Homily for Sunday, May 31st Graves Chapel
When the prophet
Elijah runs away to the wilderness, afraid for his life, he finds a cave in
which to hide on Mt. Horeb. It is there the Lord reveals his power to Elijah,
first in a rock-splitting wind and then in an earthquake and then in a raging
fire. After the disasters, there
is the sound of sheer silence and finally a still, small voice. We don’t know
whether Elijah found that silence and the quiet voice the most terrifying of
all; what we do know is that after the voice speaks, Elijah obeys the Lord.
Having the Lord
speak to us directly sounds both terrifying and glorious. I had an experience of hearing what I
believe to have been the Lord’s voice when I was a teenager. I won’t share the
entire story now, but the voice I heard was very clear, as if surrounded by
silence and power, and the message was brief. It was a life-altering moment for
me—and it happened in a noisy gym at a high school basketball game.
There is a long
tradition, and maybe it begins with this Old Testament story, of thinking of
the Lord as speaking to us, either directly or through an angel. In fact, I
remember seeing cartoons that show a person with an angel on one shoulder,
whispering in his ear, and the devil doing the same on the other shoulder. In this kind of scenario, the human in
the middle appears to be helpless while the Deity and the devil duke it out. Some
of us may be old enough to remember comedian Flip Wilson saying, “The Devil
made me do it.” Flip, like the rest
of us, had nothing to do with the choice he made, right?
How do we sort out
the constant stream of thoughts, often competing for our attention, inside our
heads? Sometimes those thoughts
are certainly things I’d never want to say out loud! Careless thoughts can lead us down a path we should never
follow. Often our thoughts define us. Seventeenth century French philosopher
Rene Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” In this faster than the speed of light
21st century, when technology seems to drive all we do, do our thoughts
really make us who we are? These
days it can be hard to focus on any one thing for any length of time. In such chaos, where thoughts dart
around like pinballs, how can we ever discern the Lord’s voice?
The short answer
is with effort—and the Lord’s help. Dave is now part of a centering prayer
group that meets on Tuesday mornings, and both of us practice contemplative
prayer every day. Today’s theologians are returning to some of the oldest
practices of prayer and meditation from the early church. The University of Virginia now has a
Contemplative Sciences Center. People are hungry for a quieter closeness to
God. We hunger to hear and understand God’s voice.
Last Sunday was
Pentecost, the celebration of the founding of the church. On Pentecost, the
Holy Spirit descended in a rush of wind, and flames landed on each of the
disciples. They began to speak in the tongues of all those gathered nearby, so
that everyone who heard them could understand what they said. As the resurrected
Jesus had promised them before he left them, the Holy Spirit appeared to them
and entered them. Jesus said, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide
you into all truth.”
That same spirit inhabits
us, as promised first in the Old Testament. The prophet Jeremiah wrote these
words of the Lord about his people: “I will put my laws in their minds and
write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my
people.” Even so, like us, God’s people had a hard time listening. When Jesus
sent the Spirit to inhabit and guide the disciples, did He formalize
that part of ourselves that we modern disciples name “consciousness” or
“conscience”? He called this spirit “the Advocate,” and an advocate is a guide,
a guardian, a friend. Christ gave us a way to recognize and
follow this voice of love and goodness, a way to discern the voice of God
speaking within us. Now the ability to hear God’s voice is always available to
us when we bring it to the forefront of our minds and don’t allow God to be crowded
out by the myriad voices of our own self-centeredness. The Holy Spirit, God, dwells within
us, but until Jesus made that powerfully clear to his disciples, we had no
formal way of acknowledging the ever-present “still, small voice” among the clamor
of other voices.
In
our first hymn today, we sang, “Holy, Holy, Holy, merciful and mighty, God in
three persons, perfect Trinity.” Today is Trinity Sunday. How do we explain God
as “three persons”? Twelfth century monastic Richard
of St. Victor wrote of the Trinity, “For God to be truth, God had to be one;
for God to be love, God had to be two; and for God to be joy, God had to be
three!” Truth, love, joy—without
someone with whom to share these things, do they have meaning? How do we share
and experience truth, love, and joy in our own loves, except in our
relationships with each other?
The collect for
today, also an ancient prayer, says, “Almighty and everlasting God, you have
given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to
acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine
majesty, to worship the Unity.”
Unity. As Richard of St. Victor suggested, the Trinity shows us
that God is a relationship. Isn’t it hard to imagine the amount
of love that passes among the Father, the Son, and the Spirit? Contemporary theologian Richard Rohr
says, the Trinity is a “fountain overflowing with love.” As relationship,
God is a community of three, and when we share bread at God’s table, when we
gather together for worship or just for fun, when we share truth, love, and joy
with one another, we join that community as God’s partners and make God visible
in the world.
Paul says in today’s selection from his
letter to the Romans, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of
God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery, to fall back into fear, but
you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba, Father!’ it is that
very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if
children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
The Trinity is a
community and a family of many, joined together in the Unity of One!
Amen.
