"Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades. Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this." Rev. 1:17-19.

Friday, June 5, 2020

Beyond the Binary

Trinity Sunday, Year A

 

Us versus them. Black versus white. Republican versus Democrat. Police versus protestor. Christian Right versus Christian Left. American versus foreigner. Do you notice anything about how we are identifying ourselves in our turbulent times? There is a definite binary, isn’t there? One pushing over here. One pushing back over there. And in between the two—the chasm of broken relationship, a diminishment of wholeness and possibility.
          Parents and teachers know what happens in binary relationship gone wrong. I once knew a father who believed that firm parental authority alone was the way to raise a good child. From the time his little son could crawl and grab, this father issued one loud command after another from his easy chair across the room. “Don’t touch that,” the father would bellow, raising his head from his book. A few minutes later, the exploring child would again be startled by a loud, “Leave it alone!” Day after day. The baby learned quickly. When the father issued a command, the baby—yet unable to talk--would raise up on his knees, head held high, and holler back with an angry, “Ahhhh” as loudly as his father had. He would then proceed to touch the offending objects. The stand-off usually resulted in a spanking … and a broken father-son bond.
          Every good teacher knows that a power struggle between teacher and student, or teacher and class, is to be avoided at all cost. A two-sided clash of wills, once engaged, demands a winner and a loser. Either the teacher must crush her student’s will—and lose his trust—or she quickly loses her authority and her ability to maintain order in the room. As a new teacher, I once issued a standard threat to an incorrigible child in the lunch line.
    “Straighten up, or I’ll call your parents,” I snapped.
    His cutting reply, “Good, please do. At least then they’ll know I’m alive” sucked the life out of both of us.
          Locked in a binary world, we are in desperate need of the “threeness” of the Trinity.[1] The way in which we imagine God is of more consequence for our lives than we often give it credit. For example, if we imagine God as a harsh Judge, we too will value harsh judgements of self and other. If we picture God as ruler of all things, we will place less emphasis on human freedom. What does it mean for us, then, to describe God as a trio of persons, a trio moving together in an energetic, joyful dance? What does it mean to imagine a holy Trinity engaged in pouring love back and forth in an endless circle, like water into an overflowing cup? To imagine God as a community of three, a unity in the multiplicity of relationship, breaks through the stuckness of binaries. As we heard in our first lesson, all of creation is good, made in the image of the Creator. All of creation participates in God’s community of outpouring love and generativity. For the very essence of God to be a harmonious outpouring of love within Godself means that we too are created for the “threeness” of relatedness in community. The question, of course, is how we human beings live into our own “threeness.”
Educator Parker Palmer proposes that we need a “third thing” in human interaction.[2] Pointing away from ourselves toward a third object, we find common ground. Focusing attention on a third thing outside of the binary levels the playing field. Many families consciously create such a “third thing” with which to negotiate their lives together: a set of family “rules” or guidelines. Monastic communities adhere to a “rule of life.” Teachers write a shared “classroom covenant” with their students. When disagreements arise, there is an accepted outside arbitrator to guide negotiations. In modern times, the social contract often serves even more widely as such a “third thing,” a shared reference with which an entire nation tacitly agrees to align itself.
As we know all too well, the problems arise when the “third thing” is devised unfairly, in such a way that some members are privileged over others. Such a covenant serves only to reinforce injustice and discord. If a family rule of life privileges the older child over the younger, or the parents over the children, then conflict is inevitable. When a social contract such as ours is built on a foundation of bondage and racial injustice, it is untenable. It can’t legitimately serve as a focal point for a just society.
And yes ... How easy it becomes for the ones in power to clear the way for themselves with violent and unjust actions. They can push into the binary with military force and then claim victory by holding up a Bible, pointing to its closed cover as if they are offering the “third thing” that can create common ground. Instead, a true “third thing” must be set in the middle of what Palmer calls a “circle of trust.” It must be placed in the midst of a circle where all are safe, valued, and included. We base our children’s Sunday School program in such a circle of trust. In the Godly Play classroom, children don’t focus on the teacher and his content. Instead, everyone sits in a circle on the floor, all at the same level. Together, story-teller and students are focused on simple objects that tell the story found inside of the Bible, the story of our relationship with our loving, Triune God. They listen together to what God might be telling each of them through the story, and then wonder together about what it might mean. The gentle open-endedness of this method is sometimes disconcerting to adults, used to the direct binary of right and wrong answers. But the outpouring of sharing and the focus on what lies “in between,” opens the space to a deeper kind of understanding.
          On this Trinity Sunday, strife in our nation and even in our St. Andrew’s community has only strengthened our harmful binaries. It’s time for us to sit down together to create circles of trust. It’s time to “bind unto ourselves the strong Name of the Trinity.” It’s time to submit ourselves to the loving, creative relationality of our God. In today’s lesson from II Corinthians, St. Paul is also writing to a deeply divided community, where factions are set one against the other. Paul ends his letter with a blessing. It is a blessing that bestows upon them the health and wholeness of a God who is loving relationship: the living trinity of outpouring grace, of love, and of fellowship. In such a blessing lies our hope, the reparation of broken relationship. May “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with [us] all.”




[1] In her book God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity, Sarah Coakley also talks about God’s “threeness” disrupting our “twoness.”
[2] Parker J. Palmer, “Common Ground and Third Things,” December 8, 2015, found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEkqIBgXlOU.