Even Though I Understand It About As Well As Oysters Understand Ballerinas, Here's A Sermon About The Holy Trinity.
Audio available at this link: https://soundcloud.com/emsworthup/june-15-2014-11-16-37-am/s-BUEB8
Matthew 28:16-20
16Now
the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had
directed them. 17When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some
doubted. 18And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority
in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
20and
teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am
with you always, to the end of the age.”
Let us begin
with prayer. Holy God of wind and
flame, we ask you to dwell among and within us. Open our eyes and ears to the moving of your Spirit. On this
day and each day of our lives. In
Christ, we pray. Amen.
The Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, England was founded in the 12th
century and it remains a popular tourist destination. The official guide for
the abbey reads, “Here the monks gathered every Sunday to hear a sermon from
the Abbot, except on Trinity Sunday, owing to the difficulty of the subject.”[1]
In a sermon about the Trinity, Barbara Brown Taylor
quotes one of her colleagues who says, “When human beings try to describe God,
we are like a bunch of oysters trying to describe a ballerina. We simply do not
have the equipment necessary to understand something so utterly beyond us but
that has never stopped us from trying.”[2]
Today, my dear friends, is Trinity Sunday, the day we
attempt to celebrate, maybe, the Doctrine of the Trinity. The Trinity isn’t really explicitly
named in Scripture, but was a doctrine developed sometime later by a bunch of
oysters. I mean, theologians. And some of us keep stubbornly trying,
year after year, to understand the un-understandable mystery of One God who is
also Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
And despite our best efforts, most of us just can’t pull it off. We are
all a bunch of stupid shellfish when it comes to the complicated relationship
that is the Holy Trinity.
And worst of all, Trinity Sunday comes right after
the happy celebration of the Easter Season, and the show-offy, fire-breathing
Festival of Pentecost. In
comparison, a Sunday devoted to doctrine seems as dry and dusty as a bunch of
old theology books in a seminary library. Who wants to go the library on a sunny Sunday in
June? Maybe the people who put
together the church calendar figured most folks would be off on vacation by
now. Might as well stick the
Trinity sermon in on a day most people are off to the beach.
But here we are, definitely not at the beach, so I’ll tell
you what has always been my real problem with preaching a doctrine rather than
scripture. Nobody outside the
rarified air of theological inquiry gives two patooties about the Doctrine of
the Trinity. People who have cancer or have chronic unremitting pain do not
care about the Doctrine of the Trinity.
People who are homeless or hungry don’t care about the Doctrine of the
Trinity. People who have lost a loved one or a job, or are worried about a sick
child don’t care about doctrine either.
On our deepest, darkest, most needy days, does it really help us to know
that Athanasius and Arius battled out the Doctrine of the Trinity at the
Council of Nicaea in the 4th century to determine that God is both
One and Three Persons --Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Do we even care who won that battle? Do we really want to learn that crazy
math that says 1+1+1=1?
Unless you are a sucker for punishment, you probably didn’t
come to church to hear dry doctrine.
You came for a little good news in a world that is mostly filled with
bad. You probably just want to know that God is God, and that God knows who you
are and what you need. You
want to know that Jesus loves you.
You probably want the Holy Spirit to blow you off whatever failure face
road you happened to stumble upon this week and onto an easier path. Why should
the Doctrine of the Trinity matter at all to people who show up in church with
broken hearts and tired bodies?
It would be so much easier for all of us if knowing about
God was as easy as learning the Nicene Creed by heart, but God continually
defies our human constructions.
God defies our categories, always has, even at the very beginning in our
text from Genesis this morning.
God does not say, “Let me make humankind in my own
image.” God says, “Let us
make humankind in our own image, according to our likeness.” And already, we have a problem. We have a plural problem. Because the creator of the universe is
not a “me” God, but a “we” God in community, and if we read Genesis carefully,
we even begin to catch glimpses of the other two persons of the Trinity. We see the immense power of the Spirit
of God that hovers and broods over darkness. Then we see a piercing light that
shines in the darkness and cannot be overcome by it, an image that is echoed in
the Gospel of John and the light that becomes human flesh in the person of
Jesus Christ. The God of Genesis looks
into a dark and frightening void, and sees something beautiful and hopeful: a
creative force, a hovering spirit, and a penetrating light that cannot be
overcome. We see both the one and
the three in this extravagant outpouring of love, a love so full that it
creates a world, overflows into the world, and pull us into the very heart of
the God.
What we see in Genesis is not a dry doctrine, but a story
about relationships being created between God and creation, and within creation
itself. That is good news we can
let seep into the bones of our dry, daily existence. Maybe we can consider ourselves part of the creative dance
of three in one that existed before time began and will exist forever. Creator, Word and Wind. A holy force to which we have been
connected through our baptism. A divine space in which we might live into the
fullness of our identity as beloved children of God.
It all sounds good, this relationship stuff, until you
realize that it is a far cry from the state of humankind. At our worst, human beings are
hopelessly polarized by race, nationality, religion, culture, class, political
beliefs, and sometimes something as innocuous as zip codes. Even when we are at our best, we are
often unwilling to admit that we need one another or need God. Teenagers can’t
wait to be old enough to no longer be dependent upon their parents. As we grow older, we save for our
retirement so we won’t have to be dependent upon our children. I think people often put off marriage
because they fear having someone need them, really need them, someone who can’t
keep their distance, but even worse, may actually come to depend upon
them. Keeping a safe
distance is a more reliable space to occupy. Independence is something we consider admirable. Self-reliance is very American. Even in our supposedly connectional
churches, we are often hard-pressed to make connections with our Christian
brothers and sisters down the street.
Maybe one of the reasons the Trinity matters is
because it shows us that the God we worship is not aloof and distant, but a God
who seeks us out for relationship with God and relationship with one another
and with the rest of creation.
Unfortunately, we often worship independence, not relationships. Our craving for separation is, in fact,
the root of what we call sin.
I learned about “Love Wins Ministries” in Raleigh,
North Carolina (http://www.lovewinsministries.org) through some friends who know the non-profit’s director, Hugh
Hallowell. I began following
Hugh’s blog about the ministry that includes a hospitality house which opens
its doors five days a week to 70 or so people who need a place to go. On Saturday mornings, Hugh and
his staff hand out breakfast biscuits to homeless people living in a local
park.
The staff of Love Wins knows every person they serve by
name, making a point to refer to each of them not as a “client,” but as “my
friend.” The goal, Hollowell says, is to build relationships because most
people who live on the streets are there because they lack one thing that most
of us take for granted -- a social safety net to call upon. Love Wins feeds people, but they are not a feeding ministry.
Sometimes, they help people get job, but
are not a job training program. Maybe
10-12 times a year, someone leaves homelessness with Love Wins’ help, but they are not a housing ministry.
When I was thinking about why the Doctrine of the Trinity
should matter to us even a little, I remembered what Hugh so often says in
talking about what they do at Love Wins, “Homelessness is not an economic
problem. Homelessness is a relationship problem.” And I realized that most of what ails all of us are
relationship problems. I realized
that the healings Jesus performed were not about curing a person of a
particular illness or disability, but about healing broken relationships and
restoring people to community.
This is what Jesus is doing in our text this morning from
Matthew. Jesus gives us the Great Commission to go out into the world and
baptize people in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit. Which means, really, to go
out into the world and invite people into a connection with the source of all
life and create space for them to connect to one another. Because the Holy Trinity is our model
of what it means to be beloved community.
The Great Commission sends us out into a world where, as my friend Jenn
Frayer-Griggs says about her work on the South Side hosting The Table,
“Everyone is hungry for something.”( http://thetableministry.blogspot.com) What unifies us all across race, class,
age, and every life situation from the homeless addict on Carson Street to the
lady in Sewickley Heights who just received a breast cancer diagnosis is the
need to be connected. We need to
be connected to the crazy, unfathomable, un-doctrinated Holy Spark of life that
each one of us carry within us.
The same spark constantly fueled by the “ruach,” the breath of life that
blew across the dark and formless void at the beginning of time.
We need to open ourselves up to the dance of the Trinity
more than we need to understand the doctrine of the Trinity. We need to experience the Trinity
because without it, our faith becomes dried up and useless. Without the Trinity, we are left with a
God who sits in isolated splendor somewhere up in the clouds, useless and
irrelevant and passionless. We
need the God who is personally involved, who understands our pain, and who is
not somewhere out there, but a presence with us in every breath. We need the God made known in
Jesus -- dynamic, involved, always relating, cherishing, shining, revealing,
expressing, giving. We need the
God made known in the Spirit to move through us with every breath, whisper in
our ear, surprise us, kick us in the rear end, and comfort us in our grief.
That’s the kind of God we need when receive the bad diagnosis or when a beloved
spouse dies or when the bank comes knocking on our door with a foreclosure
notice or when a relationship we depend upon crumbles in our hands. That’s the God who will slog with
us through the terrible days and celebrate with us on the good ones.
So maybe the Holy Trinity is a dusty doctrine that I cannot preach
or explain to you. But the
Trinity is a relationship that you and I can experience when we breathe in its
love that is constantly poured out for us in this life. And even unto the end of the age. Thanks be to God. Amen.
