Trinity A: Trinitarian Matters

Posted by DJL on Jun 4, 2020 in Dear Partner | 4 comments

Dear Partner in Preaching,

Two notes to you late in this week on this text and day.

1) I will admit that Holy Trinity Sunday is perhaps my least favorite Sunday of the year. On any given day, the doctrine of the Trinity seems remote and inaccessible, if not downright confusing, and barely touches on the realities of my life. And in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the massive and world-wide protests that has sparked – not to mention that we’re still coping with a pandemic that has now claimed more than 100,000 lives in the United States and countless more around the globe – the Trinity has never seemed so unimportant or irrelevant.

Except….

Except if there is one thing that seems important and concrete and meaningful about the Trinity, it’s the idea of relationship. Particularly as we – ourselves, our congregations, our communities – seek to move into a future that aligns more closely with what we believe deep in our heart God wants for us, then it matters a great deal that we affirm that God is, at heart, inherently, undeniably, and inextricably relational.

Look. I won’t for a minute pretend that I understand the Trinity. (And quite frankly, I don’t believe people when they say they do. 😊) But I do sense that early Christians were confronted with the fact that the reality of the God revealed in Jesus and after Pentecost didn’t fit into any of their preconceived categories and so all the language usually employed to talk about God needed to be stretched. Indeed, I wonder if we would profit as a Church from focusing less on the Trinity as doctrine and more on it as metaphor for capturing the dynamic, restless, and deeply relational reality and experience of God. (And even as I write that, I worry someone will say “he doesn’t believe in reality of the Trinity,” when I think what I’m trying to say is that the experience of God which Trinitarian language – stretched to near breaking point – tries to capture is beyond what I can conceptualize or hold onto, hence my reliance and trust in the power of this metaphorical reality to best capture our experience.)

Here’s why I think this matters: I see no path forward if we don’t make room for – and indeed give priority to – working to create space for intentional and genuine relationships with people who are different from us. People who believe differently, people who think differently, and especially people who look different and are from different social and ethnic groups than our own. There is surely room and need for protests and statements and calls to reform. Just as there is room for deep reflection, honest confession, and real repentance for how we are complicit in and benefit from structures that support racism and other forms of inequality. Absolutely. And we each have a role to play in that. But nothing, in the end, will change if we are not drawn into genuine, concrete, actual – and all of this means exciting and challenging as well – relationships with persons from communities beyond our experience or comfort. Because just as we know and struggle to name God through our actual experience of God active in our lives, so also we can only know and appreciate and love – and be changed by – others in and through actual relationships. This is the long road to not merely social change but a vision and reality of community that more closely matches God’s dreams for us and God’s own existence as a relational being.

2) The readings for this Sunday routinely border on awful. I know that’s simply because there is so little mention of anything remotely Trinitarian in the actual stories of Scripture that we choose whatever seems to come close. So we have the “royal we” of Genesis, the Pauline blessing in 2 Corinthians, and the singular use of the “Trinitarian formula” in Matthew, and if there’s every a Sunday where texts were chosen for their semantic, rather than contextual or exegetical, significance, this is it.

Having said that, this week’s readings resonate differently and powerfully in light of the turmoil in which we find ourselves:

“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (Gen. 1:26).
It’s hard for me to hear the Genesis account of creation and not reflect on how the very heart of the evil and power of racism is that it makes it painfully difficult for us to see the “likeness of God” in those who differ from us. Racism, at its heart, takes someone who should be intimately recognizable to us – one also created in the image of God and so a fellow child of God – into someone or, really, something other than us, someone/thing we need not recognize as bearing the same dignity and rights that we take for granted.

“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Mt. 28:20).
The focus on this passage is typically, and probably understandably, the “great commission.” But on this day, the words that offer the strength and encouragement for which I long are what I would call the “great promise.” Jesus is with us… in our heartbrokenness and grief, in our protests and stands, in our fear and uncertainty, in our confession and repentance. Jesus is with us. And as long as Jesus is with us, we will neither lose hope nor give up.

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you” (2 Cor. 13:13).
These are the words with which we gather for worship. They are also the words, whether spoken aloud or not, that accompany us out from worship and give us guidance, encouragement, and strength sufficient to the tasks ahead of us. May they permeate your life and ministry, Dear Partner, as you undertake the challenging but holy work of offering a word of the Lord to your people that is both faithful to the mysterious and relation God we know in the Trinity and fittingto the challenges and possibilities of the day.

Blessings on your proclamation and for health, healing, and hopefulness to you and, indeed, all of us.

Yours in Christ,
David

Post image: Andrej Rublev’s famous icon showing the three Angels being hosted by Abraham at Mamre.