Year C
 Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
 Psalm 8
 Romans 5:1-5
 John 16:12-15

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

I like magicians…  I think the first magician I ever knew about was Harry Houdini… doing the seemingly impossible in his Water Torture Cell… for those of you who are too young to remember…  they locked his feet in a stock…  and lowered him upside down into a tank of water…  and yet…  within two minutes…  he’d emerge from behind the curtain…  and then there’s David Copperfield…  who I got to see in person once…  and some of you may know about Shin Lim… or David Blaine…

I like magicians…   because they blur the line between reality and illusion… between what we see with our own eyes…  and what we believe to be possible… and sometimes the illusion is so real… it makes me wonder if they’ve broken some law of physics… if they’ve learned how to access some other dimension…  or have gained supernormal powers which no one else has discovered…  especially when people or animals emerge from spaces which our minds tell us are just way too small to contain them…

I like magicians…   because they point to mystery…  I see what I see…  but my mind can’t comprehend the how of it…  and there is a moment…  when the impossible is made real…  when we are forced to suspend disbelief…  and open ourselves up to that which lies beyond us…  but the culture in which we live dislikes mystery…  it likes to have it all hammered down…  likes being able to know things…  to understand things…  to control them…    the culture in which we live prefers a black and white world…  tries to make everything good or bad…  right or wrong…  either or…  and sometimes…  we rely on scripture to justify our positions…  but just when we think the Bible is clear… there is contradiction…  Deuteronomy 23 says Moabites are bad… they were not allowed to dwell among God’s people…  but then comes the story of Ruth the Moabite which challenges the prejudice against Moabites…  we think the Bible is clear… Jeremiah 25 says that all the people from Uz are evil… but then comes the story of Job… a man from Uz who was “the most blameless man on earth”…  we think the Bible is clear… no foreigners or non-binary eunuchs allowed… but then comes the story of an African…  who is the treasurer for the Queen of Ethiopia…  and who Philip baptizes and welcomes into the church…  our stories may begin with prejudice… discrimination… and animosity… but what we find is that the Spirit guides God’s people towards openness… welcome… inclusion…. acceptance… and affirmation…

I still have many things to say to you… but you cannot bear them now…  the disciples witnessed incredible miracles which demonstrated Jesus’ true identity… Jesus told them who he was… and what would happen to him… but this not only went against the world’s definition of success… but against the world’s understanding of death… they could not get their heads around it… they had no point of reference for it…  they could not rely on previous experiences…  to understand Jesus’ works…  or to predict the Spirit’s long-term vision and incremental revelation…

The Rev. Evan Garner…  of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, AR… shares a pivotal insight… Jesus reassures the disciples that the Spirit will guide them into that truth…  again… ]  John uses a specific word for the Spirit’s action… implying that the Spirit will not merely teach the disciples… will not only give them didactic information or intellectual understanding…  will not simply give them directions if you will…  but will accompany them…  will be with them…  as they undergo new experiences…  it’s like the difference between being told about the Grand Canyon…  but it’s another experience entirely to have a guided and thorough tour of it…  likewise…  the Spirit will show Jesus’ followers…  what Jesus alone cannot simply tell them…

June is PRIDE month…  but PRIDE was not created simply out of the desire to celebrate being lesbian…  gay…  bisexual…  or transgender…  but out of the harassment more than fifty years ago this month… at NYC’s Stonewall Inn…   created out of the right of LGBT people to live without oppression…  the denial of our humanity…  and our right to exist…  as Pastor Martin Billmeier wrote…  it took 2,000 years for parts of the church to open up to the idea…  that the Holy Spirit might call women to ordained ministry…  and it took about that same amount of time for parts of the church to wake up to the truth about LGBT people…  that the closed-off interpretation of scripture just might be mistaken… ]  and the Gospel isn’t finished opening our eyes and our minds…  yet…  there is more to learn and experience through the Spirit’s guidance…  and this morning’s passage from Proverbs makes it perfectly clear…  that God rejoices in the inherited world…  and delights in us… each and every one of us… because the diversity which God created…  was never intended to be divisive… 

Today is Trinity Sunday…  Holy Trinity Sunday…  and it is incomprehensible that the One God… is revealed as three distinct persons…  as Father…  Son…  and Holy Spirit…  as Creator… Redeemer…  and Sustainer…  it confounds the rational mind… ] try as we might…  it remains beyond our comprehension…  but it is no less real…  there’s even a story about St. Augustine…  who…  as he walked along the shore of the Mediterranean Sea…   and was pondering the mystery of the Holy Trinity…  came upon a small boy…  who was carrying a bucket of water from the sea…   and pouring it into a hole in the sand…   Augustine asked…  What are you doing…   the boy answered…   I am pouring the sea into this hole in the sand…   Augustine laughed…   Can’t be done…  the sea is too large…  and this hole is too small…   the boy replied…  So it is with you and the Trinity…  the mystery is too large…   and your mind is too small…

But the real magic of the Holy Trinity…  is the magic of relationship…  the mutual indwelling of the three Persons of the Trinity…  the relationship between each one of us and the Trinity…  and the relationships between each one of us and each other…  of equanimity…  of pouring ourselves into the Other…  these relationships give us permission to reject rigid thinking…  and give us permission to embrace nuance…  subtlety…  and diversity…  it is one of the ways…  as Bp. Singh recently wrote…  that we are called to invite people toward a holiness of life…  we may not always do it well…   but that is our aspiration…

Now a word…  our reading from Romans claims… that suffering produces endurance… and endurance produces character… and character produces hope…  and much of the church…  for centuries…  has understood this to mean physical suffering…  and sometimes…  the more the better…  like self-flagellation…  but in her book Gift from the Sea…  Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes…  I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches…  if suffering alone taught…   all the world would be wise…  since everyone suffers…  to suffering must be added mourning…   understanding…   patience…   love…   openness…   and the willingness to remain vulnerable…  and so I have to believe that the kind of suffering to which Paul refers…  must be the kind of spiritual suffering…  and corresponding growth…  that we willingly choose for ourselves…  in order to grow closer to God…  when we replace certainty with mystery…  when we let go of trying to understand the incomprehensible magic of God’s radical grace…  unmerited forgiveness…   and boundless love…  a different kind of Trinity in its own right…

(And at the baptism this morning at Two Churches.)

Cait and Becky…  as you bring Ellery for baptism…  you acknowledge that we are part of a Mystery which is incomprehensibly larger than we are…  a universe with galaxies thirteen billion light years away… that we are stardust…  that there is magic in creation…  that there are angelic realms…  and the company of saints…  that we can’t do it all alone…   and that we are connected to each other in ways we do not know and cannot yet imagine… though the Spirit will guide us into all truth…  and that in baptism…  we become members of the body of Christ…  we die to our selves and are reborn to eternal life…  and it is for that…  that we were created…