Two fellows in a hot air balloon

were passing over the countryside.

They were lost.

They saw a man walking along a country road.

They lowered the balloon.
One called down to him,

"Can you tell us where we are?"

He said,

"Certainly,

you're in a hot air balloon."

The man in the balloon turned to his friend and said;

"That man is an economist,

what he said is absolutely true,

but of no practical use whatsoever."

That could be changed to a theologian,

telling us things that are absolutely true,

but of no practical use whatsoever.

We are headed for Easter....

and are presently in Lent...

that time of self-examination, repentance,

of setting our face toward God...

a lot of us want to get to Easter as quickly as we can...

I think we've missed the point of Lent...

it is not for us to feel dutifully guilty...

though some of us are in the gifted program of feeling guilty...

The point of Lent is

to prepare us to follow Jesus...

from a physical being

to a spiritual being.

I was thinking of this

last week

as I pondered

my work,

my call,

and my job....

and I came to the conclusion that my job,

is to fire the Spiritual engine of this church.

I am a fireman on this train.

And it has been my observation that

as we approach Easter,

if we only retell the events

then we are not really fulfilling our office...

we must find a way to be in awe....

to ponder the mystery of the resurrection.

I was thinking on this...

and it occurred to me that

the same mystery that brings us such joy at Easter...

the death and resurrection of Jesus...

can also be the mystery which

brings us such pain and anger in our own lives...

when it is our kid

or our suffering

or our body

that is being offered up...

(because we expect God to do more for us and our kids

than God did for his own son.)

One of the mysteries we deal with

is the reality of God...

and how God becomes known to us...

the doctrine of the trinity.

There are people who think that

if you don't believe in the doctrine of the trinity,

you're in danger of losing your soul.

I think that if you try to explain and understand the doctrine of the trinity

you're in danger of losing your mind.

Most of us believe in the trinity,

except for some Unitarians.

The trinity of course is a very old doctrine.

You can read about the Council of Nicea

in a little town in what is now Turkey.

Where in 325 all of the Bishops and church leaders gathered

so they could write down and decide what we believe,

especially what we believe about the mystery of the person of Christ.

And if you look at 880 in your hymnal

you'll find the Nicean Creed.

The Bishops came

and each brought his own parethis.

A parathesis was a theologian.

Bishops were politicians, not theologians.

Not a whole lot has changed in almost 1700 Years.

The two parathesis were

Athenatious and Aires.

And they argued for days at Nicea.

And all the people were gathered there.

Aires was beginning to get the better of the argument.

Aires was what was known as a homaecian.

He said that Jesus Christ

was of like-essence to God the father.

Like essence, homoecian.

Athenatious was a homoucian.

Christ is of

the same essence or substance as God.

Homoucian.

They argued for days,

and finally the people began to shout.

And when folks start to shout,

they lose their mind.

Folks started carrying on...

you've seen that...

they don't know what they're saying.

Somebody started shouting,

"Homoucian,

Homoucian..."

and everybody took up the cry,

"Homoucian, Homoucian..."

And so Athenatious won.

Really.

Of course they didn't settle it for a few years.

They rode poor old Aires out of town on a rail.

But Constantine the emperor liked Aires

and was going to restore him 4 or 5 years later.

But on the very day he was to be restored,

Aires died.

You know among Christians in the 4th Century

there was an awful lot of superstition.

They took this as a sign

God didn't want us to be anything but Homoucian...

the same essence...

so we became Trinitarians

and here we are.

I want to tell you a story about twins,

John and Michael.

This story was written by a psychologist named Oliver Saks

and was published in the February 28, 1985 issue of the New York Review of Books

John and Michael were identical twins.

They had an incredible capacity for numbers.

They'd been the subjects,

guinea pigs really,

of many experiments and tests by psychologists and psychiatrists.

Their talent for numbers is just amazing.

Give them a date within the last 40,000 years

or the next 40,000 years

and they, in a second,

can tell you the day of the week that date will fall on.

It is amazing how they do this.
Give them a twenty-digit number

or a three hundred-digit number

makes no difference,

they'll turn around and repeat it back to you.

They have almost total recall of their past

from about their fourth birthday.

Ask them what happened on Feb 4, 1952,

they were born in 1940.

They will think a little bit

and then they'll begin to tell you what happened:

the weather,

events which often include stories of painful anguish from childhood;

contempt, jeers, mortification they endured

from other children

because they didn't fit the norm.

You see,

these twins are physically deformed

and mentally handicapped with an IQ of about 60.

They've spent most of their lives in mental hospitals.

Their performances

apart from the controlled experiments with professionals,

are routines they've developed to entertain people at hospital parties.

They belong to a group of people

known as 'savant' --

that is, mentally defective in all areas except one.

And they perform in that one capacity

with extraordinary wonder...

that is, numbers.

When asked how they can do that with numbers,

they say,

"We see them!"

And evidently they do,

with some kind of inner eye.

Oliver Saks puts it,

"They have available to them

a prodigious panorama of vast landscape

of everything they have ever heard, done, or seen."

And in the blink of an eye,

literally, because when you ask them, they begin to roll their eyes

like they're viewing a rewinding tape.

And they can recall anything

including the trillion or so events that have happened in their lives.

Such powers are rare,

but not unique.

In my hometown

there was an old man

who would watch the train go by every day:

maybe 50 cars,

maybe 100,

and when it passed

he could turn around

and tell you the numbers on every one of those freight cars.

Six, eight, ten digit numbers.

'Savant'

That sounds strange to me

since I carry cards and a calendar

to remind me what to do each day.

And then I forget where the notes are

or forget to look at them.

This same capacity was recorded of Mozart.

You know he composed music

when he was three years old.

It was recorded that

when he was two he heard a pig squeal...

and this little two year old yelled out,

'G Sharp!"

And somebody remembered the pig squeal,

went running to a piano,

and sure enough it was G sharp.

Mozart had what was called

'absolute pitch.'

I suppose the twins,

John and Michael,

have absolute numbers.

Saks said one day he was talking with them

and a big box of matches

fell off the table and spilled.

John immediately said

"111."

Michael said,

"37. 37. 37."

Saks counted the matches

and there were exactly 111 matches.

Turning to Michael

he asked why he said 37?

Michael said,

"37, 37, 37, 111."

He had factored.

Now that's amazing!

What I want to tell you about

are not all these stunts and tricks they perform.

I want to tell you about the contemplation.

Which when they're by themselves,

they do.

One day,

Saks saw the two boys sitting together.

They were alone,

and he said they had a kind of beatific look on their faces.

They were absolutely in sweet communion...

so serene...

so at peace.

He slipped up close enough to hear them.
He listened,

and being sort of a numbers freak himself,

he realized they were calling out 9 digit prime numbers --

that is, numbers that cannot be divided by any other whole number

but itself and one.

Next day, he took to the hospital

a book that had a list of prime numbers up to 10 digits.

They were again sitting in communion,

carried away into some other existence

calling off nine digit prime numbers.

Saks snuck up

and he called of a nine-digit prime number.

They smiled,

they had a new playmate,

and he joined them.

Then Saks got smart,

looked at his book

and called off a 10-digit prime.

They smiled again

and started calling out ten-digit prime numbers.

Then one of them called out

a twelve-digit prime number.

Saks was out of it.

He'd been cribbing.

He said an hour later

those boys were calling off

24 digit prime numbers.

He said it was a kind of joy

that came over them.

From this he drew some fascinating conclusions.

The twins,

who incidentally cannot calculate, divide, subtract, etc,

nevertheless have what can only be called

a sense of numbers.

The same way a musician has

a sense of harmony.

Indeed he compared them to musicians

and quoted the words of Sir Thomas Bounds,

"Whoever is harmonically composed,

delights in harmony and a profound contemplation of the first composer.

Whose soul is harmonic

has it's nearest sympathy to music."

And then he quoted the philosopher Litnets,

"Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic."

Then it hits me,

maybe the soul,

your soul,

my soul,

maybe the soul is harmonic.

No matter what one's IQ,

whether it be the IQ of John and Michael

or Robert Oppenheimer,

Maybe the soul is harmonic.

in fact it looks for it,

longs for it,

searches for it.

What the twins show us

in a kind of controlled experiment

is that when human life is not bound by the capacities we develop

in order to function in the so-called 'normal' world,

then it is free to do what it was created to do.

And what the soul was created to do

is to seek out and sense

the harmony and wholeness in all of creation.

In contemplating the perfection of numbers,

the twins were praising and delighting

in the harmony of the universe.

That accounts for the look of serenity on their faces,

as a kind of beatific joy,

like a mystic contemplating God.

They saw numbers as holy,

filled with significance.

Their symmetry is holy to them,

as though they had beheld the first composer.

It was their way of singing praises to God.

It is as if

when the soul is finally free,

we sing!

Which in turn reminded me

of that wonderful phrase in the Old Catechism

that my Presbyterian friends had to learn

before they could join the church,

and something Methodists borrowed.

The very first question in that old Catechism,

"What is the chief end of man?"

"To glorify God and praise God forever!"

That's a wonderful, marvelous phrase,

maybe we're onto something here --

the chief end of humanity?

Why are you here?

Maybe the difficulty we have

with the doctrine of the trinity,

and the other doctrines about God,

is that we approach them as if they are

rational definitions of God,

the way we would define, say,

a tree or table.

Maybe God cannot be understood by our minds,

if God could, then God wouldn't be God.

The great Jewish theologian Montetheor said,

"To define God,

one would have to be God."

In fact,

maybe God is not to be defined at all.

is to be glorified and enjoyed.

The trinity is not an explanation

as much as it is an instrument

that awakens in us

the harmony and wholeness that is God.

So to say,

"The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,"

to say that is

to marvel at the mystery,

that's all,

not explain it.

That is hard for us,

because we're Protestants.

We're inheritors of the protestant reformation,

and the reformation has shaped us

more that we realize.

The reformers were ones who were

trying to nail down the right answers.

It was an intellectual revolution really.

The thing they were concerned about

was finding the right beliefs.

To get the right beliefs

it had to stand counter to what was declared false.

So they drew up creeds and catechism

to test our faithfulness.

And to this day,

you and I will run into people

who will test whether or not we are Christians

by what we say we believe.

"You believe in the virgin birth?'"

"No."

"Then you're not a Christian"

"You believe in the resurrection of the body of Jesus Christ?"

"No."

"Then you're not a Christian"

You have to say yes to these things

or they will put you in a basket

and cart you off to hell itself.

"You believe in the absolute inerrancy of Scripture?"

"No."

"Then you're not a Christian"

We are judged whether or not we are Christians

on the basis of how we answer their questions,

as if faith is a matter of right beliefs.

I'm a child of the reformation,

I'm in its debt,

but I wonder if we have paid a very high price...

The loss of the esthetic,

now please hear this,

the loss of the esthetic dimension and the non-rational dimension of religion.

we are as vulnerable as sea birds

caught in an oil slick.

It gets in their feathers and they lose their buoyancy,

and down they go.

if we depend on reason and intellect alone.

Reason and intellect are fine

as long as everything goes well.

Good job,

children all ok,

happy with your spouse,

new car, beautiful house --

sure, God's blessing you real good and answering all your prayers...

But let something go wrong

and then what happens?

"Oh, but he was such a good man,

he believed in God and never missed church.

Why does God do a thing like this to him?

Look at him, dying of a heart attack..."

or

"I have prayed every night for years

and God hasn't answered my prayers,

therefore there is no God."

Reason leaves us in the lurch.

But what if,

what if when reason and intellect fail,

there are other powers

that can comprehend the depth of things.

What if faith

is not so much a matter of believing things

as it is a matter of sensing that which

the mind cannot understand?

What if having faith

were like the twins capacity to perceive harmony and wholeness

in the randomness of numbers?

Or finding order in the chaos

of a pile of spilled matches

or the ability to hear music

in the mundane cry of a pig-squeal?

Our first text this morning,

Old, Testament, book of Job.

Poetry, a Psalm really,

a psalm of praise to the creator.

It envisions the beginning of creation

that God created the world with wisdom.

Wisdom is the ability

to create order and make sense.

is to say that our life is created to make sense.

to be meaningful.

Above all

it means that God knew what God was doing

when God created the world in the first place.

when God created us.

The book of Job

is wisdom literature.

when things go to pieces and fall apart;
when things don't work out for a good person;
when things fall apart,

trust in God,

for there is wisdom,

wisdom far beyond our wisdom,

there is a sense of things

that may not make sense to us.

God says to Job,

"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

Tell me if YOU understand!"

There is an order to the world

that is not visible to us

that was here before we came

and will be here long after we are gone,

trust it!

In our New Testament lesson,

Paul identifies Jesus with wisdom,

"He is the image of the invisible God,

the firstborn of all creation,

for in him all things were created,
he is before all things,

and in him all things hold together! "

Later the theologians saw a parallel

between these texts and said,

"the wisdom that was with God at the creation

was also with Jesus."

By then they called the wisdom

the Holy Spirit.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

There's harmony in that,

unity,

though we may never understand it,

we can marvel at it

and glory in it,

and trust it,

trust that the center holds

even when things fall apart.

As I wrap this up,

let me go back to the twins.

After being together for about 40 years,

it was reasoned by the professionals,

that for their own good,

they should be separated

in order to end their 'unhealthy' communication.

They were moved to separate halfway houses

where they do menial chores to make a little money in order to live.

So what happened?

You know

They lost their powers.

They lost their powers.

Without the communion of each other

they lost the sense of wholeness of things.

They lost that sense of joy

in their lives.

That was the price they had to pay

in order to live socially acceptable lives.

WHAT A PARABLE!

What price did we pay

in order to do the same thing?

What faculties were we born with

that have atrophied because they were not useful

in the pursuit of goals the world deems important?

Maybe the first faculty we lost was

the ability to see the center of the universe.

The ability to look at nature and numbers and music

and see the hand of the master workman.

Saks observed,

"There is no longer any center to their lives."

And W.B. Yates writes,

"When the center no longer holds,

the world flies apart."

So lets take Paul seriously,

"Jesus is the first born of all creation.

In him all things hold together."

So we had better hold on,

trust in,

and stay pretty close to Jesus.

Let us pray...

In the name of the Father,

the Son,

and the Holy Spirit