Transfiguration 12 step Eucharist

Homily 12 step Eucharist

Feast of Transfiguration, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock AR

August 2, 2017

Welcome to the 12 step Eucharist at St. Mark’s every first Wednesday. To me this Eucharist is a reminder of how the 12 steps are an integral part of the liturgy of our communion service practiced by the people of God for almost two thousand years. For anyone who knows very little about 12 step groups, this liturgy is an introduction to the spirituality of the 12 steps.

I frequently hear in 12 step meetings how the church has failed people in their attempts at recovery. For many, the church could not keep them clean and sober because the God of their understanding in church was a judgmental God, pointing a finger at every wrong doing with promises of hell for all our actions. Those in addiction as well as their families and friends were already in a life of a living hell. They did not have to consider some future event. They were already there.

On the other hand. I knew from the beginning that God loved me and suffered with me daily in my addictions… and that God prayed for and with me for my recovery. I was taught that the story of God and God’s people as revealed from Genesis to Revelation is the story of a God who lives with and beside oppressed people. Those of us in addiction and our families were certainly oppressed by this life style.

The message of the 12 steps came as you know from the Oxford group, a renewal group out of the church. So, from the beginning, the spirituality of the 12 steps has been steeped in a religious foundation.

 However, I could not find recovery in the message I heard at church.  Recovery did not begin until I went to 12 step meetings. The same message is there in both my church and in 12 step groups; what is the difference? Some say we must reach a certain bottom before we hear the message. Some say that churches are for people who are afraid of going to hell, and 12 step groups are for people who have already been there.

Some say people in 12 step groups realize that their spirituality is a life and death matter, and when I speak of life and death, I am talking about a living death, which is what living in addiction is like.

Tonight, we remind ourselves that the message was there in our religious life all along. Just because our church could not initially keep us clean or sober, we should not throw the baby out with the bath water. We are returning to our roots and finding the answer still here, but we can hear and see it now that we have on a new pair of glasses./

Sunday, we will celebrate the feast of the transfiguration, when Jesus reveals himself on a high mountain to three of his disciples as the incarnation of God. Anyone in 12 step recovery can identify immediately with transfiguration, seeing the light, a moment of clarity, seeing the God who has been there all along,/ but we never saw because we were busy making “dwellings” for other idols. Moments of transfiguration happen in our lives when we are transported from our deep sleep to a moment of bright light when we see, feel, taste, and touch God. Transfiguration is about knowing our own true nature, the part of us that is of God,

that part of God that is in others. It is the moment when all else falls away and we are simply of God, and have the desire to turn our life and our will over to the care of God. It is that moment when we let go,/ and let God. Transfiguration is the message and the promise of recovery. Tonight, we gather here to celebrate recovery/ and transfiguration.

Joanna     joannaseibert.com

Pulling Weeds 11A

11A July 24, 2017 Searcy Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43.

Pulling Weeds

This is the second of three Sundays that Matthew tells stories about Jesus, seeds, and planting. Last week he talked about planting seeds. This week he talks about pulling weeds.  Next week we will hear about mustard seeds! Matthew also has a liking for parables about judgment. He is the only gospel writer who waxes eloquently about end times,/ the only one describing this furnace of fire with weeping and gnashing of teeth. Only Matthew talks about the wise and foolish virgins, the division of sheep and goats, as well as today’s gospel about the weeds and the wheat.  Matthew seems to like things black or white, good or bad, faithful or wicked, blessed or cursed. 

In today’s gospel Matthew lets the early Christians know that they are insiders to whom Jesus gives interpretation while outsiders will not hear his special message, a little bit Gnostic isn’t it;/ insiders who at the last day will be vindicated and outsiders who will go up in smoke. Now this may have been comforting at that time, but not now. Matthew is definite about two kinds of people in his world, the wheat and the weeds,/ but for most of us today it is not so clear.  The majority of us have both wheat and weeds within us as well as something of a hybrid where the two have grown together so long it is hard to separate them. So, this gathering and burning of weeds makes me a little nervous. Are we wheat, weed, blessed, or cursed?

Barbara Brown Taylor1 writes that parables rarely answer questions directly. We want to read them like a Morse code, but they behave more like dreams or poetry with images that speak more to our hearts than our heads. Parables are mysterious,/ teaching us something different every time we hear them,/ speaking across great distances of time./ According to Matthew Jesus speaks to the insiders, /his disciples, /and gives them the key; he is the sower, the field is the world, the weeds belong to the devil, the wheat belong to the kingdom of God.  So why does Jesus not just say all this in the first place?/ Some scholars say he needed to avoid arrest, and others say those who recorded his words made a few additions so we hearing his words later on would not misinterpret the meaning.

What a minute!  We just missed something. Did you notice how this passage starts, “Jesus put before the crowds another parable: ’the kingdom of heaven may be compared to’… The kingdom of heaven allows both wheat and weeds in it! According to Jesus not even the kingdom of heaven is pure. It may have started out that way, but some time during the night while everyone is sleeping, an enemy sneaks in and sows weeds among the wheat, Lolium tremulentum, to be exact, better known as darnel, a nasty wheat look-alike with poisonous seeds/ and roots like nylon cords that wrap around the wheat3. These weeds bare such a close resemblance to wheat that we cannot recognize them until the ears of wheat appear.  The problem to taking a hoe to the evil weeds of the world is that good and evil look so much alike. Only later when they bear fruit is it clear.//

However weeds get there, most of us have them, not only in our yards, but in ourselves, in our lives: thorny people who are not part of the plan, who are not welcome, sucking up sunlight and water that were meant for good plants, not weeds. Some are just irritating like poison ivy but some are as deadly as nightshade. The question is, what to do about them?

“Should we go and gather them?”, the slaves ask their master. That is the common-sense solution. Pull them up, cast them out, cleanse the field. We have seen a lot of that today and in our past century, McCarthyism, ISSIS, KKK, in Germany, Syria, Turkey, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Iraq, Israel, along our border with Mexico. Wherever people are busy trying to purify the field by hostile means, they are doing what the slaves wanted to do, only they are doing it without permission from the boss, who says, “No!”

“No,” he says, “for in gathering the weeds you uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Collect the weeds first and bind them into bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into the barn.” /This is a stunning statement, which seems to advocate passivity in the face of evil. It also suggests that we can do more harm when we think we are doing good/ than when we do nothing at all./

The boss gives at least three reasons as to why he says no to those who want to neaten up the field. First, we are not skilled enough to separate the good from the bad. We exterminate something that looks for all the world like a weed, but when we bend over to pick up the limp stalk, grains of wheat fall out.  We are reminded of one of the first crusades where knights from western Europe ravaged through an Arab town on their way to the Holy Land, killing everyone in sight. When they turned the bodies over, they found crosses around most of their victims’ necks. It never occurred to them that Christians came in brown as well as white.  Another difficulty with separating the good from the bad is that our lives are intertwined. That is one of the ways darn/el survives by wrapping its roots around the roots of the wheat so that we cannot yank up one without yanking up the other.

A second reason to let the weeds grow is that they may turn out to be useful in the end. In first-century Palestine, lumber and coal are scarce.  The most used material for heating and cooking is dried weeds or manure. By letting the weeds and the wheat grow together, farmers have almost everything they need to make bread, the wheat for flour and the weeds for fire. The other thing they need is a little patience, a little tolerance of a temporary mess, until everything is used at the harvest.

 For those of us living in the time before the harvest, this patience can be hard, but the weeds may still be useful in ways that surpass our understanding. Sometimes the weeds wake up the wheat and remind them who they are. I am thinking of people all over the world who have spoken out for health care, immigrants, global warming in the last six months./ I remember one physician I worked with who was really weedy, unkind to patents and other physicians. I repeated the Jesus prayer over and over as I talked to her to avoid saying something awful. She bullied me into developing an ultrasound test for children with sickle cell disease to determine if they are at risk for stroke. I remember the day in her unkind manner she said, “if you don’t do it, I will bring in someone else to do it or do it myself!” This test turns out to be my lifelong research and probably my greatest contribution to pediatrics. //I was hit by a drunk driver in my junior year of medical school and sustained injuries that still plague me today. I later returned to another medical school class, and that is where I met my husband. We never would have known each other if I had not been in that car accident that night./ Sometimes weedy situations turn into wheat. God always teaches us and turns awful stuff into good if we have patience to wait for the harvest.

As the field gets really messy, the challenge is should the wheat spend time attacking the weeds/ or concentrating their energy on becoming better wheat!  This becomes the third reason the Boss says no to yanking the weeds. The wheat run the risk of turning into weeds themselves when they attack the weeds. It is one of the trickiest things weeds do, to get wheat so riled up and defensive that they start acting like weeds themselves, full of prickles, full of poison, good people who turn into bad trying to put the bad out of business. /

God allows a mixed field, and God asks us to be patient, to tolerate a mixed field, both in the church and in the world. This radical call to acceptance is not a call to passivity, but a call to strenuous activity to work on ourselves, to become the person God created us to be./

If any of you have tried to love your enemies lately you know it is not easy being wheat, especially with so many weeds competing for the soil of our soul, but the Boss seems to say to let him be in charge of the weeds. Our job and our best solution to combating evil is to stay true to our own roots and bear good fruit. Learning how to love, not destroying weeds is our life’s project.4 This is why so many of Jesus’ parables are about hiddenness, love, and waiting.

1Barbara Brown Taylor, “Learning to Live with the Weeds,” The Seeds of Heaven, pp. 11-17.

2Barbara Brown Taylor, “Why the Boss Said No,”, Bread of Angels, pp. 146-150.

3Rev. Todd Weir, “Wheat and Tares”, sermon 2005.

4Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003), 41; and Homily “The Weeds and the Wheat,” July 20, 2014.

joanna

Sparrows Kathleen Battle Feinberg 7A

7A Value and Sparrows

St. Mark’s June 25th, 2017 8, 10:30 and 5

Matthew 10:24-39

Sparrows Christian Century Kathleen Battle

“Or not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground/ apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So, do not be afraid:/ you are of more value than many sparrows.” Matthew 10:29-31

 Civilla Martin, a Canadian schoolteacher, composes in 1905 a beloved poem,/ “His Eye is On the Sparrow”, based on this passage from Matthew. /“His eye is on the sparrow,/ and I know, he watches me.”

Noted song writer, Charles Gabriel, transforms the words into music to become the well-known gospel hymn that brings comfort to congregations in African-American churches in our past century/ where their race is not valued in the world’s economy.  I will never forget hearing Kathleen Battle,/ American operatic soprano/ noted for her distinctive vocal range and tone, sing this hymn A cappella/ at a concert with the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center/ the year we helped with a pilgrimage to the National Cathedral. We are on the first- row center/ where we our line of vision is directly at all the well shined shoes of the orchestra members./ Battle is there standing in front of us,/ a foot away, / wearing a striking floor length, dark red velvet dress. Her soul is singing from something deep inside of her. These words, this music, and Kathleen Battle indeed speak beyond words about how valuable we each are to God.

So often I meet and talk with people who do not feel valued by God. As I listen, I so wish I could honor what we have learned from our country’s African American tradition/ and maybe sing this hymn like Kathleen Battle to tell them their worth,/ but alas, I will have to try something else.

Instead I could quote this scripture from Jesus’ “missionary discourse” about two sparrows sold for a copper coin, 1/16th of a denarius, 1/16th of a day’s wages. In Jesus’ day, sparrows are the meat or the “ground chuck” of the poor. Yet, God cares for the sparrows, the food of the poor, and even gives them special attention. God cares about what is considered by first century Christians as the least valuable. So, Jesus makes the argument/ that does it not make sense/ that God cares for,/ watches over,/ values/ each of us even more. The knowledge that God cares and loves us so deeply is Jesus’ ant/i/dote to fear,/ any fear we may have, especially as we are sent out as disciples into the world. But Jesus also cautions us about a rabbit hole. He mentions that we may have a cross to bear, and there is no magical spell preventing us from suffering. What Jesus does try to relay instead/ is how deeply God cares/ and knows/ and loves us; God so intimately cherishes us that God knows even the number of hairs in our head. //

 If scripture doesn’t work to help someone know they are valued, I could next try reason which also includes our experience.

 I might tell the story from the recent Christian Century article by Liddy Barlow1, the executive minister of Christian Associates of Southwest Pennsylvania. She introduces us to the dilemma faced by the lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, who chairs the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund giving money to the families of those who died in the terrorist attack. He devises a formula for proportional compensation depending on the present income/ and estimated loss from future earnings/ of each victim,/ ranging /from busboys at the Windows on the World Restaurant to Wall Street traders.2 Feinberg’s training in law and particularly his experience in compensation law and mediation for /victims of Agent Orange leads him to believe that people will have different values. He even writes a book about his experience, What Is Life Worth?, describing an eight-part plan to determine the value of someone’s life depending on the person’s age,/ dependents, /income,/ and their earning potential. Feinberg describes his work as grueling, like being in a t/sunami as he works for 33 months pro bono for the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund. Seven billion dollars in compensations are given for the 5300 families of the victims of 9/11, ranging from $250, 000 for blue collar workers to $7.1 million for some executives. At the conclusion of this experience, Feinberg struggles with this differentiation as he personally learns more about each victim and their loved ones left behind. He wonders if it is possible that the value of a wealthy person is truly 28 times as valuable as a worker? In the process, Feinberg is transformed and writes, “I regret presenting myself in a more lawyer-like way rather than in a more empathetic, sensitive way. It took me awhile to evolve into that more sensitive person, listening, rather than talking. There is nothing you can say that can alleviate their pain. Better I have a background as a priest or a rabbi or a psychiatrist.”

 Feinberg later relates his story on NPR3 in May 2008 and on the anniversary of 9/11 last year. He next is consulted by the president of Virginia Tech as how to distribute the private funds for compensation to the families of those killed in the mass shooting at that campus on April 16, 2007, where 32 people are killed and 17 wounded. On these NPR broadcasts, we can hear Feinberg saying, /singing “His Eye is on the Sparrow” in the language of an experienced lawyer as he speaks,/ “Trained in the law, I had always accepted that no two lives were worth the same in financial terms. But now I found the law in conflict with my growing belief in the equality of all life.”  Feinberg had listened to the voices of families from 9/11. “Mr. Feinberg, my husband was a fireman and died a hero at the World Trade Center. Why are you giving me less money than the banker who represented Enron? Why are you demeaning the memory of my husband?”/  Feinberg, again working pro bono at Virginia Tech, this time recommends that all victims at Virginia Tech,/ students and faculty/ receive the same compensation.///

So, what do we do when we are with someone who does not feel valued by God? We listen and listen to their story. Then our Anglican tradition tells us we have at least three possible genre of stories we can share with them,/ stories from our tradition,/ stories from scripture,/ and stories from our reason or experience. Next, we again listen and listen for the Spirit to speak for us/ and make connections so that we both are no longer fearful people, so that together we can go out into a fearful world/ to become the people God created us to be.

So today, I share with you my stories from my tradition, knowledge of scripture, and my reason and experience /of the God of my understanding, the God who so desperately loves/ and so desperately values each of us./ Now, it is your turn for you to make the connections,/ listen/ as the Holy Spirit in this long Pentecost season moves through you,/ moves through each of us/ as we remember how valued we are by God,/ so that we are no longer fearful/ of going out into this world/ and sharing God’s story of love.

 1Liddy Barlow, “Living the Word,” Christian Century, p. 20, June 7, 2017.

2Ross Barkan, “Meet Ken Feinberg, the Master of disasters,” 3/9/16, New York Observer, observer.com. A version of this story appeared on the cover of the March 14th , 2016 edition of the New York Observer.

 3Kenneth Feinberg, “Lawyer Describes the Emotional Toll of Calculating Victims’ Compensation,” All Things Considered, NPR, Host, Ray Suarez, September 11, 2016, 5:06 pm ET.

Kenneth Feinberg, “What is the Value of a Human Life?”, Weekend Edition Sunday NPR, This I Believe, May 25, 2008, 4 am ET.

Wedding of Jennifer Cobb and Christopher Travis

Wedding of Jennifer Cobb and Christopher Travis

Saturday June 24, 2017 10:30 am Curran Hall

Jennifer and Christopher, what a privilege for Patricia and me to be with you and your families on your wedding day. You, your children, your parents, your families are very special to both us. 

Jennifer, I have known you longer as you grew up with our sons, but we really got to know both of you better when Patricia and I were at Trinity Cathedral, and you both were so involved on the board of the Cathedral School. You both worked so hard to make that school work for your children and so many others, and you did an amazing job.

Then without warning overnight the school was taken away from us./ My most sacred memory of all that tragedy is that of you, Jennifer,  singing as you walked out of the Cathedral with tears flowing down your face/ and carrying a single bright candle/ out of the church/ at the closing and final graduation the next day.  Well, you both indeed have become our icons of carrying a bright light out from all that tragedy to make this world a brighter place. You both have carried out the bright light of what you and your children learned at that school, and have made this city,/ this state,/ a much better place because of you.

 As you were doing all this, isn’t it amazing how the process of recovery also brought you together,/ and you fell in love. Out of great tragedy,/ came love. This is always, always the way God works. It is also called resurrection. Remember this. Remember this. Out of every difficulty you will face together in this new life, the God who so loves both of you/ so deeply can bring light and a new life to every situation. Never forget this. Keep reminding each other. You are resurrection people. Your love, your marriage is a resurrection story.

 Joanna

At dismissal:

Deacon:

Jennifer and Christopher asked us to end this ceremony with a special dismissal./ It was written by Dean Charles Higgins as a charge to graduates of The Cathedral School. Both Jennifer and Chris heard it spoken at their graduations, as did Graham, Shawn and Charles. It perfectly captures the values Jennifer and Chris wish to teach and model for their children.

Dear friends and family,

As you leave here today,

 see to it in your life and work that you put truth above ambition,

 compassion above popularity,

justice above self-interest,

and love above all.

Bear yourselves with uprightness and integrity to the glory of God,

 and may God guide and bless you always.

Trinity Sunday, Trinity Episcopal Church, Searcy

Trinity Church, Searcy, Arkansas

Trinity Sunday, June 11, 2017

There can be no better place to be on Trinity Sunday than at Trinity Church in Searcy.  But if you are like I am, you sometimes wonder why does our God need three names, three persons? How can one God inhabit three forms and be both three and one? / Most important, can belief in this Trinity really make any difference in our lives? Will the Trinity make a difference in how we will drive their cars, how we will fill out their income taxes, how we will respond to war, or how we treat the person sitting across the aisle or living across the interstate from them? /

Robert Capon says that when human beings try to describe God we are like a bunch of oysters trying to describe a ballerina. We simply don’t have the equipment to understand something so utterly beyond us,/ but that has never stopped us from trying. /

First let us start by saying the Trinity is a mystery. Do not let this word “mystery” turn you off intellectually. It means that the truth will be revealed to our understanding but never completely, because it requires that we are in relationship to the intimate parts of God. Saint Irenaeus said that God remains a mystery even in heaven. Through all eternity we will be finding new things out about God, and the mystery will be more and more revealed. There is never a time when we can say, “God, this is not a new thing you have shown us.”

The Trinity is not a quantifiable being. In human arithmetic, 1+1+1= 3. In celestial arithmetic 1+1+1= 1. Several years ago, I heard a Greek orthodox bishop give a series of lectures on the Trinity at Oxford. That’s Oxford, England, not Oxford, Mississippi. Surely a bishop in Oxford should be able to explain the Trinity. For one whole hour he drew six possible diagrams for the Trinity, triangles, circles, concentric circles, overlapping circles. Then at the end, he said, “and the answer is, the best diagram for the Trinity is this:” He erased all his work and left a blank board. It is a mystery.  

Part of our problem of understanding the Trinity is that we have no actual images of two of the persons. We have descriptions of Jesus, the human face of God, but no one has seen the Father or the Spirit. In western art the Spirit is traditionally characterized as a dove /and God as an old man with a beard. This has led to many problems, especially if the old man with a beard in your real life is not noted for his kindness and love.

A recent popular image of the Trinity is described in the book, The Shack, by William Young, now made into a movie.  In this modern midrash of the Trinity, a man named Mac Phillips meets the Trinity at the scene of the brutal murder of his young daughter. God is a large beaming African American woman who engulfs Mac in her arms, saying,” My, my, how I do love you.” She tells him to call her Papa. Jesus appears as a blue-collar man with Middle Eastern features. The Spirit is a distinctively Asian woman who shimmers like the wind and is alternately translucent or visible only out of the corner of Mac’s eye. More important than their identity is their relationship to each other. Mac writes, “I have never seen three people share with such simplicity and beauty. Each seems more aware of the other than of themselves.” The three constantly call Mac to join them in their circle of relationship. Jesus tells Mac not to ask “what would Jesus do.” “My life was not meant to be an example to copy. That would kill your independence. I came to give you life, our life together. We desire that you re- turn to us so that we will come and live and make our home and share our life inside of you, so that you may begin to see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and touch with our hands. But we will never force our union on you.” 

The Shack reminds us that if we tend to think of the Trinity by distinguishing each of its parts, we will miss the mark. If we only see the Trinity as separate persons, we will miss the power of their community. The ultimate beauty of the Trinity is in its relationship and love of each to the whole. Each part makes decisions based on the input from the others. Their minds and hearts are constantly in relationship to each other, not centered on themselves. The three parts in this relationship teach us how to love each other. The three persons of the Trinity are desperately in love with, in COMMUNITY, and CONNECTED to each other. The parts of the Trinity indwell in one another. They are transparent to each other. They have no secrets from one another.  (John 17:21-23)

God is the Creator, and father, and lover,/ and the saving, beloved Christ.  The love between them is so powerful that from that love, its own person is formed, the sustaining, empowering Holy Spirit. There is no jealousy, no fear of rivalry. (John 3:35, 10:17, 15:9, 17:23-24.) Barbara Brown Taylor describes this concept of the Trinity as the “sound of three hands clapping.”

 Perhaps we learn more about the Trinity from images where this love relationship is absent. What is hell but the absence of God, the absence of relationship. Possibly you have heard this story:

A Rabbi asks to see Heaven and Hell. His wish is granted and he's taken to a room where everyone is seated at a long dinner table with delicious food in front of them.  However, everyone there is starving and emaciated.  This is because, the Rabbi discovers, while each has a long spoon strapped to his or her wrist, the spoon is so long they cannot pick up the food and actually put it in their mouths. They are utterly frustrated and bitterly unhappy. The Rabbi is told that this is Hell. 

He is then taken to another room with everyone seated at an identical long table with delicious food, and each individual also has a long spoon strapped to his or her wrist.  These people, however, are well-fed, for they have learned that their spoons are perfectly designed to allow them to feed each other, which they are doing quite naturally.  They are joyous and contented.  The Rabbi is told that this is Heaven./

So what does this inter-relationship of the Trinity say to us? Since we are made in God’s image, everything about the Trinity can also be said about us. The Trinity calls us to a radical reorientation in our way of seeing and being in the world. We must live in community. We are what we are in relationship to. We are to be transcripts of the Trinity on earth. Either we love like the Trinity or we have no life. The God of the Trinity is not an I but a we, not mine but ours.  The doctrine of the Trinity is not designed to TELL us the truth about God / but to SHOW us how to LIVE the truth… in community, in relationship.

Yes, our belief in the Trinity and the interpersonal love of the Trinity can transform our lives. Our relationship to and understanding of the Trinity can definitely make a difference in how we drive our cars, how we fill out our tax returns, how we relate and respond to war, how we treat the person sitting across the aisle from us as well as the person living across the interstate from us. Today, the Trinity will especially make a difference in the lives of each of us in this sacred space that for so many years has honored the Trinity. You have a legacy, you are the standard bearers to show all the world how to love like the Trinity.

Your mission, then, should you wish to accept it,

 is to go and represent the Trinity - created in love, saved in love, and sustained in love by our Triune God. Love like the Trinity in Searcy and in the world.  This mission is not impossible, because with God, all things are possible.  You can do this - we can do this - together, in relationship, in community - with God's help.  Keep remembering those final words of Jesus in today's Gospel. "I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20).

 Bishop Timothy Kallistos, Summer Institute, Oxford, August, 2004.

Barbara Brown Taylor, “Three Hands Clapping,” Home by Another Way, pp. 151-154.

Fleming Rutledge, “The Multicultural Good News,” The Bible and the New York Times, pp. 169–175.

Rowan Williams, “the Hospitality of Abraham,” The Dwelling of the Light, Praying with Icons of Christ,  pp. 45-63.

Henri Nouwen, Beyond the Beauty of the Lord, Praying with Icons, pp. 19-27.

John Burton, “Seeing the Trinity from the Inside,” Preaching as Pastoral Care, pp. 70- 73.

Frederick Buechner, “Trinity,” Beyond Words, pp. 394-395.

William Young, The Shack, pp. 122, 146, 149, 175, 198.

 Joanna Seibert