| Note: No sermon is quite the same when you read it. You miss the inflections, the expression that you gain in the hearing. The words below are only a close approximation of the sermon, taken from handwritten notes. Nevertheless, the words (as best as can be deciphered!) are shared with you here. The Webmeister |
First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday On this Trinity Sunday, Lord, let us boast of but one thing, your grace: suffering to endurance — endurance to character — character to hope — hope to God. Amen. Today is Trinity Sunday. What is the Trinity? Well for one thing it is a Christian Doctrine or teaching that is completely incomprehensible. Somehow it asserts that God is One and at the same time Three. But to try and reason your way to understanding the Trinity will only make you fall asleep, like some of the Systematic Theology books I had to read in Seminary. If I work up in the middle of the night with insomnia, all I had to do was reach out and touch them with my finger to fall back to sleep instantly. No, the Doctrine of the Trinity is not for the mind, it is for the heart. It is a description of how God is to us. One wrong way to look at The Old Testament is to see it as a bunch of stories and rules just about God and then to see the New Testament as just about Jesus and then to see church history as about The Holy Spirit. All of them and all of us from Abraham to the members of the Church of the Epiphany tell the story of the same God. And the one overwhelming constant throughout scripture and throughout history and our lives is that God is the one who responds. He call, he liberates, he sends out, he guides, he loves, always in response to us. The words of God to Moses echo down all our history, "I have heard the cry of my people, I have paid attention to their suffering and I have come down to help them." Part of that response was the gift of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Part of it continues to be the gift of his Spirit right now, inside of you, around you. Trinity Sunday, when I was a kid, was the most important service after Easter and Christmas. Pentecost (which we celebrated last week) wasn't nearly as important as Trinity Sunday. But as a child I never really knew what it was all about. I mean I knew about God the Father, I knew about Jesus and I knew about the Holy Spirit. And I knew that all 3 of them lived together in heaven and came to visit us every once in awhile. And I knew that I said my bed time prayers to God; as a parishioner of mine a long time ago at St. Peters in Pasadena, Lorraine Murphy used to say, "When I pray I want to talk to the head guy." Yet as I grew older and I started to encounter the gray areas of life, as I began to understand the injustice and meanness and downright stupidity that seems built into the human condition, I sort of stopped praying to God and started praying to Jesus. His life and the way he lived led me to feel he would understand my problems and my worries and fears much better than someone busy with the creation of the Universe. The Holy Ghost, as he was known in those days remained a vague concept, sort of as Frederic Buechner said, "pale and shapeless like an unmade bed." I had not grown enough to understand. I had not grown hurt enough not grown needy enough not grown broken enough I had not become fully part of the injustice and hurtfulness and downright stupidity of what it meant to be human. I did not yet understand how much I could hurt other people, nor did I fully understand how much I could be hurt, and strangest of all I did not know that this understanding of suffering was an absolutely necessary pre condition to receiving the power and the peace of God. Does it sound strange to talk this way? Kathleen Norris has written that the true religions of America are optimism and denial. To speak directly about suffering and pain is seen as at best depressing and to speak of suffering as a gateway to God is incomprehensible. After all, God is the companion of those who have their act together in so much of modern American religion. Yet, St. Paul in the 5th chapter of his letter to the Romans says just this. "Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God." And then Paul takes a step to another level. He says, "And not only do we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God, we also boast in our sufferings." Say what? What kind of weird masochist would boast of suffering? The other way to translate the word is "rejoice" and that really sounds strange — to rejoice in suffering. But Paul knows something absolutely critical to living a Christian life. Living a Christian life does not mean shutting the world out. It means encountering the world and letting God give you the strength to deal with what you have to deal with. This is the grace we have been given, to bear what must be borne. And St. Paul says that suffering troubles, pressure, can produce something special. Suffering can produce endurance. But the Greek word means more than "endurance" which can simply be fatalistic. It means "discipline." Discipline come from the same root as disciple. Discipline means "training that produces character," which is exactly Paul's next point. Discipline produces character. The word character comes straight from Greek. It means an engraving tool that made an indelible mark on stone or metal or leather. Character is that which marks you forever and cannot be removed from you. And finally Paul says that this character produces hope. Not a hope that is whistling in the dark, but a hope in God. A "hope" that is based on the fact that God loves us even and especially when we don't love ourselves. Our former presiding Bishop Edmond Browning tells a story in one of his books about this kind of hope. "I remember, in the years that I served on the Island of Okinawa, a community of lepers who lived together there. They were separated by their disease from the rest of the people. Separated from their own families, sometimes I remember their appearance, as their leprosy progressed: their missing ears and noses, their faces eaten away, terrifying signs to newcomers of what they could expect as the years unfolded. This colony was a place from which anybody would expect hope to have fled long ago. And yet, exactly the opposite was true. They were joyful people. Generous and joyful, looking out for one another in emergencies, seeing to the children. I used to love visiting them when I was their bishop. I remember that one man insisted on giving me twenty dollars to take my mother out to lunch once when I was going to visit her in the States. Twenty dollars was a lot of money in that time and place. I kept protesting about the gift, that it was too generous for me to accept. I can still see his ruined face, with its big smile, as he gold me how lucky I was to be seeing mother. No wife, no children-but he nurtured as well as any father I ever knew. He still nurtures me. He confirms in me the central tenet of my faith: hope in every situation. God in unexpected places, grace and power from unexpected people. Joy conquering despair." "Suffering" can sweep away the illusions of life. And once the illusions are swept away we can sometimes begin to build our lives on truth. Jesus never ever said follow me and everything will be ok; he rather said, follow me and you will find your true life. I know one thing. I want a faith based on something deep and strong, something with its roots set so deep in the earth that no storm can uproot it. I want a faith so true that no disillusion with life can make me want to give it up. I want a meaning to life that is worth dying for. I believe that God (as I have come through the cleansing suffering of life to see) has given us himself. God has given our lives meaning and we must not give away that meaning to anything or anyone. God has taught us to value our lives too highly. How can anyone tell someone who is struggling, someone who is hurting that there is hope unless they too have struggled and hurt and then found hope. How can anyone talk of the "wholeness" of God unless they have been broken open and poured out and then been refilled. If we are going to be a beacon of hope to a hurting world, we must not fear suffering. What is the Trinity? It is the reality of how God gives us himself in every person we meet and every moment we live, every hope we have. Praised be the name of God! Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. The Reverend James T. Tucker June 3, 2007 *Past sermons may be found here. |
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