Becoming Not Lost

The Revd Alan Ramsey

4th June 2023

10.30am

Choral Eucharist

Matthew 28:16-end

The title of my homily this morning is ‘becoming not lost.’ And I’m going to begin with a short poem, based on an old Native American elder story, by the American poet David Wagoner. The poem is called LOST.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here. No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you.

Sometimes it can feel as if our lives are in that forest. We are dislocated and disoriented. We are lost. We don’t recognise anything about this new place. We’re not even sure who we are anymore. Everything is unfamiliar and unknown.

When we are lost, physically, emotionally, or spiritually, often the most common reaction is to try to remove ourselves from that place as soon as we can. We want out. But by trying to escape the discomfort and the disconnectedness too quickly, we miss the opportunity to see what is all around us. We miss the chance to learn anything new about who we are in this new place. What we tend to do is panic.

We feel there is no way of becoming not lost. And we’re not sure that God, whatever that is, whoever he is, will be of any use.

What should we do with our lostness?

Trinity Sunday is a panicky Sunday. Religious professionals try to sort out the nature of God and it invariably turns into one big hot mess. Let’s be honest, most sermons preached up and down the land on Trinity Sunday are excruciating (present church excepted).

We get clunky three in one analogies, wrapped up in some of the laziest anecdotes known to humankind. Or theological rabbit-holes from which there is no relief. So, if there’s one day for Anglicans to skip church, this is the one…

Often one of the biggest reasons we struggle with grasping the doctrine of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is similar to the reason we struggle to understand God at all. It’s a problem of visualisation. How do we visualise God among us today? And when it comes to the trinity, how on earth do we make sense of such a complex and abstract idea?

The rejection of God is often just the rejection of bad images or bad visualisations of God. Even the assumption that he can’t be seen presents the bad image of ‘made up’ God.

In Christianity, Jesus Christ is obviously the easiest image to make sense of, at least the first century historical Jesus. When it comes to the resurrected Christ and where he is now, or what picture we have of that, it becomes a bit muddy.

In fact, the real hazard of speaking of ANY of the persons of the Trinity is that this language makes us think of God as being constituted by various parts, where Jesus, for example is one third of God. But the transcendent God is not material in this way (Revd Will Lamb spoke about this erroneous concept of God as a ‘thing’ taking up material space in the world, in his brilliant sermon on Easter Sunday).

The Father, Son and Holy spirit is not a technical puzzle or an idea with a schematic quality. In God we have a unity and wholeness rather than separateness. God has his own depths and infinite structure that is too great and full of mystery to reduce to any satisfactory explanation. We get a tiny glimpse of this impossible complexity when we consider the intricacy and multi-faceted nature of humans themselves. We are beyond simplistic reduction. God is holy, we are holy. And language and imagery to express this has its limits.

In our Gospel reading today, Jesus says “Remember I am with you always”. He doesn’t say ‘we are with you always’. The son is not a third of God. This is just God, the holy transcendent ‘I AM’ that is spoken of in Israel’s Shema ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord.’

The theologian Katherine Sonderegger says, ‘the trinity is a doctrine about the inner life of God and therefore is about BEING itself’.

So, now if we return to our poem, how does this kind of triune God - infinite, irreducible and omnipresent - help us in our lostness? How do we visualise God meeting us in our needs, worries or questions today?

Well, if God is the act of being itself, the condition for everything to be, and to live, then we are completely enveloped by the triune God. We are surrounded and infused with the full life of God. We are not dealing with three distinct holy persons huddled together somewhere like the Bee Gees, or split off into their own separate departments. Just as we stand in the middle of the forest, as the poem describes, so we stand inside this one God. St Paul says, ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’

I’m going to suggest a few new visualisations of God. If you want a fresh picture of the Trinity – beyond the sad titled head Jesus on the cross, the Holy Spirit as embroidered fire logo circa 1980’s parish church décor, or those massive hands of father god holding a globe – you know the ‘he’s got the whole world in his hands cartoon’….all that awful stuff…If you want fresh triune God images here’s what I recommend. Drive out into the most beautiful English countryside and lie down in a field. Experience the ‘here-ness’ and nearness of the divine life (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). The psalmist says, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it…The heavens declare the glory of God.”

Or if you’re more of an urbanite go to a good party with loud music and dancing, with your nearest and dearest, and let the collective joy and love in that room enfold you. Where love is God is.

I agree with atheists, agnostics, and materialists – I could only ever believe in a God I can see. And I see God everywhere.

God is not just to be found amongst beauty, joy, or love. Perhaps the most pronounced experience and visibility of the triune God comes when we are suffering. When we are lost. Because then we recognise that our lostness does not relate to the new difficult place we find ourselves in. We realise that our lostness comes from not seeing God enfolding us, underpinning us, and living with us in that place.

Whatever we are dealing with or thinking about today, if we stand still, we may hear something besides our own panicked breath. We may become curious and hopeful, rather than fearful. What is this place? What can I learn from it? Who

might I become because of this suffering, this strangeness, my feeling of lostness? What do I do with this new moment in my life?

And gradually, the forest becomes a known place, something we call “here” rather than a place of disorientation that we only think of as "there."

Like Old Testament Jacob waking up from a dream we can say “surely the lord is in this place, and I didn’t know it.”

It is rewarding to intellectually grapple with ideas and doctrines about God. But one of the greatest rewards comes from standing still, calling this place ‘Here’ and allowing ourselves to be found by God. This is what it is to become not lost. The forest knows where we are. The triune God knows where we are. And he is with us even unto the end of the age. I’ll finish with a final reading of the poem:

Lost