Trinity Sunday

Readings: Deuteronomy 4:32-34, 39-40; Romans 8:14-17; Matthew 28:16-20

The Holy Trinity is serious business,
so you don’t hear a lot of jokes about the Trinity,
but, maybe because I’m in the business,
I have actually heard one.
A bishop is at a parish for Confirmation
and decides that in his homily
he will quiz the teenagers
he is supposed to be confirming.
So he asks them,
“who can tell me what the Trinity is?”
They all look at their shoes,
in that way that teenagers do.
So he calls on one young man
who mumbles a reply,
in that way that teenagers do.
The bishop says,
“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.”
The boy sighs,
in that way that teenagers do,
and replies, only slightly louder,
“Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
The bishop, wanting the boy to speak up
so everyone can hear him,
says, “I’m sorry, I still didn’t understand.”
And the boy, rolling his eyes,
in that way that teenagers do,
says loudly and clearly,
“You’re not supposed to understand it.
It’s a mystery.”

Maybe not the best joke,
but it makes a point
about how many Christians approach the Trinity.
It is a doctrine that we are taught to repeat
but cannot possibly be expected to understand.
And this is true, in a sense,
because the doctrine of the Trinity says something about God,
and God is the ultimate mystery of existence,
which our finite minds cannot comprehend.
At the same time,
our Scripture readings for this feast of the Holy Trinity
do give us some insight
into why the Church came to profess belief
in a God who, while one,
is also three distinct persons who are equally God.

In our first reading, from Deuteronomy,
we hear rehearsed the fundamental tenant
of the faith of ancient Israel:
“that the LORD is God in the heavens above
and on earth below,
and that there is no other.”
God is one, utterly unique;
God has no competitor gods,
no rival deities;
God possesses the fullness of divine power
and God commands unwavering loyalty from God’s people.
But then, in our Gospel,
the risen Jesus tells his disciples,
“All power in heaven and on earth
has been given to me.”
The power that the book of Deuteronomy tells us
belongs to God alone,
Jesus says has been given to him
by the God he calls “Father”;
what the tradition of Israel says
can only be true of God,
Jesus claims as true of himself.
And finally, in the letter to the Romans,
Paul speaks of the “Spirit of God”
who has the power to make us co-heir with Christ,
so that we too cry out to God as our “Abba,” our father.

So the Scriptures,
while teaching that God is one,
also claim for Jesus and the Spirit
things that can only be true of God.
Not three gods, but one God
eternally existing in three persons,
who are united in a perfect and eternal dance of love,
each fully sharing in what it means to be God.
This is what that rather strange word “consubstantial,”
which we find in the Creed,
is trying to get at.
Jesus and the Holy Spirit are just as much God
as the Father is:
they are not demigods or messenger boys;
to say that the Son and Spirit
are “consubstantial” with the Father
is to say something
about the incredible intimacy of God with us:
the coming of Christ into our world
is the promised coming of God,
not the arrival of some emissary
dispatched by God from above;
the presence of the Spirit in our lives
is the presence of God,
not the presence of some go-between
linking us to a distant deity.
The mystery of the Trinity
is the mystery of eternal love,
eternal joy,
into which we have been invited
through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

The 14th-century mystic Meister Eckhart wrote:
“Do you want to know what goes on
in the heart of the Trinity?
I will tell you.
In the heart of the Trinity
the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son.
The Son laughs back at the Father
and gives birth to the Spirit.
The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us.”
Leaving aside some finer points of theology,
Eckhart presents us
with a picture of the Trinity, of God,
as an eternal act of shared joy,
shared love,
shared hilarity,
ecstatically overflowing into the world
in our creation and redemption.

This is who our God is:
truly a mystery,
but not a mysterious force operating at a distance
nor an inscrutably stern heavenly lawmaker,
but something like the mystery of happiness
that arises from mutual love,
the mystery of an infectious act of eternal laughter
that draws us in and makes us laugh along
until cleansing tears of joy run down our faces.
So perhaps we should tell more—and funnier—
jokes about the Trinity.
Or maybe we should live our faith
in the God who is Father, Son, and Spirit
with such joy,
with such passion,
with such infectious hilarity
that those around us
cannot help but join in that laughter
and feel a bit more faith,
a bit more hope,
a bit more love.

Easter 6

Readings: Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48; 1 John 4:7-10; John 15:9-17

Though we have moved, thank God,
out of the top story slot on the cable news programs,
with their endlessly repeated video loops
of the burning CVS at Penn and North,
our city continues to struggle to understand
the events of the past few weeks.

Part of this is the struggle of how to describe
what happened on April 27, a week ago this past Monday.
Was it looting?
A riot?
An uprising?
I suspect that it was in some measure
all three of these at once.
But most of all it was a sign,
a symptom of an underlying disease in our society,
a disease of violence and injustice,
of racism and despair,
a disease that manifests itself
in the poorest parts of our city
but for which we all bear responsibility.

If a sacrament is, as St. Augustine said,
an outward and visible sign
of an inward and invisible grace,
then the violence of April 27
was something like an anti-sacrament:
an outward and visible sign
of a pervasive violence and injustice
that is invisible to many of us,
but which too many
of our brothers and sisters in this city
live with on a daily basis.
It was not simply a sign of the personal moral failures
of those who damaged property or looted businesses,
but of our collective moral failure as a society
to make good on our talk of justice and equality.
I think for many of us these past few weeks
have been a time of soul-searching,
a time in which we have been forced by events
to ask ourselves
how could we have ignored for so long
the truths about our city now made manifest to us.
We have been forced by events to ask ourselves
what we can do
and from where we can draw our hope
as we seek a city that is more peaceful
because it is more just.

The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl,
recounts a story from his experience
in a Nazi death camp:
“One evening,
when we were already resting
on the floor of our hut,
dead tired, soup bowls in hand,
a fellow prisoner rushed in
and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds
and see the wonderful sunset.
Standing outside we saw sinister clouds
glowing in the west
and the whole sky alive with clouds
of ever-changing shapes and colors,
from steel blue to blood red.
The desolate grey mud huts
provided a sharp contrast,
while the puddles on the muddy ground
reflected the glowing sky.
Then, after minutes of moving silence,
one prisoner said to another,
‘How beautiful the world could be...’”

It seems to me that when we gather
to celebrate the sacraments
it is like the beauty of the sunset
reflecting in the puddles
of that desolate, grey death camp.
God’s grace, at work in the sacraments,
is a thing of great beauty
shining in a world of sin and injustice.
It is the grace that, in our first reading,
welcomed the gentile Cornelius and his household
into the family of God,
the God who, as St. Peter exclaims,
“shows no partiality.”
It is the grace that takes us
from being slaves to sin
and makes us into friends of Christ
and of each other in Christ.
It is the grace of the God
whom we can only know through love,
the God who is love.
And when we baptize,
when we break bread,
when we anoint,
when we absolve,
that beauty shines upon us,
transforming death into life
drawing us along with Jesus
in his passing over
from the tomb of death
to the life of glory.

But while the sacraments
make real and present to us
the beauty of God’s grace,
they should also make us ever more aware
of the graceless violence and hideous injustice
suffered in the hidden corners of our city,
our nation,
our world.
It shouldn’t take the anti-sacrament of a riot
to make us face up to the injustice
suffered by our brothers and sisters,
not when we baptize in order to free from bondage,
not when we gather each week to remember
the legally-sanctioned injustice
of the death of Jesus.
The sacraments should not simply console us
with the beauty of God’s grace.
They should awaken within us a holy impatience,
a holy sense of outrage,
an awareness of how beautiful the world could be
but is not—not yet—
for those confined within places of death.

Christ calls us his friends
and calls us to be friends with one another.
The God who shows no partiality
calls us to cross the barriers
of race and ethnicity, class and culture.
The past few week have shown us how difficult
that seemingly simple command is.
What would it mean if we took this vision
of how beautiful the world could be
and lived it outside these walls?
It’s hard for me to imagine, honestly.
In the past few weeks
my eyes have been transfixed
by the ugliness of injustice.
But here at this altar we catch a glimpse
of the beauty that could be,
when the friendship of all God’s people
will be present not in sacramental signs
but in the reality of the kingdom
of the God who is love.
May our celebration today fill us
with the grace of holy impatience
for the coming of that kingdom.