Trinity Sunday
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Sermon Trinity Sunday A All Saints 6-7-20
Genesis 1: 1 – 2: 4a Canticle 13 2 Corinthians 13: 11 – 13 Matthew 28: 16 – 20
God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good.
This Sunday marks the beginning of “ordinary time”, that time between Pentecost Sunday and the beginning of Advent. We will be reading the Gospel of Matthew and thinking about the events in the ministry of Jesus. We will open the parables and discuss the people around Jesus looking for the teachings that help us follow Jesus.
Today is also Trinity Sunday. You have heard lots of preachers – including me – struggle with how to explain the Trinity. Today you will be saved from that. I cannot explain the Trinity – nor will I ever be able to do so. I can try to describe to you how I experience the Holy Trinity, but that is my limited view of God, made small by my own smallness and fears.
Blessed be the Lord, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
God the Creator of all things as described in Genesis. I have a hard time limiting God to male-ness alone. Our planet is steeped in the male/female duality of the creation of new life. Even as I pray “God the Father”, I think and feel “God the Father and Mother”. God’s masculine strength and fierceness in protecting God’s own. God tenderness and care with us as individual. God loving and nurturing us as the perfect Parent. God loving and providing for us even before God created us.
It is powerful to read the Creation story from Genesis as we think about the Trinity. There is much deep and complicated theological discussion around God’s statement: Let US make humankind in OUR image, according to OUR likeness. For me, this is the first statement of Trinity even if three-ness is not specifically mentioned. Here are masculinity and femininity, here are feathers and scales, here are roses and oak trees – here is all the abundance of our earth, made by God and held in God’s hands as God declared all of it GOOD. Beautifully made by God until the sin of separation from God enters through the doorway opened by humans.
God declared all of God’s creation to be VERY GOOD. Every animal, tree, river and mountain, God said, is GOOD. Most important for us is that God declared humankind good – all of humankind as GOOD!
Right now, as people around this country are marching in the streets, let us think about what God’s creation of all men and women means. The most obvious thing is that we are each made of God material. God made every man and every woman in the image of God – that is, to be like God. We are alone in God’s creation as the creatures into whom God breathed. God gave life to all other creatures, but God BREATHED God’s own breath of life into us.
Here is the hard part of that: God breathed God’s breath of life into every human being on the face of the earth – even those people I do not like, and especially those people whom I dismiss. God’s spirit lives in homeless villages under bridges. God’s spirit lives in people of every color not just light tan people like me. God’s spirit lives behind enemy lines no matter how many bombs have exploded. There is no human being on earth who is not made in God’s image and infused with God’s breath.
You all know that I grew up in South Georgia in the 50s and 60s. As Christians in that time, we spoke out of both sides of our mouths. In Sunday School, I learned to sing God loves the little children, all the children of the world….. But outside of Sunday School I learned that God really did not love “those” little children around the corner – did not love their parents very much either. In fact, God loved me the very most and did not want me to associate with “them” at all. Being on of the lightest tan people on earth, I was more valuable than those who were brown and black. All I had to do was show up in my light tan-ness and my importance was established.
Jesus did not make that distinction. In Jesus’s final instructions to the Disciples, Jesus set them into every corner of the world to tell every person that God the Father loved him, that Jesus Christ died for her sins, and the Holy Spirit will dwell in any heart no matter the color the skin around it. All belong to God.
We as American Christians have confessions to make and thanksgivings to offer. We must confess our sin in putting our light tan skin on a pedestal as we insist that is the most important thing about us. We were not the slave owners and traders – that was done many years before our birth. Specifically, I do not know if my ancestors owned or traded in slaves. As far back as I have traced, we were too poor to own much of anything. But that is not the point. A wound, an infection exists in the history of my country. I share that wound, that infection with my ancestors and yours. And with you, I share the responsibility of healing the wound, of curing the infection.
We are now at one of those moments often labeled as a crossroad, a turning point. We are prevented from meeting as a community in our church building by a virus. We are seeing our sins of indifference, of inattention, of looking but not seeing played out in the news of the day. It seems to me that we have decisions to make.
We can continue to hide our eyes and pretend that we do not see injustice, then return to our lovely worship in our lovely church. Or we can think of our lovely church as a base of operations in the fight for justice, mercy and peace, and seek ways that we together and individually can work for God’s Kingdom here and now. Remembering that Christ Jesus plainly told us that when we reach out to help the very least of those around us, we are reaching out in Christ Jesus with love and faith.
God the Father created us in God’s image. God the Son come to remove our sin so that we can love and serve God. God the Holy Spirit will live within us and enable us to serve God with courage and strength. We are our brother’s keeper. We are called by God to be God’s love amid this world so God’s will, God’s mercy and justice will rule on earth as in heaven.
Glory to God, Father Son and Holy Spirit;
we will praise and highly exalt you forever.
