Acts 2:1-11
Psalm 8:1-9
John 7:37-52,8:12

Batter My Heart,
Three-Person'd God

Today we celebrate grace and power falling down from Heaven upon each of us and all with the giving of the Holy Spirit. Our feast, therefore, observes the greatest Theophany: the fullness of God the Holy Spirit proceeding from God the Father, following the Incarnation of God the Son. It is Trinity Sunday, therefore, even as we remember a Thunder of Wind and Tongues of Fire descending.

I say fullness, for Descent of the Holy Spirit, like the Incarnation of God, is a singular event, described by St. Luke as like no other. — a Person of the Triune God Who will Comfort and Counsel and Console, Who will guide us and remind us of all the Son has taught us. A theologian might point out that the Son and Holy Spirit have been with us all along. Did not the Eternal Word of God create the Heavens and the earth? Was it not the Son Who revealed Himself on Sinai with all the range of human emotion? (It is a heresy to believe that God the Father, Serene and Unperturbable, is emotional.) And the Holy Spirit, too. Did not the Holy Spirit inspire the Sacred Scriptures and act as a Guiding Spirit from the beginning? "Who spake by the prophets" (which we say every day)?

The answer of course is, Yes. As our Creed affirms They have been with us ... but not as Persons Who are present to us. In that sense our great festal observances of the Incarnation at Christmas and the Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost are celebrations about us, about these outsized gifts that we have received. And today we declare with renewed vigor, ours is a personal faith, a one-on-one faith, as no other. For it is a relationship among Persons, the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity and each of us. For this a mathematics of mystery. Each Person of the Trinity is Three, for Each is fully present wherever there is One. Is our God Three or Nine? And the answer is always Yes ... but never six. And there is us for the Holy Trinity also includes a Person Who is fully human, eternally fully human even as He is eternally fully God. But this is the mysterious math of humility. For He is always One in divinity and humanity, never two. Astonishingly, we humans are intrinsically part of the Holy Trinity by way of an intimacy intended by Love and then forged in Love, through, the Son's Self-giving and sufferings. And still He bears those wounds of crucifixion and torture ... for us.

The Holy Spirit has always been present through human history. And we cherish His great gift, the inspired Sacred Scriptures. It was a gift not given on a day, but rather a long, flowing stream, whose headwaters bubbled up in the earth during pre-history, with the first sentences of Genesis, and continued to flow right up through Jesus' lifetime, for the Hebrew Bible was still being added to during the first century. (A remarkable fact ... that the canon of Hebrew Scripture was still open and changing at the time God's Son was born.) We Christians would add that this flowing river continued through the end of the Apostolic Age, with the inspiration and composition of the New Testament.

We are all aware that year after year for thousands of years, the greatest author of all-time is our Triune God, and His literary masterpiece is the Bible. But relatively few have read His book. As we might anticipate from such an author, it is an exciting read, full of twists and turns, high drama and reversals. And the subject turns out to be ... everything. Indeed, anyone who gives him- or herself over to it discovers uncannily that it is about him or her ... much more than that: it is an opening them up and a laying them bare:

A surprising read, to be sure. What book was ever like this? But even greater surprises lie ahead, for in the past two thousand years people have sought out the Scriptures to speak into their lives, even deciding the most consequential choices of their lifetimes, and like the great Oracle that it is (Rom 3:2), it is not be toyed with — but living and active. Collisions of expectation are its hallmark, for it is never "about" what it is about. And the Good Book is good only in the sense that it is God's.

Surprised? What is the first adjective that comes to mind when you think of the Bible? Religious? Well, no, in fact, it rejects religion, forbids it! Yes, its background stories are steeped in religion. We learn about Ashur, the god of the great Assyrian Empire, and Marduk, worshiped by the Bablyonian Empire, and the many gods of Egypt and Baal whose countless prophets Elijah mocked and ridiculed. Soon the Romans would arrive forcing the whole world to reckon with their gods, even the worship of their emperor (of all things!). All the landscapes we roam through in the Bible are so thickly settled with idols and their temples that the Ten Commandments open with a remarkable scene: God sweeps them off the table with one pass of His sovereign hand.

But that was false religion, we might say, not true religion! Surely, God does not include the religion of His own people of Himself in this prohibition! Well, consider that the Jewish religion was a cultus of sacrifice. Bulls and goats were offered en masse in the Temple with the gutters of the Altar running thickly with blood. And then we take up God's bestselling Book and read an ancient section known as the Psalms and find this:

Yes, a new Temple appears, but not a new religion. For it is not a religion of rules and regulations, but rather it is a a way of life. And that is its earliest name: the Way. It is not a cultus but rather a relationship, a love relationship so deep that, in a mysterious mathematics, two become one.

Do you know about two becoming one? Have you ever fallen in love? Have you ever met that one who is your moon and your stars? That one whom you thought you would never meet? So high, so pure, so ... perfect in every way? Your greatest desire is that you two might become one. But to be worthy of so wonderful a creature ... this is the great aspiration of your lifetime. So you say (to her or him), "Open my lips" (Ps 51:15). Tell me what to say, that my words be perfect and sweet to your ears. "Create in me a clean heart" (Ps 51:10), that my love be worthy and high and pure like yours, that we might be one heart. "Put a new ... spirit within me (Ps 51:10)," that my spirit might become holy like yours. For my utmost wish is to be one mind and one spirit with you. (Of course, I have been reading from Psalm 51.)

Pope Benedict XVI wrote that Christianity is not a religion of the book. It is an encounter, an encounter with a Person, Jesus of Nazareth. When His disciples asked Him to teach them to pray, as John the Baptist had taught his own disciples to pray, He shocked them and then changed the whole human lifeworld ... with two words: "Our Father." No, these are not the mantras of religion, nor the spells or charms of the magic religions of Jesus' time. This is ... relationship. And not just any relationship, but nothing less than the unconditional nurture and care of mother-and-father. Love. Yes, Jews had called God their Father before, but not like this. For a new understanding of God was opening before the world, one that was always present in His Book but never discerned rightly nor understood.

This is not religion. It is love: active, feeling, living, breathing, love. And we are to be God's beloved children! As Pope Benedict has written, no other religion in the world, or in human history, is like this — an intimate, personal, love relationship with God. This alone is found in Christianity, that astonishing gathering of Three Persons in God ... and each of us.

But, then, in the midst of this most pure and transcendent love, appears a twist in the story that no one saw coming. What?! How can this be? Destroy God's own Son, His only-begotten?! Is this to be humankind's response to Divine Love?

Then, comes another twist: we are forgiven, pardoned for the highest crime in human history. We are forgiven and then invited to become God's sons and daughters, too. Who could have written this story, if not God? God the Father, our loving parent who conceived us and created us; God the Son, Who journeyed to a far and dangerous land, pouring out His Divinity that He might cross our forbidding borders with a passport purchased through suffering ... all because His brothers and sisters were held ransom by a great and cruel lord. God the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Counselor, the Teacher, the Healing Guide, the Giver of Life, numbering the hairs on our heads, surrounding us with angels, and trying to shepherd us to the Father, Who waits by a roadside, looking for signs of our return. No. This is not religion, nor a rule book. This is the greatest love the world has ever known. And its only law is pure and high love.

To borrow from John Donne's famous poem,