The Answer. (Well, sort of. Otherwise known as the Trisagion)

I love a good story.  I have been trying to tell the story of the process of breathing and cellular respiration for the past week now.  I am afraid my students may have fallen asleep and woke back up just in time for the selected out takes, if their quiz grades are any indication.  I am not offended, because truthfully cellular respiration doesn’t have the makings of an epic. It is kind of sitting through a really bad sermon or reading James Joyce aloud.  PAINFUL. So I wish I could tell them this story, but it has nothing to do with cellular respiration.

I love words.  Maybe that is why I am drawn to teaching, or maybe that is why I love sermons so, or why some books I consider as friends. 

Last night I found myself thinking about what the word holy actually meant.  As it turns out, there is quite a debate among scholars or at least that is what Google told me. The idea of holy can be traced back to the ancients.  To the Hebrews, it was the chief word used to describe the character of God. The Hebrew word is “qadosh”. Etymologists have traced "holy" back to an Old Norse word for good health and wholeness, "heilagr", through German "heil" (meaning "health, happiness and good luck") to Old English "hal" (related to hallow). According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the pre-Christian meaning was probably "that which must be preserved whole or intact, that cannot be transgressed or violated.”

Almost 700 years before the birth of Christ, the prophet Isaiah wrote a vivid description of a vision that was beyond description…he declared it…Holy, holy, holy.  800 years later while on the island of Patmos, St. John saw a vision also beyond words and beyond description and he declared it holy, holy, holy. The Trisagion.

Holy God
Holy mighty
Holy immortal
Have mercy on us

It appeared in the Church liturgy around the fourth century and is still in use today.  Among my many loves of the Anglican liturgy is perhaps its universality.  It reminds me of the timelessness and richness and diverseness of the Church. This ancient hymn is found in almost all of the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox liturgies. There are hundreds of variations on the melody to which it is chanted or sung. 

Those of you who believe in God, well, we can never be sure of what (holiness) means exactly.  If God can show up in a stable or be a ram in the thicket or in an earthquake or in fire, or on a mountain with Moses, or in Isaiah’s dreams or as a carpenter from Nazareth or hanging dying on a cross, well then God can show up anywhere and looks like anything and maybe that is the point.   Frederick Buechner writes: 

 

“Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind.
If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too.”

I have come to believe that holiness is more about wholeness than anything else. And by singing the Trisagion, we invite that wholeness in. And since I am one of those characters always in need of saving again and again, I probably would do well to pray the Trisagion Thrice a tri-zillion time over. I am of the belief that salvation is not so much a moment in time as an ongoing experience that happens over a lifetime.  I used to only get “born again” about once a year.  Like at a revival meeting or church camp.  So if you are still young enough to go to church camp keeping getting born again yearly because by the time you get to college you are going to be doing that about twice a year and by the time you are about 30, once a quarter and in your 40’s and 50’s about four times a day.  Given that I am about a 12 months away from 50, I am in the much latter category.

It was after it was sung that I began to think that maybe we are not as safe as we would like to think and perhaps this is holiness.  "There is no place where his power won’t break and re-create the human heart." It is probably just when God seems the most helpless, when it seems as if God’s hands are tied, and just where we least expect him that God shows up. 

To me it was the most beautiful version of that simple, ancient prayer I have ever heard. And it was words last night, very simple words or perhaps it was The Word that reminded me that I need reminding again and again and again why the gospel matters.  It matters because it makes us whole.  And I need reminding of that again and again and again…and to tell the truth I will always pray more “I don’t know, I am not sure if and life can be unbelievably cruel and beautiful at the same time…” than

Holy God
Holy mighty
Holy immortal
Have mercy on us

But I am also one of those foolish people who still believes the answer lies somewhere in the mystery of the holiness of God. Maybe the mercy of God is really where we find the answer to every tear we cry and it is in that holiness three times over that we are held even when it feels as if nothing is holding us.  And maybe the mystery of the Trisagion is that it binds our broken hearts to God’s broken heart.  And maybe that is the answer, sort of.

Holy God
Holy mighty
Holy immortal
Have mercy on us,

Kathleen

The link to perhaps at least to my ears the most beautiful version of this ancient prayer:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad9fZ72lbVg