Just Pride

JUST PRIDE
Notes from Bill Bruce at www.kewbeachunitedchurch.com
Sunday, June 25, 2006

Text: I Samuel 17:19-23, 32-49

The Stanley cup has been won. The World Cup is down to the last 16, past the halfway mark. I’m sure that Canada’s Next Top Model has lost another contestant. There are winners and losers, and fans repositioning their loyalties all over town. Who knew there were so many Argentinians in town, and so few Mexicans, after yesterday? Portuguese and English flags are out today for the games competing with worship this morning. And I think it’s more about ethnic pride than passion for sports – and it’s easier to parade your pride when you’re winning!

Last week, I reflected on how sports, like life, are all ‘Just Luck’. Is it only, merely, simply luck, or is it luck justified and fair, chance smiling on the well-prepared? I noted on that Fathers Day that we are all members of the ‘lucky sperm club’, born in this fortunate generation and culture. I admitted that it was different to confess my dumb luck than to be accused of it by the luckier. I acknowledged on the 20th anniversary of our Apology to First Nations that too often we deny how we benefit from or ancestors’ aggression – then call the others ‘just lucky’ for subsistence. That was all about providence and prudence, the cards we’re dealt and how we play them.

This afternoon, a million people celebrate the Pride parade downtown. Today, it’s ‘Just Pride’. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered folks, families and friends, have been out all week. Those passionate about ‘Pride Week’ mix with soccer fans or jazz festival concerts downtown. We celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Ethnic Ministries Council of the United Church. Anyone who thinks there is no overlap between these groups has not been paying attention! Our identities, as individuals and communities, are complex, and built of all our identifications. Which ones define us? Which do we proudly display? It’s all ‘Just Pride’!

Pride is often a pejorative term, particularly in church. We demonize pride as vanity, smugness, claiming too much for what we’ve been dealt or for how we are playing it. Worse, winners’ pride can be claimed at the expense of losers, the lucky rubbing their good luck in the face of the less fortunate. No wonder our tradition warns us against the sins of pride. We associate pride with power, with violation and abuse of others. If that is pride, then to say ‘Just Pride’ is dismissive.

Pride can surely also be justified, though. Pride can affirm and assert that God made us and as the T-shirt says: ‘God don’t make no junk’. If we demonize pride as vanity, claiming too much, then we risk losing the power of pride. We claim too little, confusing humility with humiliation. Today’s ‘Pride’ parade reminds us of that power of celebrating God’s good work – will you deny that to your children, or will you be proud of them and with them? Can we not be proud of our church, as people meet later today to talk about choosing to joining forces with Bellefair?

Sometimes people complain that I talk and talk, and at the end they aren’t clear about what I told them to do. Thus, our scripture reader this morning though I was just chatting with him on the boardwalk this week, and missed that I was asking him to read the long lesson. These reflections on ‘Just Luck’ last week, ‘Just Pride’ this week, and ‘Just Feelings’ next week are trying to find words, in discourse and reflection around the stories of David. They are intended as attitude adjustment aids, to inform your disposition and your own discourse. What you do it is up to you. ‘Just Pride’ is what I wish you today - claiming neither too much nor too little. ‘Just Pride’.
There is an underlying ethical theory struggle in our reflections here these days. Some of us are suspicious of the utilitarian ethics of computation and recalibration, associated with the market model of rights bearing individuals competing in a fair and free market at the ‘end of history’. We’re trying to rediscover the place of character and community, and we’re recognizing the contribution of narrative, like biblical stories, to convey those qualitative dimensions of ethics. We’re not ‘family values’ reactionaries, but we know we are more than consumers, more than employees, more than atomized isolated agents out to maximize our own goods, or ‘value-add’, as if those goods and values could be disembodied from incarnate creation and humanity.

Heidegger illuminated how ‘techne’ was used by classical Greeks as crafts of practical ethics, equally for skilled trades and for politicians and for artists. He left us with that challenge to our own modern enlightenment distinctions among those types of knowledge and skill. Thinkers like Jacques Ellul, Gadamer, and Canadian George Grant reflected on the implications for our own technological society of this deeper meaning of ‘techne’. Alisdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor pursued the ethical and political implications, the latter popularized in ‘identity politics’ theory. I’ve been welcoming these voices into our conversation, echoing them in these notes, for years.

We live in a language world of free-floating goods and values, cut loose from their orientation in relationship among people, or toward anything beyond ourselves. We still enjoy a surprising consensus on moral norms, despite our barbaric ignorance of any moral sources. However, our consensus is vulnerable to real differences, whether what were called terrorist threats from within last week, or mutual anathemas of ‘politically correct’ or ‘homophobia’ as Ryerson University dishonoured Margaret Somerville this week. Our own Don Gray wrote the National Post, wishing that students with placards learnt to spell ‘discrimination’ as an early step in opposing it.

What if we reclaimed some of the language of ethics older than we are? Aristotle’s insight that ethics required ‘polis’ or community may be dismissed as petty parochialism compared to our rhetoric of universal human rights, but let’s remember it before we dismember it. The grammar of virtue and vice can bring us back to a reminder of goods and values beyond the individual, incarnate in creation and humanity, and may be deconstructed as guilt supporting privilege, but let’s reassemble it enough to enjoy dismantling it. Classic teachers of practical ethics knew that short of the vicious were the ‘akaratic’, who knew the right thing but gave in to impulsivity, while short of the virtuous were the ‘enkratic’, who knew and did it all right, but without passion.

It’s worth remembering even a generation back, to Reinhold Niebuhr’s analysis of his American empire, and its sins of power and pride, in Moral Man in Immoral Society, or Hannah Arendt’s On Violence, or Rollo May’s Power and Innocence. They all offer hard-won language for these issues of pride. We can claim too much in vanity. We can also ask too little in humiliation. What is violated in which violence? Can we be militant without being militaristic or martial? Can we behave adversarially without being antagonistic? Which implied ‘uses’ are affirmed, as ‘abuses’ are damned as aberrations? Where can we find people who really differ, but still talk?

Ironically, people are finding this discourse within and between religious communities, rather than from academics, politics and press pundits who claim to have transcended parochialism. Partisan, sectarian, passionate identifications with communities and with heroes provide us with the elements missing from atomized individualism and consumerism. It’s ‘Just Pride’. Celebrate without claiming too much – or too little – for who you are and whose you are. In that context, we listen the stories of David, not only as children, but also as adults who know it’s ‘Just Pride’:
David lived about 1000 years before Jesus, and 3000 years before us. Stories about him were told in his lifetime, through Solomon’s dynasty and the decline and fall and exile. Stories were retold 500 years before Jesus, taking the shape of scripture during the time of the second temple. These are the tales of a hero, tales of triumph, with the seeds of tragedy we know will follow, from our perspective of 20/20 hindsight. Imagine how even that hindsight changes depending on how far you are from the events, and how you read your own situation in the world!

I suggested last week that David’s contemporaries knew he had been a guerrilla or terrorist in the hills of Galilee during Saul’s reign, and that his record of support for Saul was spotty at best, and that his succession to the throne instead of one of Saul’s sons was illegitimate and contested. What we read is the ‘spin doctors’ rehabilitating David’s reputation, with stories of the little boy last week, chosen last of all his big brothers as the ‘heir apparent’, and today’s tale of heroism. We all love the underdog, the little guy overcoming the odds, the one with heart and spunk.

I reminded you this week that those looking back after David’s death knew that later, in power, David’s reign, begun in civil war, slipped into scandals of sex and abuse of power including the whole Bathsheba affair. The very model of underdog became in these stories a bully Goliath. This goes beyond the shorter term propping up of David, to recognizing the seeds of later trouble in his characteristic passion and heart to confront the giant, less attractive once he was the boss.

‘Just Pride’, wasn’t it? David does best when he is picking on somebody bigger than himself – from lions or bears to save the sheep, to armoured giant as champion to limit Israeli casualties. Others burdened him with help: armour and sword just weighed him down. Five smooth stones were more than enough for this underdog’s enterprise. Others thought David was claiming too much for himself, in the vanity kind of pride – but he proved his pride in his God-given gifts and opportunities. The challenge folded like bad cards: Goliath fell, Philistines scattered. ‘Just Pride’.

We’re all of us familiar with the shape of this story. We are all familiar with the roles of David and Goliath, and of the armies on both sides. Nobody gets to be David the underdog all the time, or stay in that role. We know that even David had Goliath days ahead of him. We’d rather be the plucky little guy, the brave shepherd or the champion in front of the crowd. Most of us, most of the time, are to be found in the crowds at best – on Goliath’s side at worst.

Straight white men like me, middle class and middle aged, are the parody of Goliath bullies, the villain to every victim. It’s not enough for me to complain that I don’t feel powerful, if others see me as Goliath-like. It’s not enough for me to remember the past glories of my youth when I was more often the underdog, shepherd or champion for poverty work, justice, youth, ethnic ministry or first nations. That’s just pride, and vanity. There’s always somebody and something bigger than me that I can pick on as shepherd or as champion. Rather than defining myself as mostly guilty Goliath, I can get beyond the petty humiliating feuds of vanity and prejudice.

Most of us prefer a strange kind of pride in those parts of our identities that make us underdogs, and give us the moral high ground. But we are all of us, all of the time, both David and Goliath. Over time, we have triumphs and tragedies, living that out in changing contexts. Today’s heroic underdog with a slingshot is tomorrow’s seducer of Bathsheba and betrayer of Uriah. Character and community matter, and shape us and inform our ethical choices. We learn from our experience of claiming too much or too little, of virtue and vice in relation to good and evil, but most of the time in modest versions of ‘akratic’ impulsive error, or ‘enkratic’ dutiful goodness.
It’s all ‘Just Pride’. That’s not merely vanity, or claiming too much. It’s also affirmation and assertion of the gifts and opportunities given us, greater than our burdens and challenges. It’s a matter of attitude and disposition, of expecting to succeed when cooperating with God’s goods. Don’t be so afraid of little boys throwing stones that you deny them practice in their just pride. Perhaps occasionally we may permit ourselves modest pride in our faith and our church, against lions and bears and bullies- not just humiliation of our history of misusing our powers.

Nelson Mandela at his 1994 inauguration quoted Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberate from our own fear. Our presence automatically liberates others.

Another man of power, who had long known the role of David, was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who told us at a General Council meeting: “When the elephant is standing on the mouse’s tail, it is not hard for both to agree that something needs to be done to change the situation. For the mouse, however, there is no time like the present!” Your job begins with describing the world, with reading your reality. Are you David or Goliath, mouse or elephant? What side of the fence are you on, and who’s there with you? Then you job continues, to change the world, and writing your reality. I won’t tell you what to do. Hear the mouse, the underdog David. The time is now!

God of pride, who made a good creation, and set each one free within it, to enjoy and celebrate, to savour and serve… God who made us male and female, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, who gave us life and breath, and company to share it… Permit us our pride in what you made – including we whom you have made, and those whom we love, and remember to you now.

God who made the best and the brightest ones, the least and the last ones, the helpless and the hopeless ones… Who left us to struggle and sweat it out together… Remind us what’s worth it, what’s worth living for, what’s worth fighting for, what’s worth dying for, what’s yet wanting…

God who made us who we are, as we are… Give us a glimpse of ourselves, as you see us now. Don’t give us too high an opinion of ourselves, but don’t let us claim too little for your work… Remind us of our burdens and challenges, but also of our greater gifts and wider opportunities… Then turn us again to pick on what’s bigger than we are, for purposes beyond ourselves…

God who gave us visions and viewpoints, opinions and attitudes… Reveal to us again what we have already glimpsed of virtue and vice, character and community, heroes and bullies, triumphs and tragedies… God of David… proud, flesh, the best, worst, vicious and virtuous:

Tell us the old, old story, and make of it for us a living word. We’re waiting on you now, watching for you now. Open our minds, our eyes: what word do you have for our hearts O God
Give us ears to hear… Amen Read more...

Just Luck

JUST LUCK
Notes from Bill Bruce at www.kewbeachunitedchurch.com
Sunday, June 18, 2006, 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13

Tomorrow is the 7th game of the Stanley Cup finals. That means the series is tied 3-3, the Oilers having come from behind 3-1. Even we who are not fanatics, or ‘fans’, are aware of this game. We can watch, and enjoy, and know in the end who won. So why bother to have invested so much time all season, knowing the nuances of how those teams got this far? Better yet, why not just watch the Tuesday news, and the clips of the winning goal?

It’s also soccer’s World Cup this month, when we become aware of a sport none of us follow except in local child leagues. The streets are full of people proclaiming more about their ethnic and national pride than about their detailed appreciation for the sport. Again, I don’t have a favorite, and tune in briefly and dispassionately, or wait for the newscasts. I should also confess that I am not a fan of “Canada’s Next Top Model”, or any reality TV show, and neither understand nor care about who gets voted off this week.

Isn’t it all just luck, after all? People gamble on the chances of who will win these games, and no matter how much they know, in the end they can’t be sure. It’s just luck. Does that mean that it is only luck that matters? It’s just luck. Does that mean that the element of luck is fair or just? It’s all about providence and prudence – of what cards you are dealt, and how you play them.

We are all members of the ‘lucky sperm club’, who hear and read these sermons. We were lucky to have been born to fathers in this generation, on this continent. The primary determinant of socioeconomic status (SES) and educational success is, as any educator knows, is parental SES. Sure, you can work hard and get some social mobility, but mostly we have been blessed at birth. That’s not prescriptive or morally normative social Darwinism – but it is descriptive and statistically normative. I am very ready to admit to people less fortunate than I that I enjoy benefits of ‘just luck’. Don’t forget to give thanks for your father today! He’s just your luck!

However, I met with a guy this week that I’ve known for over 30 years. He’s a bit younger than I, comes from a slightly more affluent background, and has been consistently more successful than I as a minister, at bigger churches with more official titles. He says to me: “You’ve always been very lucky in your career”. And I took offence. Did he mean it was all just, or only, luck? Did he mean to imply that based on merit I should not have done so well, in years of part time and short term and interrupted service, none nearly as prominent or well paid as any of his?

It’s just luck. Apparently it matters who says it, in what context, to whom. I intend thanksgiving, a rueful admission of unearned and unmerited privilege, of providence and the grace of God. But if some people tell me how lucky I am, I take offence at the implied judgment of my own efforts! On this First Nations Sunday, the 20th anniversary of a United Church Apology to First Nations, I want to reflect a bit more on these issues of just deserts. I have a cartoon on my bookshelves, with a large feline, a ‘fat cat’, sitting behind his massive ornate desk, talking to the janitor who is pushing a cleaning cart, and happens to be a small mouse: “I’d like to apologize for how my ancestors treated your ancestors. There… that should square things.” Now, get on with your job!

It’s just luck. It’s just, in the sense of irreducibly including elements of chance, luck. It’s just, in the sense that only as random accident can it be seen as fair in some wider scheme, luck. It’s just luck, to have been born of these fathers and not other fathers. It’s just luck – isn’t it?
I’m not a hockey fan, or a soccer fan, or a fan of reality TV. I don’t get the same pleasure out of these highlights, even if I can follow the newscasts of who wins. I don’t share the same memory, knowledge, emotional commitment, anticipation, or identification with participants as fans may. However, I am a religious fanatic, and a big bible fan. When others come for the news clip take on the faith, the Sunday lesson with a bit of colour commentary, I feel like sports fans do today.

Saul is king. Samuel the prophet says God gave up on Saul, and he will anoint the next king, the same as he anointed Saul. He tells Jesse it’s one of his sons. Jesse brings in his favorite, Eliab. (Dad always liked Eliab best!) Eliab is the oldest son: tall, dark, and handsome. Primogeniture – the eldest son inherits everything. It’s the way of the world. Eliab was just lucky. Like us.

Samuel pontificates for a bit. Don’t get stuck on appearance or stature. God does not see as mortals see, for people see outward appearances, but God looks on the heart. Then, to add insult to injury, Jesse calls on Abinadab, then Shammah, and four more, for a total of seven sons, and Samuel rejects them all, in the name of God. Apparently none of them meets this invisible test. On the other hand, they can take consolation that Saul the king has also failed Sam’s test!

Finally Jesse admits he has one more son, the youngest. (Mom always liked him best!) He’s off keeping the sheep, but in a sort of Cinderella story for boys, he is called upon. Scripture points out that he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome (not that God cares about that). David meets human standards of outward appearance, and also those elusive invisible inward divine tests of heart. (Miles and miles and miles of heart.) He was just lucky. Like us.

Even those who aren’t religious fanatics, or big bible fans, can get the news here. The underdog, the little guy, the youngest child, can be chosen. We used to teach it in Sunday School. Samuel picked David, not his big brothers. God knew he had heart, and potential. It’s still a good lesson, for little guys. (We never worried about whether Jesse had daughters.) It’s just luck. Trust it!

Let’s dig a little deeper, adding a bit of analysis to the colour commentary. What was wrong with Saul? Why didn’t he die of old age, and pass the crown to his sons Jonathan or Ishbosheth? Where was David when Saul needed him – or Saul’s sons? Think of Samuel as a Dalton Camp engineering Tory leadership succession, or a David Smith in Liberal politics. Succession of one leader by another, and its political legitimacy is an ageless human issue. Who says when Deifenbaker, or Stanfield, or Clark has to go? Who takes which sides with Chretien or Martin, and when the dust settles, which of many heirs apparent will be anointed?

Saul’s sin was not following through. He was supposed to fight Amalekites to keep people safe. He did enough to beat them back, but then he stopped, and did a bit of profiteering and looting. Samuel ended up with blood on his hands from killing the Amalekite king for ‘war crimes’, and mad at Saul. So Samuel and Saul went home to their own villages, Ramah, and Gibeah, only three miles apart, and never spoke again till Saul was killed. They carried a grudge to the grave.

Scripture is the record of ancient spin doctors, telling the stories of David’s suspect succession to the throne of Saul. This week is the romantic story of the youngest son, picked last for his heart. Next week is the story of his slingshot against Goliath the giant. He’s a musician, a dancer, and a ruddy, with beautiful eyes and handsome. Don’t you listen to the rumours that he was off in the hills being a terrorist and guerrilla when he should have been helping Saul, and Saul’s sons! Sure, there’s some scandal about infidelity and sex with a series of women, but God chose him!

So, is it all just luck? In sports or personal SES, but also in political succession, legitimacy and authority, is it just luck? Is it only, or mostly, a matter or opportunity and chance? Are those imponderable patterns of providence determining our collective fate? Who gets credit or blame, when troops are sent to Afghanistan, or if they shoot to kill, or are shot and killed? Whose fault is it, or who’s responsible, if Caledonia roads are blockaded by Six Nations protestors? On this First Nations Sunday, we reflected on this last situation for a bit longer.

When John Graves Simcoe came here as governor in the late 1700’s, he had been stationed in Staten Island and in turn further north during the American Revolution. His new job was to build a Loyalist imperial colony north of the Great Lakes. He counted on the large buffer state of the Six Nations remaining between the 13 colonies and here. He had not counted on the Yankees kicking the Six Nations Confederacy out of their ancestral lands in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Simcoe promised the Six Nations, on behalf of the Queen, that they would have the best great tracts of land along the Grand River – from the lake up through Paris to Cambridge and Kitchener (once Berlin) and Waterloo. With that sharing promised, Joseph Brant, Tyendaga, and his nations tipped the balance to preserve this colony against the American threat and invasion in the War of 1812. If their heirs did not realize or settle that land, or sold it in turn, they may not have given informed uncoerced consent to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage, or reserves.

Today, one of many unresolved land claims by first nations is related to land around Caledonia, where residential subdivision development is in progress as Hamilton and the GTA sprawls west. The claims of succession, legitimacy, and authority, come to a head with a road blockade. Some people want to say to aboriginal neighbours “you’ve been very lucky”, given years of state money payments and tax exemptions. The first nations don’t agree that this is just luck.

Where’s the United Church this time? We are encouraging a negotiated settlement. We are giving far less support to First Nations than we did in the Oka crisis a decade earlier. We are a bit like the fat cat in the cartoon on my bookshelf, with our 20 year old apology: “I’d like to apologize for how my ancestors treated your ancestors. There… that should square things.” Now, get on with your job! You’ve really been very lucky, you know. It’s just luck, after all. This sounds too much like the Apology to First Nations we made 20 years ago, to me.

How do you every make choices like this? In retrospect, how do you we manage succession and legitimacy and authority? How to choose the winner? We can see how political parties approach the anointing of new leaders, and the fates of the heirs apparent. Can anybody figure it out accurately based on merit and earned victories to those who deserve power? Are you ever surprised by which kid turns out the most successful? Is it based on beauty and brains? Perhaps we’d like to claim it is justified by an invisible standard of ‘heart’. Is it just luck?

You can tune in to game 7 tomorrow to see who wins, or just wait for news summary highlights. You can remember the core of this story of surprising choice, not of the eldest son who is tall, dark and handsome that Dad always liked best, but of the pretty little boy that Mom loves. Perhaps you will become a religious fanatic like me, a big bible fan, chasing down what is implied and what we infer, as we learn to read the text and shape how we read reality and our own lives. What heir apparent is rejected? What forgotten Cinderella rises up? What claims are made for political succession or authority, covering looting or violence? It’s just luck. Isn’t it?

We need to practice making friends again. We can begin with pretty modest outreach to people already in the room with us, and appearing very much like us. We will learn when it is offensive to say ‘you’ve been very lucky’, and when it is gracious to admit that our success is ‘just luck’. We can recognize the Darwinian pattern of survival of the fittest, without adopting it as a creed. Rather than competing with neighbour churches until the losers die off, or making them join us and do things our way, we could learn new ways to discern and anoint leadership in succession that it not primogeniture favouring the heirs apparent, but recognizes surprising new choices. We need to make good on our confessions and apologies. After all, it’s just luck, you know.

Apology to First Nations
1986, General Council
United Church of Canada
20th Anniversary, 2006

Long before my people journeyed to this land
your people were here,
and you received from your Elders
an understanding of creation
and of the Mystery that surrounds us all
that was deep, and rich, and to be treasured.

We did not hear you when you shared your vision.
In our zeal to tell you of the good news of Jesus Christ
we were closed to the value of your spirituality.

We confused Western ways and culture
with the depth and breadth and length and height
of the gospel of Christ.

We imposed our civilization
as a condition of accepting the gospel.

We tried to make you be like us
and in so doing we helped to destroy the vision
that made you what you were.

As a result, you, and we, are poorer
and the image of the Creator in us is twisted, blurred,
and we are not what we are meant by God to be.

We ask you to forgive us and to walk together with us
in the Spirit of Christ
so that our peoples may be blessed
and God's creation healed.

Subsequent statements on justice for first nations and residential schools healing:
www.united-church.ca Read more...

Trinity

TRINITY
Notes from Bill Bruce at www.kewbeachunitedchurch.com
Trinity Sunday, June 11 2006

Text: John 3:1-17

It’s Trinity Sunday. Last week, we celebrated Pentecost, the gift of the Spirit, the birth of the church, in dance and lots of music, ending Easter resurrection season of 1 John’s incarnation. The VIBE youth asked Alydia about the Trinity last winter, and we promised I’d get around to it with them – but never did. In case you are asked, by them or anybody else on the street soon, today’s sermon is intended to prepare you a bit. Trinity: three in one, one in three. OK? No? Oh.

Usually I try to find common ground of our shared experience, then to find applications of text and tradition in these reflections. It’s not familiar turf for us, to begin with doctrine and dogma. Why give answers to questions we haven’t framed? We think of faith as something you die for, but doctrine as something you kill for. We are proudly pragmatic, at best – modern in our individualistic enlightened rationality, not wasting our valuable time in esoteric religiosity. We are ignorantly barbaric, at worst – wasting our time on far less worthy things. Let’s throw our social stigma at our religious dogma. God knows what our great old retriever will bring us back!

We who live immersed in popular culture know the trinity through our secular scripture. Matrix movies present us a postmodern trinity of Morpheus, Neo, and Trinity – Laurence Fishburne the original key, Keanu Reaves the incarnation, and Trinity the beautiful woman giving some spirit to the impassive others. Leon Uris’s novel Trinity is summer holiday reading, immersing you in a tale of 3 Irish families facing the 1916 rising in Ireland. My own preference is Robbie Coltrane in Nuns on the Run trying to teach teenaged girls that ‘God is like a shamrock’. The United Church of Canada’s worship and preaching planning resources actually suggests that we tell you that the trinity is like ‘3 in 1’ brand lubricant! Our karma has run over our dogma, I’m afraid.

The Anglican Book of Common Prayer still appoints the Athanasian Creed to be recited in Morning Prayer. I recited more of it aloud on Sunday, but this sample should remind you:

And the Catholic Faith is this:
That we worship one God in Trinity and trinity in Unity
Neither confounding the Persons: nor dividing the substance

There are not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated:
but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible

The continuing Presbyterians who left Kew at union in 1925, to build a church on Glen Manor, challenged us for abandoning our confessional heritage, and sliding into relativism. They retained the Westminster Confession as the standard of doctrine:

In the unity of the Godhead there be three Persons of one substance, power, and eternity:
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.

The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding;
the Son is eternally begotten of the Father;
the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.

Our Methodist forebears cut loose from much of the verbiage such as the Athanasian creeds in favour of a simpler revival of the faith and relationship to Jesus and the fellowship. Our founders of Union begun a century ago and realized in 1925 continued the pragmatism. Perhaps we have carried it too far, in dumbing down the faith in the name of rejecting sectarian dogmatism. The Catholic Encyclopedia says liberal Protestants like me are unable understand, let alone reject, revelations of mysteries of “trinity” or “proceeding” dogmas. That may be true. It may be that if we had intellectual integrity, most of us should join the Unitarian Universalists, who pushed through the consequences of enlightened rationality further than we did.

Probably the most exciting development in my adult life in ecumenism has been reconciliation on the ‘filioque clause’. Does the Holy Spirit proceed “from the Father and the Son”, or just “from the Father”? The Anglican communion agreed 20 years ago, when I worked for them too, to omit “and the Son” as a development in the creeds which alienated the Orthodox communions.
I still haven’t met anybody in United Church leadership express an informed opinion on it. Before we blithely go on our way, proud barbarians rooting in the ruins of religious traditions, let’s pause long enough to wonder what might be retrieved, if we threw our stigma at this dogma.

Religion is about the big stuff. What’s real? What’s our human meaning and purpose? Usually, we work on those sublime matters in mundane ways. We are continually shaping and reforming our social and moral norms without much explicit attention to any ultimate roots. United Church folk spend time going to meetings, helping in kitchens, singing in choirs, fixing buildings, helping those in need, and mistrust those who only talk the talk. But after all our church time, should we not be able to talk with a bit more ease about what’s real, and meaning, and purpose? People keep saying they want sermons to be uplifting, to give them practical nuggets and life lessons to take away for the week. But we also want to ways we can see, and words we can say.

“Hermeneutics” is the fancy word for ways we see and words we say, to interpret and express our experience, texts and traditions. One metaphor for hermeneutics is the lens through which we frame or see or read our reality. Dave read the St Patrick’s Breastplate prayer before the lesson, but had to borrow reading glasses from Joan at the organ. Julie read the gospel, without glasses. I preached with bifocals, but Dave couldn’t use them. Unlike most middle aged folks, my vision is getting better for reading, but I can’t see the expression on faces in the pews, especially those further away from me, without help. Try on some different glasses, so to speak, and see if they help with ways you can see, and words you can say, John’s text or Trinity dogma.

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the religious.
He came to Jesus by night…

Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?”
Jesus answered him “Are you a teacher if Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

The religious leader, a United Church type, comes to Jesus by night, and admits “I don’t get it”. There’s the first step in any recovery program, admitting you don’t get it. Religious discourse doesn’t work when it starts with claims that we do get it, or that the other people don’t get it. This text includes some ‘greatest hits’ phrases of modern piety, that I’ll return to later, but Sunday we kept returning to a rhythmic recital of this mantra of hermeneutics:

YES…BUT…YES…BUT…YES…BUT…

Fred Lawrence of Boston College, writing on hermeneutics in general, suggests there were three great turning points in the way the western world saw and said reality, meaning and purpose:

1. After the canon of bible books closed, and after the creeds of the great ecumenical councils were voted, great voices expressed the “hermeneutics of consent”. They took the texts as given, and tried to interpret them through and to their context and culture. Augustine told us how to read our bible and our creeds from North Africa in the 400’s. Thomas Aquinas developed and elaborated that catholicity. Today we prayed Patrick’s version from the 400’s. These voices were rooted in liturgical practice and the practice of love, accepting the received texts, making sense of them and applying them. My version of this academic’s “hermeneutics of consent” was the chanted mantra of YES.

2. Reformation, renaissance and enlightenment were historic contexts of Lawrence’s second turning point of how we saw and said reality in the west, as critical voices articulated their “hermeneutics of suspicion”. Spinoza, a Jewish philosopher, through Marx, Nietsche, and Freud, developed critical analysis, historical and critical approaches to history and faith, culminating in our liberal assumptions that relevance to our own experience and feeling was a test for the authority of texts and traditions. At the risks of relativism, historicism, and subjectivism, the “hermeneutics of suspicion” responded with a mantra of BUT.

3. The 20th century, while playing out the ideas of suspicion in violent historical events, produced a “hermeneutics of integration”. After Heidegger, disillusioned in Germany, came generations of Kierkegaard, Barth, Arendt and Gadamer, framing existential, neo-orthodox attempts to follow critique with assimilation, in circles of ‘faith seeking understanding’. (Carlyle’s 19th century Sartor Resartus sure looks like a premature integrated circle to me.) Latin American and feminist liberation theologies took these circles of action and reflection further in their own contexts with the “hermeneutics of integration”, our own mantra:
YES…BUT…YES…BUT…YES…BUT…

That’s hardly fair to the academic sources, but was intended to invite you to a rhythm of trying on different lenses or eyeglasses, before we returned to the doctrine of Trinity, or text of John 3.
God is. We see it and say it in talk about creation, reality, what is given. God is. We see it and say it in talk about incarnation, intention, intellect, word in flesh. God is. We see it and say it in talk about spirit, wisdom, will, love, passion. Does one rule the other or any flow from the other? We’re talking about reality, meaning and purpose. I’m trying to beg the metaphysical questions!

Most of our folks are pretty good at YES. We celebrate reality, created and given and relished. There’s a gut-level naïve affirmation of life amongst us, celebrating and sharing God’s good creating, redeeming and sustaining presence, ‘consenting’ to reality, meaning and purpose.

Most of us, more or less of the time, are good at BUT. We are analytical, critical, sophisticated, occasionally jaded urban people. We can exercise a healthy attitude of ‘suspicion’ in relation to reality, meaning and purpose as shrewd modern consumers.

The challenge and invitation is to get through the once-for-all YES, to escape the corrosive irony and analysis of entropic BUT, and find a celebrating, sharing rhythm together in widening circles of discourse and action, affirming and shaping reality, meaning and purpose as a constructive process of construing or making sense together in penultimate ways with ultimate consequences:
YES…BUT…YES…BUT…YES…BUT…
Trinity: YES…BUT…YES…BUT…YES…BUT…
On Trinity Sunday, let’s approach the doctrine within that community of discourse and action. Doctrine is not demanding consent, nor subordinated to suspicion, but a way to see and say more about reality, meaning, and purpose. The metaphysical and ontological nature of God is as the creeds say, “incomprehensible”, and phenomenologically and epistemologically “unknowable”. The creedal affirmations are about us. What will we see and say? The economics of relationship within your trinity are related, however inarticulately, to your economic life and relationships to reality, meaning and purpose – creating, redeeming, sustaining, what is given, intended, willed.

When we baptize infants here, we several alternate sets of words for ‘the triune God’, but once each time, we baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Feminist critique is valid about exclusive masculine images of God. So is the critique of other communions who say our ‘creating, redeeming, sustaining’ sounds like one God acting in three modes, not trinity. This is an affirmation of belonging, not only to universal humanity, nor merely to our local club, but to a circle of discourse and action that shares this way of seeing and saying things about God.

So also we use prayer talk of God “of” this or that, or generalized “spirituality of spirituality” language. Like Patrick in Ireland in the 400’s, we include in our prayers many names, and we affirm the trinity to keep in a wider circle of discourse and action, beyond our barbaric tribe. When our prayers ask that “all creation to praise God’s name”, it’s not an appeal that they accept our name for God and abandon their own. However, our heritage includes mysteries like trinity, and sometimes we need to get past our enlightened rationality of “but” with older affirmations.

John 3: YES…BUT…YES…BUT…YES…BUT…
Most people these days reduce John 3 to “born again” and “believe and be saved”. That’s not what John said, but the result of modern “hermeneutics” or ways of seeing and saying things about reality, meaning and purpose. Even, or particularly, the so-called “conservatives” get stuck in liberal assumptions that what matters is my experience, subjective feeling and belief. This suspicious way of reading reality is presented as “yes”, but sure acts like “but”, particularly in its attitudes and threats in relation to the other, nor sharing our experience, feeling, or belief.

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the religious.
He came to Jesus by night…

Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?”
Jesus answered him “Are you a teacher if Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

Change your glasses. Look through another set of lenses to frame what John shows Nicodemus. Paradigm shifts are asked of us, or at least empathy for those working out of different paradigms. Today, I recognize more in John 3 about the trinity than I set out to find. Nicodemus sees signs, and asks how to read his reality. How do flesh, water and spirit relate? How does Jesus’ person and work relate to God, creator of all? How has one uniquely “ascended to heaven”, who uniquely descended from heaven, proceeding? What’s born from what, who’s born from whom?

Anglican Primate Ted Scott, used to ask people who used John 3:16 as a slogan ‘What’s 3:17?’ Get away from ‘born again’, ‘believe and save’. Get with God, who did not set out to condemn the world, or save born again believers, but to save the world. Start with making sense in circles together of earthly things, construing them, constructively, together. Heavenly things will follow. Join the dancing circles of action reflection: YES…BUT…YES…BUT…YES…BUT…AMEN Read more...