Sermons

Trinity Sunday, May 18, 2008

St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church
Albuquerque, NM
Trinity Sunday, May 18, 2008
Preacher: Christopher McLaren
Theme: God is a Community calling us into Community

Today is Trinity Sunday, interestingly it is the only Sunday in the Church Calendar that is dedicated specifically to a doctrine of the Church. That of the mystery of God’s triune being, Father, Son and Holy Spirit – one God in three persons, a unity of being. It is the church’s new math if you will. While the Abrahamic faiths of Islam, Judaism and Christianity are often seen as closely related and resolutely affirming of the oneness of God, we Christians have taken a rather wild approach to describing God. For us three is the new one. We don’t believe we’ve said God, until we’ve said, “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” This witness to the nature of God, sets our theology apart in a striking way.

I imagine that saying this Sunday is dedicated to a doctrine is extremely exciting to you. You probably have tingles running down your spine. The word doctrine or the notion of it has become a sort of undesirable thing, especially when we’ve had experiences of doctrines used a weapons instead of how they were intended. The word doctrine simply means teaching. Now that’s not so scary is it? In the Christian tradition the word doctrine is used in a broad sense to describe the whole body of Christian teaching, or in a narrower sense to describe what Christians believe about particular aspects of their faith, like the Trinity. To be sure the doctrines of the church are meant to protect us from error, to point us in the right direction, but they do far more than that. Doctrines when understood rightly are intended to be models for helping us not only to understand God but more importantly how to live. The doctrines of the church are pictures of how we believe the reality of God to be. Doctrines exist not just to form our belief system but to shape our actions and patterns of behavior as well. Another helpful way to understand the need for doctrine is to consider one’s need of a map if you are headed into unfamiliar territory. For Christians God is often wild uncharted territory, and it helpful to have at least a basic map when on a journey into the divine presence. The map is not the experience itself, it will not ever substitute for a real experience of the living God, but it may in fact be extremely helpful in getting one face to face for the encounter. To be painfully clear Christians do not believe in this or that doctrine or doctrinal system. We believe in God. Doctrines are the result of faithful Christians reflecting upon their experience of God in whom they believe and trust and thus attempting to put into words what they believe to be true about God and the Christian way of life.

One of my concerns about preaching on a doctrine is that your eyes don’t glaze over, that you don’t start thumbing through the hymnal, or feel the sudden urge to run to the bathroom. While doctrine doesn’t sound terribly exciting it is far from boring when you plunge beneath the surface.

For example take the wonderful reading from Genesis that we enjoyed this morning and the delicious plural within the Hebrew text that says of God, “Let us make humankind in our own image, according to our likeness...” Right in the first few lines of Genesis there is this sneaky little plural referring to God and it can lead to some rather wonderful understandings of the Trinity that are anything but boring. Consider what Robert Capon has to say about why God made the world.

One, afternoon, before anything was made, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit sat around in the unity of their Godhead discussing one of the Father’s fixations. From all eternity, it seems, he had this thing about being. He would keep thinking up all kinds of unnecessary things- new ways of being and new kinds of beings to be. And as they talked, God the Son suddenly said, “Really, this is absolutely great stuff. Why don’t I go out and mix us up a batch?” and God the Holy Spirit said, Terrific! I’ll help you.” So they all pitched in, and after supper that night, the Son and the Holy Spirit put on this tremendous show of being for the Father. It was full of water and light and frogs; pine cones kept dropping all over the place and crazy fish swam around in the wineglasses. There were mushrooms and grapes, horseradishes and tigers-and men and women everywhere to taste them, to juggle them, to join them and to love them. And God the Father looked at the whole wild party and, “Wonderful! Just what I had in mind! Tov! Tov! Tov! And all God the Son and God the Holy Spirit could think of to say was the same thing. “Tov! Tov! Tov!” So they shouted together “Tov meod!” and they laughed for ages and ages, saying things like how great it was for beings to be, and how clever of the Father to think of the idea, and how kind of the Son to go to all the trouble putting it together, and how considerate of the Spirit to spend so much time directing and choreographing. And forever and ever they told old jokes, and the Father and the Son drank their wine in unitate Spiritus Sancti, and they all threw ripe olives and pickled mushrooms at each other per omnia saecula saeculorum Amen.

It is, I grant you a crass analogy; but crass analogies are the safest. Everybody knows that God is not three old men throwing olives at each other. Not everyone, I’m afraid is equally clear that God is not a cosmic force or a principle of being or any other dish of celestial blancmange we might choose to call him. Accordingly, I give you the central truth that creation is the result of a Trinitarian bash, leave the details of the analogy to sort themselves out as best they can.
(From The Third Peacock, by Robert Capon)

I myself love Capon’s playful and joyful writing about Creation as a Trinitarian bash and the feel in my bones that his vision of the essential creativity of the Triune God is dead on. But what is most alive for me in his writing is one of the most important understandings about the Trinity, that God is a community, that inside of God is a community of being, a relational matrix of three that makes God not some generic, vague, powerful force but a personal, relational being that is itself in community.

Now what does that have to say to you and me, that the God we worship, the God we call Trinity, is a community of persons? The doctrine of the Trinity stresses that God, all reality, is relational in nature. The European Enlightenment invented the idea of a person as isolated, inner, individual consciousness, detached from the world. We have now reclaimed (thank you, sociology, psychology, history, and literature) the Trinitarian insight that personhood can't be divorced from relation. Paul put it this way, "You are the body of Christ and individually members of it" 1 Cor 12:27. You and I are made for community, we are Trinitarian in our being made for communion with God and one another, the church intends to pull us into this relationality.

Modern Trinitarian thought is fond of latching on to a Greek word, used by ancients, to describe the inner life and the outer working of the Trinity. The word is perichoriesis. It means literally in the Greek, "to dance around." It can also mean "interpenetration," suggesting that the Trinity is a dynamic, intimate, participation of the Three who are One. We are thus free to pray to any member of the Trinity, because these three are one.

The Trinity is complete, mutual, self-giving love. Christians define that slippery word "love" through the Trinity. Too often, in our culture, "I love you" can mean, "I love me and want to use you to love me even more." Too often, love is self-receiving rather than self-giving. Because we have met a God who is complete, mutual, self-giving love, we become more loving in our relationships with others. This is what we mean when we say, "God is love." We do not just "have" relationships, relationship is who we are. One of the most ethically formative things that a church asks you to do is to be a Christian in community with people whom you did not even know before you joined this church and people who, when you get to know them, you don't particularly like! We really believe that there is no way for you to grow in Christ when you are alone. You need relationships with other Christians in order to grow in your faith in Christ. Christianity can never be a solo experience because we are Trinitarian at the very base of our being. We are made for community just as God is a community.

Our God is always reaching out, speaking forth, reaching in, even as the Father is always reaching toward and talking to the Son, and the Son is always speaking to the Father, and the Holy Spirit is always reaching toward the Son and the Father. It is the nature of our church to want to draw everyone into the conversation, just as it is the nature of the Trinity whom we worship, to draw all reality into itself. The more we find ourselves alive to the Trinitarian God we worship, the more our lives will draw others of all sorts into our conversation about divine love. The more Trinitarian we become in our thinking and acting the more we will value self-giving in our communal life above all else.

In fact, you're here this morning no because it just seemed like a good way to kill a Sunday Morning but because the Triune One, our relational God, has drawn you here. And this relational God living in you keeps putting you in contact with others, keeps enabling others to get through to you, and you to them.

Even Christian preaching is relational. You probably think that I'm up here by myself just talking to myself and letting you listen in. No. Preaching is a group endeavor. Preaching is a mutual act of communication with God. I'm watching you now, as I speak thumbing through the hymnal, fighting off the urge to go to the bathroom. You are sending me signals, responding to my words and gestures, and I am responding to you. Often the most important part of a sermon is after I've stopped speaking and you tell me what happened in you as a result of it or send me an email or call me on the phone to tell me about what you thought you heard God saying through the sermon to you. The sermon thus continues in your minds, hearts and in your lives as well. It takes at least two to preach, someone to speak and someone else to listen and to respond. No, it takes at least three to preach - a speaker (me), a congregation (you), and God to speak through the words of the preacher, and to enable all of us to hear. Fortunately, because our God is Trinity, preaching works. This God is always reaching toward you, even when you're not aware of it, always speaking to you, even when you don't listen, always reaching for you in love. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.