The plunge

Trinity Sunday 2013
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CTrinity_RCL.html


Every morning that I drop my spouse off at her teaching job in the West Hills, I get back on the Hawthorne Bridge going east. At the top of the on-ramp, there is a “primo” corner for a panhandler that is always empty.

Up until last Fall it was always occupied. There sat Kirk Reeves, the “trumpet man”, clad in a white suit and Mickey Mouse hat. He played his trumpet and opened and closed a colorful collapsing plastic toy globe, or worked a hand puppet. Kirk inhabited that corner with whimsy and his own personal magic, and the day was only complete when you caught sight of him. Without words or a sign, Kirk called out with his simple, enchanting presence to all of us who were filled with our busy, distracted lives. No matter where your thoughts or attention were as you endured yet another commute, Kirk invited you ceaselessly into another reality, one of joy and surprise and pathos and sadness and compassion as well.

Tragically, Kirk ended his life last November. But for those of us who were touched by him, that eloquent empty corner still calls us and reminds us of joy and magic and of a human being whose life and struggle was lived in our midst.

“Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights, beside the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
"To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.”

Like a gentle clown at the crossroads, the divine Lady Wisdom, she whom the Church identifies with the divine Son of the Trinity, also calls to the depths of our souls. Come near, listen, and live.

Today is Trinity Sunday, the most dreaded day of the preaching year. I cut my teeth on four consecutive Trinity Sundays during the four years of my curacy in St. Louis. Bob Skinner, the rector, would grin maliciously and growl, “You’re up, Neilson.” Bob had no wish, as he said, to “preach on a doctrine.” That very word “doctrine” sets off alarm bells for people, as if something dry and abstract said with the weight of some distant authority is about to be expounded. So today is analogy-day, and somewhere someone is probably trotting out the old Saint Patrick legend about the shamrock—three leaves, one plant—or other images taken from here or there.

All of these attempts do just what we do not want to waste time on—making God the Three into some intellectual puzzle that we trot out once a year. In the end, any “explanation” is so inadequate that it flirts with heresy. The deeper the mystery, the more we impoverish it with our explanations. The simple truth is that God the One in Three is a revealed mystery, a profound reality that we cannot ever get to the bottom of with our very limited minds. The one God is Three persons. At the depth of God is dynamic relationship. The stillness of God is found in the depth of endless love given and received, endless knowledge shared and returned.

We are in that reality, encompassed by it, blessed and created and re-created by it. The simple image that comes to me is that of a diver plunging with confidence into a pool from a high board. The best way to get the Trinity is not to think, but to plunge.

But whatever attempt we make to plunge, to enter the mystery as close to us as water is to a fish, cannot come close to the Trinity’s ceaseless attempt to plunge into us.

Holy Lady Wisdom calls out ceaselessly to us, as gentle and as vulnerable as Kirk Reeves on his on-ramp street corner. “Come, come with me, I who was present always at the heart of God.” The eternal Word of God is not just “with God” as the Gospel of John says, but is “toward God”, ceaselessly moving in love and desire to the heart of the Father. The power and passion of that movement is God the Spirit. This Spirit is given to us, poured out in us, given not as a measured dose but completely, in generosity and trust. A contemporary writer points out that one of the Greek roots of the word we translate as “God” is “to leap.”* God the Father longs for the Son, breathes forth the Spirit, the Son ever longs for the Father and moves deeper into the Father’s heart. And God longs for us, leaps powerfully over any obstacle that we imagine prevents us from seeing and experiencing God. God makes the leap, and yet does not overpower, does not coerce. God the Three, in whom we swim and soak, yet calls out to us in love and longing and sadness and humor and joy and delight all at once. Come, come be inflamed, come join my life. Come hear my voice, and take my hand, and plunge into my depths.

Come take the plunge today. If your feet feel heavy, let the Spirit bounce the diving board for you. Come hear the voice that calls out, with sadness and joy, unnoticed on the street corner as we pass by with our forgettable errands. Come plunge into the depths of life beyond life, delight beyond delight.


*Clement, Olivier The Roots Of Christian Mysticism (2nd edition). Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2013, p. 32.