Today, in our church year, we mark Trinity Sunday. And rather than tying ourselves in knots trying to pull apart the oneness and the threeness, the threeness and the oneness of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I want to suggest just a few things for us, and then walk through one way we might translate this good news for our friends and neighbours beyond these four walls.
There are probably lots of ways we could speak about the Trinity today. Here in the church, we often talk about God being both one and three. This is a doctrine, a core belief of the church, one that informs much of how we understand both the essence of the Divine, as well as the relationship between God and God’s people.
All that being said, the Trinity is not first a doctrine, but rather a way in which people throughout time and space have tried to explain their experience of God.
Perhaps you can think of a particular experience of God that you’ve had. In some sense, it’s completely inexplicable. And yet as humans, we make sense of the world through stories, through pictures, through words. And so, we often try to put words around those inexplicable experiences. “God is like such-and-such,” we might say, “but also somehow like this…and this other thing too.”
Across time and space, people have experienced God in a number of different ways and this, early in the church’s history (the 4th Century), led to a sort of consensus on one God, three persons.
Here’s another way of thinking about these things:
Rachel Held Evans, a great author, and one of my heroes—a woman who like me emerged from fundamentalism—and who wrestled with the Bible and the church so fiercely and so publicly, in ways that I have found so incredibly help, wrote this in her book about the Bible:
the scandal of the gospel is that one day the God of our theology books and religious debates showed up—as a person in flesh and blood.” She goes on to say, “while God delivered a few sermons and entertained a couple of theological discussions, it is notable that… according to the Gospels, when God was wrapped in flesh and walking among us, the single most occupying activity of the Creator of the universe, the Ultimate reality, the Alpha and Omega and the great I AM of ages past and ages to come was to tell stories.
That is to say, God shows up in flesh and blood to tell stories, and to inhabit our stories. God shows up in your story. My story. God is present in the story of this congregation, as much as that fictitious congregation we started to engage with last week. The question today, as with the story we explored a few weeks ago is—are we ready for God to show up? Would we notice if God did? If someone were to show up today searching for God, what way would we point?
And now, a third example of how we might think about the Trinity. Michael Ramsey, the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, puts it this way:
“God is Christlike, and in God is no un-Christlikeness at all.”
Another way to say this is, if we want to know what God is like, we need to look to Jesus. What is God like in all of God’s complexity? Jesus shows us. And so, if we want to know what God is like, and what God is calling us to, we need to look at and look for Jesus. In prayer. In scripture. Perhaps in sermons. In service. Where does Jesus hang out? With whom? If we believe in that God, then we ought to be there too.
Those are three ways that I know, and that have helped me to think about, to wrap my head around the Trinity.
But ultimately I don’t think that this is about the head, but about the heart. And one of the ways that helps me to move beyond head to heart is through stories. And so I want to invite you, as members of this congregation to reflect on this question, and to share part of your story, as you feel able:
Can you share with us an experience of God in your life? What was that experience, and how would you say God showed up in that moment?
[Stories are invited from the congregation]
In response to the God we are coming to know in Jesus, the church’s task is not to run around and try to do this, that, and the next thing so that we can get more people to come here so that we can fill our pews or pay our bills. Instead, the work of the church is to orient our whole selves, our entire lives, our congregational life to the practice of waiting and listening for God. To wait and listen for God. And, when God speaks, it is our task to listen, to follow, and to bear witness to all that we have experienced.
And sometimes—oftentimes in fact—our experiences of God often come in moments of disorientation and hopelessness. Our ways of experiencing God are not, as Luther notes, “limited to what you can comprehend.” Instead, they usually transcend our comprehension.
And so I want to share another way into this story. Last week, through Facebook, a number of things came to my attention. First was the way in which the climate in North America—the US especially, but also in Canada—is becoming more and more hostile towards queer and trans folks. The second was a reminder that the church has often been silent on these issues, and that it is important that we are clear about what we mean when we say words like “everyone is welcome.”
With these things in the back of my mind, something jumped to the forefront. It was Jay Hulme’s poem “Jesus at the Gay Bar.” Which I will read for you now.
He’s here in the midst of it—
right at the centre of the dance floor
robes hitched up to His knees
to make it easy to spin
At some point in the evening
a boy will touch the hem of His robe
and beg to be healed,
beg to be anything other than thisand He will reach his arms out
sweat-damp and weary from dance.
He’ll cup the boy’s face in his hand
and say,My beautiful child
there is nothing in this heart of yours
that ever needs to be healed.
This June, and throughout the summer, many people across our province will celebrate Pride.
What began as a necessary protest movement has shifted and evolved over the decades. Some places have domesticated the event, seeking to make it family-friendly. In other places, events have been taken over by corporations attempting to appeal to a wider audience by selling rainbow-flavoured kombucha (or whatever).
Here in the Kootenays we see the ways in which anti-queer and anti-trans protests and actions are being emboldened. We can see the ways some feel safe to threaten their 2SLGBTQIA+ siblings and neighbours all the while hiding behind the false flags of free speech and religious freedom. It’s a stark reminder that hatred will find any convenient cover to sustain itself. In the end, we all have the choice to seek human flourishing—or not.
It’s so important for me that we, and that the church as a whole, proclaims love above all as witnesses to the love that we have met in Jesus.
The beauty and the challenge of living in small communities like ours is that everyone seems to know your business. Who you are, who you’re related to, who your friends are, what you’ve done. This can make it hard—scary even—to come out. For those coming out who cling to their faith, the challenges can be even greater.
For me, the power of Jay Hulme’s poem rests on the young man’s assumption that Jesus—like many church people today—will demand that he single handedly undermine the reality of his biology and lived experience. It rests on the assumption, drilled into him from birth, that there is something defective, something wrong, something unlovable about his sexuality or identity.
The power of this poem—indeed the powerful good news of this poem—is that none of these assumptions are true. What the young man finds when he touches the hem of Jesus’ robe, when Jesus cups the boy’s face in his hands, is neither shame nor condemnation, but love. Above all, love.
We religious folk bicker an awful lot about the truth and who’s got it. And indeed, the truth of God’s no-holds-barred love shall set us free! The scriptures that talk about “the way, the truth, and the life,” are the very same scriptures that remind us that we don’t always see the whole picture. At best, we see pale reflections in the mirror.
What then do we have to hold onto? The apostle Paul suggests we have at least three: “faith, hope, and love,” he says. And then he continues (and with this I wholeheartedly agree), “the greatest of these is love.”
My greatest hope for this community is that we are, and that we are always becoming a community of love. May we care for our neighbours across any lines that might otherwise divide us. May we look for the divine spark in each others’ eyes. May we find that spark in places expected and unexpected. And may we celebrate the beauty of humanity in its rainbow of God-given diversity, now and in the days to come.
God’s love isn’t some abstract notion. It is not just a set of propositions, although our understanding might rely on particular ideas, concepts, words, even doctrines. But each of these things ought to point towards God’s love is love in action. It is love experienced on the dance floor, it is love experienced in the sanctuary of a church. It is the love of a triune God who created all things not because of a lack of love, but through an abundant overflowing love amongst the three persons of the trinity.
The good news is that we are recipients of God’s love.
The even better news is that God's love is abundant. God's love is not in short supply. Like a spring-fed well, God’s love fills from the bottom, filling us, that we might share living water with all we meet.
What I know of Jesus—the one who shows us what God is like—is that no matter who we are, no matter where we come from, no matter what we have endured, he greets us, welcomes us, embraces us with open arms, offering the healing that comes from knowing that in the eyes of God — Creator, Christ, and Spirit — we are enough, we are loved.
And so, each time we are sent from this place into the wider world, we are being sent to make sure everyone else knows that they are God’s beloved too.
