St Mary's

In the church calendar today we celebrate Trinity Sunday:

We are three, You are Three

When his ship stopped at a remote island for a day, the bishop determined to use the time as profitably as possible. He strolled along the seashore and came across three fishermen attending their nets. In pidgin English they announced to him that centuries before they had been Christianized by missionaries. “We, Christians!” they said, proudly pointing to one another.

The bishop was impressed. Did they know the Lord‟s Prayer? They had never heard it. The bishop was shocked.

“What do you say, then, when you pray?” He asked.

“We lift eyes in heaven. We pray, „We are three, you are three, have mercy on us.‟” The bishop was appalled at the primitive, the downright heretical, nature of the prayer. So he spent the whole day teaching them the Lord‟s Prayer. The fishermen found the English difficult, but they gave it all they had and before the bishop sailed away next day he had the satisfaction of hearing them go through the formula faultlessly.

Months later his ship happened to pass by those islands again and the bishop, as he paced the deck reciting evening prayer, recalled with pleasure the three men on that distant island who were now able to pray, thanks to his patient efforts.

Suddenly he saw a spot of light in the east that kept approaching the ship and, as he gazed in wonder, he saw three figures walking on the water. The captain stopped the boat and everyone leaned over the rails to see this sight.

They were the bishop‟s fishermen, of course. “Bishop,” they exclaimed, “We hear your boat and go past and come hurry hurry meet you.”

“What is it you want?” asked the awestricken bishop.

“Bishop,” they said, “We so, so sorry. We forget lovely prayer. We say: Our Father in heaven, holy be your name, your kingdom come… then we forget. Tell us prayer again.”

It was a chastened bishop who replied, “Go back to your homes, my friends, and each time you pray, say, „We are three, you are three, have mercy on us!”

What message does this story hold for us? Maybe it is to keep our prayers simple and our concepts of God simple. Do we need all the dogmas and creeds and beliefs that define and contain one religion from another?

The belief in God as Trinity is one such belief, one such box we place God into. Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday and we may ask how did we ever decide that God was three persons but one? And lock that one in. Like the decisive answer in one of those “Who wants to be a millionaire” quiz shows.

We could start understanding this belief by understanding that in making Jesus, God, we then have to explain aspects of God and come up with God as Triune. As Peter Kennedy said on the Q&A program echoing many other Biblical scholars, Jesus as a Jew, would have been scandalized by the fact that Christians made him into a God. But a God-Man became necessary to bridge the gap. A gap created by the faulty understanding that a price had to be paid to placate an angry God. God became angry with humanity for allowing an imperfect world caused by sin and in particular the first sin of Adam. A gap occurred between an elsewhere God and humanity.

A price had to be paid, a sacrifice, and that sacrifice could only be paid by some being that was both God and human so Jesus. These takes on the status of divinity, Jesus would have been scandalized by such an understanding of the Divine.

The Divine, for Jesus, as being something exclusively beyond, was foreign to his understanding. For the Jesus of the Gospels, the Divine permeates all of reality, the divine comes to expression in all people in and through their loving. The whole point of Jesus’ preaching, was to elevate our understanding of ourselves by becoming aware of our intimate connection with the Divine.

The Christian Church changed the focus by separating the Divine from the human and then arguing that Jesus had to have a special share in the Divine in order to bridge the gap between the two.

Thus a split was accentuated between what is sacred, what is profane. Instead of believing that we and the entire world were equally permeated with the presence of the Divine we got into distinguishing between what is Holy and Sacred from what was not. Just think of the tabernacle in Catholic churches. Catholics have been conditioned to believe that is where the sacred really is. Another example, some people have refused to come to the TLC building because it is not a consecrated building like the Catholic churches that are specially blessed by a bishop.

As Michael Morwood in his book “From Sand to Solid Ground” asks, “I wonder how we would relate with each other and with planet earth if we believed that we and the entire world were equally permeated with the presence of the Divine?”

That is a thought worth staying with for some time, hence I placed it on the front of our bulletin this week. Only last Monday, June 1st, noted passionate Priest, Thomas Berry who considered himself not a theologian but a cosmologist and geologian “an Earth scholar”, died in the United States aged 94. Thomas was among the first to say that the earth crisis, such as the problems surrounding climate change, is fundamentally a spiritual crisis. The way we treat and have treated the earth can be traced back to the negative

effects of our religious views. One aspect in particular is the addiction of thinking dualistically of splitting the world into the sacred and profane. Instead of seeing that all of life is infused with the Divine, or in the words of EE Cummy’s, that “Earth is crammed with heaven and every common bush aflame with God.”

On Trinity Sunday oru thoughts are challenged to go beyond an elsewhere Triune God somewhere beyond us to a God, a divine presence oozing forth from all of creation and our prayer in response is simply one of amazement and enchantment. To once again get caught up in a sense of wonder and awe at the sheer magnificence of life. I would like to finish with a few lines from the Kentucky poet, James Still, which sums up what I am trying to say and as a tribute to Thomas Berry, “I was born humble, at the foot of mountains, my face was set upon the immensities of Earth, and stone, and upon the oaks full-bodied and old. There is so much writ upon the parchment of leaves, so much beauty blown upon the winds. I can fold my hands, and bend my knees in these leaf pages.”