June 11, 2006, First Sunday after Pentecost, Trinity Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Ezekiel 37: 1-14; John 15: 26-27, 16: 12-1
Every Trinity Sunday preachers throughout all Christendom stand up and
try to say something intelligent about what is ultimately an unintelligible mystery.
What do we really, truly know about the way the Trinity works? Does it even
exist? How can we know?
Someone asked about unanswered prayer at Prayer of the Heart this week.
She is reading a book about the Bubonic Plague and thinking of all the tens of
thousands of people who prayed to save those they loved who nevertheless
suffered and died. We can think of any situation today—the genocide in Darfur,
the war in Iraq or the Pacific Island nations praying that global warming may stop
raising the sea that is submerging their homeland. Millions and millions of
prayers go up from the earth everyday that seem to be of no avail.
If the Trinity or any one of the three exists, why are so many prayers for
peace and well-being left unanswered? This question has led some people to
decide that there is no God, there is no Christ still living in the world, there is no
Holy Spirit with any real power. Faith is a lie. Hope is a cheat. Love is a weak
and passing thing.
What can we say to such words of despair? If we point to prayers that have
been answered, I am afraid the numbers are against us. Kathryn Kuhlman was an
American faith-healer in the mid-twentieth century whose prayer cured thousands
of people, including some spectacular, doctor-verified miracles. But she was as
baffled by it as anyone. She could not explain why nine out of ten of the people
who came to her to be helped went away with no apparent improvement.
The numbers are against us, and someone is always ready to explain away
even the few apparent miracles as coincidence or placebo effect. Personal
testimony is similarly weak.
An evangelical preacher once told me of a miracle of answered prayer that
happened to him. He went into a hospital in the Midwest to visit a heart patient
who was in a cardiac care unit. His parishioner was out having a procedure done,
but the preacher noticed that the patient in the other bed looked afraid. So the
preacher started talking to him, asking him if he was right with God and if he had
been born again with Jesus. The patient became quite agitated and said how bad a
person he had been, and the preacher saw an opportunity to do something. He
prayed to be able to save this man. Then he warned the man that if he died with
all his sins on his soul he would surely go to hell. The heart patient got even more
agitated at that and began to weep.
The preacher turned on the pressure and told the patient that if he would
only accept Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior, he would surely go to heaven.
“Do you accept Jesus?” he kept asking urgently as the man wept and moaned and
said how bad he had been. Finally the patient said, “Yes, Yes, I accept him.” The
preacher began a prayer, asking Jesus to forgive the man’s terrible sins and save
him from the eternal fire of hell, but in the middle of it the patient’s chest heaved
and his monitors screamed their alarms and the nurses rushed in with their life-
saving equipment.
They could not save him. He died right there and then. The preacher told
me proudly that God had answered his prayer. The preacher said, “ That poor man
was about to die and go to hell, and just in time God helped me save him.” But all
I could think was, “You didn’t save him, you killed him!” Jesus didn’t brow-beat
poor sinners to death, he loved them to life!
Maybe the preacher was right, or maybe I was right, but that is my point.
Personal testimony of how God has answered prayer does not prove anything. It
may feel good and be important to tell our story, but we are human, and capable of
misinterpreting even what we experience ourselves. Neither outside evidence nor
inside evidence nor any other argument has ever proven the existence of God. In
fact, the argument is often far stronger for despair than for faith or hope.
Yet to me, this is the closest thing to a sure knowledge of God that I have
found—those moments when, in spite of lack of evidence, we rise above despair.
In spite of everything, something enables us to say yes. To me, that something is
the Trinity at work.
In the Gospel of John Jesus said he had things to tell us that we could not
bear, but the Spirit of Truth would come from God and guide us into all truth.
Maybe this is what Corrie ten Boom was talking about after she was released from
the Nazi death camps where so many members of her family died. She said that
no matter how deep we go into the pit of suffering, we find that Jesus is waiting
there. The pit of suffering has something to tell us that we cannot bear, but in that
pit the Spirit of Truth comes from God and guides us to what we need to know and
comforts us so we can bear it. If you want to know something about the Trinity
and how it works, don’t look up toward heavenly glory. Look down in the pit of
suffering and despair. Don’t be like that evangelical preacher trying to pressure
people out of the pit. Crawl down in there with them and try to see things with
their eyes, and you will be of more use to them and you will learn more truth.
This is why some of the greatest teachers we have about God who is and
how God works are members of 12 Step groups like Alcoholics Anonymous.
They know that a higher power exists that can give them peace and well-being
because they have been to the rock bottom of the pit. God has lifted them up when
everything in them was bent on self-destruction.
God asked Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, “Mortal, can these bones
live?” And Ezekiel gave an honest answer. He said, “God knows.” But when
God told him to talk to the bones and prophesy that God would make them live
again, Ezekiel found the courage to try. And the bones rattled together and sinew
and flesh wrapped around them, but they still did not have breath in them. And
Ezekiel believed enough to try again, and the breath came into them from the four
winds, and the Spirit lived in them.
Maybe you have experienced the Godless despair of feeling like a pile of
dry bones yourself.
Maybe the Christian church looks like a pile of dry bones to you
sometimes—especially the progressive church right now.
Maybe the America of your dearest ideals looks like a pile of dry bones, as
Israel looked to Ezekiel—parched by the scorching sun of our own practice of
torture, domestic spying, secret CIA prisons, immoral, unjust war, tax cuts for the
rich and program cuts for the poor.
“Mortal, can these bones live?”
God only knows. Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes dry bones turn
to dust, for individuals and churches and empires alike. Maybe we will pray and
pray and our prayer will go unanswered. But we need to pray anyway. We need
the courage to pray because even though the odds are against us, what if this is the
one out of a million times that prayer will work?
Unanswered prayer does not mean that God does not want what we want.
God may want it, too, but the force of evil or human free will may be getting in the
way. Maybe our prayer adds another needed human will to God’s will, and when
enough of us are on God’s side, God’s will may prevail.
Most importantly, we need to pray because even when prayer is
unanswered, and even when we are praying for the wrong thing, prayer always
makes us able to make the best of what happens, to turn all things to the good,
even if they stay bad. This is true because prayer leads us to the place where we
can best know the sacred way of God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Prayer leads us not up but down. It puts us on our knees. It puts us in the
dust. It leads us into the pit of the human condition. Prayer puts us into right
relationship with God because whether it is a prayer of thanks or petition or
wordless meditation, prayer acknowledges that we are weak and God is strong, we
are the creatures and God is the creator. Prayer opens us to the possibility of
something greater than us working through us, the possibility of something
miraculous happening, the possibility of God making dry bones live, the
possibility of the Spirit of truth teaching us what we cannot otherwise know, the
possibility of Jesus filling our dry, dark hearts with love and light. Even when
prayer is apparently unanswered, it can always change us if we pray with true
humility. It can always bring us down to where God is waiting to lift us up.
And then we will know. Whether we live or whether we die, we will know.
Evidence or no evidence, we will know the truth.
Let us pray in silence. It almost doesn’t matter what you pray for or how
you pray as long as it involves the humility of looking to God, Jesus Christ and the
Holy Spirit as entities of goodness beyond your power of strength or
understanding. That attitude leads to the sacred way. Let us pray…
Sermon 06/11/2006