Rex Piercy’s Homily from June 4, 2023

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Homily for the Feast of the Holy Trinity, June 4, 2023, Holy Wisdom Monastery, Middleton, WI

Beginning today we now navigate a long season of the church year after Pentecost which gets dubbed ingloriously as “ordinary time.” This nearly full half year of the calendar begins and ends with two days whose origins do not arise from actual events like Christmas or Easter but are based upon abstract concepts, ideas, or more likely on later doctrine developed by the church. Ordinary Time closes on the Sunday just before Advent begins as the Reign of Christ, celebrating a cosmic Christ, the universal Savior, the Ruler of heaven and earth. Ordinary time begins today with something called the Feast of the Holy Trinity.

Now having confessed to you in previous homilies that I consider myself a “Biblical Unitarian,” I was quite surprised when I found I was assigned as your preacher today. When it popped up in the scheduler, I was sort of like that woman on the Plexiderm commercial who says she doesn’t dare speak her astonishment with words not appropriate for TV…or church! Yet here I am and here you are so here we go.

Most of the Trinity Sundays that I have experienced over the years have often traversed an intellectual path that tried via sermons and liturgies to attempt to explain this doctrine we call Trinity, often to a confused or incredulous congregation. We might be better off doing a Saint Patrick take on the this and just hold up a three-leaf clover and be done with it. But by the way, that’s a legend. He probably did no such thing.

It has always seemed to me it is paradoxical at best to enshrine a notion like the Trinity in a religion that claims to be monotheistic.  Clearly such an “orthodoxy” was most certainly an early church invention which, on the face of it, is at odds with this “only one God” idea we claim to share with our Jewish and Muslim neighbors. That said, I prefer to treat this day as a day to praise and adore the infinitely complex and unfathomable mystery of God’s being however we may choose to describe it. That is certainly what I find in today’s readings and Psalm 8, one of my favorites.

I must begin by telling you that I have always preferred to judge the Bible by Jesus, not Jesus by the Bible, since all these texts were obviously written by fallible men (mostly) who sometimes contradict one another, and who have also sometimes been mistaken in their estimate of Jesus. Today’s Gospel reading from Matthew is a prime example. Whoever wrote this and ascribed it to the disciple Matthew did so several decades after Jesus’ death. And we know how good our memories are sometimes when even just  minutes after entering a room, we ask ourselves why we have come into it!

By the time Matthew’s Gospel was written, it had become clear to these early Jewish followers of Jesus that the mission to their fellow Jews seemed to be slowing down to a near standstill. If the now several decades old church was going to survive, it needed a new target audience called Gentiles. Matthew who begins his Gospel by rooting Jesus in Judaism ends it by opening up the Gospel to the whole world. That is precisely what the Great Commission account we read today does.

If you examine it closely what you discover here is that what is commissioned and commanded is not some check list of beliefs one must hold before ten o’clock on a Sunday morning. Instead it’s a call to faith in action in the world. It’s a summons to take Jesus’ moral teachings seriously. Whatever else we may think or believe, the bottom line was then and is now still a task, our task, our crucial task, to teach and to embody Jesus’ code of life with urgency and yet with meekness. Here at the end of Matthew’s gospel we find reiterated something which Jesus said on another mountaintop as he began his ministry. Only those who are poor in spirit, only those who know their need of God, are equipped and strengthened to make all the difference in the world. However we choose to understand Jesus of Nazareth as Emmanuel, God with us, we must understand this: we are called to live together in communities that are shaped by Jesus’ teachings about radical righteousness, purity in heart, and a hunger for the time when God’s justice will be established for all members of society, from bottom to top, from alienated to included. We share and embody Jesus’ teachings best, just as Jesus did, by example, and not just by word. We are to be about the business of doing, more than the practice of believing.  What is promised here at the end of Matthew’s Gospel as the final note is the best news yet – that God is not just with Jesus but with all of us too – all the way to the end.

Even our reading from Paul, who more than anyone else perhaps,  is responsible for turning the religion of Jesus into a religion about Jesus, even Paul seems to step out of his usual mode of rants and raves about requirements and doctrinal adherences and zeros in on something more urgent. The words he uses to close his often tense and difficult second letter to the church in Corinth are an urgent plea for unity and peace, not a call for rigidity of belief. Paul offers that the blessing of God is not found in making comfortable boxes for our theologies but in living grace-filled and grace-lived lives just like Jesus lived, steeped in the love of God and in communion with one another in God’s Spirit.

Today invites us to step into a mystery, a mystery that lives in the infinity of God who made everything and declared it good. I guess my real problem with the Trinity is not so much with the doctrine, per se, but with the idea that we can somehow define and describe God. The divine mystery is self-disclosing, not discoverable by us. We know God only in the ways that God is willing to reveal God’s self to us. No creed can do that for us. We are limited human beings, just like everyone who ever came before us, including the authors of the Bible and the crafters of doctrines.

So I think we err grievously when we try to lock up this mystery into some teaching crafted with all our human intellectual limits or experiential histories, all the while depriving ourselves or others of this inherent mystery. As Karl Barth once said, our theological constructs are nothing more than humans speaking loudly.

The Trinity is nothing more and nothing less than a finite and human sign of an infinite and eternal mystery. And we enter into this mystery via the only avenue of faith that matters – the way of love. Only by loving and being loved, by serving and being served, do we confirm the faith that is in us, that is around us, that holds us and sustains us. This is why we were created. This is the goal toward which we move. This is the work we are called to do. Love.

The God who created the heavens and the earth and all the farthest flung galaxies is committed to us in love. And in ways that belie our explaining, Jesus’ life witnesses to God’s loving nature and purpose. Each one of us is precious in God’s sight and we can follow no higher way than to commit ourselves to follow Jesus in loving God and our neighbor and to react in all the crises of the spirit with the same spirit that animated Jesus, which still calls forth our worship and our lives. That’s not some theological system you have to embrace. That’s not some intellectual agreement you have to adhere to. That is life, the life in which you live and move and have your very being in the God who created you and all things bright and beautiful.

Perhaps on a day like today we’d be better off on a bench out there on the prairie or in the woods or by the pond, praying Niebuhr’s serenity prayer, admitting that there are some things we can control and know and some things we cannot. Or maybe we should hear again Schweitzer’s tremendous sentences: “He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old by the lakeside. He came to those who knew Him no. He speaks to us the same word, ‘Follow thou Me,’ and sets us to the task which He has to fulfil in our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they will pass through in His fellowship, and, as in ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.”

To believe in God is a journey of faith beyond our certainty. It means following a divine power greater than ourselves, who from the very beginning, is now, and ever shall be working for good. The mystery is not in thinking about God but in trusting what we cannot control or contain. J. Philip Newell writes that we don’t find God by leaving our daily lives to go to church or worship services, or looking to an invisible, spiritual realm, but by “entering attentively the depths of the present moment.”  “There,” Newell says, “we will find God, wherever we may be and whatever we may be doing.”  Or as Barbara Brown Taylor suggests, we encounter God in a myriad of ways if we pay attention beginning with the small space right in front of us.

We are bound up together in a single divine blessing. And what a mystery it is, this holy web of relationship; a gift meant for all, vibrating with pain in all its parts, its destiny our joy. Let us give thanks for this mystery that sustains us here and now in this beautiful, hurting world.

Perhaps the very best we can do today is to utter what the ancient poet wondered: What are we that God is mindful of us? What are we indeed?

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