6-16-19 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Proverbs.

Does not wisdom call, and does not understand raise her voice?

On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads, she takes her stand.

Beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals, she cries out to you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live.

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts long ago.

Ages ago I was set up at the first, before the beginning of the earth.

When there were no depths, I was brought forth.

When there were no springs abounding with water, before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth, when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world's first bits of soil, when he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned the sea to its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world, and delighting in the human race, the word of the Lord.

Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.

And we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.

And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

The word of the Lord.

For the Spirit will not speak on the Spirit's own, but will speak whatever the Spirit hears.

And the Spirit will declare to you the things that are to come.

The Spirit will glorify me because the Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you.

All that the Father has is mine.

For this reason I said that the Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Now, if we don't do a great job, don't worry.

We won't have to do this again until next year.

And it really is, it really is our invitation.

I want to tell you up front that uh if you're looking for me to explain to you where the doctrine came from, you are out of luck.

Because quite honestly, all the research says that by the end of the first century, that is by 80 or 90 of our common era, Christians were baptizing one another in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And quite honestly, what is practiced influences what is thought.

And so from there, theologians came up with the Trinity.

I don't mean they made it up, I mean they contemplated it.

So who thought it up in the first place?

We don't know.

I want us to think about what it means for us.

And honestly, um I'm probably going to descend into heresy today because anytime we talk about a holy mystery that is so above us, how can we help but limit it with our words?

So I hope you'll forgive me up front of the heresy I'm about to commit.

Um I also want to suggest to you um that there's been a lot of play on Trinity recently, and honestly, part of it I think is the limitation of words.

And so traditionally we've got father, son, holy spirit.

And I think that's so difficult because we know what fathers are like, we have those.

We know what sons are like, we have those.

We don't really have Holy Spirits in the family.

Maybe yours does.

I can tell you mine didn't.

And uh so it's a little bit confusing because we've got two members of the Trinity that we've got very concrete cultural understandings for, and then a third member that's just really hard.

And compound with that, um, if you know your church history.

Back in the second century, there were a couple folks that they were the incarnations of the Holy Spirit, like the Holy Spirit made flesh, and a lot of people were really excited about that, but then they died, and people are less excited since then.

And I I can tell you, because we're not in a charismatic Christian church here, we're we're not.

Many of us who aren't are kind of skeptical about well, speaking in languages that aren't sensible, you know, to us, or um, passing serpents around or rolling around on the floor.

I mean, we we usually approach these things with a hermeneutic of suspicion, uh, mainly because they're not normal to us.

I'm not saying they're bad.

They're just not normal to us.

As a result, it would be really bad.

So please do not offer me a snake today.

I I think this is part of our challenge thinking about the Trinity.

And I and I and I want to tell you, um, maybe about 50 years ago there was this shift that said, hey, let's change the language so that we have a better understanding of function.

So many of you have probably heard this.

Instead of father, son, spirit, there was a push that said, well, let's let's use words like creator, sustainer, and redeemer.

Anybody heard those?

Creator, sustainer, redeemer.

Uh to be honest with you, helps me understand the Trinity functionally a little better than Father, Son, and Spirit.

Helpful.

Um The problem with the doctrine of the Trinity is we were given it, uh, this is this comes from the Council of Nicaea in 325, is two conclusions.

One is, this is the statement of the council.

God is no more one than God is three.

Try explaining that to a five-year-old.

I'm not really sure I understand it.

Let me give it to you again.

God is no more one than God is three.

The other thing the council decided is that the Trinity was not a doctrine designed to help us understand God.

The Trinity was not contrived, the word is modalism, so we can understand, aha, God acts in these ways and that helps.

The Trinity, the council decided, is who God is, whether it helps us or confounds us.

Don't you love councils?

That was the proclamation.

Now I'm going to give you one more image and then talk about, I think, what all this could mean for us.

So, and I maybe said this before.

When I was in seminary, I took this class, and the professor gave us this option to do a research paper or to do a project.

Projects are really scary for me, uh, because I don't know how you grade those, but they're not scary for everybody.

So somebody in the room made a project, and what her goal was a feminine image of the Trinity.

She was an artist, so she made a sculpture, and it was circular.

There was a mother giving birth, and there was a midwife facilitating the birth of the new child.

There was the mother, the new, and the facilitator.

It really was a glorious image, you know, I mean it really fit together concretely.

I'm not suggesting we need to replace what we have.

I think the truth is if we miss the invitation of the Trinity into different ways of being as a church and different ways of being with one another, we've missed the whole point.

If we get overbogged down in the arcane details of this, I think we miss a true invitation.

So now I'm going to descend into heresy.

Okay?

I'm going to show you.

It's interesting that we sang this St.

Patrick hymn today.

I bind into myself today, because in general, um, one of the ways we've been given a Trinity is like an equilateral triangle.

Three different points on the same figure.

All right?

Three points on the same figure.

Does anybody know the symbol of the Trinity St.

Patrick came up with?

It's on the Irish flag.

A shamrock, a shamrock, which is how many leaves?

Are those leaves the same?

Now see, this I think is really interesting.

They're different leaves with a common stem.

The diagram, maybe you've seen really, is this one.

Yeah?

This actually is a simplified version of what St.

Augustine of Hippo gave us in the late fourth, early fifth century.

Um, Saint Augustine was kind enough to put words all over the thing.

So he sort of said, look, this area in the middle is the Godhead.

You see it, the little tiny triangle is the Godhead, and each other bit represents father, son, and spirit.

Augustine drew a circle around this and said, aha, the father is not the son, is not the spirit, is not the father.

Really, what he needed, and what he was hinting at is a Venn diagram.

Now, see, this actually is really helpful.

And again, I'm gonna descend into heresy for a moment, but I want you to go with me.

According to the Venn diagram, you see, all three circles have something in common.

But if you'll notice and take the diagram seriously, these two circles have something in common that this circle doesn't have.

It's like they've got their own relationship.

And even more interestingly, there's things that only this circle has.

You notice that?

It's like there's aspects of the father that are unique to the father, that the son and the spirit don't have.

And the father and the son, they've got their own thing going that the spirit doesn't quite have.

But they've all got that.

I know that's really simplistic and gonna sound a little bit crazy, but um, I want to say, if you take that seriously with me for a second, I think it really might help us to consider how we're supposed to practice Trinitarian life.

And these are the phrases our bishop uses, quite honestly.

The church is meant to be a place unified in mission, not uniform in practice or doctrine.

This is my major point, so I'll say that again.

The church is a place unified in mission, not uniform in practice or doctrine.

I think we make this mistake that unity means uniformity.

And I said this last week, and it is the only thing we ever accomplish here at St.

Thomas.

I think it would really be praiseworthy that the church is supposed to be the safest place for us to disagree with one another.

Like in the world.

It's a place where we say disagreement is just fine, because after all, there's parts of the Father, the Spirit, and the Son don't have, and here they are unified in mission.

And that disagreeing is not an affront to the Trinity, it's a way of participating in the Trinity, as long as we do it in a spirit of unified mission.

I think sometimes we like to take these three different circles and completely put them on top of each other and have no room for variants.

No room.

If you were around for the adult forums that we offered back in April, I presented to you some uh ideas from something called Imago Relationship Therapy.

And and here's some of it, whether you're there or not, that I think is really worth hearing.

Um the therapists have done a lot of data-driven research and said basically, in all couples' relationships, we start off with romantic love and everything's just so interesting and everything's wonderful, and then we get to this place, honestly, where that just doesn't happen anymore.

This is called the power struggle.

Now, uh they they say this is characteristic, really, of every relationship.

If you defy the data, please let me know later.

But um the reason for the power struggle, they say, is because we do this thing called symbiosis, where we start to think, aha, like we're married or we're together.

So what I think is what she thinks.

Or what she thinks is.

We rarely think about it the other way, quite honestly.

Normally we think, aha, because we're in love, we must have the same mind about certain things.

And that creates power struggle.

Now, they say we can move past that, but but really what they say is the way to move past it, honestly, is to differentiate from one another.

My spouse is not me.

On the Venn diagram, actually, we just have two circles.

On any given day, I'm not sure how much we overlap.

What they say though is that this differentiation is necessary to move past the power struggle because it allows us to say there is healthy space between us, and instead of being in conflict about the things that are different, we can be curious about it.

If we said the relationship is a given, usually what we say is the relationship's a variable.

So you go get yourself fixed up and then come back.

And if you can't fix yourself up, then I guess we're done.

See, what if we took a different approach to that?

This is the Amaga relationship therapy model.

The relationship is the given.

We're going to fix ourselves by fixing the relationship.

I know that's counterintuitive, but don't you see it's based on the idea of being unified in mission?

Which I think is pretty interesting Trinitarian theology.

What would that mean?

I guess that would mean that, hey, there's folks who have really different perspectives about, well, God and the Trinity.

Relationships in politics.

And what if our relationships with those folks were never in jeopardy because we have different thoughts?

But instead, we started with the premise that we are unified in dignity and mission, and then we could actually be curious about one another's perspectives instead of being threatened by them.

I don't know if that's heretical, but I think it's a pretty neat idea.

I grew up with this interesting idea, maybe you thought you've heard before too.

It's all over the place.

It sort of says that God made human beings because God was lonely.

Anybody heard that before?

God was lonely up in heaven.

But see, listen, if the Trinity is a real community, God wasn't lonely.

And really what it means is when we live in community with one another, we're not just being nice.

We're living into who God made us to be.

And who God is.

Sometimes again we say, oh, okay, that's just being nice.

It's sacramental.

It's part of who God is.

So what if the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit loved each other so much that the world just overflowed?

What if the world wasn't God's need?

It was a reflection of God's grace.

Of God's grace in community.

And it can get really crazy here.

Because somebody in the Trinity had an idea that roaches would be good.

Now, if they were to speak with me, I think I could bring them around.

And isn't that often how we approach things?

But if we stepped back, I mean, geez, they drive me nuts, but roaches are pretty good at what they do.

You know, they've been around a really long time, apparently.

They probably will outlast all of us, too.

That's that's the suggestion on the table.

And God made roaches and called them good.

Boy, that's hard.

It's gonna be really hard when the mosquitoes show up.

Somehow they haven't yet, thank God.

They're going to show up pretty soon.

And you know the thing is, they're really good at what they do.

They've been around a long time.

They predate humans by, well, a long time.

They're really good at what they do, even though it's annoying to me.

And if we could have that perspective about things that we share the ecosphere with, maybe it would help us have that perspective on people we share the family name with or people we work with.

Because the thing is, if God had wanted us to all be the same, God wouldn't have made us so different.

Difference is no threat to the Trinity.

And if difference is a threat to us, I think we've rejected the Trinity.

Dave Giles and I often have this conversation about world religions.

It's really neat.

It's a neat neat thing.

We've talked about whether tolerance should be the goal for world religions, and I've said no, it absolutely should not.

We should not have tolerance as our goal, we should have respect as our goal and tolerance as our minimum.

I think we've come around on that a little bit.

We're still working on it.

You see, part of this though is the idea that people don't have to do it the way we do it in order to be worthwhile to God.

Worthiness is our birthright.

So what if we could respect that?

It doesn't mean we gotta do what other people do.

It means we can respect that.

I'm not saying, I'm oh, you're okay, you're okay, everything's okay, there's no accountability.

What I'm saying is there's really something to this idea of being unified in mission, in seeing in another person not a threat to us, not a mosquito or a cockroach, but someone who is deeply, madly loved by God.

God's love overflowed in the beginning and made time and made that difficult co-worker.

God's love made that person.

What if we started there and made that our given instead of hoping we might get there in the end if they do it the way we like?

I don't know if that was heretical.

I don't think so.

And the reason I don't think so is because it asks us to consider living bigger lives than we normally settle for.