June 7, 2009 at Saint Mark in Norman, OK
Deuteronomy 4:32-34,39-40 + Psalm 33 + Romans 8: 14-17 + Matthew 28: 16-20
Over the forty-one years of my priesthood, I acknowledge a lot of growth and am always grateful for the patience, endurance, and good humor of countless people who have stood, sat, and knelt in front of me. I have looked at faces glazed over with boredom, deep concern, and into the eyes of holy people deep in prayer. I have recognized the critic, who like Scribes and Pharisees sit and wait to trap or trip me up. I have also seen a few backsides as some have stalked out or pinched their baby into crying so that they might make a hasty escape.
All of this comes to mind on the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity as this book calls this day. I am always amused at the title some have now applied to this Feast. The superlative adjective, “most” might imply that there was a comparative “More Holy Trinity” suggesting two, or simply a “Holy Trinity” when there are no other Trinities to compare. Personally, I am content with one: “The Holy Trinity.” One is enough to wrap your mind around. One of the remarkable signs of growth in my life other than size is the fact that I am now content with just one, and that I no longer schedule my retreat, my vacation, or an illness to coincide with the Sunday after Pentecost. There was a time in my life when I did everything possible to avoid preaching on the Feast of the Holy Trinity. That phase followed an earlier first phase when I loved to preach about the Holy Trinity. When in the vigor of my youth I provided barely breathing congregations long expositions of this theological truth and reasoning to support and affirm our faith. I think that came about from the childhood memory of being told by countless well meaning religious sisters that the Trinity was a “Mystery” I couldn’t understand. Of course, that’s all I needed as a child was to be told I couldn’t do something or that something was a mystery. It’s like giving a child a beautifully wrapped box and saying you can’t open it.
Finally I got over my early enthusiasm as a priest and wore out all the theological jargon I had learned and decided to take a vacation after Pentecost leaving this feast to some poor substitute who probably said, “yes” when asked to take my place without looking at the calendar of feasts! Which brings us to today: Here I am. For several years now, I have been over it. You get no graduate level lecture on the scholastic idea of the Trinity, and I have already taken some vacation time after Easter. I’m in my third developmental phase, and I hope for both of us that it will be the last. I have no desire to neither convince you nor explain to you the mystery of the Holy Trinity. I am not interested in giving a talk on dogma. As you know I have a passion to talk about the Word of God, so fear not. I shall not bore you with technical theology. But I do want to tell you about and bear witness to a God who does not dwell in outer space nor hide in the mind of scholastic theologians who love to speak of one in three, three in one, undivided unity. To my mind that language always sounds like algebra which is not an experience but rather a way of thinking.
You can have it either way, I suppose: a God who is something to think about or a God with whom you live day in and day out. I have come to believe that the challenge of this Feast is to bring the right brain and the left brain together, or to touch the mind and the heart lest we go through life with ideas about God and no experience; with thoughts and no memories. Our God is not an idea. Our Trinity, God, three in one, is a God for us. In Jesus, God has become not only “for us” but “with us” and through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, a God “within us.” There is some language to wrap your mind around: for us, with us, within us — — — that is language of Trinity out of experience not from a textbook. The dogmas of the church from experience it’s not the other way around.
To get it, we simply pick up the Word of God today. In the Book of Deuteronomy, the writer celebrates a God “FOR US” awakening our memories of the moments when God’s involvement in human history was clearly evident. The writer moves us into a way of recalling events that have happened to us that only God could have accomplished, and because of it we respond by living in a grateful relationship with that God who is so obviously for us.
To get it, we simply listen to Paul’s letter to the Romans today. Paul celebrates the “for us” character of God and affirms the intimacy of relationship to which we are invited by God. Not slaves or simply creatures, but loved, chosen, and adopted children who can call God, Abba resting in the assurance that God is not only for us, but is also with us.
To get it one last time, listen to Matthew’s Gospel today. A people who know that God is for them and with them, will suddenly begin to understand the truth that God is within them, and if within them, God is within everyone one of them; that every human being is made in God’s image which means that Father, Son, and Spirit are experiences not just ideas. We know the Divine as Father comes when we share in God’s creative life with creative moments in art and beauty and in bringing life into this world. We know the Divine as Son when we embrace the unwashed and unwanted, the hungry and the poor, and confront hypocrisy, greed, and violence continuing the work and life of Christ Jesus. We know the Divine as Spirit with every burst of inspiration and imagination, in wisdom, and in every word and work of love. The God whose image we reflect does not remain distant, but chooses to be near making this feast ours as well as God’s because it is you and me that God has chosen to be involved and invested. It is in you and me that God chooses to dwell. In love we are scooped up into that embrace that has given us life and purpose and meaning. On a hot summer Sunday that truth is enough to celebrate, to remember, and to enjoy.