May 26, 2024, Trinity Sunday, “Live in Love as Love Lives”

Rena Turnham

     

The Venerable Rena Turnham

First Sunday After Pentecost:  Trinity Sunday May 26, 2024

St. John’s Episcopal Church – Minneapolis

Isaiah 6:1-8, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17

“Live in Love as Love Lives”

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Trinity Sunday is the first Sunday after Pentecost in the liturgical calendar of the Western church. Today we celebrate and glorify the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the Triune God, and the three ‘Persons’ of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

While the Trinity is not explicitly named in scripture, it is Christianity’s attempt to understand and name the nature of God, past, present and future, as witnessed and revealed to us in scripture.

God, the Godhead, is three separate and distinct Persons of the same nature and essence yet each is unique. AND all Persons are the same God.

The Father is not the Son, the Father is not the Holy Spirit, and the Son is not the Holy Spirit. The Father sends the Son, and the Father and Son send the Holy Spirit. Co-equal, co-eternal. God is the Father. God is the Son. God is the Holy Spirit.

Confused yet?

The doctrine of the Trinity is a way for us to begin to comprehend the incomprehensible so we all ought to be confused, right?

This makes more sense to me than anything else, that we can’t know the enormity, the breadth and depth of God, God eternal, in every one of God’s expressions and in the acts of God as community, much less attribute single words for the Persons of the Trinity.

This is the only time in our church year that is devoted exclusively to a doctrine.

And thank goodness for that, huh?

We could get lost in how this doctrine came to be and what is meant at that time and never get to why this matters to us today.

What we name and know in the Trinity is that God is relational in nature, manifesting God’s self in three unique Persons, and an example of perfect communion. Perfect Love – the beloved community.

What we CAN do is look to and experience the Trinity as perfect relationship and perfect community, as this witness has been given to us: God as the Father, God as the Son, God as the Holy Spirit.

This is why the Trinity matters to us to today, not just for the sake of theological understanding or knowledge but as it relates to how WE WALK the Way of Love.

Let’s pause now to address what’s on the minds of many of you…let’s name and address the patriarchal and binary language that has been used to name and express the Persons of the Trinity:  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I found these other names of the Persons of the Trinity helpful in both expansiveness and inclusivity and well as imagery, offering a wider lens for experiencing and understanding God and everyone and everything that is made in the image of God:

Creator, Savior, Sanctifier

Mother, Child, Breath of God

Rock, Redeemer, Friend

Lover, Beloved, Love

How might this different language and imagery for the Trinity help us to see God anew in the present?

What is your image of God and how has this changed over time? What three words would you attribute to how you name, understand, and live your life in the Triune God?

No matter the words we use, which are wholly inadequate to express the fullness of God, the Trinity is eternal and unchanging and yet also present, active, and dynamic. No words can ever express the entirety, the wholeness, the unending expansiveness of God over all eternity.

In For All God’s Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the Church, N.T. Wright describes Trinity Sunday as the Sunday we “rub the sleep from our eyes and discover what the word ‘god’ might actually mean.”

It’s an opportunity to think about what we know, or think we know, about God and what we do not know about God.

“The Trinity,” he writes, “is not something that the clever theologian comes up with as a result of hours spent in the theological laboratory, after which he or she can return to announce that they’ve got God worked out now, the analysis is complete, and here is God neatly laid out on a slab. The only time they laid God out on a slab he rose again three days afterwards. On the contrary: the doctrine of the Trinity is, if you like, a signpost pointing ahead into the dark, saying: Trust me; follow me; my love will keep you safe.”

What is it to experience God as all three persons working in the world, as God, all the time? How might we expand our perception and awareness of God’s movement? How might we more often turn from our own confusion and paralysis to wonder and possibility? How do we stop defining and limiting God within in our minds’ scope of possibility?

Are we confused, or do we sometimes lack the curiosity and the courage to trust God, follow God and believe we are safe in God’s love? This is how we are to Walk the Way of Love for the sake of becoming beloved community.  We do this when we step put and welcome strangers from Ecuador, feed the hungry at First Nations Kitchen, enact climate friendly policies, support teachers in Haiti, and on and on.

What would it be like to live with in and from the belief and practice that God is still revealing God’s self, still working in the world, working in you, working in me, working in ‘the other,’ always living from and at the same time moving us, God’s people, towards Beloved Community.

Our culture of loneliness, longing, yearning for connection and community, and the liberation of every soul—this is what makes our hearts heavy.

We are often physically with one another and yet emotionally disconnected and ‘not there,’ and in some past or future moment. It’s the consequence of living in a world where one doesn’t have to connect with oneself, others and the earth. And it’s killing us – our souls and our bodies.

Social media, working from home, amazon packages sent direct to your door, online learning, movies on demand, Doordash, our kids holed up in their rooms, texting and emailing rather than talking, a fence between you and your neighbor, a 24 news cycle, and an overpacked schedule. You know what I mean.

This is how and why we are becoming anxious, depressed and disconnected. We are not present to ourselves or one another. This is the epidemic of our current society and culture, and there’s no end in sight.

It’s what Esther Perel, Psychologist and relationship guru, calls AI…Artificial Intimacy.

The world we live in, right now, is starving for the real thing, real intimacy, real LOVE. Love is shared from person to person, in relationship, with one another, and its mutual, active, dynamic. The Trinity gives us a perfect example of this, of beloved community in practice, in the present. It’s God’s very essence and God’s dream for us and the world.

It’s what we try to practice here at St. John’s as we Walk the Way of Love, so that we may also do it outside of this wonderful community we share together.

Right now, God is still creating, God is still walking the Way of Love with us, and still guiding us. It is us who need only wake up, rub the sleep from our eyes, and take it in even a glimpse. We can only do this when we are clear-eyed, open hearted, and living in the knowledge of the mystery that is God.

How might we be affirmed, known and renewed – ahh this is what is means to be reborn, or born of the Spirit, what Jesus speaks of it today’s gospel text.

What we have here at St. John’s is GOOD, it is VERY GOOD, but our life is not simply to be preserved, but rather shared, in relationship, with this neighborhood, and with all who we encounter and care for – all who are yearning for belonging and kinship. And this includes our relationship with the land we occupy.

Being LOVE in this world isn’t simply to be thought about, rationalized and planned out as some intentional future action. It’s to be lived in the now and in communion with one another and God. It’s to be lived this day, this moment, in relationship, with those closest to you, those we set our gaze upon and those we look away from–those whose hearts are being broken and whose limbs are being twisted, at this very moment.

Are we confused or do we lack the will to imagine, improvise, respond in the moment? Where is the invitation to be curious and courageous and abandon ourselves to the God of possibility? It’s there. It’s always there. But if we are not spiritually present we may miss the opportunity.

How can one person possibly do any good, make any changes that tip the scale of oppression, make movement towards creating the beloved community? It’s not one person, it’s you and it’s me, and so on.

We’re doing this when we show up in the public square, in the offices of our legislators or in the halls of city government, when we hold hands and offer shoulders to our families, friends, and neighbors, and when we listen to and respond to the cries of the hungry, the homeless, the stranger, and the oppressed. This is what it means to be caught up in the very essence and expression of God as exemplified by the Holy Trinity.

This is how we become partakers in our healing and in the healing of this community and the world – in the example and teachings of Jesus, in the Love of the Creator and with the Wisdom that whispers to us through the wind.

Amen

 

 

10am Service