Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Canticle 2 or 13
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20
Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity: Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
As a “neat-freak” mom, I took pride
in how my children’s toys were placed on well-organized shelves in their rooms.
I taught my kids from a young age how to clean up every night, putting each
puzzle back in its place and every Lego back in its bin. The whines of clean-up
time were well-worth the deep satisfaction that I felt afterwards as I looked
at the orderly rooms, secure in the thought that we would be ready to start a
new day, calm and uncluttered. What got me in a tizzy was what I knew would
happen after any of my young children had a great play-date at our house. Their
friends didn’t seem to have learned the “clean-up lessons” that my children
had. Since I had three children under the age of eight, an afternoon spent
indoors with an additional 2 or 3 friends resulted in a house that looked like
a tornado had passed through: the floors covered in blocks, dress-ups scattered
throughout the house, toy kitchen utensils dumped from their bins, puzzle
pieces and Playmobile figures mixed up together like scrambled eggs. Come
supper time, my children were rosy with happiness from a fun afternoon, but I
was aghast and completely undone over the mess.
I confess these old feelings to you
today on Trinity Sunday because I think that our ideal for God, the Church, and
the Christian life tends to be like my ideal for an ordered house: organized,
unified, and straightforward. And the Trinity is the play-date that brings life
and leaves a mess. Most of our theological concepts have neat shelves in the
Bible. We know where to find them, and we know where to return them when we’re
through playing with them. If you want to look at incarnation, you turn to the
stories of Jesus’ birth. If you want to look at freedom, you turn to the story
of the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. If you want to look at forgiveness, you
turn to the parable of the Prodigal Son. You take down the neat packages of
scripture from their shelves and you apply them to your life and you put them
back and go to bed all warm and cozy, ready to take action …. sometime … in the
morning.
But the Trinity isn’t directly
explained in the Bible. Oh, we have passages like we read today that talk about
the Spirit of God, or that mention the Father and the Son and the Spirit in the
same few verses. But these verses don’t talk about the three being one. They
don’t name the Trinity or really even describe what the Trinity is. That’s
because we know about the Trinity from our experience of God in the life and
death of Jesus and in our own personal glimpses of God’s spirit in our lives.
We then read that experience back into the Bible. We believe in the Trinity because
we know that God isn’t like a static playroom full of toys sitting neatly on
shelves. God is like the creating, loving, imagining energy of children
absorbed in the give-and-take of relationship. God is full of movement and
vigor. God is outpouring and in-taking. God is messy and continuous
connection—unity in the multiplicity of relationship.
Professor David Lose talks about a
“Trinitarian congregation” as a way of acknowledging this “backwards” way that
we have to approach the Trinity itself. Instead of trying to see how one God is
three persons, he says, look how one faithful Christian community is
Called and sent by the Holy Spirit
To bear witness to the good news of Jesus Christ in word and deed
For the sake of the world God the Father created and loves so
much.[1]
Yes, Christians are called to be in community with one
another, to rejoice and worship and play together with God with the gusto of
messy three-year-olds. We are called to be a place where people can look in and
see the movement and creation and love that characterize our God. As a community, we can energize one another
when individual spirits lag; we can carry one another in hard times; we can speak
together in faith when as individuals we retreat in doubt; we can hold out
common hands for causes and for people that alone we would not have the courage
to support. You cannot be a disciple all by yourself. Christians need Trinitarian
Community.
And yet I would like to add to the
Trinitarian complexity of Lose’s image. We are in God’s image not just as a
parish community. Our individual witness matters, as well. Like the Trinity, we
are a paradoxical mixture of unity and multiplicity. God calls us to Christian
life not just as a church. God calls each of us to be a disciple in our weekday
lives, to be an individual follower of Christ, to show forth Christ’s life in
our words and deeds, to go out, as Jesus commands us today in Matthew, to
preach the Good News to the ends of the earth.
There was a blog making the Internet
rounds this week titled, “Maybe We Should Stop ‘Doing Outreach?’”[2]
Robin posted it on our St. Thomas webpage. The article asks us to consider
outreach not just as church programs but as individual lives connecting with
neighbors every day. At St. Thomas our designated plate offerings each month
are outreach. The way we let community members use our buildings for ESL
classes is outreach. Our Reading Camp and tutoring programs for Zachary Taylor Elementary
are outreach. This kind of outreach represents our parish in action. It is
orderly, easy to quantify, and soothing for people like me who like to line up
everything on shelves. It is outreach “for” other people. We collect money for the poor. We cook food for the hungry. We go on a mission trip
in order to build homes for the
homeless.
But there is another messier kind of
“outreach.” It happens whenever one of you helps a neighbor or a colleague in
the name of Jesus. Every time you invite a new acquaintance to come to St.
Thomas for a service or to help at Reading Camp. Every time you stand up alone and
vulnerable for justice in our community or are brave enough to hold up a sign of
protest. Every time you take a Healing Blanket to your sick colleague or
teacher. Every time you stop and spend some time to pray with someone in need. This
kind of outreach isn’t “for” people, it is “with” people. Author Sara Miles
claims that “with” is the most important word in the Bible. Jesus is
“Emanuel—God With Us.” The Trinity is God with God. Jesus says in today’s Gospel: “I am with you
always.” Miles writes: “If we model ourselves [on the Trinity] it changes
everything. Our lives as Christians must mean being with others the way God is
with us. With, not for.”[3]
Outreach “with” others involves give and take on an individual level. It
involves being vulnerable. It involves finding out every day what the person in
front of us needs and then responding to that need in love. It involves
scattering our toys all over the neighborhood.
Last Thanksgiving, my daughter
attended a “friendsgiving” potluck with some of her young adult single friends,
none of whom could go home for the holiday. Stretching her legs after eating a
big meal, she was roaming the empty holiday streets of San Francisco and came
across a beggar on the sidewalk. Wanting to reach out to the beggar in the Thanksgiving
spirit, she ran back to her friends’ house and loaded a plate full of left-over
food and brought it to the disheveled beggar. Up until that point, she was
doing “for” him. But then something made her sit down next to him on the
sidewalk while he ate. She talked with him and listened to his tragic story. As
their time drew to an end, the beggar began to weep. “It has been years since I
have eaten a meal with anyone,” he sighed. “It means more to me than you can
imagine.” Such is the power of “with,” the power of the Trinity.
With a Triune God who is moving,
messy connection, what makes us think that we can keep everything on the
shelves of our Churches or our Christian lives, doling out love in orderly
fashion? What makes us think we have to have our act together before we can
serve? That we have to have an outreach committee before we can help our
neighbors? That we have to deal with our doubts before we can share the Good News
of Christ? Aren’t all of these hesitations really just excuses?
As we reflect this summer about what
kind of outreach we are called to do at St. Thomas, let’s not just think about
what “somebody else” can do in the name of the parish as a whole. Let’s think
about what our own lives as disciples would look like if each one of us were to
enter God’s messy world of “with.” What would it look like for you to dump your
box of treasures out all over the floor in generosity? What would it look like for
you to shed your fear and your dignity around the community in which you live,
like my kids shed their dress-up costumes? What would it look like to be the
disciple of a Triune God?
[1]
David Lose, “Trinitarian Congregations,” found at
http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=3254.
[2]
“Maybe we should stop ‘doing outreach’” found on 6/10/14 at http://www.frcathie.org/?p=63.
[3]
Sara Miles, “The Most Important Word in the Bible,” Found on 7/24/13 at http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/mission/the_most_important_word_in_the.php?utm_s...
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