+Book of Common Prayer lectionary:
Isaiah 6:1-8 The first Trisagion
Psalm 29 Afferte Domino
or Canticle 2 Benedictus es, Domine
Revelation 4:1-11 A rainbow round the throne
John 16:(5-11) 12-15 The Spirit will guide you into all truth

+Revised Common Lectionary:
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 Wisdom is a She, and She's very old
Psalm 8 Domine, Dominus noster
or Canticle 2 or 13 Benedictus es, Domine
Romans 5:1-5 Hope has been poured into our hearts
John 16:12-15 The Spirit will guide you into all truth

Pope Alexander II in the eleventh century discouraged the clergy from holding an annual festival in honor of the Trinity, as he said it was recognized in the Gloria Patri anyway, but its popularity grew from the grassroots up, and in 1334 Pope John the XXII finally ordered its acceptance by the whole Church; it is not observed in the Eastern churches, who keep this day as the festival of Holy Martyrs. Thomas Becket was made Archbishop of Canterbury in the octave of Pentecost in 1162, and this association with Trinity Sunday boosted its popularity in England. Anglicans for centuries thereafter followed the Sarum use and numbered the Sundays after Trinity, until our last Prayer Book revision brought us online with the oikoumene.

So we began with discouraging a Feast, then reluctantly accepting it, and now having to explain it. The doctrine of the Trinity is popular poetry which we have alas been taught as a formula; it is a rune which we have made into a regulation, a riddle which we have posted as a reason. But Pentecost has come and gone, and we are left with the cold duck of the morning after our pentecostal "high" and have awakened now to try to sort things out, like those who had too much fun at the farewell party and now must try to remember who we are, and where, whose party it was we went to, and who else was there. And whether we have good friends left to us this morning. We have managed to remember enough of what transpired to write it down as Trinitarian. It's an explanation we are stuck with now that the Sun is up, our feet are back on the floor, and the neighbors want to know what happened to us. Muslims and Jews are baffled by our version, and think it means three gods. The fault must lie in the way we explained ourselves. The prophet Muhammad is right, after all, there is no God but God. Shout it in song from the minaret, the synagogue and the church.

"It was in the year that King Uzziah died" that another prophet got high in the Temple in Jerusalem, where there was lots of incense, as there might be in an Episcopal church, and there was lots of trembling, as there might be in a Pentecostal one, and beyond the veil a glimpse of golden angels around the mercy seat, the hilasterion, as there should be in an Orthodox one. There was wonderful singing, as in a Lutheran church, and it seemed a creature flew in, with six wings it seemed, from the altar guild, and touched the prophet's lips with the burning charcoal, ready for the incense, and his guilt and sin seemed purged away by this singeing and scorching of his lips, branded now forever with the Spirit's truthfulness. The Japanese acupuncturist I go to in Managua lays bits of burning incense on my spine, and leaves little scorches on my hips and thighs, bosom, shoulders, and feet, and afterwards I walk more lightly, springing along as if feathered with the twain with which the seraph flew.

A song came to the prophet that he remembered later and someone wrote it down, and it is the oldest verse in our hymnals. How long had the angels been practicing it before Isaiah heard them, and passed it on to us? "Holy, Holy, Holy is Adonai of Angel Armies, the whole earth is full of God's glory!" We remember the words, and make them into creeds, but we have forgotten the celestial music, and the context of that thrice-holy joy of composition and performance--putting them together for a chorale in choir robes. Yet all of us remember singing songs around a parlor piano, or around a campfire, and how the old words of old gospel songs come alive with song, and with mixed voices, but sometimes sound silly when limited to speech.

It was 740 B.C.E. that was the "year that King Uzziah died"--suddenly, some historical fact, some information intrudes itself into our ecstasy, and we are asked if we can give an accounting of ourselves. What has our ecstasy to do with guilt, what has our song of sanctity to do with the inescapable justice of eternity?

Fifteen years ago now the Methodists and others decided to retire "Onward Christian Soldiers" from their repertory. It remains in the prestigious Hymnal 1982 at #562, to Sir Arthur Sullivan's (of Gilbert and Sullivan) tune "St. Gertrude." Sabine Baring-Gould was not Shakespere or Dante, and Sullivan's tune perhaps fits better in one of the comic operas he wrote with Sir W.S. Gilbert, like the Pirates of Penzance. The image of the Church as an army militantly marching off to war evokes less enthusiasm than in former imperial years. Its metaphors did not seem aptly drawn from Viet Nam, at all, and less so from the cowardice of Desert Storm Trooping.

Isaiah's song is about a mighty God of Hosts -- not consecrated wafer bread, but hosts of armies, as "the hosts of Attila the Hun." The angel armies of Yahweh, in a metaphor, but throughout history human governments have identified their own armed forces with those of the Lord's. Constantine did it, the Kaiser did it, the King-Emperors of Great Britain, the Tsars, Emperor Napoleon, Reichskanzler Hitler ("Gott mit uns") and our American presidents too. God and Country, Applehood and Mother Pie. Our own president Nixon held protestant mishmash religious services in the Casa Blanca, blissfully unaware that history too knows some dirty tricks and would play one on him.

The point they all forgot is that Isaiah's vision of God and the song he heard in his ecstasy are about God's power and strength to enforce and see justice done in all the earth. The holiness of God is inextricably linked in the SANCTUS to justice, and the incense and coals of the censer are held to our faces and our lips and to our telling of the truth. It is our truth-telling, our gospel-preaching that the Spirit comes to ignite, so that the sweet smell of prayer will rise to heaven, the odor of sanctity as the perfume of justice in human society. "Go and preach that God's judgment is on the way", was the rubric given to Isaih, "Go and tell that your behavior as a nation is bringing disaster upon you. Go and preach exile, destruction, desolation. Go and preach pollution is destroying life on the planet, radiation is in your milk bottle, cancer in your hamburger, annihilation in your foreign policy, catastrophe in your religion, revolution in your repression. Holy, Holy, Holy, is Adonai of Angel Armies. The whole earth is to be filled with God's radiant rule. An everlasting song of holiness is an unrelenting demand of wrongs to be righted, justice to be done.

We often sing our songs without remembering where we learned them. "Oh say can you see by the dawn's early light" we sing at evening baseball games, but no one remembers that Francis Scott Key, organist in an Episcopal church, wrote it the early morning after a bombing raid. It is a vision of a desolate city, rocketed, blitzed and laid to ruin, and the message is "then conquer we must when our cause it is just". But it is our might that always make us right, and not everyone attributes justice to our cause. When we sing the SANCTUS too at mass, we should know that it is like singing the national anthem at a ball game. At first it was not sung at mass, but at the mobilizing of the might of God for justice doing--it is a song for places where justice is to be done: in courtooms, chanceries, demonstrations at street-corners. The Misa Campesina, a Nicaraguan popular setting by Carlos Mejia Godoy, sings the SANCTUS in that way:

    Por todos los caminos -   On all the highways
    veredas y cañadas,        pathways and trails
    diviso Jesucristo         We see, Jesucristo, 
    la luz de tu verdad.      the light of your truth

    Vos sos tre veces Santo,   You are three times Holy
    vos sos tres veces Justo,  You are three times Just
    libéranos del yugo         Deliver us from the Yoke 
    danos la libertad.         Give us liberty 

    Vos sos el Dios parejo     You are the God who is like us
    no andás con carambadas,   You don't run with hypocrites  
    vos sos hombre de ñeque    You are the one with muscles,      
    el mero Tayacán.           The best of all Guides          

But John said he saw the God who was AND the God who IS. The God that Flip Wilson knew in his "church of what's happening now." That's the Ancient of Days who is also the God of the tenth of June, 2001. As well as the God of the year that King Uzziah died. The God of our little oratory at our Managua Casa today, as well as the God of Solomon and Herod's grand Temple, the largest public building in the world in its time. The God of African Americans and Irish Americans and all the hyphenated ethnicities of all the world. We find ourselves all together the morning after our own visions and re-visions in mosques or churches or temples or in Exile. God has promised everybody a place on the planet--and even Palestinians have a right to their homes, not to meretricious U.S.-Israeli promises.

John further declared that the song he heard was of the God who is to come. If we are stuck with the God who was or if we are stuck with the God who is, we are stuck with a two-dimensional god, and a two-dimensional universe, and a Reader's Digest indigestion indeed. We are stuck with a God who has nowhere to go. We are stuck in the present--what a claustrophobic place for the Spirit! But John's vision saw AN OPEN DOOR IN HEAVEN, and an open-ended universe, and no closed system but an open future open to a re-visioning of human hopes and religious faith, feeling, and formulation. We are not trapped in the past or in the present by the God who was and the God who is, for God is yet to come. "Lift every voice" goes on to its third dimension: "Facing the rising sun, of our new day begun, let us march on, till victory is won." God is three times holy, three times just, because God beckons us through the open door into a future where God lives hereafter, and bids us, "Come up hither, and I will show you what must take place after this."

The poet prophet Alice Meynell once again speaks to us:

  ". . . But in the eternities
   doubtless we shall compare together, hear
   A million alien Gospels, in what guise
   He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.
   
   "O, be prepared my soul!
   To read the inconceivable, to scan
   The million forms of God those stars unroll
   When, in our turn, we show to them a Man."     

You will see ALL THINGS NEW. T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem "Little Gidding" that "the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." The journey is necessary for the re-vision. The way we see things new is our re-vising of the past. Our seeing the possibility of new hope for the future. Separating from the past brings our own new understandings, 'though at the time we see them as disaster, as many saw the reforms of Vatican II. "It is to your advantage" Jesus says, that the past and the present go away. The Spirit will show you the things to come.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson went to Cuba in 1984 and got Fidel Castro to go to a Methodist church in downtown Havana with him to commemorate Saint Martin Luther King Jr. It was Fidel's first visit to a church in twenty seven years. Frei Betto, a Brazilian Dominican brother, a few years later published FIDEL AND RELIGION, an account of his twenty-three hours of conversation with Fidel. It sold half a million copies at once. Fidel says in it, "from a strictly political point of view, I think one can be a Marxist without ceasing to be a Christian. . . what is important is a question of sincere revolutionaries disposed to abolish the exploitation of humankind by humankind, and to struggle for the just distribution of social riches." And before my eyes a door opened in heaven and a voice that I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, "Come up here and I will show you what must happen hereafter." Fidel had special praise for liberation theology, now disdained by establishment (bought and paid for "court") theologians. He said, "It is a re-encounter by Christianity with its roots--its most beautiful, most attractive, most glorious history." A tersanctus of praise. Can this be what we mean by a God who is open to the future--or is our God stuck in the capitalist selfish adolesence of the human race? Feudalism was its childhood, but it has still not attained maturity and wants to live in a Me-First world.

Openness is the meaning of the Triune God we celebrate today. Fidel's famous slogan is "Within the Revolution all things are possible, outside the Revolution nothing is possible." And we may say Amen to that, and also be faithful to Apocalypse: "Within the Revelation all things are possible, outside the Revelation nothing is possible." For this is true of the Eternal and Ever Blessed Trinity, continually revealing Godself--and within the Trinity of God all things are possible, within the Trinity of God who comes out of our past, who walks with us in the present, and who beckons us to the truly human future. All things are possible and open to us now.

GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni

• The Series: Father Gallup's "Homily Grits": http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/grits.html
• The Series "Joy Anyway!": http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/joy.html
• Louie Crew's Anglican pages: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/rel.html
• Louie Crew's home page: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew
• Send mail to: lcrew@newark.rutgers.edu

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