For my preaching at Faith Lutheran, I've decided to write a new (newish) sermon for each Sunday. I do give myself permission to borrow from myself, and I have two sermons that I wrote for my Women and the Preaching Life that I will use because they were written with the church in mind. But for the most part, I'm trying to do some new thinking each week. I will also preach from a manuscript, so that I stay on topic. I'm still sorting out how long the sermon should be.
It also makes some sense to post the sermon manuscript here on this blog, which has become an archive for all sorts of ministry ideas. Here is last week's manuscript, preached on June 4, 2023, Trinity Sunday:
June
4, 2023
When I started seminary, I had pastor friends who told me
that I should expect that my faith would be shaken. I heard stories of people who had been
challenged by Systematic Theology classes or by meeting people from deeply
different faith backgrounds. However, I
did not expect my faith to be shaken by Church History class, particularly not
in learning about the earlier centuries of the Christian Church, a time period
I knew very little about. Throughout
that class, I learned about all the divisions that led to schisms between
Christians, schisms and sometimes worse, like wars and massacres.
As I prepared for this sermon, for Holy Trinity Sunday, I
thought about one of the earliest schisms, the one that led to the Nicene
creed. In the years before the adoption
of the creed in the year 325, early Christians bitterly disagreed about whether
or not God the Creator was equal to Jesus or existed before Jesus—were they
both created of the same Divine substance or was the Creator elevated?
Modern people might be surprised to learn that this
controversy wasn’t resolved by the adoption of the Nicene Creed. Over and over again, this issue caused
controversy and schism—and worse.
So why have a Sunday that celebrates the Trinity? Why poke at this old wound? You might also wonder why we celebrate the
Trinity so soon after Pentecost. Can’t
the Holy Spirit be the focus for a bit longer?
It’s not a new festival—we’ve been celebrating it in some parts of the
Church since the 1300s. By now, most of
us don’t need Trinity Sunday to help keep us from heresies like the ones that
disavow the Trinity—that could be the subject for a different sermon. But since it would probably be more like a
Church History lecture than a sermon, let’s go in a different direction.
Let’s think about what Trinity Sunday has to offer us here
in the 21st century. First,
let’s return to our readings for the day, particularly the reading from Genesis. In the words of that song from The Sound
of Music, let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to
start. Let’s go back to one of my
favorite creation stories.
I won’t read the whole thing out loud here again—it’s quite
lengthy. But go back and take a look and
see if you immediately notice what’s missing from this story. Correct—there’s
no snake, no forbidden fruit, no casting out from the garden. Maybe you think we just haven’t gotten to
this part. But if you go back and read
further in Genesis—homework?—you’ll notice that the story we have for this morning
is complete. It’s the first creation
story, and it ends here—and then the next one starts, and that’s the one that’s
more familiar, the one with humans misbehaving and expulsion from Paradise.
So let’s look at this one again. It’s become one of my favorite depictions of
God, God as creator, God in full creation mode.
God creates and creates—such a variety of creations--and declares
everything “good” and “Very good.”
Unlike many of us, God the creator in this version doesn’t say, “This attempt
was stupid. I am so stupid. I am putting away all my creative materials that
bring me joy and I will never create again.”
No, God takes joy in creating and the next day, God finds
more joy in creating. We don’t see a God
of hellfire and damnation here, no God of punishment, no God of disappointment. It’s a very different picture of God than the
one that many of us think we know.
This past year in seminary, my Preaching professor said
this on our last day of class. She said
that one of the most prophetic things we can do is to tell people that God
loves them just as they are. She said that we might be surprised how many
people have never heard that God loves them. I don’t think she’s wrong.
If you look at Church history, you’ll see that the church
has emphasized a very different picture of God than the one we see in this
first chapter of Genesis. It’s not
always a very loving picture. And it’s
not limited to the past. I’ve been to
many a retreat and heard people talk about God sending them all sorts of
tribulations as some sort of test. While
I admire the ability of people to try to find the good in the most awful
situation, I have to wonder why people would worship a God like that.
Happily, that’s not the version of the Trinity that we meet
today. In addition to God the Creator,
we meet the Redeemer, and we even get a sense of the Holy Spirit. This brings me to the other way that I think that
the Triune God is so important, still important, for us today. From the very beginning, God shows us, and
keeps trying to show us, how to live in community.
The early Church was asking the wrong questions when it
spent so much time trying to discern which part of the Divinity was in charge,
who was most important, who came first. The
science fiction writer Octavia Butler has a scene in one of her books where a
space alien notes that humans have a lot going for them, but what will doom
them is their need for hierarchy. That
character wasn’t entirely wrong—but God works to try to save us from our doomed
need to put people in rigid hierarchal structures. God does this by showing us a new way of
being in community, even though humans through the ages have resisted following
God’s model of the Trinity.
I also wonder how much our received views of the Triune God
limit us from experiencing the new ideas that could come if we think of the Trinity
differently. For many of us, some of the
traditional aspects of the Trinity problematic.
I think of this each year when Pentecost approaches, and I wonder for
those of us who live in places that are susceptible to the damaging force of
wind and fire (and that’s more and more of us these days), if this vision of
the arrival of the Holy Spirit means we’ll be less receptive.
As I’ve spent time broadening my image of God from one of God
as a father (and not always a patient father) to God as a creator, I’ve
experimented with other aspects of the Trinity too. I’ve thought about communities I’ve been part
of, communities where we are so much stronger together than we are as individual
units. A few years ago, I explored this
idea a bit in an article for Gather magazine, an article that envisioned the
Triune God as a quilt group.
I wrote: If we
thought of the Holy Spirit as a quilt group, perhaps we could transform our
relationship with this part of the Trinity.
Once I saw God as an angry judge.
Now I see God as the ultimate quilt designer who invites us to
contribute ideas, fabric, thread, effort.
Once I saw Jesus as the college student who could get us all into
trouble, good trouble, as John Lewis would say.
Now I see Jesus as one who comes
to our tattered quilt of existence, to introduce us to new fabric and more
interesting patterns and vibrant colors, all stitched together with much
stronger threads than any we’ve had before.
The Holy Spirit is the quilt group member who comes to us with complex
quilt patterns or information about quilt shows that we should enter. The Holy Spirit is the one who believes in
our creative powers, even when we’re less sure ourselves. It’s a wake up call, to be sure, but not the
kind of wake up call that natural disasters bring. It’s the insistence that we can be better
versions of ourselves, that we already are better versions if we could just
believe it.
In
the coming week, I encourage us all to think about the example of community offered
by our Triune God, the image of a Triune God that has been so important through
the ages. I encourage us to think about
what elements of the Triune God are most important to us and what those
elements say to us as we nurture the communities that are important to us and
to the larger world.
I
encourage us to return to the words of Jesus in Matthew, the words that he
gives after the resurrection. He makes
it clear that his mission is not complete, that he’s relying on us. He invites us to continue the work and
promises always to be with us. He
invites us to be part of the community that the Triune God has already begun to
create.
Today
and every day, I hope we say yes to that invitation.
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