Well, friends, today is finally
here – it’s Trinity Sunday! Yay. Ok, maybe it’s not a day that we get
all excited about. It’s not like we get to light anything on fire like on
Pentecost.
Truly, I am certain that most of
you are not really all that excited about delving deeply into doctrinal
concepts this morning. At least, I doubt that was on your mind when you got up
this morning.
And yet, the struggle is real
for those of us charged to lead the flock in living into this core belief that
we demonstrate in liturgy and language – in faith and practice. In fact, in the
words of Christian author and missionary, Sarah Miles, “Everything about us
expresses our belief from [the arrangement of seating] in our sanctuary, to the
songs we sing, to who does what in worship, to how we spend our money, to how
we decorate. It all says something about what we believe.”
And to that end I have been
struggling all week with this idea of the Triune God, and I’m not alone.
There’s a thread in an online group of PC(USA) leaders that has been talking
about it all week, and the responses range from, “Meh, why try to define God?”
to, “Belief in God expressed as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer is what makes
us who we are,” to “The Trinity demonstrates how God is understood through
relationships. God existed in harmony before creation, created out of a desire
for greater harmony with and through God’s good creation, and continues to move
us toward greater harmony with God in and through our relationships with one
another and all of God’s created order.
Now, if you got all
that, then we can just be done. Mystery solved. Undefinable God comprehended,
thanks to the doctrine of the trinity. Yeah, I didn’t think so. I don’t quite
get it either. My human brain wants to make sense of a God who is both son and
father – even though Jesus said, “I and the Father are one.” Then there is the
Holy Spirit thing. Who knows where and when that thing goes— which is kind of
the point of the Holy Spirit.
Really, today is a day that we
can actually say that we don’t fully understand, and we’re OK with that. Today
is also a day that makes us recognize that the God we serve is bigger than the
God we can conceive. It’s kind of a stop gap to say, “We celebrated the power
of God to raise Jesus, but that’s not all there is to the power of God. We’ve
celebrated the presence of God in the Holy Spirit, but that’s not all there is
to the presence of God, either. God is separate and Holy, but God is as close
as our breath.”
That’s what this day is about –
a God who is both transcendent and imminent – and we find both in our
scriptures today.
John’s gospel gives us this
story of Nicodemus coming under the cover of night. This connects with themes
of light and dark – sight and spiritual blindness – in John’s gospel, but could
it be that Nicodemus is coming at night less because he does not want to be
seen and more because he does not want to see Jesus?
Jesus has just cleared the
temple and people were responding to him as one with authority. Could it be
that Nicodemus just didn’t want to see the uncomfortable truth that Jesus
brought – the truth that sets everyone free from the obligations that gave
Nicodemus his power – and so he shook his head in disbelief?
And what of you and me? Jesus
brings all of us into the crisis of decision making, not just once, but over
and over again. He creates for each of us the experience of Isaiah in the
temple who faced the Holy of Holies and cried out as one facing death!
This wasn’t a sweet, “spot light
on me” for being picked by God kind of moment. This was more of a “Holy Mother
of Dragons!” kind of thing. You know, interestingly the Serif that came to him
was actually a flying snake. Yeah. Seraphim were snakes with wings, and the
people that heard this story would also remember that there was a bronze snake
on a pole in the temple from days of old. They viewed it as God’s agent, and
they recognized that purification meant allowing the impure thing to be burned
away.
How he spoke after that remains
a mystery, but when God seemed to ponder who could be sent, Isaiah was not just
an eager volunteer. He had been made pure. It was not really even a choice, but
yet God still left it up to him to recognize that he had been set aside for
just this thing.
And the thing he was set aside
for was – the worst sermon ever. There seems to be no grace, no mercy, no
providence, and certainly no love in the message he was given. Yet, it all
comes down to the promise of a stump.
And from this stump we are told
that the line of Jesse produced Jesus, and through him the message became one
of grace and mercy and love beyond measure!
Through him we have these words
of adoption and inclusion from Paul that flip the tables once more on the
expectations of the world! You see, adoption did not happen very often in Roman
society, and when it did it was a means for one person to secure holdings of
land and the benefits of citizenship. It was a path to full personhood and
inclusion that depended on others not having these same rights and privileges.
By saying that Jesus was the son
of God, and that he had broken the hold of the cross, and that he had been
given authority over life and death and sin and salvation, and then saying that
we were joint heirs in all of this was to offer an emancipation that had never
been seen or heard of before!
And yet… Paul also reminded us
that if we share with Christ in glory, then we share in suffering, too. Not
only is this because the powers that be do not like being told that they are
not the powers that be, but also this is because God had issued in a new
understanding of an old truth through Christ.
That old truth is that we are
one. That old truth is that Christ opens us to understand that we are one with
all of God’s creation, and that includes both joy and suffering. So, the suffering
of the child in poverty is my suffering. The suffering of the elderly one who
is isolated is my suffering. The suffering of the one who is rejected or abused
for color, be it one color or the whole rainbow, is my suffering. The suffering
of the one mourns the death of a loved one killed by a bomb paid by my tax
dollars is my suffering, just as the suffering of the one with PTSD from
defending my freedom is my suffering.
It is truly too much to bear,
and yet we are not without hope. In fact, we have been given one another so
that we might have hope. Our hope is found in knowing that we are not alone,
and that we might be able to bear more of the suffering of this world together.
For deep down, the truth of
God’s amazing love is reflected in the nonsense and mystery of the triune God
who calls us into a more common unity. This God who reveals Godself as Creator
who is still creating, Redeemer who never gives up on our refinement, and
Sustaining presence who provides and pushes us to seek what we truly need –
this God is the one who says to us today, “Hmmm… whom shall I send? Who will
speak for us?”
Be careful how you sing that
song today, or you could be like Sarah Miles. I mentioned her earlier – the
writer and missionary. She walked into St Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church and
ended up seeing the church as a place with few borders between people that
society seeks to separate. As she grew in that community, she began to answer a
calling that has been turning their sanctuary into a supermarket over and over
every week for the last 18 years to provide fresh food to those who have none.
In a recent interview, she said
that the times she feels the very real presence of the sacred otherness of God
is when she sees herself as the stranger and the one who comes in as the one
bearing the holiness of God.
Friends, we are not hanging out
in here with something that we can manage or contain through a doctrine or
idea. We are not here to top of our spiritual tanks and head back into the
unspiritual world. We are here to recognize that God is both beyond our
thoughts and the source of reason itself.
We are here to recognize that
our sin has been consumed and there is nothing left to do but respond in faith.
We are here to recognize that we have been joined with all of God’s creation in
an eternal embrace that even includes suffering, but never bows to it.
From here we can either live
into the new reality of each new day as a new experience of the Holy One, or we
can deny the possibility of it all. As for me, I choose to live into the
mystery of love, moment to moment, in the hope that all might be one, and I
give thanks for those times when I am assured without a doubt that we are
seeking to respond to God’s love together.
For, in this way, we may be
received as the stranger in need of hospitality by the one who has come to
bring holiness into our midst. To that hope I say, O Lord make it so. Send us,
again and again and again, Amen.
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