Will you pray with me?
Lord, may the words of my lips and the meditations of all
our hearts be
acceptable in your sight. Amen.
At midnight this past Sunday, after we
had taken off our red
and orange outfits, taken the red parament off the pulpit, and finished
with
our Pentecost celebration, something happened to our church. You may not have noticed it.
In fact, you probably didn’t. But
at midnight last Sunday night, our church
entered ordinary time.
Yep, that’s right. Our
church has entered ordinary time. You see,
in the Christian liturgical year, there are two
great
festivals, great high points: Christmas and Easter.
Each of them has its own sets of seasons of
preparation and celebration attached to it. Christmas
has Advent, the twelve days of Christmastide, and
Epiphany. Easter has Lent, the fifty
days of Eastertide, and Pentecost. Every
thing else, everything not attached to one of these great festivals, is
considered
ordinary time. Basically, that’s a chunk
in January and February, and then a big, looong stretch from round
about the
end of May/beginning of June through till Advent in December.
Ordinary time. No
special liturgical festivals, no big holidays. Just
ordinary, just regular church for the next few months.
And right here at the beginning of all this
ordinariness, the church situates Trinity Sunday, the day we set aside
to pay
special attention to our murky and mysterious, our confounding and
confusing,
our utterly nonsensical and exquisitely challenging belief that our God
is at
the same time both three and one, one and three.
The Trinity is very near the heart of
most Christian belief,
so near that we make a point of singing about it in every single
worship
service we hold: Praise God from whom all blessings flow/ praise God
the Word
in flesh born low/ praise Holy Spirit ever more/ one God triune whom we
adore. It is so important that it once
caused our Old South Church
to once upon break
from the
other Congregational churches in Boston. In
the nineteenth century, every single
Congregational church in the city of Boston
became Unitarian, that is, began believing that God is a unity of
persons
instead of a Trinity and that Jesus, though inspired, is not divine. Every single church, that is, except Old
South, the only one in the city to continue to, in belief and practice,
keep a
belief in the Trinity at the center of its life.
The Trinity is the notion that God the
Creator, Jesus
Christ, God’s only begotten son, and the Holy Spirit, are three
distinct
persons and yet, somehow at the same time, of one, undivided substance. Which is easy enough to say, but certainly ess
easy to understand. One group of people
that I think did understand it, however, are the Celts.
Celtic Christianity grew up in the 5th
and 6th centuries largely isolated from the rest of the
Christian
world, on Ireland, Wales, Cornwall,
Brittany, and Scotland. As a result of its isolation, it developed
several of its own powerfully distinctive local flavors, one of which
was a
deep and powerful belief that the Trinity, not just God, but God as
Trinity,
was present in every part of every day’s life.
Today’s call to worship, from a prayer
called St. Patrick’s
Breastplate, comes from this tradition, but the Celts had prayers for
nearly
everything, nearly every small and ordinary task, throughout their days. These prayers were sung or chanted, often
with three repetitions of ritual movements. For
example, there is The Bathing Prayer, which says in
part: “A palmful for thine age,/ A palmful
for thy
growth,/ A palmful for thy throat…The three palmfuls/ of the Secret
Three,/ To
preserve thee/ From every envy,/ Evil eye and death;/ The palmful of
the God of
Life,/ The palmful of the Christ of Love,/ The palmful of the Spirit of
Peace,/
Triune God of Grace.”
Then there is the blessing spoken as a
piece of new-woven
cloth is given to its new owner: “Mayest thou wear the cloth to
shreds,/ Mayest
thou wear the cloth to rags,/…In thy modesty,/ In thy health,/ In thy
friends,/
In thy love,/ In the grace of the Father,/ In the grace of the Son,/ In
the
grace of the Spirit,/ In the grace of the Three of the elements.”
At a child’s birth, the midwife and nurse
would bathe it,
singing in part, “The little drop of the Father/ On thy little
forehead,
beloved one./ The little drop of the Son/ On thy little forehead,
beloved one./
The little drop of the Spirit/ On thy little forehead, beloved one.” The list goes on. There
are prayers for the fire, for the loom,
for cattle, for churning, for a speck in one’s eye, for healing, for
sowing and
harvesting, for traveling.
When you first read them, these prayers
and chants seem
almost like superstition, as if they were charms devised by an ignorant
people
to call God in to help them deal with a frightening world.
But I want to suggest that they’re something
more than that. Imagine, just imagine
taking
the time to bring God with you even into the bath and singing as you
washed
your body, The palmful of the God of Life,/ The palmful of the Christ
of Love,/
The palmful of the Spirit of Peace,/ Triune God of Grace.
How would your hurried morning shower be
different if you bathed in that way
Or a weaver rhythmically smoothing folds
of cloth, which she
has made with her own hands, and chanting, In the grace of the Father,/
In the
grace of the Son,/ In the grace of the Spirit. Or
the tender, beautiful scene of a midwife singing
blessings to a new
baby as she washes it.
To me, these sound not like the words not
of ones who
desperately hope God will show up to help, but the words of ones who know that God is already there. They’re
the words of people who understand
that God doesn’t spend most of God’s time hanging around in heaven or
on
mountaintops; they’re the words of people that understand that our God
loves
this world God made so much that God wants to be in
it, in it deeply, and not just in the grand dramas of life and
love and death—though God is in those, too—but in the little, the
ordinary
things of everyday life: the bathing, the homemaking, the working. The Celts chanted and prayed these words as
they went through their ordinary lives not because they needed to call
God into
them, but because they needed to remind themselves that God loved them
so much
that a holy God was already in them, making them holy.
And not just any God for the Celts, but
the God who is Three
in One and One in Three. This God is too
big to be contained in one identity. This
God has so much to do to reach God’s people that one person can’t
handle
it. This God loves the world and wants
to be close to its inhabitants so much that entering into it in just
one way isn’t
enough. So this God enters into it as
powerful
parent, as loving, warning, forgiving creator who shows up on
mountaintops and
in grand scenes of divine courts. And
God enters into it as human, as brother, friend, challenger, and gentle
guide
who shows up in unexpected places among unexpected people about the
business of
their everyday lives. And God enters
into it as Spirit, blowing through all the creation, energizing,
quickening,
enlivening and inspiring, who shows up as the very force that keeps us
alive
and draws us together as love. All ways
to know God, to meet God, to find out from God that God is always right there, very present and inviting
us to know it, to come close and be loved. All
ways to discover that God is close to us as breathing,
close to us
as sleeping and waking, close to us as our work, close to us as bathing.
Isaiah sees God in the Temple
in Jerusalem,
nearby,
right here on earth. Prophets before him
had seen God enthroned in the heavens, in thunder and lighting on
mountaintops. But Isaiah sees the court
of God also on earth, the home of God also in a holy city of mortals. One would come after Isaiah who would tell us
that the realm of God is even closer than the Temple, that the realm of
God is
not just in heaven, not just in the holy city of Jerusalem, but also
here,
among us, in the spaces between you and me. And
closer still, says our Jesus: the realm of God is also
within us, in
our hearts and minds and souls and our ordinary, daily lives, if we
will but
take the time to notice. And taking the
time to notice is just what the Celts were about in praying and
chanting
through their days.
The Trinity is about a holy, holy, holy
God getting close to
us in every way that God can and making our lives holy, too. Not just the big moments, our births and
deaths and new lives beyond death, though we well know that God is
certainly
there, but in our ordinary lives full of their ordinary things. So as a church, we enter ordinary time with
the promise that, though Easter and Pentecost are over and Christmas
still far
away, yet is God the Parent with us, reminding us that we are beloved
children. Yet is the God the Son with us,
challenging
us to live as the very heirs of God’s realm. Yet
is God the Spirit with us, giving us the power to dance
in joyful
times, the power to grieve hopefully in the sad times, and the power to
live
boldly in all times. Even in ordinary
time—especially in ordinary time, the Celts would say—is God near to
us, and
very strong, and in love.
So with Saint Patrick we say:
I
bind unto myself today
the
strong name of the Trinity,
by
invocation of the same,
the
Three in One and One in Three.
I
bind unto myself today
the
power of God to hold and lead,
God’s
eye to watch, God’s might to stay,
God’s
ear to hearken to my need.
Amen.
