John 16:12-15; Romans 5:1-5; Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Time seems to be running short, all of a sudden.
Many of my friends and family are in the throes of the end of the school year – when everything is due all at once, and transitions and goodbyes and celebrations all happen at once.
Deadlines and decisions are coming thick and fast into my inbox every day now as the General Convention of the Episcopal Church is being rebuilt to a much shorter calendar just a month before we convene to do critical business of the church.
And around a table in Jerusalem, all of a sudden time has run short for Jesus and his first disciples, and he’s talking to them about the great end and transition they are about to experience.
I have so many things for you to know, he tells them, and you can’t take them in right now. This time is too short, too constrained by who we’ve been, and what you already think you know. You need more.
We need more.
And we have it.
Because the Spirit comes.
Jesus promises that the Spirit is going to guide us into all truth – all the things Jesus has been trying to teach us, all the things we think we’ve got, but we don’t really understand, all the things we don’t know yet that we don’t know, and need to know. Guide us into all the things Jesus is.
With the coming of the Spirit, our relationship with Jesus continues, this relationship goes on and on and on and beyond the dramatic moments of ending. The Spirit is united with Jesus who is united with the Father, and all of this – this whole united relationship – is what we are being guided into as the Spirit comes and stays to guide us into Truth.
Into God. All of God.
Forever. Past forever, present forever, future forever.
The Trinity – this promise Jesus is making to his disciples about how the Spirit is going to give to us everything that the Father and Jesus share; this way of inviting us into the relationship of entwined unity shared by Jesus and the Spirit and the Father – is a story about forever.
About the long term, the time that reaches past every ending, every transition, in all directions. The Trinity is a long-term relationship for every short-term moment.
That thread of enduring relationship, long-term connection, runs through most of the scripture the church asks us to hear this “Trinity Sunday”. It’s here, in the gospel story, as Jesus promises his friends and faithful followers on the threshold of everything ending that they do, in fact, have all the time they need together, that his own death won’t stop us from being led into the whole unity of God.
That thread of long connection is woven through Wisdom’s invitation to all God’s people to dance with her into this relationship with God, of God, that begins before we can count time, in the moments of creation.
And it’s in Paul’s exhortations to the church in Rome. He wants them not to yield to the present pressure to be ashamed of the trouble they may find themselves in, as friendships and family relationships and business relationships are disrupted, even ending, because of this new faith that changes how they live and behave in the world.
Through God’s love, he says, this suffering, this trouble brought to us by our commitment to our faith produces patience, steadfast perseverance. And that endurance produces character, proof of worth, which leads to hope, to confident expectation, which is cause for celebration, of which we can never be ashamed.
Paul’s not trying to tell us about God’s love as a miracle cure for suffering. He’s painting a picture for his friends in Rome of what has happened to him personally, what is happening to them now. As we encounter resistance, the love of God poured into us over long, slow days and years, cushions our tendencies toward anxiety, resentment, and defeat, and instead forms patience in us, which forms worthy character, which roots us in hope, in confident, joyful expectation of glory shared with God.
Our relationship with God is – it must be – long term.
It does not end, and God does not change, at any deadline, or any death, or any transition, or any loss, or any triumph and celebration of completion. When it seems to end – when Jesus dies, when oppression or depression, or suffering of many kinds makes us feel cut off from God – the Spirit pours love and truth into us, day after day after day after day after year after year, giving us forever to become part of God’s forever. To draw us, slowly and deeply, into God’s own long-term relationship with God.
Think for a minute about your own long-term relationships. With parents, children, siblings, spouses. Or with that friend from grade school, or from a job long ago; that friend who lived down the block from your first house…
When I think about my own long-term relationships, I notice that most of them are built of very many, very ordinary moments. Built of extremely everyday, unmemorable, routine experiences – commutes, and loading and unloading the dishwasher, and hours after school that all blend into one another and have no distinguishing characteristics.
Built of hour after hour of being present with one another, often when we would have preferred not to be – because the meeting was excruciatingly boring, the fifth hour of the family car trip was already eighteen hours too many, because our disagreements felt tense and uncomfortable, or I had better things to do.
Built of hour after hour of being present in unremarkably good ways – loading and unloading the dishwasher in a rhythm that makes life easier, falling asleep on each other’s shoulders, laughing about nothing, feeling tension or restlessness soothed by familiarity.
Slow afflictions and gradual blessings, steadily, continuously, unhurriedly forming us in patience and persistence, in character and worth, in hope and expectation. In love of the long, resilient, trustworthy kind.
That’s the relationship that God has with God.
That’s the love that God is inviting us into.
When Jesus’ disciples stand on the brink of crisis and ending, he promises them the persistent, patient Spirit of truth to teach us, to form us, into sharing this long-term, unending, forever relationship of God with God.
This absolute opposite of whirlwind romance is exactly what I need to hear sometimes.
When everything seems to be urgent, I need to hear and remember that the relationship of God with us is long, and slow, and patient, and trustworthy, and expectant. Because that’s who God is.
When my relationship with God is boring – slow and uneventful – I need to be reminded that this is exactly what eternal love means – trust and confidence formed deep and strong by the long, slow, boring stretches of long term relationship.
When I regret my lack of a bright, sudden moment of insight and transformation and conversion like Paul’s, I need to be reminded that the long, slow, generational, daily relationship of uneventful prayer and worship and scripture reading – and crankiness and laughter and all the ordinary spiritual equivalents of unloading and loading the dishwasher – show me the patience and persistence and trustworthy character of God as powerfully as any sudden moment of revelation can. And that those ordinary, gradual days and years are how God shows me the abiding, slow, reliable, expectant soul within me that links me, and you, just as deeply into the heart of God as any instant miracle could.
Sometimes, it seems like everything is running short.
Other times, it seems like nothing has been happening, forever.
All the time, though, we have all the time we need.
All the time, we have the forever, persistent, trustworthy relationship of God with God,
inviting us in,
pouring slow, unending, patient, hopeful love into our hearts,
uniting us, slowly and forever, with the forever loving Trinity.
