May 22, 2005 - Trinity Sunday - Mother Stephanie Parker

FIRST READING: Genesis 1:1-2:4a
SECOND READING: 2 Corinthians 13: 11-13
GOSPEL: Matthew 28: 16-20

(Audience participation will be noted in bold print and italics)

There is a story of a man who only came to Church once a year, and it wasn't on the usual suspects of Christmas or Easter; but he always came on Trinity Sunday. So, finally, somebody asked him, "Why is it that you only come on Trinity Sunday?" And he said, "I just love seeing the preacher so confused!"

And that was his reason. But, it is an unusual day in the celebrations that we have as a gathered community of faithful as the Church, because what is unusual about today versus the other big celebrations and feasts that we have, like Easter and Christmas and Ascension and Pentecost, is that today, on Holy Trinity Sunday, we celebrate a doctrine. A doctrine, of course, is man's response, humanity's response, to God; whereas, in all of these other occasions, we see God's loving action to humankind. Right? We see the incredible Resurrection and the birth of Christ at Christmas, and we see all of these ways that God continues to act on humanity to bring knowledge of God's love for humankind. So, today, celebrating this doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which sort of started emerging in the 9th century and, I think, by the 13th century - Church historians can correct me - but around the 13th century, one of the popes declared that we should celebrate this as a feast day. And so, this is us trying to formulate a loving response to all that God has done for us and trying in some way to comprehend, with our limited ability - limited only because we are human and not God - but with our limitations, to make some response to claim this God that loves us and wants relationship with us. Now, we succeed at other times, and we succeed at some times better than at others.

There was one commentator that I read this week that had a lot of fun with our attempts to define the Holy Trinity. He takes this segment of the Gospel, where Jesus is walking down the road with His disciples, and he says to them, "Who do people say that I am?" Remember that? And we hear ultimately Peter's great confession of Jesus as Messiah, and we see this step forward in understanding and enlightenment.

So, he has fun with this and writes:

Jesus said, "Who do people say that I am?" And His disciples answered and said, "Some say You are John the Baptist, returned from the dead; others say Elijah or another of the old prophets." And Jesus answered and said, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered and said, "Thou are the Logos, existing in the Father as His rationality and then, by an act of His will, being generated in consideration of the various functions by which God is related to His creation, but only in the fact that Scripture speaks of a Father and of a Son and of a Holy Spirit, each member of the Trinity being co-equal with every other member, and each acting inseparably with and inter-penetrating every other member, with only an economic subordination within God, but causing no division which would make the substance no longer simple." And Jesus, answering, said, "What?"

I wish I could take credit for that little piece of creativity, but I borrowed that from someone else.

So, we see that, in the Doctrine of the Trinity, any time man tries to use limited words to describe something that is infinite and finite and beyond our comprehension, we often struggle. It's difficult to articulate that with any clarity, and so, in an attempt to do just that for you, where all others have failed before me, perhaps (a little arrogance there!), I went back to one of my favorite books from Seminary, a book written by a brilliant Trinitarian theologian, a modern one, Catherine Mowrey LaCugna. I didn't go back and read the entire book, but, in the end - it is funny, because I remembered that this was my experience of this book back when I first encountered it - she goes on for about 400 pages trying to describe this complicated doctrine and why it is something that is alive for us and is something that means something in our lives, and, in her summary, one of her final conclusions is, "In the end, what it all means is that God is for us".

God is for us. So often in history we have just decided that somehow God, in all of God's mercy and all of God's love, stands over and against humanity, over and against humankind; and it is sort of an inconceivable notion, but one that we carry all the time. And so, what the Holy Trinity is and what our grappling, what our honest inspired grappling with this Holy Trinity does, is seek to bring us in closer communion to this loving God. What happens when we try to describe love? Have you ever tried that?

There is a wonderful movie; it is one of my favorites, and it is also a book by Carl Sagan, called Contact. Give me a show of hands how many of you are familiar with this, so I know how much description to give. Oh, a lot! I can spend the whole sermon just talking about the movie. That's an easy way out! I read the book, and I saw the movie several times. I own the movie, and I watch it quite a bit. For me, there is this wonderful line in the Gospel where it says, "And Jesus came and said to them, 'All authority in Heaven and on earth has been given to Me'" Now, for me, in this small tiny known way, this is how I know that that is true. This book, and ultimately the movie, which, for me, is a huge testament to the mystery of God and how God is in and present with us as a creation, is written by a professed atheist. It is an incredible apologetic for our understanding of God. In this movie, Contact, we meet this brilliant scientist, Eleanor Arroway (Ellie, in the movie), and we first meet her when she is very young. We already know that she has lost her mother, and her father is the center of her life. They have an incredible relationship. He is loving, and he feeds her incredible intellect and her curiosity about the Universe; and then, when she was about nine or ten years old, she has the devastating event of her father's sudden death. So, already, at this very, very young age, she has known so much loss and so much grief, and she has this incredibly agile mind that is seeking some understanding, in the face of such devastation, to know what has happened to her. In this encounter that we see in the movie, which is painful for me as a clergy person to watch, we see this clerical person who is either Roman Catholic, Anglican, or Presbyterian by the collar (it is hard to tell - doesn't matter - it's very neutral) - we see this clergy person come out to this young woman in her pain. She has isolated herself from the rest of the people there, and he is telling her about where she is going to live and this and that. And so she asks him the questions, "How? Why? Where is God in all of this?", and, of course, in a moment of deep loss for words and embarrassment, he mumbles something to the effect, "Oh, God has a plan; we can't know the mind of God". And so, at that moment, with that terse reply, that broken reply, Eleanor Arroway, at that point, decides what?

That God is not for her.

She has lost somehow. She has moved into a place of disillusionment, where God, she perceives, is no longer for her, and there was no one there to articulate that clearly for her. So, she grows up, and she becomes a brilliant astrophysicist and an astronomer; and her whole goal in life (she turns down prestigious teaching and publishing positions in order to pursue her one dream) is to make contact with another life-form out in the universe - to put all of her incredible intellectual abilities toward making contact with some other form of life rather than humanity, out in the universe, proving her father's favorite saying, "If we are the only ones", he said, "It is a terrible waste of space." A terrible waste of space.

So, into this searching, into this journey that she takes, where she ultimately does succeed in making contact (we think - it's a mystery) with another form of intelligent life, she meets a Holy Man, a man who, himself, doesn't know that the Church is the way, but certainly knows that God is for us. The character's name is Joss, and, as she ascends to this great scientific accomplishment, this gentleman ascends to being the spiritual advisor to Presidents - one to whom the whole world looks. We know these people; we know holy people who are published and who are not necessarily affiliated with the Church. She meets him, and he becomes someone very important in her life. And, at one point, she turns to him, and she says, "You are so brilliant; you are so smart; how can you believe in this fable, this God? What is it that makes you devote your whole life to something you cannot prove or put your hands on?" And he turns to her, and he asks a simple question, "Did you know that your father loved you?" And, of course, her immediate response is, "Yes!" She knows that her father loved her with all that he was and all that he had, even in the short, too short, time that she had him. So then, Joss turns to her, and he says, "Prove it. Prove it; prove to me that your father loved you". And, of course, all she could ultimately do in response, which she does, is nothing, because silence is the only response she could make. We see her come to the realization that the only way you can describe some things is to describe what they do, how they make you feel, how you know that you are safe and loved and warm in the world. Now, ultimately, we see her go through an experience. Her science takes her to an experience that, for her, is beyond words. She travels through time, through wormholes - it's a good movie; go get it; I won't go through that part - but, in the end, she comes back, and what happens? She finds that she is forever transformed by this experience that she cannot comprehend and that she cannot explain. She does not have the words for it, and she is sitting before Congress because trillions of dollars have been spent on this scientific mission based on her work; and she comes back, and she says to them, "I have no proof for what happened to me, but I know that I am forever transformed. I am forever changed. I will never, ever again understand the world in the same way that I did before, and I just want everyone to know that we are not alone in the world, and that there is love out there greater than we could possibly imagine." What a gift to know that no matter how small we are, no matter how insignificant our lives may seem, we are not alone. And a member of Congress asks her, "But I said, can you prove it?"

And so, we are left with his incredible sense that, in the end, it's not the proof; it's the power of God for us that is the reality, that is the truth that the Holy Trinity brings to us. And I think the Gospel talks about this so much. Now, we look at the story in Genesis first before I go to the Gospel, the story of creation, and we see love, infinite love, poured out of itself, separating the chaos, creating creatures, creating living beings, creating humanity. And God said it was good! That which God has created out of God's loving, giving self, is good.

And even after the fall, and even after we fell short of God's expectations for us, what was God's response? God came after us. He called us back, time and again, "Come"; until, finally, God pours out God's self into what?

Oh, you know this one, this is easy. I'll give you a hint; it has something to do with Christmas!

God pours God's self out into flesh - flesh, human flesh that can feel pain, that can feel grief, and, more importantly, human flesh in the name of God that can touch the untouchables, heal the unhealables, call people from the margins into the center of God's Light. God for us creates for us this transformative person, this Jesus Christ, who calls us all into this incredible relationship of God for us - not God against us, not God opposing humanity, not God seeking to punish - but God for us. And, of course, it can get real complicated, right? We are given this commission in the Gospel, "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name. . . ." on and on and on. And that is a very significant piece, but what is the most significant piece? At least to me, this is the most significant piece . . .Well, let me go ahead - by the way, I am jumping around - let me situate this Gospel for you, because it is very important. We have been jumping around in the Gospels through this liturgical season because it is just the nature of the beast, but we are back in Matthew's Gospel. Can anybody tell me what has just happened prior to this?

The Resurrection! See, I am pushing you today - we have all the doctrines wrapped up into one! Matthew summed it up for us. So, the Resurrection has just happened. Jesus has just appeared to the two Marys and their companions in the garden, and what did Jesus say? Three days - and if this is not proof that God is for us! - three days after the humiliation and betrayal of these closest friends, in Jesus' first words as the resurrected Christ, He says to Mary, "Go tell my brothers . . ." "Go tell my brothers, I will meet them in Galilee". Not, "Go tell those rotten deserters to get their behinds to Galilee, because I have retribution aplenty!" No! God is for us, so the risen, resurrected Christ says to Mary, "Go tell My brothers to meet Me in Galilee".

And so, today, we bear witness to this. Now, remember, it has been three days that they have been locked up on a room, running for their lives, scared to death of the authorities, and here is what it says, "When they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some doubted." Some doubted. Of the 11 that were left - Judas, remember, had killed himself at this point - of the 11 that were left, there were some who got it, but some who doubted. Now, this is key. In the image of God, if he were against us, what would have happened at this point in the Gospel when Jesus perceived that there were those who doubted? Did he call them up and say, "O.K. I got three of you I can tell are solid, so I am going to use you to do my work. The rest of you, get out of here, get down the mountain, I got no time; I got no space for doubt; I got no time for your warts and wobbles (as somebody called them this morning); I got no time for that; get on down the mountain." Is that Jesus' response to the disciples who doubted? No! He walks into the midst of all of them - and I love that - He walks to them and says, "All authority has been given to Me. Go, therefore, into all the world and tell the world that God is for us".

That is what I want you to do. Tell the world that God is for us. We don't always get it right, do we? We can point to some pretty sticky times in history where Christianity has not really been the best messenger of telling the world that God is for us, but does this failure put us out of God's love or the ability to do what God has called us to do? No!

Because God is for us - and Jesus tells us He is with us to the end of the age - we always come back. God is in charge of God's Church, and God for us, always, always reveals God's self as the loving creator of humankind, not its opposer or oppressor. So, in the end, what we are called to cling to in the tight spaces is this - In the Holy Trinity, we are swept up into the loving life-giving truth that - - -

God is for us!

God is for us! God is not forever distant and unknowable. God is not punitive or angry. Knowing and trusting this truth brings us to the true worship of God, which is the worship of the beloved to the lover. I read that in a book somewhere - the worship of the beloved to the lover. How wonderful is that?!

So, this is the worship of the beloved responding to the glorious love that is continually being poured out for all of God's creation, not only back in the beginning, but now, tomorrow, and always. God, for us, is where the mystery of God touches the concrete - where God becomes flesh and embraces us in the midst of all of our mistrust and all of our dis-ease. God, for us, embraces us in these times and makes us whole. The power of this love is found in the Holy Spirit's continuing ability to transform the hardened hearts - and this is key - and make disciples out of even those who doubt, and that is you and that is me. No matter how we fall short, and no matter how we may fail, this is the transforming power of God.

The doctrine that we celebrate today is a faithful attempt to illumine God's nearness to us in Christ and in the Holy Spirit. It speaks to call us into the deepest possible communion with God, just as God is doing what? Seeking the deepest possible communion with us. And Jesus describes this mission statement, and I have said it already, but I will say it in parting, "Go; love one another; spend yourselves in the task and journey of telling and teaching the rest of the world that God is always for us".

AMEN