How do you usually
get an invitation these
days?
More often than
not in my life, an invitation is a few words; a text message: “Hey, what are you doing for lunch?” Or
a Facebook post or an email about an event, with the assumption that if the
creators can just get the information
about what’s happening in front of me, I’ll want to join in.
And most of the
invitations I isssue go out by email, come to think of it.
I also get an
occasional beautifully
printed wedding or anniversary invitation, or a phone call from a friend who
would like me to visit, outlining plans and hopes and how good it will be to
spend time together.
There are a wide variety
of ways that you and I get invited to events and occasions; a wide variety of
ways we get invited into relationship – as many ways to invite one another, in
fact, as there are means of communication between one person and others.
And God uses all
of them.
Including some
that aren’t very usual these days, like the town crier. We heard about that
this morning: Does not Wisdom call and understanding raise her voice? On
the high hills and by the road, at the crossroads and the gates: in the town
hall and the mall and the coffee shop and the internet?
Wisdom is trying
to get your attention everywhere. Every possible place that people go, every
kind of communication: Wisdom is there, calling out an invitation to all living
people to enter into relationship with God.
The author of the Book
of Proverbs pictures Wisdom as a person, and as an aspect of God known and
distinct from the beginning of creation, as a co-worker and friend of God,
sharing in the planning of the universe and celebrating the delight of
armadillos and azaleas and riptides and human beings.
Centuries after
Proverbs was written, Christians would start identifying the person of Wisdom
with both the Holy Spirit and with Jesus, separately and together, but the most distinct,
consistent feature of the portrait of Wisdom in the book of Proverbs is her invitation into true, healthy, holy, enduring
relationship with God.
Wisdom issues that
invitation to all living people, every single one of us created by God, without
exception, without regard to qualifications or pre-existing relationships.
In a spirit of celebration
and delight, Wisdom goes high and low and uses print and mail, text and email,
TV and radio, Facebook or Twitter, even LinkedIn or Match.com, to invite every
single one of us into honest, faithful, wholehearted, lasting relationship with
God.
Jesus does the same
thing, by the way, all his life long, with his teaching and parables and
miracles, and his living example, right up to and through and after death.
Jesus keeps on inviting his disciples, Gentiles and strangers and outcasts and
you and me, all into deep, truth-filled, transformative relationship with God. In fact, Jesus invites us
explicitly to imitate and to share his own relationship with God, and
promises that the Spirit of God is going to be here with us to keep leading us
into – or deeper
into – that relationship with God that is just like Jesus’ relationship with “the Father”, just
like our relationship with Jesus, because they are one and the same… and here
the whole relationship invitation gets circular and swirly and we arrive at the heart of the
relationship and the theological theme of today.
The theological
theme of Trinity tells us that God – Jesus, Spirit, Wisdom, Creator, Father,
Son, One, All – God keeps inviting us into this central relationship because
relationship is central to who God is.
Two thousand years
after Jesus, even more centuries after God’s people first began to describe the
Spirit of God, or the Wisdom of God, as the active presence of God, you and I
have inherited the vocabulary of “the Holy Trinity”, of “Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit,” to describe the
way that God relates to God, as revealed through the collective human
experience of God. We’ve inherited, and we regularly repeat, a basic story of
God: Almighty, creative, and unified, who is also Jesus in a particular time
and place, distinct
from and entirely unified with God Eternal, who is also the Holy Spirit, the
force and effect of the presence of God when we don’t know how else to describe
God.
We call that story
“The Creed,” and recite it often as if it’s a collection of facts and stated
beliefs, when it’s actually more of an attempt to describe what can’t be
explained: to hear color, see sound, or measure and weigh love.
But it still
conveys, somehow, the truth that we have learned through thousands of years of
experience with God: that from the very beginning to the very end, God’s whole
being is in relationship.
And the story of
our faith is the story of being invited into that relationship, to grow closer
and closer to the heart of God, whether we first encounter God as Jesus of
Nazareth, as the dancing, electric wind or deeply quiet voice of the Holy
Spirit, or as the eternal and all-powerful Creator of all things.
Some of us – probably
a relative few – find the logical impossibility of three-in-one a natural
understanding of God. Some spiritual extroverts may revel in the confusion and
crowding of all the persons of God into one relationship.
Many of us,
though, make sense of that relationship mostly by knowing the “persons” of God one at a time – by studying
and following and imitating Jesus, perhaps. Or
by worshiping and praying to the all-powerful, eternal and original, creator or
father face of God. Or by seeking and following the guidance of the Holy
Spirit, the faceless, fiery and gentle movement of God in our lives as
individuals and communities. All of them continually inviting us to grow closer
to Godself.
Any way we begin
our relationship with God, any way we grow in that relationship, the truth of
that relationship is known not in linear logic, but in experience and story, in
the language of the heart.
The image you see
there is one you’ll start to see more often over the summer and into the fall,
to represent this congregation, developed in consultation with the Vestry and
staff and a few other leaders. The Vestry liked the sense of growth and movement, and the heart at the center as an
image of ourselves, of our relationship with God and one another.
You yourself may
not see what I just described in that image. You may see more. You may see
less. Someone else will see something entirely different than you do.
That’s not unlike our encounter with God
the Trinity: the same true thing, experienced differently from time to time and
person to person.
Behind and beyond
whatever you see, whatever I see, whatever we draw or say or do, is the same
original and eternal invitation: the voice of Wisdom, the voice of God, calling
out to each of us, to everyone we don’t know, and to all of us together, to enter
into relationship with God, to join ourselves with the heart of the true,
abiding, faithful and transformative relationship of God, with who God
is, now and forever.
-->
No comments:
Post a Comment