The Church of the Ascension
June 3, 2007
Trinity Sunday

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

My son Brian is a terrible liar.  He always has been, and in some ways it has not served him well.  Bless his heart.  When I would find the candy he had been told not to eat gone and the wrappers lying at his feet and would ask him, “Brian, did you eat that candy,” he would say “no” – but his eyes would be big as saucers and he would literally twitch!  In subsequent years, any attempts to prevaricate about classes cut or papers not forthcoming were just as unsuccessful.  There were times when I almost wished he could pull it off – just to save himself some trouble!  

Though it has made him a lovely adult with lots of integrity, it is odd in a way that he doesn’t seem to have the knack for spinning. He grew up with it all around him.  The Southern culture plays fast and light with the truth, never letting commitment to truth stand in the way of a good story or even always engaging in truth telling when it is hard and unpleasant.  “Oh, no, honey, Uncle Billy doesn’t really have a drinking problem; he is just a little under the weather today – and has been for thirty years.”  Or from Pulitzer prize winner Beth Henley’s great play, “Crimes of the Heart,” one sister says to the other, “Sweetie, Momma wasn’t crazy; she was just having a really bad day – when she hung herself.” And all of us in the south claim to be fallen gentry.  A small farm gets translated as a plantation fairly easily and modest parties suddenly are parlayed through the magic of revision into grand cotillions.  Truth…southern style….the story is so often better than the reality.

Throughout his life with the disciples, Jesus devoted considerable time to talking about truth, claiming that is it important to know and embrace that which is true.  At one point the gospel of John reports that Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and knowing it will set you free.”  If he gave them any details about how complicated that can be, about how much trouble it can cause you – perhaps even getting you killed as it did him, John failed to mention it.  Sometimes it is just as well that we don’t know everything in the beginning.  I think Jesus’ point in all this “you will know the truth and it will set you free business” was that pretending that something is true when you know it isn’t results in its own terrible kind of bondage.  Desperately claiming and hanging on to something that is not true can become the worse kind of chattel.  Sometimes, e.g., abuse victims create their entire lives around a lie because the truth is just too hard to bear – or so they think.  But it is only when the truth can be spoken that real life opens for them.  The truth sets us free because pretending is no longer necessary.  It is a hard lesson but an important one. 

In today’s passage just before he leaves his disciples, he tells them that part of what will come to them after his ascension is this Spirit of truth.  He has already said that God will send the Comforter, the Advocate; but in this verse, we learn that the coming of this Holy Spirit will have another benefit – the spirit of truth.  Talk about a gift that keeps on giving!  But like most things in life that are worth much, it is not always as easy and direct as it sounds.    

The truth gets a lot of play in our culture.  It is something that we say we value above most other things.  In fact, we act as though we know the truth all the time – and not just regarding some sort of internal truth that finally only we can know but to great sweeping truths about the world – philosophies of governance, economics, and theology.  “Judaism is the true religion; no….Islam is the one true religion; but no wait, Christianity is the one true religion.  Ah, no…religion isn’t true; only science has the truth.  Hmmm….not surprisingly claims about ultimate truth lie at the heart of world conflict.  Global warming is the truth, man; oh come on, global warming is a big hoax and that is the truth, man!”  Hmmm….. War is about the search for oil and world dominance.  Oh, please, war is about spreading democracy to a world that needs it.  Hmmm…it is not always simple to know the truth.

And, yet, we swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help us God day in and day out about things big and small.  We know – or claim to know - the truth about everything from relationships, about what makes one relationship good and one doomed to the truth about how physics works.  We know – or claim to know – the truth about so much.  That is what life in a highly technological, information driven world is like.  The truth is that if we don’t push the correct key, the computer is not going to give us what we want.  And that is the truth, man.

Is that the sort of certainty that Jesus is talking about in this gospel lesson?  Is that what he claims we can know when the spirit of truth comes upon us?  In some ways I wish it were, but I don’t really think so.  It would be nice if it were - particularly on Trinity Sunday, that time every year when people like me attempt to speak definitively about something that defies definitude.  In a concrete world, Trinity Sunday is not a challenge.  In a concrete world, one puts in the right data and as a result complex, human derived concepts like the Trinity can be sufficiently and compelling explained in simple words or analogies and only those who are unwilling to know the real truth have any problem with it.  I think that the truth to which the spirit points us is a much deeper truth than the kind we normally imagine, a sense of truth that is not synonymous with certainty. 

The truth is we don’t know: we know what we hope; we know what we cherish.  But I think that the greatest gift the spirit of truth visits upon us is the awareness that we just can’t know some things this side of eternity.  It doesn’t seem anti-intellectual to me to confess that the deepest truth God grants us is the truth that we cannot grasp God.  It may be giving the early church fathers more credit than they are due, but I wonder if they knew all along they were speaking almost gibberish in an attempt to explain something that is unexplainable.  I also wonder if they chuckled among themselves imagining that blowhards coming after them would fight among themselves trying to understand what they meant. They were doing the best they could – which is all we can do, all that is expected of us I think.

 God is creator, the maker of everything, the one who came from nothing and is everything.  God is also the redeemer, the One who could not accept how desperately we had marred the divine plan for us and so acted in the world – again – and this time not just as creator but now as redeemer, as the One who would set things right, coming to us in the form of a man, Jesus, bearing the truth and fullness of the Christ.  God is also the Holy Spirit, known by so many names in so many cultures, but the great spirit of God that sanctifies us, that surrounds with God.    

Hmmm….that works as well as anything come to think of it.  Is it doctrinal?  Is it orthodoxy?  I guess…..for as much as any of that means.  Most of all it seems that it is a decent stab at truth, a stab at truth that reminds us remarkably that God is God and we are not.  We can’t understand; we don’t need to understand it.  We live it – which is quite different from proclaiming it as the dogma of our lives.  The Spirit of truth is about living a life with God, not about defining a life with God.  Truth waxes and wanes; God is always here.  It works for me.