The Trinity Is Our Dwelling Place

Church of the Incarnation

Trinity Sunday -- May 30, 2010

John 16:12-15

Trinity Sunday is a little bit like Arbor Day - it’s on the calendar, but no one gets that excited about it!

In the early 5th century, a North African bishop named Augustine wrote a treatise on the Trinity.  He argued that knowing and loving God as F/S/HS is the goal of human life.  In 1793, a Prussian philosopher named Immanuel Kant wrote a little book called Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.  In that book he argued that talking about God as F/S/HS is worthless.  It doesn’t do us any good.  It’s like an appendix - it hangs around, but has no use.

For Augustine, talk about the Trinity is like taking a tour of a beautiful mansion which you’ve inherited.  As you’re walking around, you’re thinking, wow, I get to live here!  For Kant, talk about the Trinity is like reading an article on an uninteresting, unattractive building you’ll never visit.

The Vanderbilt summer home is one of the mansions in Newport, R.I.  We have visited several times and I am always overwhelmed at the opulence and beauty of the place.  I wander around shaking my head - I can’t believe this is even here. That someone lived here.  Now change the scene: suppose I am walking around the Vanderbilt mansion not as a tourist, but as someone who has been invited to make this my dwelling.  Suddenly, everything changes.  Jesus once said, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places [mansions]” (14:2).  So I invite you today to imagine the Trinity as your dwelling place.  It is the space in which you are formed and transformed into a new kind of person.

Text: John 16:12-15

Our text for today invites us to dwell on the experience of prayer.  Jesus promises his followers that the Spirit of truth will come.  Jesus’ focus is on the Spirit’s activity: the Spirit will guide you into the truth; the Spirit will glorify Jesus; and then three times in three verses Jesus says that the Spirit will declare to you what is shared between the Father and the Son.

Although we often think of prayer in terms of our speaking to God, Jesus reminds us that deeper than our own speaking is the Spirit’s speaking to us.  One one level, of course, prayer is something we do - and we do it in response to God’s grace.  But Jesus alerts us that there is always something else going on in our praying - God is at work to say a word to us through the presence of the Spirit.  

I hope that this practice of prayer is at least strange enough to interest you for a few minutes this morning - this speaking to God which is also a listening to the Spirit of God.  I want to note three characteristics of this kind of praying, and then I want to end by suggesting that this life of prayer, this dwelling in the Trinitarian God, is a clear alternative to the way of life offered to us in late-modern, North American culture.

Prayer as a Process - “I still have may things to say . . .”

Do you ever feel like you’re supposed to have your act together?  I am often angry at myself because I have unrealistic expectations of where I should be in life.  I have yet to hit the golf course but I will soon.  And I can tell you exactly what will happen.  I will hit a ball in the water, respond with frustration, showing the incredibly stupid assumption that my game should have improved over the winter!  It takes a lifetime of practice and worship to learn to love God and to love others in God’s name.  Yet we often live in unnecessary guilt about how far along we should be.  

Jesus says to his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (16:12).  Jesus takes us where we are.  He knows what we can handle.  He has plans to give us more in the future.  What a wonderful picture of God’s patience with us.  Our praying will be different if it registers the gentleness of God.  We can let go of all the nervous worrying about how slowly we’re making progress.  God leads us along at a pace we can handle.   

John Calvin pictures God as a loving mother who accommodates her speech to her small children, speaks in language her children can understand.  God is like a mother who woos her small child to take a few steps, and laughs with delight at the effort, whether we stagger forward or fall down.

Prayer as Intimacy 

When we neglect to pray, when we pray very little, or feel that all is a lifeless routine, it is often because we imagine ourselves praying by ourselves across a great distance to a God who may or may not hear.  Often we are discouraged by thinking that God is big and up there, and we are small and down here.  We do this out of shame, or guilt, or idolatry, or anger, or sadness.  Or maybe we do it because we’re American, and we are trained to think very highly of our own capacities and agency.  I want to be the one praying. 

Jesus said that “when the Spirit of truth comes,” he will guide us into all the truth.  Jesus sends to us the Spirit so that the Spirit can guide our lives ever deeper into the truth of God’s love for us, God’s desires to bless us, the truth about our own proper dignity and worth.  We are invited to pray as those confident we are being guided, drawn further and deeper into the truth of God’s love.

This intimacy is echoed by the Apostle Paul in Romans 8:  “You are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. . . . the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. . . . The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”  This is a very intimate picture of what’s going on in the experience of the prayer.  We sometimes talk of contemplative “mystics” as if they’re an elite breed.  Actually, all who belong to JC play host to this speaking Spirit.  In all your praying, the Spirit speaks in you and through you.

Prayer as Creativity- “All that the Father has is mine”

One of the goals of prayer is to expand our imagination and creativity.  Even though our culture thinks of itself as creative, it functions to deaden creativity in many ways.  We are technologically innovative but not very creative when it comes to the way we imagine what’s possible, what kind of life projects we should pursue.  

You and I live in a culture shaped by private property, market transactions, and the goal of accumulating personal wealth.  If it’s mine, it’s not yours.  If it’s yours, it’s not mine.  We live in a culture that imagines life as a zero sum game: the more I have, the less you have.  For me to win, you need to lose.  “All the Father has is mine.”  Here Jesus enables you and me a glimpse behind the veil of mystery: what is it like to be divine?  It is to live a life of complete self-giving.  It’s a life of “what’s mine is yours.”  It’s a life of circulating gifts.  Goods flowing freely between lovers.  So all the Father has belongs to the Son.  And all the Son has belongs to the Spirit.  And the Spirit takes what belongs to the Son and shares it with us.  You have been pulled into the circulation of gifts.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point identifies certain people as connectors or mavens.  These are the people who ignite trends.  They know lots of people and they connect people.  His main example is Paul Revere.  Another example would be the bartender at PJ Clarke’s in the Times this week.  He said the best bartenders don’t just get you a drink, they get you a date and a job too.

Jesus describes the Spirit this way.  The Spirit is the power that pulls us into God’s life.  The Spirit takes what belongs to Jesus, and gives it to us.  The Spirit makes us participants in all that’s already going on between the Father and the Son.  Prayer takes us up into the life of God, and invites us to imagine ourselves as people who participate in the circulation of gifts.

So the experience of prayer is the experience of being pulled by the Spirit up into God’s Trinitarian life.  This is how our lives are formed and transformed by God - it happens in a process, and it’s characterized by intimacy and creativity.  Now I want to bring this life that God offers us into contrast with the cultural landscape we inhabit.

What kind of life are you aiming at?  Who are you hoping to become?  You might be surprised to hear it - but those basic questions are at the heart of the church’s teaching on the Trinity.  The goal or primary narrative for modern selves is liberation or emancipation from control.  

The modern and late modern self is the expressive self: (the danger we fear most is repression, which means we no longer have any language for self-control and self-restraint.)

1. emotionally expressive - don’t bottle it in, let it all out all the time

2. sexually expressive - don’t ever pass up an opportunity to express yourself sexually

3. artistically expressive - make of your life a work of art, meaningful and beautiful to look at

LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavalier is a free agent now after seven years.  He had a contractual obligation to Cleveland, and now he’s free.  NY Magazine devoted a whole issue to why he should come to the Knicks.  Most of us feel a bit uneasy with free agency.  It moves the focus from teams with a stable identity to a few superstars who move from place to place for the highest bid.  Everyone just assumes that LeBron’s task is to maximize his celebrity and earning power.  It’s difficult to imagine saying that he should seek his flourishing along with his teammates and the city of Cleveland.  Strangely enough, the cultural factors at work in free agency are at work in our lives too.

Robert Reich, former labor secretary, writes this:  “ The price of the new economy is the anxious worker, always only tentatively committed to a company or job because it can be lost at any time.  We work with our briefcase nearby, our resume always ready.”  Reich’s point is that the dominant narrative of “freedom” is a kind of false gospel - it has left us trapped in a thousand ways.  The dominant cultural narrative we inhabit offers us the goal of liberation or emancipation.  And within this narrative we are to hear the good news that God offers us something deeper, something more -- the chance to be formed and transformed by God’s grace.

The goal for Christians is transformation of the self that only happens when persons share in God’s life.  The Christian vision for our lives is bigger than the enlightenment vision.  Jesus invites us into a particular kind of freedom - the freedom to be formed and transformed by the love of God.  You have been taken into the circulation of goods between F/S/HS.  It is in the practice of praying that we experience this circulation most powerfully, but it flows out into all our lives.  The Trinity is our dwelling place, the place we become the people God has called us to be.