You Can't HANDLE the Truth!

Texts:  Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31; Romans 5: 5b;  John 16: 12-15
       

Picture first that court martial scene in A Few Good Men as Tom Cruise relentlessly demands the truth from the infuriated Jack Nicholson, who finally barks back that famous line, "You can't handle the truth!" 

Although stated with an entirely different tone to make an entirely different point, Jesus said essentially the same thing to his followers just before his arrest and trial. 

Picture now the last supper scene in John's Gospel as the disciples question where Jesus is going and how they'll be able to follow him (John 14).  Jesus gently, perhaps wistfully, responds: "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 15:12). In other words: "You can't handle the truth; you can't take in the 'whole truth and nothing but the truth'." 

Then he adds, "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” (John 15:13).

I wonder how often there is more truth available to me--were I prepared to handle it. But receiving truth in limited doses is, I suppose, a blessing. How comforting to know that Jesus felt compassion for his followers who weren't ready to hear the fullness of his truth. How hopeful to hear a promise that more was/is yet to come from the Spirit of Truth that animated Jesus's life and that guides us today with a Still Speaking Voice. I'm not expected to have figured out everything. I can be at peace when I have received all that my little mind and heart and spirit can bear--and no more.  Yet I can be expectant that there is more.  We can believe, as one of our UCC forebears said in 1620: “There is yet more light and truth to break forth” (John Robinson).

In my personal life, there have been times when I protected myself from difficult questions for fear my worldview would change too much, for fear I would have to delve deeper in my own emotional life than I was prepared to go, for fear I would leave my old self behind and never find my way back to that me, for fear I might discover a God bigger than I could handle.  At other times I have simply been so weighted with my own needs that I've missed transformative experiences with others that could have deepened my spirit.  I was too distracted by my hurts, preoccupations, or prejudices to listen deeply to someone else's truth.  I've not always welcomed new truth.

In a more cosmic sense, I believe Truth has many more things to say to humanity, but we are not able to bear them now. Just to consider that the universe is literally expanding, that it includes black holes and dying suns and subatomic particles and perhaps parallel universes, wormholes through space, and intelligent life on other planets--is more than most of us can handle. If the theory of evolution challenged us theologically 150 years ago, what are the theological implications for quantum physics?  We can't bear the thought quite yet--not because such a universe appalls but because it is astonishingly unfathomable. 

Culturally, too, there are limits on truth.  Human cultures have taught not only what is true but also how to know truth.  However—and we often forget this—the truth we know is always partial and culturally-mediated. As culture changes, so do our understandings of what is true and how we know what is true. It’s not simply that we accumulate new facts but that we put on new lenses that change how we see things.

I’m oversimplifying, but I ask you to consider that in pre-literate cultures, truth--or Wisdom--was apprehended through stories or sayings handed down or through dreams divined. The book of Proverbs, from which we read earlier, is an example of a type of trusted ancient wisdom or godly truth that was based on sage sayings. A wise person was one who could deliver the perfect aphorism or parable for the right situation. Sayings and stories and dreams—spoken by an authoritative figure like a shaman, elder, priest, or prophet—transmitted the truth.*

When cultures shifted from oral to written communication, the printed word became the ultimate arbiter of Truth.  Religious and political leaders eventually began grounding their declarations of truth in printed words.  Laws were written down. Our democratic system evolved when printed words allowed even the average person to pin down complex ideas long enough to follow a logical argument--and later to hold someone accountable for his or her argument. Wisdom written down allowed laws that were more than rulers' whims to gain power and stability.  And Wisdom printed by a printing press allowed for laws and philosophies behind them to develop and be distributed to more and more people. Truth in print, of course, has given us the false impression that what is printed is Truth.  So once again we see the limits of Truth within our culture's primary conveyance of truth.

Some culture watchers argue that the current vehicle for truth is the image.  A picture’s worth a thousand words, you know.  And now they say, “If you don’t have a picture of it, it didn’t happen.” Events that matter are those that are televisible. Our phones are cameras. Courtroom evidence is a video. We click on icons or touch pictures to operate our computers. Some hear sermons on television where the preacher’s image and personality fill up the whole screen. Some go to church to see video clips on a big screen so that even religion is picture-based. Pictures offer a truth that is more emotionally charged but maybe less rationally developed. Each new medium for delivering Truth expands and contracts what we can know.

As the general culture has reconsidered how it receives Truth, so has Christianity. The first authority for Christian Truth in a largely oral culture was found in the sayings of Jesus, passed on by word of mouth to followers who eventually incorporated them into the pages of Gospel accounts. Later, authoritative figures who stood on top of those sayings became the arbiters of God's truth, and others stood on top of them, until the Church's truth eventually was determined by a powerful hierarchy. 

When once again culture shifted, it was neither Jesus’s sayings nor papal authority that determined Truth for many Christians.  It was, in the slogan of the Protestant Reformation, sola scriptura—or "only scripture."  The Bible, now available in print to the many, became the chief repository of Godly truth and wisdom.  “No one can tell me what to believe,” Protestants protested. “I’ll read it for myself.” But how was the Bible to be interpreted?  Making Christian scripture the ultimate authority for Truth had its own limits. So by the 18^th Century John Wesley argued that spiritual discernment happens best when we consult scripture, tradition, reason, and our own lived experience.

What would you say is the primary way we today determine spiritual truth?  At some level our image-based culture, as I suggested earlier, drives how we deliver and receive religious truth today.  But another contemporary arbiter of Truth is found in our general culture and increasingly in religious life: community. In popular culture today, the World Wide Web is our icon for a vast and interrelated network of information that holds our wisdom. The Arab Spring last year demonstrates the power of these vast but loosely organized connections.  At Open Table, our emphasis on group discernment—which trusts the members of our faith community to find truth together collaboratively—reflects our own preference for an ancient/modern method for discerning what is true. Two heads are better than one.  There’s a theological presupposition that the Spirit of Truth works in community and that we, the Body of Christ, are all interrelated in some fundamental way, that there is unity across our many differences. We are committed to hearing even, or especially, the voices on the margins, because Truth lies there, too. Are there limits to this communal way of knowing?  Of course. 

But on this Trinity Sunday, I suggest that a communal approach to Truth is very Trinitarian. The Trinity is a picture of the Sacred as a diverse yet united community that seamlessly, eternally communes: Parent, Son, Spirit picture a mysteriously united and yet distinct pattern for Truth.

If the Trinity is True, then it's true more as a picture of loving community than as a doctrine to be developed through entirely rational argumentation.

If the Trinity is Truth, then our generation may see that truth best as relationship.  All that needs to be known and treasured and enacted is ultimately found in some pattern of relationship: as one atomic particle bonds with another, as one planet pulls its moon into a regular orbit, as one human paradoxically retains her distinct identity while being shaped by others in the community.

If the Trinity imparts truth, then truth comes also through ongoing revelations.  All that needed to be understood about God had not been shared by the time Jesus said farewell to his followers.  Truth continues to unfold—as we see through science and religion.  God’s “truth is marching on.”  But Truth is a messy and boisterous process. Recall the words of Lady Wisdom we read earlier as she strides forth: 

“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.”

Lady Wisdom, long associated with the Holy Spirit, does not stay home. She’s assertively active.

Jesus shared his truth but believed there would be other vehicles for sacred truth so that his Spirit would continue to prick consciences and nudge loving actions and teach creative ways of nonviolence and connect us to one another and inspire us to work for justice. The way Truth would get told would be through humanity's messy engagement in life.  To sit across from Jesus in the passive mode of listener had its limits.  We understand truth in the context of our daily interactions. 

In the fictional world of A Few Good Men, we observe several understandings of Truth. Truth is known in Jack Nicholson’s world--that is, the world of his character, Colonel Jessup--through slogans and unwritten rules like the Code Red and authority figures in a military chain of command.  But truth requires that authority be questioned, whatever the authority du jour.

Truth is known also in the world of the JAG corps in which Tom Cruise’s character operates. The US Constitution, formal military codes, even letters and a flight schedule are used as evidence and thus attest to power of the written word to tell us what is true. Yet these written truths require interpretation.

Ultimately, the audience plays its role as the ultimate determiner of truth. The film, you see, ends ambiguously. The Marines on trial are found not guilty of criminal charges but are dishonorably discharged. So it’s a hollow victory for the defendants and for their attorney. Meaning it’s up to the viewers—having heard the stories, having reviewed the law, having witnessed a powerful authority speak his truth, having seen logic and reason brought to bear on a complex case—it’s up to a jury-like audience, which represents the communal way that Truth today gets determined, to decide if Truth won out.

How much easier it would be to line up behind one confident authority who’ll happily decide truth for us. 

How much richer it is to be in relationship with the Spirit of Truth.

PRAYER

Trinity of Truth, keep us humbly mindful that we can know only in part, but keep us seeking truth nevertheless.  May we see love as the brightest light for truth. Amen

*My discussion of epistemological shifts was influenced by writings of Phyllis Tickle and Brian McLaren and others but is mainly informed by Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.  (New York: Penguin Press, 1985).

To the Trinity . . . and Beyond!

Texts: Isaiah 6:1-8;  John 3:8

               For those who define Christianity as fourteen unbelievable things to believe before breakfast, the Trinity might be at or near the top of the list of unbelievable beliefs.  The lack of explicit scriptural references to the Trinity keeps the doctrine on the defense. The Trinity’s arithmetic is confounding: 1 + 1+ 1 = 1?  The begotten-but-not-made, true-God-from-true-God wording of the ancient creed fails to clarify. The 4^th Century councils that funneled all those questions about Christ’s divinity and humanity into a three-personed container labeled monotheism did not seal the lid on the matter.

              

               But I suspect 21^st Century Christians are neither particularly interested in nor entirely stumped by the three-in-one-ness of God.  We have a more general problem with the Trinity. God as a personal being is what snags some of us.  Feminist theologians, for instance, are troubled that God as a male being (Father, Son, and neutered Spirit) enshrines patriarchy and elevates men over women.  But more basic than concern about God’s gender is our skepticism that God even has gender or personhood or personality. 

               Conceiving of a too-human God might cause us to imbue our concept of the Divine with our own human limitations and prejudices and lock God in some physical realm in the sky that modern science says does not exist. Always imaging God in concrete and creaturely ways comes close to violating the second commandment against making graven images of God.  If we consistently name God as Father or King, for instance—we erect a metaphorical monument to a part of God that we eventually will mistake for God’s essence and totality.  We then worship an idol and not the living and evolving and Still Speaking God.  Whether God is one being or one being with three personas is less the issue, for me, than whether God is best imaged in any exclusively human form. 

               But that’s not to say that Isaiah’s vision of a human-like God, for example, lacks truth.  Given Isaiah’s culture, it’s understandable he experienced the Divine as a gigantic Eastern potentate, an emperor on steroids, attended by 6-winged creatures. Isaiah’s God is such a superhuman figure that the mere hem or edge of his robe completely filled the temple.  Isaiah begins describing his vision by explaining it came to him in the same year that King Uzziah died, so perhaps Isaiah was comforted to realize, through this dream, that God wields a power that earthly rulers do not.  Such a critique of earthly empires was also one of Jesus’s themes.  And especially at a time of political instability after the death of Isaiah’s king, it would have been reassuring to picture God as the ultimate and enduring ruler.  Isaiah’s emotional response to the divine—his awe—is palpable.  His specific image for God, however, may say more about the prophet’s own circumstances and values than about any essential characteristic of the Divine.  Likewise, our own images for God express partial truth without ever capturing the fullness of God.

               Last Sunday, when we celebrated Pentecost, we focused on a very different and still incomplete understanding of the divine as holy spirit or breath or wind. From John’s Gospel we hear again today that God’s movement in the world is like the invisible and uncontrollable wind that blows where it chooses (John 3:8).  John says God interacts with the world not like a person of power but like a force of nature.  Do you see how different are these 2 images of God? Which is correct?                

               We don’t have to choose.  We experience the Holy in many ways.  The perfect words or images for the sacred will always be just out of our reach--even for poets like Mary Oliver, who expresses the illusiveness of the sacred in her poem “Where Does the Temple Begin, Where does it end?”. 

There are things you can’t reach.   But

you can reach out to them, and all day long.

The wind, the bird flying away.  The idea of God.

And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

The snake slides away; the fish jumps, like a little lily,

out of the water and back in; the goldfinches sing

               from the unreachable top of the tree.

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.

Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around

               as though with your arms open.

And thinking: maybe something will come, some

               shining coil of wind,

               or a few leaves from any old tree—

                              they are all in this too.

And now I will tell you the truth.

Everything in the world

comes.

At least, closer.

And, cordially.

Like the nibbling, tinsel-eyed fish; the unlooping snake.

Like goldfinches, little dolls of gold

fluttering around the corner of the sky

of God, the blue air.[i]

              

               How do we ever hope to fathom God if poets and theologians admit they fail to find words and pictures for awe-filled experiences of the Holy?   For Christians, the human Jesus who became the eternal Christ is the best revelation we have of the divine. I’m not ready to give up all human-like mental pictures of God!  No.  Jesus remains for me the very best depiction of the Divine, and Jesus’s way of self-giving love is the very best way of enacting the Sacred.

               For that matter, the Hebrew creation story, the opening narrative of our scriptures, insists that we were created in the image of God.  So God is a part of us and, as Christian scriptures say, the Christ dwells within our very human hearts. 

               But increasingly, Christians also see a bigger God.  Not in Isaiah’s terms of a supersized human but more abstractly. So Tillich named God the Ground of All Being, the foundation upon which all that exists has being.  Others use the term Ultimate Reality because God is that which has ultimate value and is that which is really real.   I like Marcus Borg’s term The More.  Yes.  God is MORE than we can know or experience and that which is always becoming even more.  But it’s no wonder our Jewish friends do not presume to speak God’s holy name. Maybe verbs rather than nouns get us closer to saying Sacred things.  I like the Gospel of John’s active image of the blowing wind.  I like the Force of Life or the Source of Love.  Yet when we name God through activities, we’re still stuck with nouns:  Creator.  Redeemer.  Savior.  Lover.

               But here is where Trinitarian theology offers us so much more than we had assumed.  The Trinity pictures not three gods and not really even three persons as we think of persons and not so much the actions of persons—but the interactions of a "a communion of persons" (LaCugna 84).  God IS relatedness and mutual interdependence, says the Trinity, and this communal existence is what we aspire to.  To be fully human is not, according to the Trinity, a matter of self-sufficiency but instead requires mutual, self-giving communion with others[ii] (LaCugna 91).  The Divine is recognized in the actions of love.  Self-emptying love among a community of equals is the kind of love for which the Trinity is the prototype.  If I’m losing you here, let me say it again as you learned it long ago: God is love.  God is the One who gives love, and the One who receives love, and the love itself flowing between them.  God is what happens between and among loving human beings. God is loving energy and process and connection.

               The Trinity says further that love is not exclusive but is ever-enlarging.  God’s love does not close off the possibility there are new ones to love. 

               Before we turn our attention to an artistic rendering of Trinitarian love, I want to describe a more mundane example of that love.  I’ll do that by first introducing you to Julie and John, two of our daughter’s childhood Sunday school teachers, who co-taught children in ways that made everything fun and made every child special.  Actually, John was in charge of the fun; Julie was in charge of John, whose methodology the parents sometimes questioned, but whose loving influence on the childlren was undeniable.  For instance, John taught the children a not-so-secret signal to use during the worship service.  When John, a choir member, adjusted his glasses during worship just so, the children in his Sunday school class understood him to be saying “hi” to them, and they were told to reply to him by rubbing their noses. Of course, the children never knew when John would send them his signal, so his devotees probably paid more attention to his eye glasses than the pastor’s sermons.  But I think John was signaling more than “hi.”  He was saying, “You are special.”  He might have also been implying: “And I have my eye on you.”

                John and Julie made the children feel empowered when, for instance, they encouraged the children to come up with a name for their class.  For weeks they debated in secret before announcing to the church that they had become the WLSTPTWA class.  No one outside the class knew what those initials stood for. Eventually the children disclosed, with broad smiles, they were the “We’re lots smarter than people think we are” class.  At our daughter’s wedding three years ago, the former members of the “We’re Lots Smarter Than People Think We Are” class gathered for a photograph with the bride and with their adored teachers, Julie and John.

               But John and Julie had created more than enduring friendships among that group of children.  Knowingly or unknowingly, the class had practiced being the Trinity.  The opening ritual on Sunday mornings began as John greeted the first child to enter the classroom that day by offering his chair to the child. The chairs were arranged in a circle, and John sat near the door, so when the first child entered, John in effect gave up the nearest chair for that child’s convenience. When the next child entered, the first child would greet that friend by name, get up, and insist that the new child take the special chair.  If the peer politely offered to sit elsewhere, the ritual required that the one offering his or her chair would, in mock seriousness, reply, “But I insist” and gesture with a flourish. Whenever the next child entered the room, the person in the closest chair at that time would rise, welcome their friend by name, and give the best chair to them.  This was a joke, of course.  This is not how children interact.  It was a game. The children laughed at the ritual. But they also loved it.  And think about the way they came to embody in that ever-enlarging circle the self-giving love of the Trinity, which is best defined as a loving community of persons.

               The Trinity’s loving community is pictured perhaps most insightfully by the medieval icon painter, Andrei Rublev.  Study again that image of Rublev’s icon on the front page of your worship bulletin.  The 14^th Century iconographer gets it right. What his three figures capture is loving and ever inclusive interaction.  See how they incline their heads to one another in conversation.  See how they gesture as they talk.  See how their postures remain open to one another, no figure being excluded.  And see how they remain open to us, making room for the next person to join their circle.  God is not one person or three persons.  God is communion that connects us and enlarges us.  God grants space for us to enter.  The Trinity’s circle is perfect—and yet not closed, not completed.  God’s power is not through imperial commands but through gentle invitation, not for the purposes of adoration but for communion and mutual love and self-sacrifice.

               The Trinity is best understood as a picture rather than a doctrine.  It invites us not to believe certain things are true but to live out that truth.  The Trinity makes a hospitable place for us to inhabit and imitate.  In fact, “The Christian community is supposed to be itself an icon of God’s triune life” (LaCugna 106).  We are baptized into this inclusive, equal community so that we become its living icon. If we can save the Trinity from those who would turn it into a math problem or a doctrinal test, it will picture for us the community we embody. 

               I love the picture of the Trinity.  Do I believe in it?  I am living within it.  There is an infinity within the Trinity.  “To Infinity and beyond,” is the catchphrase of Buzz Lightyear.  I say, “To the Trinity—and its infinity—and beyond!”  May that circle remain open! Amen 

---

[i] Oliver, Mary.  “Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does it End?”  Why I Wake Early.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2004, 8-9.

[ii] LaCugna, Catherine Mowry.  “God in Communion With Us: The Trinity” in Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective.  Catherine Mowry LaCugna, ed.  New York: HarperCollins, 1993.   See LaCugna's interpretation of Rublev's icon.