A Story of Touch (July 1 2012)

Homily:  Yr A P13, July 1 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  2 Sam 1:1, 7-27; Ps 72:1-8; 2 Cor 8:7-15; Mk 5:21-43

You might be forgiven for thinking that today’s gospel is meant to teach us that Jesus is a great healer.  After all, in the passage that we just heard from the gospel of Mark, we have the story of not one, but two miraculous healings.  But I don’t think that Mark’s purpose in telling these stories is to prove that Jesus is a powerful healer.  You see, by this point in Mark’s gospel we already know that.  By this time in his ministry Jesus has already performed hundreds if not thousands of healings.  Mark has already given us the details of the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law, and the leper, and the paralyzed man, and the man with the withered hand and the mad guy from across the lake, and many more.  If we’ve been paying attention to the story at all so far, we know that Jesus is a great healer.  The crowd knows that Jesus is a great healer, that’s why there’s a crowd.  Jairus and the woman with the hemorrhage know that Jesus is a great healer, that’s why when they’re desperate he’s their last hope, that’s why they come to him and throw themselves at his feet.

No, Mark must have another reason for telling us this story.   Did you notice how carefully he crafts today’s passage, sandwiching the story of the woman with the hemorrhage in between the two parts of the story of Jairus and his daughter, linking them, drawing out the symmetries between the 12 year old and the one who has suffered for twelve years, between the one who is affectionately called “little daughter” by her father and the one who is affectionately called “daughter” by Jesus.

There’s lots of interesting stuff here for theologians to work with and they have, just check the commentaries.  But I want to tell you a story that was told to me this past May by John Bell at a homiletics conference in Atlanta.  John Bell is a member of the Iona community in Scotland, and he’s probably best known for his hymns and music.  One day he was invited to a church, and was asked to lead a bible study, and it turned out that the passage that they were looking at was the same one that we read today as our gospel.  So John asked the people at the study what they thought of this story and whether it reminded them of any experiences that they may have had.  Several people shared some thoughts, and then an older woman began to speak.  It turned out that a long time ago, in her youth, she had been a medical missionary in Africa.  And she told the group about how one time when she was stationed in a remote area, she’d been called into a village because a young girl had died.

  

When she arrived in the village, she heard the sounds of people mourning, and was met by the girl’s parents who took her to where the girl was lying.  When the woman examined the girl it turned out that she was not dead, but rather in a coma.  And as woman spoke with the family and villagers, she gradually tried to piece together what had happened.  This was a tribe in which the loss of blood was taboo, and someone  who was bleeding had to be separated from others, and there was a lot of fear associated with all of this.  And this little girl had just had her first period, and was bleeding, and she didn’t know about menstruation because no one had told her.  And the taboo around blood and the fear and the separation anxiety it had provoked in this girl had been so traumatic that it had overwhelmed her, and she had fallen into a self-induced coma, from which, thankfully, she recovered.

When the old medical missionary had finished telling her story, John Bell asked her, in light of her experience, what stood out for her in the gospel passage.  And she replied without hesitation that the most important thing for her was that when Jesus went into where the 12 year old girl was, he took her by the hand.  Because touch can be an amazingly powerful thing, especially for one who is untouchable.

Today’s gospel is about healing, but even more so, it is about touch.

Jairus falls at Jesus feet and begs him repeatedly “come and lay your hands on my daughter, so that she may be made well and live.”

The woman with the hemorrhage forces her way through the crowd and comes up behind Jesus, thinking to herself, “If I but touch his clothes I will be made well.”  And she touches his cloak, and immediately she is healed of her disease.

Jesus turns about in the crowd and says “who touched me?”

And Jesus goes into where the child lays, takes her by the hand and says “Talitha cum” which means little girl, get up.”  And immediately she gets up and begins to walk about.

What is it that’s so powerful about touch in these stories?

For those who are the untouchables, for the parts of each one of us that are untouchable, touch may be the most powerful thing of all. 

For the young girl who is having her first period in a culture which treats such things as taboo, and forbids contact, the fear of losing the touch of another human may be overwhelming when the bleeding starts.

For the woman who’s bleeding never stops, who is described in the greek text as “gushing with blood”, a woman who will never know the touch of a man, who will never be able to have children, who lives alone on the margins of society, who has endured twelve years of this and spent every penny she had, the touch of another loving human must seem too much to hope for.

Touch I suppose is something we take for granted until we lose it.  And then the consequences can be devastating.  You don’t have to take my word for it.  You can ask people right here who were made to feel untouchable in the 80’s and 90’s when AIDS struck, giving rise to powerful fears and prejudices and taboos, right here in Ottawa.  These people know what it’s like when others are afraid to touch you.

Jesus went into where the child was and touched her.  In so doing he made himself unclean, because in Jesus day that’s what happened when you touched a dead body.  The woman with the hemorrhage broke the law when she touched Jesus.  She was unclean and her touch made Jesus unclean.  That’s why she trembled with fear when Jesus turned around and said “Who touched my clothes?”

Now we don’t have the same notions of pure and impure, clean and unclean, that existed in Jesus day.  But we still have our taboos, we have our fears and prejudices, we have our ways of dividing people into right and wrong, good and bad.  And within us, each one of us has our own dark place, our place of embarrassment or shame, the bit of us that we don’t dare reveal to anyone else. 

Today’s gospel is saying that God isn’t too good to go there.  We don’t have to hide stuff from Jesus.  Like the woman, we can tell him the whole truth, the whole, risky, messy, embarrassing, scandalous truth, and there is nothing we can say, there is nothing we can do, there is nothing about us that will stop Jesus from touching us, even if the whole world thinks we are untouchable.

  

Jesus comes to us where we are, as we are, in our muck and in our glory, and touches us.  Nothing will stop him.  He will break down social barriers, overcome taboos, ignore our rules, violate laws, become unclean, associate with riff-raff, make himself vulnerable, and do whatever it takes to touch us, make us well and give us life.

Come and lay your hands on my little daughter so that she may made well and live.

Amen.

How Would You Prepare? (John the Baptist, June 24 2012)

Homily:  Birth of John the Baptist, June 24^th 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  Is 40:1-11; Ps 85:7-13; Acts 13:14b-26; Lk 1:57-80

How would you prepare?

In the days of King Herod, right around the beginning of what we call the Common Era, there was a priest named Zechariah, who was married to a woman named Elizabeth.  They were good people, but they were sad and were even scorned by those around them because they hadn’t been able to have children, and now it was too late because they were getting old.  One day when it was Zechariah’s turn to be on duty in the sanctuary of the temple an angel appeared to him, and he was terrified.  But the angel said, “Don’t be afraid.  You and Elizabeth will have a son, and you will name him John.  God is coming, and your son John will be sent to prepare the way of the Lord, to get people ready for God’s coming.”

And Zechariah said, “Yeah right.”  And he lost his voice for the next nine months.

Now, despite Zechariah’s skepticism, it turns out the angel was indeed right.  A few days later, Elizabeth conceived a child.  And nine months later she gave birth to a baby boy.  And the whole family and all the neighbours celebrated with Zechariah and Elizabeth, that is, until eight days later when it was time to name the boy.  You see, pretty much everyone was agreed that since this was likely to be old Zechariah’s only son, they should follow tradition and name the boy Zechariah after his father.  But Elizabeth, for some strange reason, wanted to name the boy John.

“But nobody in your family has that name,” replied all the relatives in exasperation at Elizabeth’s stubbornness.

They turned to Zechariah to settle the matter.  And Zechariah, remembering the words the angel had spoken to him, wrote on a tablet, “His name will be John”.  And suddenly his voice returned and he began praising God.  And now everyone was afraid, and rumours started spreading throughout the village and the surrounding hill country, and everyone started asking “What is so special about this boy?  What will this child become?”

And Zechariah, filled with the Holy Spirit began to prophesy:

“And you, child, you, John, will be called the prophet of the Most High

 for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,

to give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the forgiveness of their sins. 

By the tender mercy of our God,

the dawn from on high will break upon us. 

To give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,

and to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

And the child John grew and became strong in the spirit.

And I can imagine that when he was a bit older, John went to his mother and father to ask them a question.

“Hey mom, dad.  Why is it that everyone else seems to be named after someone in their family, but my name is John even though nobody else in our family is named John?”

And perhaps his parents responded,

“John, I guess it’s about time you knew.  You were given to us by the Lord and it is God who named you John.  God is coming, just like the prophets said he would.  And you have been chosen to prepare the way of the Lord, to get people ready for God’s arrival.”

Now I want you to imagine yourselves in the sandals of young John at that very moment.  Suppose someone was to walk up to you and tell you that God is coming, soon, really soon, and that your purpose in life, the very reason for which you were born is to prepare the way of the Lord, to get people ready for God’s arrival.

What would you do?  How would you prepare?  What would you say to people?  If you had to choose something, what would be the single most important thing that you would focus on?

These aren’t rhetorical questions.  You should find pencils in the pews in front of you, and you can use the empty pages in the booklet to write down your thoughts.  How would you prepare the way of the Lord?  Take a few minutes to write down some thoughts, and then you can turn and compare notes with the people sitting around you.  What would your first priority be when it comes to getting people ready for God’s arrival?

If we accomplished nothing else with this exercise, I’m sure we all have a lot more sympathy for John than we did a few minutes ago.  When John was told that God was coming and that he’d been chosen to prepare the way and get people ready, I wouldn’t have been surprised if his reaction had been “you’ve got to be kidding”.

It’s not like John had a lot more information than we do.  He didn’t know what God’s coming would look like.  He didn’t know that God was coming in the particular person of Jesus of Nazareth.  He just knew that his job was to get people ready.

So how did he go about that?  How would you go about that?  How would we get people ready for God to come?  Any ideas that came out of your reflections?

  

We might have all sorts of ideas.  We might encourage people to go to church (in John’s day the temple and synagogue).  We might teach people about what God is like.  We might exhort people to live lives of justice, to live ethically.  We might encourage people to spend more time in prayer, to get to know God.

I imagine that John thought about all these things and more. 

But it seems that, perhaps inspired by the power of the Spirit, John the Baptist made one thing his priority.  And that one thing was forgiveness.

When it came time for John to prepare the way of the Lord, he went into the region around the Jordan River proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 

John’s priority was forgiveness.  His way to get people ready for God was to teach them about, and help them experience, and give them a ritual, for forgiveness.

Now most of us know from our own experience that forgiveness is hard.  Forgiveness is complicated.  But forgiveness is essential if we are to have good relationships with God and with each other.

John isn’t the only one who makes forgiveness a priority.   Jesus also makes forgiveness a priority.  In fact, it was one of the first things that got Jesus in trouble with the authorities.  And in the prayer that he taught us, the one that we say together every Sunday, Jesus tells us that in order for God’s kingdom to come on earth as in heaven, we need to forgive others in the same way that God forgives us.

That sounds like a challenge.  Forgiving others isn’t easy.  Accepting and really understanding that God has forgiven us isn’t easy.  Even forgiving ourselves isn’t easy, in fact that might be the hardest one of all.  It seems that we have a natural inclination for “tit for tat”.  It seems that the idea that people should get what they deserve is deeply engrained in our psyche and in our societies.  It seems that we like to hold grudges in our back pockets, just in case we ever need to take them out and use them.

But John invites us into something new.

I think that the reason that John makes forgiveness a priority is that he’s inviting us into a new way of living, in order to get us ready for the coming of God into our lives. 

A way of living, a way of being, a way of relating, that Jesus calls the kingdom of God.

It’s a way that requires repentance. It requires us to change our way of doing things, in fact, it requires that we change ourselves.  It requires that we turn toward God and towards each other, and let go of those things that burden our relationships, things like guilt and resentment and keeping score and anger and fear and so on.  And not just to let go of them, but to lift them off each other.  The Hebrew word for forgiveness that John would have used has exactly this sense. To lift up.  To remove someone’s burden.

Know that you are forgiven, and learn to forgive others, so that we can all experience a new way of living.  That’s how we prepare the way of the Lord.

Amen.

Sane or Insane? (June 10, 2012)

Homily:  Yr B Proper 10, June 10 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  1 Sam 8:4-20; Ps 130; 2 Cor 4.13-5.1; Mk 3:20-35

Sane or Insane?

Not too long ago, while I was at seminary preparing for ordination, I did an internship at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, the psychiatric hospital we have here in town.  The hospital provided an orientation session for the new interns.  And one of the things they told us about was the Ontario Mental Health Act, and how individuals can be apprehended and admitted involuntarily to a psychiatric facility.  One of the ways for this to happen is for someone, perhaps a family member, to give evidence about an individual’s behaviour and the risk it presents to a Justice of the Peace, and then the judge fills out what’s called a Form 2.  At the Royal Ottawa, the jargon for this was that the patient had been “formed”.

Well if the Ontario Mental Health Act had been around in Israel two thousand years ago, in today’s gospel, Jesus would have been formed.  His family would have gone to a judge, had Jesus formed and then taken away to a psychiatric facility.  In our reading we heard that when Jesus arrives back home, his family tries to seize him because they think that he’s out of his mind.  Crazy.  Insane.  They think Jesus has lost touch with reality and that as a result he’s become a danger to himself and to those around him.  And it wasn’t just his family that thought so. So did the authorities, the ones who had traveled all the way from Jerusalem to find out what was going on.

Why did they think he was crazy?  Well, it was because Jesus had declared that the long promised arrival of God’s rule on earth was happening now, at this very moment, in and through Jesus himself.  “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand” was the cry with which he launched his mission.  He took upon himself the title of “Son of Man” from the book of Daniel, the title of the one who would manifest God’s power and win God’s victory in the cosmic battle that had been foretold.  Now, these things of themselves weren’t unimaginable to a first century Jew.  The Jewish people had been expecting a Messiah.  But Jesus didn’t behave as the Messiah was expected to behave.  He sided with the enemy.  He forgave sins.  He violated the sabbath and dietary laws.  He partied with the wrong people, tax collectors and sinners.  He provoked conflict with those who considered themselves to be “good” Jews.  And because of these things, they conspired to destroy him.

So do you blame his family for thinking he was insane?  For thinking that he was out of touch with reality and a danger to himself and others.  If he was your son or brother, wouldn’t you have had him committed for his own good?

Sometimes, there’s a fine line between sanity and insanity.

Let me tell you a story.

If there had been in the 19^th century such things as iPods, MuchMusic, Grammy Awards and Super Bowl half-time shows, you can be assured that the concert pianist Franz Liszt would have been all over them.   Long before the Beatles and Elvis, Liszt toured all over Europe, performing to enthusiastic sold-out crowds, causing ladies to swoon and shock their husbands by taking off their scarves and tossing them on the stage.  He was the superstar of the Romantic piano, modernity’s first rock star.

But then something strange happened to Franz Liszt.  At the height of his popularity, he had, well you’ll have to decide how to describe it.  A psychotic breakdown.  A spiritual awakening.  A deep religious conversion experience.  Whatever it was he began to take the Christian faith very seriously, and began to pattern his own life after the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  As for his vast fortune, he gave it away.  He began to give free piano lessons to the impoverished children of his town.  One day when he was traveling, Liszt went into a hotel and the hotel manager recognized him, and with a grand flourish gave him the key to the Royal Suite, compliments of the Hotel.  Liszt took the key and gave it to his valet, and said, perhaps there’s something else for me, maybe in the servant’s quarters.

People all over Europe started whispering “something terrible has gone wrong with Franz Liszt”.

When he died in 1886, there was found on his piano an unfinished composition of sacred music.  And in one section of the music there was scrawled in Liszt’s own hand, De Profundis, the title of Psalm 130 which we read together this morning, “out of the depths I cry to thee O God, hear the voice of my supplication, if you would mark the iniquities no one could stand, but there is forgiveness with you.”

The section begins with clashing chords, jarring melody and disjointed harmonies that gradually work themselves out into a gentle melody of great beauty and serenity, almost as if Liszt has found a way on his piano to play himself from great chaos to shalom.

Shortly before his death, Liszt’s son-in-law heard him working on this strange composition through the thin walls of the family residence.  Liszt’s son-in-law was Richard Wagner, himself a great composer, whose heroic music and anti-semitic writings would later be appropriated by Nazi Germany in the 20^th century.  And when Wagner heard the jagged melodies of De Profundis, he turned to his wife and said “Cosima, I think your father is insane.”

Sane or insane?  It’s a good question.  Which one is sane, Richard Wagner spewing out anti-semitisms, or the broken down Franz Liszt giving away his money to the poor and trying to play his way from Chaos to Shalom?

Who is sane and who is insane?

The one thing they all agreed on in the Gospel of Mark is that Jesus was insane.

Jesus came to establish the kingdom of God on earth by fighting and defeating the forces and power of evil, by opposing and overcoming all that robs humanity of the abundant life that God intends for us.

Now before I go on, I want to say a brief word about evil, because sometimes when we read these ancient texts with their exorcisms and demon possessions, we start to get a bit hung up.

Evil exists.  This we know.  This world is not the way God intended it to be.  Much is wrong, things have departed from God’s intentions.  We call this evil.  We can identify it in the world around us.  We can see it in human history, in the big events of wars and genocides and in individual instances of abuse and violence.  Some of us may not like to use the word evil and we can use other words if we like, but whatever we call it, it exists.

However the way we talk about evil is culturally conditioned.  The worldview of Jesus time pre-supposed that there were spirits, and that the power of evil manifested itself as the will of demons, the principle one of which was known as satan.  In our own time, in our post-enlightenment, post-modern culture, we tend to talk about evil in other ways.  We use the insights of psychiatry.  We talk about “mob mentality”.  We talk about corruption.  We talk about systemic injustice.

It doesn’t matter how we understand evil and talk about it.  But what we have to see in order to understand the gospel of Mark is that Jesus saw himself as the one who had to defeat evil in order that God’s kingdom might be established and that humanity might be saved from oppression.  That’s why Jesus casts out demons, and liberates those who are oppressed.  That’s why Jesus talks about tying up the strong man and plundering his property.  These are signs of the in-breaking of God’s kingdom.

But what happens in a world where evil is disguised as sanity?   Where it’s embedded in habits and customs and conventional wisdom?   Where hatred between ethnic groups has been normalized and accepted as praiseworthy, as it was in Jesus world and sometimes our own?  Where the Temple system which oppresses the poor by forcing them to pay for taxes and sacrificial animals is thought to be the will of God?  Where purity laws which segregate and condemn people are part of the religious infrastructure?

In a world where evil is disguised as sanity, the one who fights evil will be called insane.

We’ve seen this throughout history.

When Mahatma Ghandi began his long march to the ocean to make salt, people thought he was crazy.

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955, everyone  thought she was out of her mind.  But in truth, she was the one who spoke sanity to a world which had gone insane.  And that world of racial segregation started to crumble when she exposed it for what it was.

We live in a world where far too often, evil is disguised as sanity, and is embedded into our laws, and markets and social systems.

We live in a world where if we were to reduce military spending by just a few per cent a year, we would have the resources to eliminate diseases such as malaria which claim millions of lives annually.

We live in a world where we have drugs that cost little to manufacture and could save millions lives, but we can’t get them where they’re needed because that would infringe on patents.

We live in a world of credit cards, which reward people who are wealthy with free travel, but for those who are poor and use them out of desperation, we charge them 20% interest, money which pays for our travel rewards.

Is that sanity or insanity?

Jesus came into this world to announce God’s kingdom, to defeat evil, to fight against oppression, to confront and overcome injustice and to bring peace and healing.  He did it in a way that shattered expectations, broke the rules, turned social systems upside down and revealed a God that we had never imagined.

No wonder they thought he was out of his mind.

Amen.

(with thanks to Dr. Thomas Long, who told us the story of Franz Liszt at Homiletics 2011 in Minneapolis)

Quantum Physics and the Trinity (Trinity Sunday, June 3 2012)

Homily:  Yr B Trinity Sunday, June 3 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

Some of you might know that many years ago I did my graduate work in theoretical physics, and that for a number of years I taught the history of science at a small liberal arts college.  The students at that college didn’t have much math or science background.  And one of the things that I tried to do as part of that history of science course was to teach them some quantum physics in one or two lectures.  Now, that’s not easy!   And to make it even harder, one of the key concepts of quantum physics that I wanted to teach them was the idea of wave-particle duality, the strange notion that an entity such as an electron, for example, is both a wave and a particle.

This created a bit of a dilemma for me.  You see, the simplest approach would have been to just tell the students that this was true, that an electron really is both a particle and a wave at the same time, that the experts have figured this out, and that they as students are just going to have to believe it, even though it might make no sense.  But what would be the value in that?  Simply telling people to assent to something that they don’t have any feel for or understanding of wouldn’t achieve very much.  It wouldn’t open up their imaginations.  It wouldn’t help give birth to any new ideas.  It wouldn’t give rise to feelings of awe and wonder about this universe we live in and it wouldn’t really teach them anything of value about quantum physics.

So instead, I figured that it would be much more productive if I was to help them experience the electron as both a wave and a particle. 

So we talked about televisions.  Not the flat screen TVs that we use today, but the big old TVs with the picture tubes that we used to use.  

And I explained how they work, that a TV is basically an electron gun that fires electrons between some charged metal plates towards a phosphorescent screen.  When the electron hits the screen, it gives off light.  And I showed them that if a physicist was to ask the question “what is an electron?” using the TV as an experimental set-up, the answer he or she would get is “the electron is a particle with a mass and electric charge”. 

But suppose I was to change the experimental set up a little bit.  Supposed instead of having electric plates in the middle to guide the electron, I put a barrier with two slits in it where the electron could pass through.  And instead of a phosphorescent TV screen, I put photographic film which records a little white dot whenever the electron hits the film.  

Now what sort of pattern would you get on the photographic film when you fired a bunch of electrons through the slits?  You might expect to get a pattern like this, where the length of the white bands indicates the number of electrons that hit the photographic plate at each spot. 

But what if I was to tell you that the actual pattern you get when you do this experiment is more like this, a pattern of alternating white and dark bands.

And that this surprising pattern makes perfect sense if the electron is not a particle which passes through one slit, but rather a wave which simultaneously passes through both of the slits on its way to the photographic plate. Something like this wave interference pattern.  

And so now, if we ask the question “What is an electron?” using this different experimental setup, we get a different answer.  An electron is a wave with a particular frequency and wavelength.  Same electron.  Different way of experiencing it.

So now you know something about wave particle duality, how an electron can be both a wave and a particle.  And you know it not because I gave it to you as a doctrine that you had to believe, but rather because it comes out of a shared experience, out of the stories of what actually happened in a physics lab when physicists did these experiments.

Our understanding of God is a bit like that.  Our understanding of God comes out of our experiences and encounters with God, and the stories that other people have told us of their experiences and encounters.  And the doctrines and theology that come out of these experiences and encounters are our way of naming and giving structure to all of this so that we can talk about it, and recognize how our own experience relates to that of others.

Today’s readings are all stories about what happens when humans encounter the divine.  But they are not all the same!

In our first reading, Isaiah has a vision of God as big.  Huge.  Immense.  He sees God sitting on a throne, high and lofty, so big that just the hem of his robe fills the temple.  Isaiah is filled with fear and wonder.  He is painfully aware of his own insignificance in the presence of the one who created the heavens and the earth.  This is the experience of God as transcendent, the God who is beyond us.  In our psalm this morning the poet has a similar experience.  He encounters the awesomeness of God in creation, in the thunder and earthquake, in the lightning and wind.  Paul in his letter to the Romans writes that “ever since the creation of the world, God’s eternal power and divine nature have been understood and seen through the things God has made.”  And I think that most of us get this. Think of the times you have beheld the beauty of a sunset, or the peacefulness of a forest or the glory of worship, the times you have experienced the transcendence and wonder of the divine energy which is beyond our grasp and comprehension.  This is one of the ways that we experience and encounter God.

But it’s not the only way.  Sometimes we experience the divine not as something beyond us, but as something within us, not as something that’s immense, but as a still, small voice.  In our second reading Paul talks about God as Spirit, a Spirit that leads him, a Spirit that cries out from within him, a Spirit that teaches us that we are children of God, a Spirit that urges us into intimacy with the divine.  This is the experience of God as immanent, as within and around us.  And once more, it is not just Paul who experiences God this way.  We do too!  Think of the times that you’ve experienced the divine as a subtle presence, as comfort and inspiration and power from within, as an invisible energy which surrounds you and upholds and strengthens you, as love which is poured into your heart and you in turn have to offer to others.  This is our encounter with God the Holy Spirit.

And then in our gospel today we heard the story of Nicodemus’s encounter with Jesus.  Nicodemus had heard the stories about Jesus, his acts of healing and the crowds that followed him around.  But what Nicodemus was totally unprepared for, the thing that blew him away was that when he met Jesus, Nicodemus found himself to be in the presence of the living God.  In Jesus, Nicodemus gets a glimpse of God the Son, the one sent by God out of love for the world, the one who makes God known.  We call this incarnation, God revealed in human flesh.  Nicodemus encounters God in the person of Jesus.  And so do we.

Remember the stories you’ve been told of the love and compassion and wisdom of Jesus of Nazareth, how he came to seek us out, how he sought out those who were rejected and marginalized by society, how he delighted in their presence, laughing and celebrating with them at table, and how his work and ministry continue in the people who carry on with his mission today.  This is our experience of God as incarnate, God with us, Immanuel.

We experience God in all these different ways, the awesome God who is beyond us, the inspiring God within and around us and the God who is revealed in the humanity of Jesus.  There are so many ways that we can encounter God. If you’re sitting there thinking to yourself that you have yet to experience or name or imagine God in these different ways, don’t be discouraged.  We all have different experiences – that’s why we share our stories.  Don’t be discouraged, instead, think of this as a wonderful opportunity to take the relationship you do have with God and to move and deepen it in new and exciting directions.

My hope for this morning is not just that we’ve learned something new about electrons, but also that we’ve learned a little something about the Trinity, our understanding of God as One God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Not as a doctrine written in some dusty book somewhere, but as a lived experience that comes from our own encounters with God and from the experiences of those throughout the ages who have graciously shared their stories with us.

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

Amen.