“Community”
The Holy Trinity – The
First Sunday after Pentecost
26 May 2013
All Saints Episcopal
Church
San
Francisco, California
INI
An Introduction:
It is a dangerous and intimate thing that you and I will do
together this morning. It is always
dangerous to preach on this Sunday of the Holy Trinity – perhaps the Sunday most
given to heresy as we try to understand the notion of the Trinity. Martin Luther had a great phrase when
it came to situations such as this: pecca
fortiter – “sin boldly” – and so we shall. So thank you Fr. Kenneth, for
giving me such an interesting first assignment here.
Danger always lurks as well as we begin a different kind of
relationship with one another.
Having been with you in the pews for a few months, now I dare to preach
to you. Preaching is the product
of an intimate relationship of knowing – something that will develop here
between us, but it will take time, and talk, and thought. Knowing these difficulties, I am going
to trust the Spirit, who, as Saint Paul writes “personally makes our
petitions (or our preaching) for us in groans that cannot be put into words,”
and trust that the truth and insight will be the final product for each of
us. So we begin
A Vision of God and
Community
And I was by Him,
an intimate,
I was his delight
day after day,
Playing before Him
at all times,
Playing in the
world, His earth,
And my delight
with humankind.
This is Robert Alter’s translation of the final verses of
our first lesson for this morning, and it has captured my imagination. Something has to capture imagination as
you attempt to divine the Trinity.
I hope that it will be a good jumping off place for us to begin to know
the Trinity and to know ourselves in relationship to this (I want to say
doctrine) but it is more than that, isn’t it? - Our relationship with God.
In a wonderful poem, the author of proverbs treats us to a
vision of God at the moment just before creation. It will be a tactic that Saint John will use as well when he
begins his Gospel with its grand prologue – “And the Word was made flesh and
dwelt among us.” But that was
Jesus, and here the poet is calling our attention to something different. Something new? The feminine personification of Wisdom
was common to the cultures of the ancient near east, but here the poet aligns
her with the Hebrew God. She is
with God, is in community with God before there is humankind.
Early works in the Hebrew Scriptures do not always depict
God in a divine loneliness, but rather in the company of others. In Job we see God sitting with a
counsel of gods, and Satan as a visitor hot to trouble Job. In Psalm 82 we have another vision of
God in Community, “God takes His stand in
the divine assembly, in the midst of the gods He renders judgment.” So it is not odd for the proverbs to
have this vision of God and Wisdom together at the beginning of things.
Lest we get to heavy here, let’s go back to how Professor
Alter has translated the verses I quoted earlier. Notice the vocabulary: “intimate”, “delight”, and “playing”. These are tender words that are not
only applied to Wisdom but to the Great I AM, as well. And it is a delight, play, and intimacy
that are not internal. These are
actions of relationship, knowing, and community. If we talk about God, we need to establish this first: God desires community, and with Wisdom
God desires us and delights in us.
The first reading, last Sunday, the Day of Pentecost, the story
of the Tower of Babel is seen by some as a lesson about how we might explain
the emergence of language in Biblical terms. Others have a different take, however, seeing this story as
an anti-urban screed that read well in a nomadic community. Such an attitude, however, is not
consonant with the God of Proverbs who both delights and plays in whatever
community is present. God desires
the gathering of people and creature and delights in the beauty of
relationships. That is the first
point that we need to hear this morning.
God delights to be with us.
A Vision of God as
Community
And now for something completely different! Fascinated by its title, The
Filioque History of a Doctrinal Controversy, I bought the book, wondering
if I would really ever read it.
Let me explain. The filioque is that phrase in the Nicene
Creed that was added over time but most definitely during the reign of
Charlemagne. It is a phrase that
separates the Western Church from the Eastern Church – and so we need to be interested
in this phrase. We will all be
able to remember it since you say it every Sunday, “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds
from the Father and the Son.” In Enriching our Worship I, it is
eliminated, as it is in the new Lutheran prayer book. Now, however, I am on a tangent – I have another point.
I did read this
book, while waiting for penitents to come in for Confession and Absolution in
the Chapel at Saint Mark’s Church in Berkeley. What I discovered in its pages
was not a solution to the problem of the filioque,
but rather the words of Western and Eastern theologians who in describing the
inner economy of the Godhead, often described the Trinity as a community – a
relationship of the persons. Saint
Gregory of Nyssa says it best, I guess:
Regarding the divine nature,
we have not thus learned that the Father does anything by Himself in which the
Son does not take part, or again that the Son acts separately in anything
without the Spirit; but every activity that extends from God to the creation. .
. starts from the Father and goes forth through the Son and is completed in the
Holy Spirit.[1]
In short, they play
well together. And the point this
morning might be that the Trinity then becomes a model for human life. Such an understanding of this activity
on God’s part adds new understanding to Jesus’ words in the Gospel for today,
“She will glorify
me, because she will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the
Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and
declare it to you."
So, God not only desires community. God is community.
A Vision of Community
with God
And this brings us to Kahlil and Caitlin, and baptism, the
community it engenders, and the words that I really wish to impart to you
today. If God delights in
community, and is the embodiment of community, then it behooves us to know our
own community with God. The
prophet Zephaniah (3:17) provides us with a good reminder:
“The
Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; God
will rejoice over you with gladness.”
The Dutch historian/philosopher Johan Huizinga, in his book Homo Ludens (Man at Play) discusses
and describes the elements of play in culture and most especially in
religion. That we should learn to
play with one another means that, like children, we should learn more and more
about not only ourselves but about the God that calls us into community. It is important that we confront the
Font as we enter this place each Sunday, because it calls us to be something
more than our selves in isolation from one another. It calls all of us and all who enter here to be in
relationship with God and embodies us as the Body of Christ. Talk about a community!
In a way, in Baptism we are called, like Wisdom, to be an
intimate to the act of creation, for it is in baptism that we are made
new. All that draws us away from
community, from our peers, from our enemies, from our society, is countered by
this act of washing. It is a
refreshment, if you will, and when we touch our fingers to the waters and
remember we are again reminded of our community not only with one another, but
with God as well. That why we
baptize in the Name of the Father, and of
the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
We baptize into a community of intimacy, delight, and play.
A Final Thought
I am a bit uncomfortable in having given the Holy Trinity
such short shrift. Perhaps this is
residual Lutheran theological guilt and having not wrestled more mightily with
the topic. Or perhaps we don’t
really need to wrestle at all on this day, or any day really. As they say today, “it is what it
is.” The question for us is how
will we apprehend what the fathers and mothers of the Church have been
attempting to tell us about God.
There is a passage in Alan Jones excellent book, Common
Prayer on Common Ground, a Vision of Anglican Orthodoxy. It describes and commends to us an
attitude when confronting the difficult parts of faith and believing, and I
believe it can help us here:
“We must never forget
that for Anglicans, theology always gives way to the impulse to worship. We move into prayer and into
silence. It’s no wonder that we’ve
spent more time producing prayer books than defining doctrines. Mystery, silence, conversation, freedom
leads us to worship. Theology can
be done only on our knees.”[2]
And so we bend the knee before a God full of mystery and
hiddenness, who nonetheless desires and delights in us, and in our community. So may we delight in one another and
cherish the Body of Christ.
SDG
