Monday, May 27, 2013

Sermon for The Holy Trinity, The First Sunday after Pentecost - 26 May 2013


“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


[1] 4Ad Ablabium; F. Mueller, ed. Gregorii Nysseni Opera Dogmatica Minora, Pars I (Leiden: Brill, 1958), pp. 47-48

[2] Alan Jones, Common Prayer on Common Ground, A Vision of Anglican Orthodoxy, Morehouse Publishing, 2006, page 79.

1 comment:

  1. Eugene A. Koene27/5/13 22:48

    To relieve your "uncomfortableness," here's a word from one of my ELCA colleagues: "The best preaching on the Trinity is not on the Trinity." -- If by "new Lutheran prayer book" you meant ELW, rest assured the Filioque is retained for the Liturgy, but with an asterisk -- the note at the bottom says, "Or 'who proceeds from the Father.' The phrase 'and from the Son' is a later addition to the creed." I suspect there may have been some discussion of eliminating it altogether, but they thought better of it. -- Enjoyed reading this sermon.

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