June 15 ~ Wisdom is Gained Through Prayer, and Listening to the Whispers from Above

Click above to watch a recording of Sunday's Sermon

The Holy Trinity

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Psalm 8

Romans 5:1-5

John 16:12-15

(The context of this sermon was 100% written in Canada by a human)

Today, most of us are celebrating or remembering our fathers and the fatherly influences in our lives, so let’s begin with this question: If you had to describe your father’s character to someone, what is the first story that pops into your mind?

For me, I remember how my father taught young men who were down and out how to build wooden canoes in the basement of the Welland church where he served. And how he would take his four sons to play soccer with the rest of the youth in the neighbourhood, to give our mom a break on Saturdays, and buy a single chocolate bar with the change he had saved up as a mission pastor, and give each person a tiny square, which was enjoyed more than the full chocolate bars other fathers could afford.

Maybe, like my wife, Erin, you have a childhood memory of your father’s selling the family’s old Toyota Tercel to the single mom and then taking it quietly to the mechanic for a tune-up before she came to pick it up. And if you are like most of us, not every story is so charming or caring. Our fathers are human; the stories we tell about them are the memories we choose to keep of them. In a 1950s essay in The Atlantic magazine, Virgina Woolf remembered her father’s magic-like ability to take scissors to paper and produce perfectly formed elephants and monkeys. Last year, in The Atlantic, writer Ross Andersen reminisced about the colourful jokes he made in public that mortified his son, and his own ferocity while playing driveway basketball.

Fathers also have their own stories to tell – throughout history they have often been the ones to detail the adventures, the family history, the hard-luck stories, stories out of a past before we knew them as our fathers. Which ones do you remember still?

And then it pays to think about why? Why these stories? Why these memories? What are we seeking to learn from our fathers – good and bad? How do these stories help us understand them, and thus ourselves?

And how can Holy Trinity Sunday – when we pray, in traditional language, to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – how can this day help us better understand these fatherly influences in our lives, and all the people we love and are yet to meet and will never know?

For starters, while we are remembering our own fathers, let us consider that one father is almost entirely absent from the gospel: Joseph. Jesus goes out in the world to preach and teach and risk his life, and we learn that his mother walks with him for much of the way, but Joseph is not there. According to our Christmas story, Joseph makes one of the boldest choices as a man of his time, and remains faithful to Mary, even with her complicated destiny; he gets her to Bethlehem; he keeps his family safe while they flee, and while Mary is still recovering from childbirth. Back in his hometown, he helps raise this unique son, and teaches him his own trade of carpentry, presumably realizing even then that Jesus would not be taking over the family business – not his earthly family business anyway. And then Joseph disappears from our story completely. It is assumed that he died before Jesus left home and began preaching, which is why Mary came alone. Perhaps the loss of his father wounded Jesus so deeply, it precipitated his heading out on the road. We never hear.

Instead, the father of Jesus in the gospel is God, which cuts down on a certain level of confusion. But if we can understand God as God, and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, then we should also remember that Jesus, who was human, carried the stories and lessons of both father and mother. As a human, Jesus walked the world with confidence, and an understanding of human behaviour, in the manner of someone who grew up knowing he was loved and taught to love, well before his adult relationship with God developed.

I know that some of you struggle with this idea of God as father. I encourage you to use whatever word speaks to you: mother, creator. The whole idea of Trinity Sunday is that God can and should be explained through many stories, and from many views. God is God, who defies a full understanding. God is Jesus, who stands with us, protects us and cares for us. And God is the Holy Spirit who exists everywhere, and who, we hope, speaks to us when we need the voice of wisdom – as described in our first lesson – or acceptance as explained in our second, or compassion, as Jesus describes.

As humans we struggle with complexity; we want a simple answer – a God who looks like Santa, sitting up in the clouds. Instead, we are given a greater gift, a sophisticated idea of God. Living in that complexity is good for us; it leads to wisdom, which is ultimately the humble acceptance of what we do not know and never will.

I suspect for many of us, it is the same with our fathers and fatherly influences. Our dads are both knowable and unknowable, present and also untouchable. If your dad is still around, I encourage you to ask some of these questions: what gave your life meaning? what are your regrets? what are the moments you felt happiest? when did you feel closest to God? If your father is no longer with you, reflect on those stories that you remember; in them lies meaning. And in that meaning – our clearer, more compassionate understanding of one another – we learn to savour what we know and accept what we don’t. This is what Trinity Sunday teaches: God is a complicated ideal, and we do not have to know everything for certain; we need only to seize the wisdom however it comes to us -- in our prayers from above, in the whisper of a story from the Holy Spirit, and in the loving, imperfect humans, who, like Jesus, walked life with us, and did their best. Amen