Trinity A

I’m guessing that the folks who put the lectionary together chose the first reading from Genesis for this Trinity Sunday because of a certain word. At least that might be part of the reason.

You probably read this creation story from Genesis so often that you might have passed right over it. I know I did the first 1000 times I read this passage. But some in this past week’s bible study caught a hold of it pretty quickly.

So now, when I read this passage with Trinitarian eyes, I can’t help but lock in on the fact that God speaks of God’s self in first person plural.

“Let US make humankind in OUR image...” God says. And this is not a typo. It’s in the original Hebrew. It’s like the lectionary folks wanted to remind us that God is a tiny community - and always has been, right from the beginning, if God can ever be said to have a beginning.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this Genesis passage, but that’s what it says to me. God may be “One” but we don’t know how God self-identifies that “Oneness.” Especially when God is a relational God. God is never alone because God can’t be. That’s not who God is.

And since we’re created in God’s image, we can’t run from the fact we TOO are relational creatures. We are made to engage and interact. Our very being demands that we remain connected to others, that the path of faith and life is not supposed to be a lonely walk or solitary exercise, that we can’t be who we are without each other. No matter how much we try.

“I’d like you to baptize my baby,” the voice said on the other end of the phone.

“I’d be glad to,” I replied.

“What’s involved?” she asked

“Well, I’d like to meet with you and we can talk about it. When can you meet?” I asked

“How’s Sunday at 1:00?” she said.

“How about you come to church then we’ll meet in my office after worship,” I suggested.

“Ummmm...no, I don’t think so,” she responded. “How about you come to my place at 1:00.”

“Okay,” I responded.

I arrived at her house armed with a hymnal marked to the baptism service, as well as a copy of Baptized We Live, a sort of comic book version of what we believe as Lutherans.

“So, why a baptism?” I asked her. I ask this question to most if not all parents I meet for the first time who present their child for baptism, not to jam parents into a corner, because I’m NOT looking for a “correct” answer. But because I’m genuinely interested in what parents believe about baptism.

“Well, I got done, my parents got done, and I want to have my baby done,” she said. Her answer was pretty typical from what I get from parents. At least she was honest.

I opened the hymnal and turned to the liturgy for Holy Baptism, and I pointed out the section where she would be making some pretty heavy duty promises on behalf of her child:

“As you bring your child to receive the gift of baptism, you are entrusted with responsibilities:

to live with her among God’s faithful people,
bring her to the Word of God and the Holy Supper
teach her the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments,
place in her hands the holy scriptures,
nurture her in faith and prayer,
so that your child may learn to trust God,
proclaim Christ through word and deed,
care for others and the world God made,
and work for justice and peace.

Do you promise to help your child grow in the Christian faith and life?”

I couldn’t get through the rest of my spiel because she burst out crying.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t want to do any of that,” she said.

“I don’t understand, what’s your concern?” I asked.

“I don’t want to force any religion on my baby. I’m not going to bring her to church because I want her to make her own choice when she grows up. I don’t believe in church. I don’t believe you have to go to a building to worship God,” she said.

“It’s not the building that’s important, it’s where God’s people gather to worship,” I replied.

“I don’t care!” she said, and stormed out of the room.

I always find it interesting that some parents see faith and spirituality as areas where they can raise their children with little or no guidance, yet still assume their children will make good choices about these things when they grow up.

And I often wonder if she told her friends about the mean ol’ pastor who wouldn’t baptize her baby. But then I realized it wasn’t me who said “No” to her child’s baptism, it was her.

At an earlier point in my ministry I would have been furious at this encounter. I would have thought “How dare she treat the sacrament of Holy Baptism with such cavalier consumerism, as if I’m in the religious service industry! This is God’s activity in her child’s life, not the Sears portrait studio!”

But after a few years into this job I realize that she’s just doing what the culture taught her to do, to define life and faith on her own terms, rather than seek the wisdom of a community who lived and breathed their faith for thousands of years.

Like so many others, she was making it up as she went along, dogmatically asserting the infallibility of personal choice and the inerrancy of individual spiritual preferences. She’s so deeply immersed in the waters of consumerism, that she believes that she is swimming upstream, against the religious current, that she can’t see that most other people are floating in the same direction.

She is not as unique and radical as she probably believes herself to be.

She was probably worried that I was trying to jam her into a religious box that was not of her own making, where she would gasp for air, rather than seeing that God was providing a doorway into the new and abundant life that God wants for her and her child, offering her and her daughter an opportunity for participate in the world’s salvation.

And she was right about one thing. You don’t have to go to a building to worship God. But you can’t be a Christian without others. We need the support, encouragement, fellowship, challenge, and prayers of others to grow into our faith. There cannot be any individual Christians, because there is no individual God.

God is a community. A family. An intimate connection. Three-in-one and one-in-three. As you know we call this the “Trinity.” Don’t ask me how this all works because I haven’t a clue. No one really knows.

But what I do know is that God is profoundly relational. God-is-with-us because that’s who God is with God and with everything that God has created in God’s image. And that’s who God wants us to be. We can’t be Christians without each other.

Some say that such a perspective coming from a guy like me, doing what I do, is just the theological justification for keeping my job, and it’s the religious rationale for propping up the church institution.

I won’t deny that you folks coming to church helps pay my bills and puts shoes on my kids’ feet. After all, a guy’s gotta eat. And I really like my job.

But there are easier ways to make money than being a pastor. And more of it.

So when we baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, we baptize into a community - God’s community - where we are never alone.

As I thought about what that mom said I realized that at least she had the integrity to NOT go through with a ritual that she realized she didn’t believe in. And it could be said that her saying “No” to her child’s baptism respected the church and what we believe as Christians.

But still, I never say “No” to a baptism because God never says No. Even when the parents clearly have no desire to follow through on the promises they make on behalf of their child at baptism, I still do the baptism, because God DOES follow through on God’s promises made at these waters.

And God keeps the promises God made TODAY as JACK is received into the community called “Trinity” and the community called “church.” Today we are fulfilling Jesus’ commission to baptize, and to teach everything he taught the disciples; that the kingdom of God, the kingdom of peace, of justice, of forgiveness, of mercy, of grace, and of life is reigning in Jack’s life, and will guide him through his years and lead him into eternity when the time comes. Jack is now a participant in the world’s salvation, as he walks through his years, giving the world his gifts, building on what God is already doing.

And it won’t be easy for Jack because it’s not easy for us. Our challenge - as a church - is learning how to live our promises in world that doesn’t believe in them, among those who try to make up faith and spirituality as it goes along, in a culture that’s - rightly or wrongly - suspicious of formalized faith.

But whether we live up to that challenge or if we fail, God who is Trinity will remain faithful to us and to the world, because that’s who God is. That’s what God does. The Three-in-One and One-in-Three has received us into the intimate community called “God.”

May this be so among us. Amen.

Trinity Year C

I don't know why those in charge decided to designate one Sunday as "Trinity Sunday." Shouldn't every Sunday be "Trinity Sunday"? A celebration of the great mystery of the three-in-one, one-in-three God? 

As Christians we confess God to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, three-persons, co-equal, co-eternal, one in essence, nature, power, action, and will. It's basic to what we believe as Christians.

But do we really know what that means or know why that's important? To the outsider it might look like a lot mental gymnastics. We have to become theological contortionists, in order to justify a contradiction. 1+1+1 does NOT equal One. Volumes of books have been written trying to sort out the math. How can God really be three distinct persons, yet one God? It simply doesn't add up.

Other than Christ the King Sunday, Trinity Sunday is the day when we feel most tempted to keep God at a philosophical distance. We muse about the mystery of the Trinity. We try to do make the math work. On no other Sunday do most preachers do a weaker job connecting God to peoples' lives.

I think that's because we don't really know how to talk about the Trinity without resorting to mind-numbing philosophy. As fun as that may be for some of us, it can hardly be called "proclamation" and it certainly isn't good news. At best it's a self-indulgent exercise in theological gratification. At worst, it keeps God at an unhealthy distance, unconcerned about the world God created.

We talk about the nature and so-called "Problem of God” which is theological shorthand for saying that we have NO IDEA who God is.

We confess the inner-unity of the Trinity. We debate whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father, or from the Father and the Son. We discuss the fine points of the Greek. We wrap it up air-tight.

But whatever it is that we wrap-up with suffocating efficiency, it certainly isn't God. God will not be so easily contained, no matter how hard we try. We Christians don't believe in the god of the philosophers.

We believe in the God of the bible. Be believe that the God of the bible gets up close and personal with us. We believe that God refused to be relegated to the realm of abstract thought and flighty spiritual imaginings.

As Christians we believe that God became flesh. That God has a face and a name. That God - somehow - touches us.

I think you know this already. This is not new to you. That's why you're here this morning. You’re here in church not to hear me ramble on about the philosophical problem of the Trinity. You’re here hoping to meet the Word Made Flesh. You’re here to encounter the God of creation. You’re here to be encountered by the God who knit you together in your mother’s womb, then claimed you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, in the waters of baptism. You are here to bask yourself in God’s love. You are here to truly worship.

True worship, in the name of the God we call "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" is always incarnational, personal, and embodied. True worship takes us by hand and grabs our hearts. True worship makes a home for God in our lives, because that’s where God finds rest, and we find renewal.

But in theology, oddly enough, we tend to take our lead from the ancient Greeks. The gods of the Greek philosophers were distant and aloof. God is high, lifted up, and unapproachable. That's who they believed god to be, because that's what they needed from God, that's what they valued and that’s what they aspired to.

And they're not wrong. But that's only part of who God is. The God who meets us in Jesus shows us God's nearness, approachability, and humanness. This God has sleeves rolled up and muddy boots. This God demands to get personal with us. Maybe too personal for our liking. An incarnate, embodied, God who knows us with an intimacy that we often find unsettling.

But here I go again, resorting to abstract philosophy to talk about the God who more interested in getting dirt under divine fingernails than worrying about the philosophical foundations of the sacred. 

For us, I think it's easier to talk about God in the abstract than in the personal because a personal God will actually do something with us, and we'd rather not have God intruding in our lives. We don't want God disrupting our carefully constructed existence. We want to add God to what we've already built on our own rather than have God leading the construction effort.

We want to keep thinking that we are in charge of our lives. We don't really want to consider that God is in our driver's seat. Because then God might take us to places we don't want to go.

A personal God will ask us uncomfortable questions about our politics, our business dealings, our family relationships.

A personal God asks us about how we spend our money, about that grudge we've been carrying for decades, about the gossip we shared that hurt someone.

A personal God will want us to let go of our anger, our pride, our selfishness. A personal God will want us to care for folks we don't like.

A personal God will sit us down and make us listen to the cries of people in pain and ask us to do something about it.

A personal God will confront our comfortable middle-class lifestyle built on the backs of poor children around the world.

An abstract God won't ask us to change. An abstract God won't stick it's nose where we say it doesn't belong. An abstract God will leave us alone to tend to our lofty thoughts and comfortably elevated speech.

But a personal God, the God of the bible, the God who is called Trinity, doesn't care about our comfort. The God who is called Trinity cares only about how we love each other and God. And that’s not always comfortable.

The God who is called Trinity is more interested in how we get along with each other than in what we believe about God. That's because God knows that we'll never get it just right. There will always be parts of God that we won't understand. And parts we will always get wrong.

That's why, on the one hand, God is a divine, transcendent mystery, and on the other, God is a personal, intimate being that is found in every facet of creation.

The ancient celts - early Christians in Ireland - knew what this meant. Finding God in creation was a big part of how they understood God. My favourite hymn, “I Bind Unto Myself Today” based on St. Patrick’s Breastplate (we won’t sing it today, but you can bet we’ll sing it at my installation!), has, in its third verse, a powerful expression of finding God all around us, living deep inside creation. 


I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun’s life giving ray,
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
The stable earth, the deep salt sea,
Around the old eternal rocks.

The ancient celts knew that God the Trinity is everywhere in God’s unfolding creation, through God's love for everything this God has made.

Where life is being birthed, there is God the Trinity. 

Where lives are being changed from self-centred living to serving others, God the Trinity is at work. 

Where ever care for others emerges from the nastiness of human conflict, we see the Triune God in action. 

Whenever bitterness is over come by forgiveness, God the Trinity is there. 

Where ever there is love; messy, uncontrollable, transforming love, there we will find God, who is three in one, and one in three.

We know this because that's who God is. It's love that makes the math work. 1+1+1=1 only works because the love the Trinity has for itself is so strong that it glues them together as one, then that intimate, reconciling, sacrificial love spills out in the world, into EVERYTHING this God created, and continues to transform the world into the image of the lovingly One God.

God reconciles. God loves. God creates. That's who God is and who God made us to be as images of the lovingly invisible God. The God who is Trinity, whose math works in our lives.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Trinity Sunday

I’m guessing that the folks who put the lectionary together chose the first reading from Genesis because of a certain word.

You probably read this passage so often that you might have passed right over it. I know I did the first 1000 times I read this passage.

But when I read this passage with Trinitarian eyes, I can’t help but lock in on the fact that God speaks of God’s self in first person plural.

“Let US make humankind in OUR image...” God says. And this is not a typo. It’s in the original Hebrew. It’s like the lectionary folks wanted to remind us that God is a tiny community - and always has been, right from the beginning, if God can ever be said to have a beginning.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this Genesis passage, but that’s what it says to me. God may be “One” but we don’t know how God self-identifies that “Oneness.” Especially when God is a relational God. God is never alone because God can’t be. That’s not who God is.

And since we’re created in God’s image, we can’t run from the fact we TOO are relational creatures. We are made to engage and interact. Our very being demands that we we remain connected to others, that the path of faith and life is not a lonely walk, that we can’t be who we are without each other. No matter how much we try.

“I’d like you to baptize my baby,” she said, on the other end of the phone.

“I’d be glad to,” I replied.

“What’s involved?” she asked

“Well, I’d like to meet with you and we can talk about how we can get your child baptized.

“When can you meet?” I asked

“How’s Sunday at 1:00?” she said.

“How about you come to church and see what we’re all about then we’ll meet in my office after worship,” I suggested.

“Ummmm...no, I don’t think so,” she responded. “How about you come to my place at 1:00.”

“Okay,” I responded.

I arrived at her house armed with a hymnal marked to the baptism service, as well as a copy of Baptized We Live, a sort of comic book version of what we believe as Lutherans.

“So, why a baptism?” I asked her. I ask this question, not to jam parents into a corner, and I’m NOT looking for a “correct” answer. But because I’m genuinely interested in what parents believe about baptism.

“Well, I got done, my parents got done, and I should have my baby done,” she said. Her answer was pretty typical from what I get from parents. At least she was honest.

I opened the hymnal and turned to the liturgy for Holy Baptism, and I pointed out the section where she would be making some pretty heavy duty promises on behalf of her child:

“As you bring your child to receive the gift of baptism, you are entrusted with responsibilities:

to live with her among God’s faithful people,
bring her to the Word of God and the Holy Supper
teach her the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments,
place in her hands the holy scriptures,
nurture her in faith and prayer,
so that your child may learn to trust God,
proclaim Christ through word and deed,
care for others and the world God made,
and work for justice and peace.

Do you promise to help your child grow in the Christian faith and life?”

I couldn’t get through the rest of my spiel because she immediately burst out crying.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t want to do any of that,” she said.

“I don’t understand, what’s your concern?” I asked.

“I don’t want to force any religion on my baby. I’m not going to bring her to church because I want her to make her own choice when she grows up. I don’t believe in church. I don’t believe you have to go to a building to worship God,” she said.

“It’s not the building that’s important, it’s where God’s people gather to worship,” I replied.

“I don’t care!” she said, and stormed out of the room.

I always find it interesting that many parents see faith and spirituality as areas where they can raise their children with little or no guidance, yet still assume their children will make good choices about these when they grow up.

And I often wonder if she told her friends about the mean ol’ pastor who wouldn’t baptize her baby. But then I realized it wasn’t me who said “No” to her child’s baptism, it was her.

At an earlier point in my ministry I would have been furious at this encounter. I would have thought “How dare she treat the sacrament of Holy Baptism with such cavalier consumerism, as if I’m in the religious service industry! This is God’s activity in her child’s life, not the Sears portrait studio!”

But after a few years into this job I realize that she’s just doing what the culture taught her to do, to define life and faith on her own terms, rather than seek the wisdom of a community who lived and breathed their faith for thousands of years.

She was making it up as she went along, dogmatically asserting the infallibility of personal choice and inerrancy individual spiritual preferences. She’s so deeply immersed in the waters of consumerism, believing that she is swimming upstream, against the religious current, that she can’t see that most other people are floating in the same direction.

She is not as unique and radical as she probably believes herself to be.

She was probably worried that I was trying to jam her into a religious box that was not her own making, where she would gasp for air, rather than providing a doorway into new and abundant life that God wants for her and her child, offering her and her daughter an opportunity for participate in the world’s salvation.

And she was right about one thing. You don’t have to go to a building to worship God. But you can’t be a Christian without others. We need the support, encouragement, fellowship, and prayers of others to grow into our faith. There cannot be any individual Christians, because there is no individual God.

God is a community. Three-in-one and one-in-three. Don’t ask me how this all works because I haven’t a clue. No one really knows.

But what I do know is that God is profoundly relational. God-is-with-us because that’s who God is. And that’s who God wants us to be. We can’t be Christians without each other.

Some say that such a perspective coming from a guy like me, doing what I do, is just the theological justification for keeping my job, and it’s the religious rationale for propping up the church institution.

I won’t deny that you folks coming to church helps pay my rent and puts shoes on my kids’ feet. After all, a guy’s gotta eat. And I really like my job.

But there are easier ways to make money than being a pastor. And more of it.

So when we baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, we baptize into a community - God’s community - where we are never alone.

As I thought about what that mom said I realized that at least she had the integrity to NOT go through with a ritual that she didn’t believe in. And it could be said that she saying “No” to her child’s baptism respected us and what we believe.

But still, I never say No to a baptism because God never says No. Even when the parents clearly have no desire to follow through on the promises they make on behalf of their child at baptism, I still do the baptism, because God DOES follow through on God’s promises at baptism.

Our challenge - as a church - is learning how to live our promises in world that doesn’t believe in them, in a world that tries to make up faith and spirituality as it goes along, in a world that’s - rightly or wrongly - suspicious of formalized faith.

But whether we live up to that challenge or if we fail, God who is Trinity will remain faithful to us and to the world, because that’s who God is.

May this be so among us. Amen.