Erl Purnell Sermon

cTrinity Sunday ~ June 3, 2007 ~ A sermon preached by The Rev’d Erl G. Purnell at Old St. Andrew’s Church, Bloomfield, CT

Isaiah 6.1-8; Psalm 29; Revelation 4.1-11; John 16.12-15

Thrones and trumpets, white robes and golden crowns, six-wingèd seraphs, a house filled with smoke, hot coal-totting tongs, and more; thundering glory, mighty waters, broken cedar trees, split flames of fire, a shaken wilderness, and oak trees writhing. Plus, the Spirit of truth.

Are you among the millions waiting for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final Harry Potter book? I am. I love the Harry Potter series and will miss having a new book to read every few years. Well, maybe now all I need do is turn to our holy Scriptures where there is plenty of intrigue, mystery, confusion, and good verses evil. Hum.

I’m always struck by the imagery-laced descriptions throughout Scripture. Our Hebrew ancestors used vivid and compelling word-pictures to convey their thoughts, thoughts often inspired by dreams or visions. “I saw the Lord,” writes Isaiah, “sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the Temple.” It must have been quite a robe and quite a hem.

The point for Isaiah really isn’t the robe and hem, but the awesome nature of the Divine. How else to express something as ineffable as God? In days when little was known about the natural universe, Isaiah and others wanted to get the attention of their listeners and to impress upon them a perception of God that their compatriots could grasp. And so, the style of assigning fantastic attributes to God began very early on.

Likewise, the place of God in heaven—the temple according to Isaiah—was extra-ordinary. This temple was not the one in Jerusalem, but one far beyond humanity’s construction capabilities. It was huge and filled with amazing things—six-wingèd seraphs flying around, for example, and a fire pit of glowing embers on the altar. So, too, just imagine the volume of sound that filled the space. It must have been a crushing noise!

This supernatural heavenly temple is home to the Lord God whose voice says, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Holy, holy…holy smokes! In one of the most powerful statements in all of Scripture, Isaiah replies, “Here am I; send me!”

Psalm 29 layers in more images of the Lord’s glory and strength. Again, the listeners are transported by God’s deeds of the incredible—snapping great cedar trees like match sticks, splitting flames of fire, and shaking the wilderness of Kadesh with a Godly shout. (Kadesh, by the way, is on the banks of the Onrontes River in Syria. It was the sight, in 1274 BCE, of one of the greatest battles in history, involving a record 5,000+ chariots and at least 9,000 foot soldiers.)

But the real purpose of Psalm 29, according to some scholars, is King David’s reflection upon the might and power and glory of God as experienced in a rolling thunder and lightening storm that’s coming off the Mediterranean and moving across lower present-day Syria to the wilderness of Kadesh in the east. Now can you see wind-whipped waters, the cedars snapping and oaks writhing? The storm stripping the forests bare? All we need do today is watch CNN in the aftermath of a huge weather system wreaking havoc in Nebraska or Kansas. David acknowledges, if the Lord is this awesome in creating this storm—And what a storm it must have been!—then how much more awesome is God in creating the peace that follows such a storm? He takes his lesson from the weather and says the strength of the people comes from God and likewise the blessing of peace comes from God.

And then there is Revelation. Talk about imagery in the spirit of LucasFilm or DreamWorks! The door to heaven opens and a trumpet voice calls out, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.” Then, zap, the author of Revelation is instantly “in the spirit” where, “in heaven stood a throne, with one seated on the throne!” It’s pretty obvious that the one on the throne and surrounded by “an emerald rainbow is God, who “looks like jasper and carnelian”. Kind of strange, don’t you think? There are twenty-four other thrones and twenty-four elders, flashes of lightening, peals of thunder, a sea of glass, and spirits of God. Phew, what a place! And, you’ve got to watch out, too, that you’re not run over by “the four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind” who sing day and night, “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come.”

So, the question this morning is How DO we experience God? Do we anthropomorphize the ineffable Creator by clothing HIM in elegant robes whose hem fills a whole big temple? Or, are there another, less ostentatious and more suitable ways to relate to God? Personally, although I’m kind of entertained by the hyperbolic descriptions of ancient days, the more I contemplate the Divine Creator of the universe humanity has come to know, the more elusive a suitable description becomes.

On the one hand, I can turn to quantum- and astro-physics. There seems to be a creative energy that permeates universe. Buddhists have a sound for this energy. It’s OM. This vibration has been ascribed to the Creative First Power—the one I call God. I rather like this approach, although it isn’t Christian per se.

Religious people of many persuasions name the Creator, GOD, or for Muslims, ALLAH, or for native American, GREAT SPIRIT. And, for Hindus, there are many gods, just as there were for the Greeks and Romans, the ancient Persians and Egyptians.

Christianity, of course, springs from Jewish monotheism—the God of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah. The Jewish God was so powerful and so remote, however, that simply saying the name of God was prohibited. Likewise, God could not be depicted in an single image. Remember the golden calf at the foot of Mt. Sinai? Though often described hyperbolically, as I said earlier, God is truly unknowable in Judaism.

In our own religious tradition, sometime in the mid-fourth century (rather late actually following the death of Jesus), Christianity formally adopted the notion of a triune Godhead: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This concept of God is described in the Nicene Creed some of us recite each Sunday. The Trinity depicts how people chose to understand God (as Creator), the very real presence of God in history (as Jesus), and God’s continued relationship with creation and especially humanity (as Holy Spirit). Each is a descriptor of the same Godhead.

There are those who accuse Christianity of being poly-theistic, that is having multiple gods. Really, I think that misses the point of how we regard our Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer God. Our understanding is that God is a single entity AND panentheistic—that God is both immanent and transcendent—here among us as well as in and of ALL things. Of course this is a paradox. Like all paradoxes, the tension of holy mystery needs to be held with a faith that knows ALL is as it should be.

Amen.