Trinity Sunday, June 4, 2023

I considered checking out that app ChatGPT to see what it would offer as a Trinity sermon…but it would have meant downloading the app to my phone, and I’m cautious about that sort of thing…so instead I looked back into the Nancy Moore Sermon Archives and found one that said what I want to say on this Trinity Sunday.

Imagine for a few minutes that you woke up one morning to find that your home country had been invaded by another, stronger force. Imagine that everything you love about the city or town in which you have lived your whole life reduced to rubble. Imagine that you are forced to leave the place you know, and trek across miles to a foreign land.

This is the context in which all the stories which we now call the book of Genesis were compiled into the first book of the Torah.

Those first chapters of Scripture which you just heard were written by people struggling to understand God and themselves in exile in a nation that worshiped some other deity. Their captors told different stories of our origins. Their stories often began with stories of gods at war with each other, each trying to get the upper hand. In some, humans were a mistake, an unexpected development in one god’s attempt to overthrow the others. In other tales, humans were created as cannon fodder or slaves, tools to be used in a great battle between gods who didn’t care what became of their creation. How might your faith be different if our story didn’t begin with the assertion that God created us out of love and joy and care?

This is part of what frustrates me in the endless debates between creationists and evolutionists. They have completely missed the point. These verses were never meant to be a scientific textbook explanation of how the universe came into existence. These verses are a poem—a love poem—told by people who had forgotten their own worth. Our creation myth was not intended to answer the question how; it was intended to answer the question why. God created us…

And it was good.

I often imagine a group of exiles sitting around a fire at night, saying or perhaps even singing this creation story to one another under the stars, a kind of protest song against the circumstances in which they found themselves. If you can step away from all the tension and argument and just let it flow over you, you might hear it the way it was intended to be heard, rather than the ways in which it has been tortured and twisted to fulfill some other purpose.

It says that God is not indifferent to creation; God cares about us because God created us for God’s own self to love. With that in mind, if you look again at this story, it’s impressive how close they were able to come to the actual progression of events according to science. “And then there was light” could easily be one way of describing the Big Bang. You don’t have to take this story literally to understand the deeper truth it holds: God cares about us because we belong to God, and God is with us—even when we are far from home or our lives have been reduced to ash.

We run into similar problems when we talk about the Trinity. The urge to make sense of the relationship between God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit is understandable. We have been blessed with curiosity, and with those gifts comes a desire, even a need, to have things make logical sense. But we are talking about God here—a God we could completely comprehend would not be God.

I distinctly remember the day in seminary when we reached the topic of the Trinity in our discussion session. The Teaching Assistant seemed to greatly enjoy watching us follow a particular train of thought down its path, waiting until that moment when she could speak up and say, “Nope, you’ve just wandered into heresy there.” We would back up and try a different approach. We would be okay for a while, but sooner or later she would sit up and say, “Nope. Heresy.” This went on for nearly the full 45 minutes of our session, until finally in frustration I looked at her and said, “So what you’re saying is that we really can pin this Trinity thing down, we just have to live with some mystery where it’s concerned?” She smiled and said, “NOW you understand.”

If you are spending all of your energy trying to make the math work, you’ve missed the point. The point is not to balance the equation; the point is to be open to all the ways in which we experience the Divine. As the late Gwen Bohr, a priest of this diocese once said, “It’s enough to offer hospitality to the Trinity. We don’t have to understand the Trinity.”

What a brilliant statement! The purpose of our relationship with God is not understanding, but hospitality. Our purpose is not to fully comprehend God, but to live with God.

Now for those of you who are married or have children, I bet you could say that there is a similar dynamic in being a spouse or a parent. How many of you have had occasions when you honestly cannot understand what is going on in the head of the person you love more than life itself? But you stay there, in the tension of unknowing, and do your best to love him or her despite the confusion. And if you a really fortunate, you come around to a place where you can celebrate the difference. You come to cherish that there is some part of this person that is incomprehensible to you, some part of them known only to God. You learn something about loving the person, not despite the differences or quirks, but because of them. You learn to love them because they proves just how amazing God is, to have created a family out of such different people.

Learning how to show the Trinity hospitality, learning how to make room for the parts of our loved ones we don’t like or don’t understand, is not an end in itself. In learning to make room for the Trinity, we learn to make room for the unknown with the assurance that God is entirely trustworthy. Then we learn how to make room for those we love, who are perhaps not so perfect, not as trustworthy as God, but still worth the risk. All this is training ground so that we learn how to make room for the stranger.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples to go and make disciples of all nations. To be a disciple is not to have all the answers, but to be on a journey of learning to ask questions. We won’t learn anything about following Christ if we only stick to the safe roads. We cannot fulfill the Great Commission if we stay in our comfort zone. We have to learn to take risks, to be disappointed more often than is comfortable. We have to be open to hearing how others experience God, not rejecting it because it doesn’t fit with our own picture, but asking ourselves if they see clearly some aspect of the Divine that is in our blind spot. It’s risky, it’s difficult, and it can only be done if we trust God to be with us in the midst of it all, to trust that if it is from God, it will eventually be revealed as good.

You don’t have to understand God to make a place for God in your lives. You don’t have to understand the people in your life to make a place for them in your hearts. As Christians, we are given the unique commission of walking the road that God has set before us, a road that is largely unseen. Not just walking it ourselves, but inviting others to walk with us. No one disciple has the full picture. But when we work and walk together, more of it becomes clear. Discipleship is a team sport.

Listen again to these words from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, which we heard today. Close your eyes and let them reach your heart through your ears.

“Finally brothers and sisters…put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you…The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

What really matters, in the end, is that God loves us and chooses to be with us. And it is good. Amen.