we have a dialogue about issues of faith in our culture.

Metaphors of Reality

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Newton by William Blake (1795)

One of the sets of vows that is commonly used when I do weddings includes the words “to better understand ourselves, the world and God.” One of the things we do as humans with our language to better understand ourselves, the world and God is we attempt to describe objects and actions and their interactions. All of these words, symbols and ideas are constructed within a system to give meaning and sense to them, for example in the world of mathematics 1 + 1 = 2, if the rules of the system were different 1 +1 could equal a different number, but the rules that the system works within allow 1 + 1= 2 to be the correct answer while 1 + 1= 3 would not make sense within the system. The systems we understand the world within are attempts to describe the reality we observe and know, and yet they are always metaphors or propositions of reality. As Jacob Bronowski states:

I believe that all the kind of scientific descriptions that we can make about one another are perfectly real. And yet, I believe that any theory that we as human beings make at any point in time is full of provisional decodings which to some extent are as fictitious as the notion of force in Newton. (Bronowski, 1978, p. 58)

As Bronowski alludes to, Newton’s description of force, particularly the force of gravity where “the gravitational attraction is proportional to the mass of the two bodies divided by the square of the distance between some point in each mass.” Or in the symbolic language of science:

G= k ( m m’) / r²

Which as a description of reality worked well in a system of Newtonian based physics, but when Albert Einstein published his first paper on relativity in 1905 it demonstrated the flaw in the concept and proposed a new way of describing the reality, and yet even Einstein’s theory is no longer held to be an ultimate description of reality- yet both the work of Newton and Einstein and countless other scientists (just to stay within the scientific realm of creativity) work well for describing reality as it is encountered and it is only when we find exceptions to the rule where we begin to wonder what might cause these anomalies, is the way we have constructed reality inaccurate in some manner and we begin to wonder if perhaps there is some new way to understand the world our senses observe and to describe it so that others can encounter the world in a new way.

Science is not the only discipline that works this way, think for example in the realm of religion. At various point in history different metaphors have served as a dominant metaphor for understanding God. For example, at the beginning of the enlightenment where the clocks and watches were one of the most complicated pieces of technology available that most people would encounter in their world there was the common image of God as the clockmaker who constructed the world and then allowed it to run. It is not coincidental that this was a time in which deism was the primary philosophical tool for talking about God and the deist view of God was a God that was for the most part uninvolved in the day to day undertakings of the world. This is not the dominant picture of God today and there are a number of problems with this image, but it was how many religious people of that time tried to make sense of God in a way they could imagine.

Here I think is where the mystical tradition of talking about God can help us out: on the one hand there is the cataphatic tradition which in a positive manner says that our language can point to God while, on the other hand, there is the apophatic tradition which states that our language is never adequate to describe God. Moving back to our world and ourselves there is a sense in which our language describes reality, for example I can say that I have hazel eyes or that I am around 6’2” tall but ultimately my descriptions, even of myself, will never be completely adequate to convey all of who I am. Our understanding of the world around us is also provisional or metaphorical, that doesn’t mean it is incorrect-but it may not be complete. I think the French language has a helpful construct here with its two words that we can translate into the English ‘to know.’ The French word savior refers to knowing a fact, knowing how to do something or to know something by heart. The French word connaître refers to knowing a person or being familiar with a person or thing. There is a sense where we can know about and describe individual things but people, for example, are not reducible to a set of facts. We can describe others, ourselves, the world and even God, but that sense of knowing is always based upon our relation to those things and is in its own way contingent on the systems we understand them within. Each of these systems are really theories about the nature of the world and there may be times where we find our own metaphors of reality are inadequate and need to be reexamined as we attempt to make sense of our relationship to the reality we encounter.

Creativity for Fun

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Jay Silver’s fun little video is really about the joy of discovery and interacting in new and playful ways with the world around us. The creativity he shows in the video is from manipulating and combining things that normally don’t go together and just experimenting (which is often how many discoveries come). Something as simple as the Makey-Makey circuit allowed for others to take this basic circuit and use it in numerous ways. Sometimes the discoveries and uses were unexpected, like the dad who decided to use the circuit to help create a controller for his son with cerebral palsy-a very useful invention. Many were just for fun and the delight of trying to create music, sound and interactions in new and creative ways.

Play is an under recognized form of learning, but it is something that all mammals do to learn, experiment and interact with their world. There is a sense of joy with playfully interacting with the world around us and exploring and discovering. Sometimes in the midst of the journey we encounter a problem that we have never had to answer before and we have to rethink a solution based upon the tools that are available. Necessity often can become the mother of invention, but so can playfulness. Not to take away from the work, research and knowledge that goes into the process of creation, or the frustration of failures (which all to often deter people) but as when boundaries are pushed there is often a sense of wonder at the discoveries that are eventually made.

I’m going to bring in some of these discussions on creativity as I go along. Take your own lessons and wonder from them, and hopefully you can also have something playful sparked in your own life.

In The Beginning Was The Sentence

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Creation by Selfish Eden (deviantart.com)

Human beings have an incredible sense of perseverance when you think about it. We will take complex tasks, think them through, experiment, learn and then try to be prepared for the next time we use things. Now, on the one hand, this can lead to some unhealthy behaviors of hoarding or becoming pack rats but, at the same time, we don’t discard a tool that has become useful like animals will do. A chimpanzee may realize that it works well, for example, to use a stick to poke into an ant mound but they don’t store sticks for this use, when the chimpanzee comes upon the need he finds a stick and the same way with other tool using animals. Humans are unique in their ability to predict a future need based upon a past need and within language this also is a crucial development. (Bronowski, 1978, p. 32f.)

Now it is possible that there have been breakthroughs in animal communication that I am unaware of, but the way Bronowski illustrates this breakthrough is the concept that animals communicate not in words but sentences or ideas. For example a chipmunk may has a different signal based on danger from a snake, danger from the air, or danger from a large ground animal, but you can’t deconstruct and recombine these signals into components of danger and the type of animal-they are one unit. They paint in a way a limited verbal picture of their environment and the immediate need they need to respond to. Yet human language is different, and the way our language is structured relying on words and not sentences as the building block of communication allows for the sharing of knowledge and imagination in ways not possible otherwise. For example “Jack loves Jill” and “Jill loves Jack” even though they share the same components do not mean the same thing. Language becomes an incredibly powerful tool for conveying and sharing images, thoughts and even worldviews, a picture may be worth a thousand words but only if it is done well and the person viewing the picture can understand what it is. It is not a coincidence that early languages began with characters that represented pictorially the ideas they were trying to express, but as ideas became more and more complex and the communication of thoughts and ideas contained more and more words language evolved to use letters to create words reflecting the sound of the word. For a word either read or heard to be transformed into a visual image is an act of imagination and it may evoke different images for different readers/hearers. For example if I say “bird” someone may think of a sparrow or an eagle or an ostrich, or perhaps even an obscene gesture, words on their own begin to paint the picture and then when combined within a sentence with actions and descriptions we refine the picture.

Imagination and creativity may help with survival and with creating new tools and ideas that help an individual, but if they are going to make any lasting impression they need to be able to be communicated. The evolution of language, first spoken and later written, has made it possible to pass on and build upon the ideas of others. But there is always a process of taking the information we receive in terms of letters and sounds and reconstituting them in our mind in terms of images (and these images are often moving images-videos if you will) as we translate representations into a mental vision.

The Image And The Imagination

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New Era by Aeon Lux on deviantart.com

Humanity practices both science and art, two incredibly unique and imaginative processes where we attempt to make sense of the world and our relationship to it. Both science and art rely on imagination and vision. Jacob Bronowski highlighted to me something in our language that is very illuminating about imagination when he says, “I want you to think of the following words: visual, vision, and visionary; and image, imagery and imagination….Almost all the words we use about experiences of the kind that go into visions or images are words connected with the sense of sight.” (Bronowski, 1978, p. 10) That somehow there is something to the way we visually interact with our world is an important part of imagination, since the word image is the root of the word. It is a word that comes from crafting and shaping and playing with images in our own mind. The way we interact with our world is, of course, mediated by our senses: vision, sound, touch, taste and smell and certainly for most of our interactions we rely heavily on vision and sound. Bronowski argues that there are essentially two types of art: those dominated by sight (painting and sculpture for example) and those dominated by sound (music for example) and I would argue that there are some that are reliant on the interaction of both senses (drama, movies, etc.). Science on the other hand is dominated by the visual sense, so we can speak of observations, which refers back to the art of seeing. So perhaps one of the most critical things to imagination is the ability to see, or to interpret the senses in a way that allows the person to make sense of their world and to see alternatives and interpret interactions with it.

The visual process itself is a process of decoding, since our eyes on their own apparently don’t just take a picture and project it into the brain like an old style camera projecting onto film, but rather if Bronowski is correct (and I’m now curious since this is an older work) it would be more like the process that goes on in a digital camera where individual rods and cones in our eyes develop a level of stimulation to the light it receives and sends all the signals back to our brain which then interprets all these signals and assembles the picture in a way that is far more accurate than the individual cellular receptors in the eyes are capable of making. The very process of seeing relies upon the visual part of the brain making inferences about the world it is seeing to make up for the shortcomings in the visual organs, and that compared to most other animals we have a phenomenal portion of our brain dedicated to the process of interpreting visual input.

Combined with this process of interpreting the visual input we receive from our eyes, our brains also allow us to imagine differently-to see alternatives and to attempt to predict based what we currently see and what we have seen before. Part of what makes us such curious animals is our ability to take the images we have and to imagine possible futures, alternatives if you will. In one sense the idea of free will goes back to the idea of “visualizing alternatives and making a choice between them.” (Bronowski, 1978, p. 18) There is a lot to unpack with this revelation that imagination is a function of the process of seeing and interpreting our world and imagining other possible worlds, and that will come but perhaps part of learning to imagine is learning to pay close attention to sight (as well as sound and the other senses) and attend to the images and the possibilities.

The God Who Meets Us-A Sermon for Holy Trinity Sunday

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Rublev’s Icon of the Holy Trinity

If you had to describe what God is like to someone, how would you do it? Now I know that there is always a sense in which our words fail us and God is beyond description, but that doesn’t alleviate the need for us to talk about God and to try to say who God is and what God is about in the world. We need to understand who God is and how God acts as we try to make sense of the disasters, whether they are something huge like the tornado that devastated the city of Moore and parts of New Castle, Shawnee and Oklahoma City last week or whether they are the more personal disasters we may encounter in our lives. How do I talk about God in the midst of the ending of a marriage or the loss of employment, in having to move-where is God in the midst of these things and who is God in the midst of all of these things. We may argue with God, question God’s character, weep with God and yet I am becoming more and more convinced that we do our best to describe in some way the God we come to know in the midst of our lives-or the God we want to come to know in the midst of our crises and cries.

Today is Trinity Sunday, now every Sunday is a Sunday in which we attempt to talk about God and the way God interacts in the world, but on Trinity Sunday we come to talk about the God who meets us in the Father, the Son and in the Spirit and we celebrate a concept about God-a way of talking about God that the early church leaders felt was their best answer to give words to the experience of God they had experienced and the world had experienced. It is the picture of a God who is always coming down to be a part of the world and a part of the lives of God’s people. It is a mystery, we cannot adequately describe everything about God, but we try to use the language of the scriptures, tradition and our experience to give a frame of reference to talk about the God who creates, who renews, who enters into relationships and restores peace and the God who loves. Unlike most other stories of the ancient world, the Bible’s story of creation is not a story of a god who subdues and conquers an evil world but rather a God who speaks into being a good world that God loves, that God wants to be a part of. From the earliest stories of Adam and Eve we see God’s desire to come down and to be a part of the lives of Adam and Eve, of Abraham and Sarah, of Jacob and Leah and Rachael, of Moses and Aaron and Miriam, of Samuel and Solomon and of many others. God was not content to be separate and distant from their lives, no instead God chose to come down and interact with them. We see a God who loves the world for all its warts and worries. The entire purpose of the people of God building first a tabernacle and then under Solomon a temple was so that God could dwell in the midst of God’s people. God would continue to send God’s Spirit upon the prophets and priests and sometimes even kings to speak to the people. In the Book of Proverbs we hear about the wisdom of God which was there at the beginning of creation and the prophets can often talk about the Spirit of the Lord coming upon them, but at the same time somehow the LORD their God was one, and there was only one God. And yet they Jewish people used the language they had to try to talk about who their God was.

Yet God was not content to dwell in houses made of stone, to remain locked behind the walls of a temple or a tabernacle. God is many things, but never tame, never safe, God is good and loving but never safe. In the prophets we began to hear the hope for a new relationship God was creating with God’s people and who God’s people were was about to move beyond the boundaries of the Jewish people as God continued to love the world. In the words of the prophet Jeremiah:

³¹ The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. ³² It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt– a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. ³³ But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ³⁴ No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. Jeremiah 31: 31-34

Or in the prophet Joel which we heard last week at Pentecost:

²⁸ Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;

your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

your old men shall dream dreams,

and your young men shall see visions.

²⁹ Even on the male and female slaves,

in those days, I will pour out my spirit. Joel 2: 28-29

At Christmas we celebrate this Word of God that was there in the midst of creation, that was with God and was God coming down, sharing our life, putting on flesh and living among us. This Jesus of Nazareth came and proclaimed the kingdom of God and in his healings, his words, his actions, his forgiveness of sins and his life people encountered something they hadn’t before. Somehow in the midst of this man people were encountering God. Somehow he was more than just a righteous and holy person and it was really after the resurrection at Easter that those who had been with him began to understand in a new way that this really was God dwelling and walking among us. And yet there was Jesus and there was the Father who Jesus had prayed to and somehow they were both God. The early church would wrestle with how exactly they were going to talk about this, but ultimately in both Jesus and the Father they had encountered God and they needed some way to give honor and praise to the God who had continued to come down and dwell among them.

At Pentecost we celebrate the Spirit coming down and the disciples and the people encountered a presence that was somehow undeniably of God. And yet this was the Spirit that was there throughout the ministry, it was the Spirit that also had moved over the waters of creation, the Spirit that had spoken through the prophets. And as the early church tried to make sense of this God they had encountered in Jesus, in the Father and in the Spirit they talked about God as Trinity. It was a way of giving language, words to the experience of the God who comes down, who loves the world and us so much that God cannot seem to help but want to be a part of our lives.

Yet wherever God the Father is active, when we look we find the Son and the Spirit, and when Jesus is active the Father and the Spirit are there, as Jesus can say to his followers :

¹² “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. ¹³ When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. ¹⁴ He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. ¹⁵ All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. John 16: 12-15

The Spirit speaks what the Spirit hears, the Father and the Son share in this ministry. The Spirit bears witness to the Son and the Father. Sometimes people will talk about the Father being about creation, the Son about redemption, and the Spirit about the new life-but each are involved in all three, for example when Paul talks about redemption:

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, ² through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. ³ And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, ⁴ and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, ⁵ and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

That somehow this action involves all of God but we encounter God and Jesus and the Spirit all working at the same time to give us peace and pour love into our hearts. We are made a part of what God is doing in the world and as God suffers we also encounter the suffering that is a part of love. At some point it is probably simpler to say 1+1+1=3 and stick with pictures and diagrams of how God the Father and God the Son and God the Spirit interact and are related. This picture from the Church Center is just that, one of the traditional representations of three in one, yet ultimately this is not about a concept of God, it is about the God who loves the world and who we encounter throughout the story, throughout times and in the experience of our own lives, a God who loves and comes down to dwell with us. A God who we encounter in Jesus and the Spirit and in the God who is the creator of all things, and somehow they are all somehow God and yet we experience them in different times and different manners.

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The God Who Meets Us-A Sermon for Holy Trinity Sunday