Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: “To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live. The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth - when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil. When he established the heaven, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.
Psalm 8
O LORD our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! - you whose glory is chanted above the heavens out of the mouths of infants and children; you have set up a fortress against your enemies, to silence the foe and avenger. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses, what are mere mortals that you should be mindful of them, human beings that you should care for them? Yet you have made them little less than divine; with glory and honor you crown them. You have made them rule over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet: all flocks and cattle, even the wild beasts of the field, the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and whatever passes along the paths of the sea. O LORD our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Romans 5:1-5
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
John 16:12-15
Jesus said, “I still have many thing to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he 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.”
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Have you ever felt like you don’t believe enough, or don’t believe in the ‘right’ thing in the ‘right’ way? Either because somebody told you one way to do what you’re supposed to do, or because you’ve learned that to belong someplace you’ve got to buy into the wholesale everything about it, hook, line, and sinker? Ever been afraid that you’ve gotten it wrong, or that maybe you never had it to begin with?
It’s Holy Trinity Sunday today, which some of us jokingly call ‘holy heresy Sunday.’ We make light of it now, that none of us can really understand or fully explain what we mean by describing our One God as a Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit, but for hundreds of years we killed one another over words about God. In many ways and places, if we are honest, we still do that today. The winners of an argument would of course slander the losers in the way history gets written, and heresy in many places is a serious enough charge for not only excommunication, being thrown out of a faith community, but for execution. We have always been quick to kill one another over fear, especially when we can name it as a killing to defend God’s honor and reputation. If that’s not irony, I’m not sure what is.
Way back at the beginning, the Creeds were a way of knowing who the insiders were, for our own protection, because many rumors going around about Christians put our lives at danger. So if you knew the Creed at the point in the worship service where it was proclaimed, you knew enough to understand that Christians aren’t incestuous cannibals, but if you didn’t know the Creed, that’s when you would be shown out and taught the basics while the rest of us continued with communion. But when the church fathers, of course only the educated men of privilege, put the creeds together, there was much name calling and fighting over getting this exactly right, lest we say something wrong about God that might steer someone in the wrong direction and lead to their destruction. We were so afraid of getting it wrong that we would not allow people to think differently… What kind of God were we really thinking of, to live in that kind of fear?
We in this time and place are far from that sort of persecution today, having become the dominant culture under Constantine back in the 300s, conquering and colonizing all over the world in the name of Jesus. It’s more than a little tragic, the way Christians have historically taken the name of God as a tool to abuse the world God created, to erase the cultures of the people Jesus came to save, and to attempt to put the Holy Spirit’s work into boxes we can control and measure.
And yet.
And yet God still wants to be known, for the sake of life and of love. God still shows up and creates and re-creates and renews and even through and in us and our fumblings offers hope and grace and peace to the world.
When we teach the Creed in confirmation, we take it one part at a time, Father/Mother Creator for an hour, Jesus and his saving work for an hour, the Holy Spirit for an hour. Of course each of these ways of encountering God show up in all of our other classes, too, from the commandments to the Lord’s prayer to the Eucharist. But the way I see it, the Trinity is a way of talking about God’s self-revelation to the world which is only sometimes tangible, only sometimes terrifying, only sometimes a comfort, only sometimes translatable into language.
Because God is a mystery, but we lose track of mystery when we get comfortable in our language, we have this Trinity idea to remind us of how little we can actually put God in a box of our own definitions. Even in the historical attempts to do so, to define and control holiness, God wiggles around in our words and slips through the cracks into unconquerable spaces.
We have an idea of God as Father, yet with many mothering attributes, the womb of creation, the one who knits us together, the one who brings up the mountains and scatters the stars and plays with sea monsters, who is revealed to us in the ongoing work of creation all around us. This is probably the most universally known face of God, considering how we cannot ever truly get away from our natural environment. We know that if we do not connect with the earth we get sick at heart and sick physically, we’ve even scientifically proven the value of taking a walk in the woods, as though we need an academic study to prove what children are born knowing innately. And the stories we tell of the beginning of creation place us firmly in the garden as ground keepers, as stewards of this creation while also deeply part of it, as connected to something which is ordered for thriving, which is at its core very good. This is one basic, major way that God is revealed to us.
As Christians, and as Lutheran Christians in particular, we focus a lot of our understanding of God in the person of Jesus Christ, and even more specifically, in his willing death on the cross. It’s a big sticking point, and that’s okay, to say that Jesus is not just a good man but also God enfleshed. There are so many fights, historically and currently, over whether God could so limit God’s Self as to wear skin and bone, to weep and to bleed and have indigestion. But even as we wrestle with what it means, we confess Jesus crucified as the clearest, most solid revelation of God’s will and love for the cosmos. - Not that God wills us to kill one another, but that God would rather die with us than live condemning us to perpetuate our violence. - When we look at Scripture for discernment on who God is and how to live these lives we have been given, we always go back to the way that Jesus lived and died and rose again as the lens by which to read the rest. We go back to the Beatitudes and the last words and the commissioning before his ascension. We don’t even get the same accounts of his life across the four Gospels in our canon, not exactly, but if ever we have questions about how to interpret the rest of the Bible, we start with Jesus. And when we suffer, because suffering is universal, and wonder where God is in our pain, we look to Jesus for comfort and strength.
Then comes the rest of stuff, the things we can not explain, the dark matter on which everything else hangs, the space between our cells and the gut feelings and the work of living together in community and the little reminders of the power of life over death. The Holy Spirit has been called many things by many people, and we tend to say we know Her by Her fruits. She has been called sneaky, disturbing, comforting, Advocate, catalyst, instigator, lover, fire, wind, Wisdom, breath, spark, and we still fight many fights over where She is supposed to show up and where we don’t think She is allowed. Can the Spirit work through women? Through gay people? Through refugees? Through drug addicts? Through people we disagree with? Through the poor? Through the dead? But that doesn’t stop Her from doing Her work in the world, stirring us to justice and mercy, connecting people across the various boundaries we erect between differences. We hope to understand and recognize Her work when and where it comes, but so often She surprises us, in hard conversations and difficult people no less than in those things we quickly and readily call miracles.
So this Trinity Sunday, we have much to grieve in the ways we historically and currently appropriate God-talk to control others, the ways that God-talk has been used even against us when we could live more fully, and we also have much to celebrate in the ways God-talk has inspired hearts and minds and relationships of courage and love and renewal. This Trinity Sunday we gather together some small part of the complexity of what it means that we are part of a world with so much messiness and mystery and hope, and that we are not ever alone in that wondering. That when we confess that we believe, believing does not mean checking off a list, because the God of whom we seek to speak is continuously loving and challenging and confronting and healing and moving as we grow and fall and fail and are forgiven and are lifted up again and again. Sometimes when we confess, we confess mostly that we are still trying, still trying to let love win over fear in the natural world, in our relationships, in the way we build community and explore our creativity. And in the stories we tell, over and over again, we confess that God is still loving us stronger than our fears, in all of those places and all of those ways where we fear falling short, with a love that will surprise us, a love which will not ever let us go.
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