The 'least worst explanation'

“He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. St. John 16:14-15”

In the first year of seminary, my classmates and I were sent out a few Sundays to preach in local congregations.  I drew the short straw, and was assigned to a Family Service in a rural Cotswolds village on Trinity Sunday.  The assignment was to say something orthodox and meaningful in about five minutes, and the core audience was a dozen elementary school children.  Well, I mustered my full energies, and most of what I was learning in my class on the church fathers, and put together a plan, which involved a circle dance and some half-digested fifth century Greek theology. 

I was feeling rather confident about my impending oration, and on the Saturday before Trinity Sunday, over breakfast after Mass, I announced to the congregation at Pusey House Chapel that I’d happened upon a way to explain the Trinity to kids.  Father Philip frowned over his teacup, looked me directly in the eyes and said bluntly: “If you think you have explained the Holy Trinity, young man, then clearly you’ve got it wrong.”

Presence and Power

“You know him, because he abides with you and will be in you.”  St. John 14:17

My late father had a personality that could fill a room.  We come from a family of storytellers, of gregarious men.  But Dad was unusually gifted. He worked for years as a hardware salesman, which helped him learn to feel comfortable relating to many different kinds of people, and finding just the right topic for small talk.  It made me smile to watch what would happen when he walked into a family reunion, a wedding reception or coffee hour after church.  People would immediately walk in his direction, smiles would break out, the room would grow louder and more animated as people began to speak up. 

Some people have this kind of social pull because they have to be center of attention. They dominate conversation and cultivate eccentricities that make them stand out.  But aside from being able to tell a joke really well, there wasn’t much that stood out in the way dad presented himself to others.  He didn’t interrupt or compel, but was genuinely interested in other people.  He was able to draw them toward others, to bring out what was best in people.  You might say that his presence lifted everyone else, that he infused a kind of power into gatherings that made them altogether different than they would be without him. 

"A Wider Perspective"--A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the LORD sitting upon a throne,

high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.”  Isaiah 6:1

            Erik Mebust and I had coffee together last weekend, and we talked about all his exciting plans for the next several months.  Erik will be studying literature for a term at Kings’ College in London, and I was able to give him some advice about museums, historical sites and churches.  He also has two or three weeks after his term finishes to do some travelling around the rest of Europe, and a big list of places he’s dying to see.  There’s Paris, of course, and the Rhine Valley in Germany, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to see the Alps, and he has a friend spending a term in Montpelier, down on the Mediterranean Coast.  And I was trying to slow him down a bit.  You don’t want to spend half of your time on trains, after all, and you might well be able to go back again later in life and try some of what you will need to miss this time. 

But of course, by American standards, all these places are really quite close.  This is part of the wonder of Europe to an American.  In a few hours you can travel between places whose languages, histories, foods, music, and architecture are completely different.  New York State really isn’t all that different from Minnesota.  But Spain and Poland are a world apart, and the distance is really about the same.