Trinity Sunday(B): Speaking of the Trinity

By: The Rev. Dr. Lori Walke, JD

Perhaps the text from Isaiah is not the preacher’s first choice for Trinity Sunday for the obvious reason that Jesus had yet to make an appearance at the time of writing and would not for quite some time. Having all three “persons” of the Trinity would seem to be a prerequisite if the focus is on this particular designated doctrine. It almost feels like organizers of the lectionary knew they had to include a pericope from the Hebrew Bible, saw Isaiah’s thrice repeated, “Holy, holy, holy” in verse three, and called it close enough to include on this liturgical Sunday!

To be fair, none of the suggested lectionary texts in the Hebrew Bible or New Testament lay out an explicit explanation of the doctrine, in no small measure because the word “Trinity” itself does not appear in Scripture. The reality is that opting to read from one of the gospels or epistles is no guarantee of making Trinity Sunday any easier.

It is at this point that some preachers bail on talking about the Trinity at all (No? Just me?). But I suggest that the Isaiah text is a microcosm of our attempts to speak about experiences of God and the very real feeling of God’s presence in our lives. This was, after all, the purpose of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity in the first place, for like other doctrine, “it is not the development of purely intellectual considerations but is also an attempt to express the faith the church experiences in worship.”[1] In other words, when considering doctrine in the most generous light, its purpose is to deepen our spirituality and life of faith beyond a “just the facts, ma’am” approach.

Isaiah’s experience of God, the vision that we read about beginning in chapter 6, is one of those attempts at expressing faith. Some experiences of God were so clear and intense that the prophets try to share them in ways that the reader is invited to see and feel it, too. The prophet Isaiah manages to capture the unimaginable expansiveness and power of God using all of his senses. Whatever happened to Isaiah was a holistic event, felt spiritually and physically. We read of experiences like this from other prophets, including Jeremiah 15:16, where Jeremiah says he “found” and “ate” God’s words, and they became a “joy and delight of my heart.”

Walking line-by-line through Isaiah 6:1-8, we are repeatedly invited to connect with God using all of our senses and holy imagination. While some of the imagery is more easily modernized than others, it is clear that Isaiah is attempting to make real to others his experience of God.

Isaiah’s descriptions remind us of those moments in our own lives when God’s presence is larger-than-life: God’s presence is so large, just the hem of the Lord’s robe fills the temple. Some experiences of the sacred and the holy are so all-encompassing that it can feel like we are only seeing a few strands of the tapestry.

Unfamiliar and strange creatures are part of Isaiah’s vision. Unexpected embodiments of God happen all the time, from the someone panhandling on a street corner to an artistic teenager to elements of nature. Instead of responding with mistrust, cynicism, or trying to rationalize, it may be that we just need to receive the experience with awe and wonder.

The prophet tells us that the scene was a bit hazy, for “the house filled with smoke.” Even if we have never been in a house filled with smoke, most of us have looked through the not-quite-invisible waves that drift in the air after blowing out a candle and noticed how it changes what is seen and unseen. There are some experiences of God and the Christian life that are not yet clear in their meaning to us yet. We may see the path forward as a fuzzy outline, as if obscured by smoke, but we can choose to trust that the Spirit is letting us see just enough that it still requires faith to take the next step.

Even if we struggle to identify with what might seem like over-the-top descriptions in Isaiah, we can use these passages to focus in on experiences of God that are more relatable—concrete, grounded, dirt-under-our-fingernails experiences of God. To circle back to the Trinity, the text with its grand descriptions may actually prompt us to think about the embodiment of God in Jesus as a person who experienced hunger, thirst, grief, and joy—all of which we can relate to.

On this Trinity Sunday, preachers can invite the congregation to think about experiencing God as a holistic event, just like the prophets in the Hebrew Bible did. Our ancestors of faith have always made a sacred effort to express our faith, and Isaiah is just one more example of this work. How might we add to this effort?

[1] Justo L. Gonzalez. Essential Theological Terms (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, 2005), pg. 175.

The Rev. Dr. Lori Walke, J.D., is the senior pastor of Mayflower Congregational UCC Church, a graduate of Oklahoma State University, Oklahoma City University School of Law, Phillips Theological Seminary, and Emory University. She was once described as a loose cannon. Lori is married to Collin Walke, an attorney and State Representative for House District 87, and together the “Rev & the Rep” try to make as much trouble in the name of Jesus and justice as they can.

Trinity Sunday(A): Origin Stories

Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20

By: The Rev. Andrew Chappell

In his introduction to Genesis, Theodore Hiebert shares that the writer’s goal “was to make sense of the world [the Hebrews] knew by explaining how it came into being. They came to terms with who they were as a people by explaining their own origins in that world.” (The CEB Study Bible, 1 OT) Thus, Genesis 1:1-2:4a begins the Torah with a story detailing a very harmonious and beautifully-structured creation, not unlike the structure of Israel’s religious life, with a goal of articulating the climax of creation: the Sabbath (2:1-3). If a Hebrew child were to ask a question about the Sabbath, a teacher might have pointed to this very story and said, “It is at the foundation of who we are and who God is.”

Origin stories are important to us. Any K-12 education in the US comes with a history of how we became who we are with imagery of revolution, slavery, women’s suffrage, and civil rights. Popular culture is filled with origin stories. How many times has modern America witnessed Peter Parker bitten by a radioactive spider? (I honestly don’t think we can take another one!) Sometimes, when an adopted child grows older, they have questions about their parentage, leading to a search for answers.

In all of these things, one idea comes to the surface: knowing more about the beginning may shed light on the present. And in that manner, Genesis 1:1-2:4a sheds light on the very beginning of the Sabbath, the imago Dei, and the responsibility and stewardship of humanity over creation, ideas that have ever-present meaning for the modern reader.

The Psalmist demonstrates the concern with origins in the first praise psalm, which is a celebration of God the creator. The psalm carries with it the origin-centric understanding of the imago Dei when it declares, “You’ve made [human beings] only slightly less than divine, crowning them with glory and grandeur. You’ve let them rule over your handiwork, putting everything under their feet” (8:5-6, CEB). It seems that the very beginning of humanity and scripture still plays an important role in Israel’s present at the time of Psalm 8, and in the Christian lectionary today. From the start, humanity has been created in the image of God, to partner with God in bringing order to the chaos of the world and to care for creation and creature alike in harmony.

The origin of the Jewish people plays a role in 2 Corinthians when Paul writes to the community, “Put things in order, respond to my encouragement, be in harmony with each other, and live in peace.” (13:11, CEB) Why is this the call upon the life of the early Christian? It most certainly has some root in the creation story above. The harmony-bringing of God is still the call of humanity. The 2 Corinthians’ charge also has its beginnings in another origin story of sorts.

In Matthew 28:19-20, the resurrected Jesus gives a mandate to his disciples that is the origin of most church vision statements and the historical evangelism (good and bad) of the global church: “Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I’ve commanded you.” (CEB) This disciple-making — rooted in obeying Jesus’ commands — is rooted in his summary of the law: love God and love neighbor. But the origin of this understanding comes from the Torah, from Genesis, and from creation, when from the natural outpouring of God (who IS love) came creation, humanity made in God’s image, the structure of religious life, and the task to bring harmony and care to creation and to one another. And all of that has great implications for who we are today. Our origins matter. And this is our ultimate origin story. So how will the knowledge of our beginning influence how you live right now?

Andrew has been in ministry since 2008 and currently serves as the Associate Pastor of Northbrook United Methodist Church in Roswell, Georgia. Andrew has degrees in Religious Studies and Telecommunications from the University of Georgia, and an M.Div. from Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Andrew loves listening to records, watching Seinfeld, and beignets from Roux on Canton.

Trinity Sunday (C): God is NOT a Puzzle!

Trinity Sunday (C): God is NOT a Puzzle!

John 16:12-15

By: The Rev. Paul Carlson

“When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…”

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday and it is the one day in the year that we do not focus on a proclaimed message from the Gospel or readings for the day, but instead focus on a message or understanding that comes solely from centuries of the Church’s teaching about, and life in, God. Although our understanding of the Trinity is certainly and directly inspired by Scripture, it is important to note that the word “Trinity” is not found anywhere within.

When it comes to this doctrine of the Church, many (most? all?) of us get caught up in when we attempt to explain every detail and specific quirk about it. We try to put all the pieces together in a nice, heavily manipulated picture, and call the puzzle of the Triune God solved. In doing so however, we lose the freedom, power, and understanding the mystery of the Trinity holds and bestows in our lives.

So I’m not going to go there. Instead, what I want to highlight is what the Apostle Paul refers to in Romans 5.2 (the epistle reading for this Sunday) as “boasting in the hope of sharing the glory of God.”

In order to do so, let me first draw you all back again to that image of the puzzle that I mentioned briefly before. Whether they be crossword, Sudoku, or even just the plain old jigsaw puzzles, my wife and I love them. We like big, complicated puzzles that take days to finish. And the reason we like them, I must admit, is because we know that if we just work at it hard enough and if we just work together well enough, we will finally be able to solve it. We will be able to turn that table top from a picture of chaos into a picture of—oh I don’t know—Mickey Mouse and all his friends, or one of Monet’s paintings, or anything really. The important point is that the puzzle is solved and we have a proud sense of triumph over it. We pat each other on the back and give each other a high five, before looking for the next puzzle to solve.

Now jigsaw puzzles might not be everyone’s preference, but most folks I know gain some degree of satisfaction from solving problems. There is something deeply rewarding about fitting together pieces of information until you can explain every detail and stand in triumph over it, knowing that nothing about that problem, question, or mystery escapes you any longer. This drive for solving problems have moved scientists to map the human genome, allowing them to put together certain pieces of DNA as if they were Lincoln logs or Legos. We are working on trying to solve the puzzle of life itself.

But God…

…God who is the source of all life?

God who created all things and knows each of those things, intimately?

God who weaves us together in our mother’s womb, names us, and numbers every hair on our heads before we take our first breath?

We try to solve God too, but we find that doing so is impossible.

When solving a puzzle, it’s often easier to fill in the border first, fitting each piece together until the image is contained in a neat, perfect box. That leads me to wonder: given that we often treat God as a puzzle to be solved, what borders does God have? What end pieces are there to limit the Creator of all? What box can contain the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

This is why we have so many heresies revolving this specific doctrine. People want to give God a definite border. But God is not a puzzle. God is not to be solved. No matter how much time and effort we put into solving God, we find that God is simply too big.

So then what does Jesus mean when he says that when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide us into all the truth? Doesn’t that mean we will be given all of the answers to life—that all the pieces of the puzzle will finally be put together? I wish it did.

At times, the questions and mysteries of life seem so great and overwhelming that I want to scream! Truth be told, I have screamed! I’ve cried out to God, hoping that God will make things black and white. “Make it clear and easy! Explain yourself to me! Tell me why you let it all get so muddled up! Why you let wars go on, tornadoes and hurricanes rip life apart, loved ones die, hunger prevail, and hate destroy?”

But you know, in return, more often than not (though seldom all at once), eventually I do receive God’s response. It does not come as a proof of some truth that acts as the keystone, solving all of my problems. Rather, it comes as understanding.

Understanding is not the same as solving a puzzle or problem. The details often go completely unexplained. Rarely (and to the chagrin of my math teachers) am I able to “show my work.” When I receive understanding, I do not receive some sense of triumph or victory over a puzzle solved; rather, I receive peace. Peace in the understanding that triumph and victory belong to God. The problems and puzzles in this world are solved by God’s hand, not mine.

Understanding that God is Triune reveals to us what life is and is to be. God is not to be solved, but God is certainly to be revealed. The Holy Trinity reveals to us that through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God is in full, life-giving relationship with Godself. And through the Trinity, we are invited into the truth, life, and peace that flows out of that relationship. In contrast, the individualistic culture that surrounds us in this world leads us to value and decide everything in terms of ourselves. The relationship of the Trinity, however, leads us to value and decide everything in terms of others.

Listen again to some of the key scripture verses we have in this powerful, life-giving faith of ours from just the Gospel of John alone. John 3:16 “For God so love the world that he gave his only son so that whosoever believes in him may not parish but have eternal life.” John 15:13 “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And John 16:15 “All that the Father has is mine. For this reason, I [Jesus] said that he [the Spirit] will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

In Christ we are invited and connected to the Holy Trinity by Jesus’ revealing act of the Father’s love on the Cross and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Through the Spirit, we are given the understanding that we have indeed been created in God’s image. We are created in that Triune image of God for relationship. We are made for each other.

The Reverend Paul Carlson is a Lutheran pastor along with his wife, Pastor Lauren Carlson, at Calvary Lutheran Church in Morganton, North Carolina. Originally from the West Coast, he moved from San Diego to Dubuque, Iowa, where he graduated from Wartburg Seminary. He has served calls in Wisconsin and Virginia and is now enjoying the opportunity he gets as a half-time pastor, raising two children in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

Trinity Sunday (B): Be Moved to Join the Movement

Trinity Sunday (B): Be Moved to Join the Movement

John 3:1-17

By: Casey Cross

Every extraordinary experience sparks from the ordinary. Full of curiosity, Nicodemus proactively seeks Jesus out at night. Jesus transforms what was an inconspicuous evening into a remarkable, life-changing event.

What I love about the Gospel of John is the way we readers, thousands of years later, are turned into witnesses. We become witnesses not just to fact-based, hard-nosed, “real news,” but to God’s reality on earth. We become witnesses, not to an ideology, but to the movement of God. We are suddenly standing alongside Nicodemus, bound by our physical bodies and limited perspective, about to have our mind blown by a completely new way of seeing and being in the world.

In this particular story, we see Jesus launch the transformation of Nicodemus from questioning leader, ἄρχων (John 3:1), to witness, μάρτυς (John 3:11) to the movement of God. The movement of God is Trinitarian; it is physical, spiritual, and divine. It takes our full selves to be part of this movement. We cannot compartmentalize it to one hour or one day. We cannot compartmentalize it to a single choice and belief. This is difficult for us to grasp because our entire world is about compartmentalization. We count the minutes and hours of our days, divvying up our time to work, relationships, goals, celebrations, conversations, and chores. This is also difficult for us to grasp because so much of our lives are about reaching certain dates, milestones and achievements. We live by the idea that once we reach that particular place, we will have “made it.” Nevertheless, the movement of God blurs and smudges the lines by which we have ordered our lives. The movement of God never stops. The movement is, in essence, God’s full self – Father, Son, and Spirit. During this late-night conversation, Jesus invites Nicodemus to wake up, be “born again,” move beyond the limits of his occupation and title and join the movement.

In his book, The Divine Dance, Father Richard Rohr describes the movement of God as flow. To join God’s movement is to step, jump, or dive into the flow of God’s full self with our full selves. The tide of God’s movement leads us to a way of life that is always growing, evolving, transforming; a way of life that is about unification, alignment, and action.

Source: https://upliftconnect.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Light-9-1.png

Like Nicodemus, it takes a little time for us to catch on. It’s hard to be moved from all that we know – this one body, this one life, our understanding of science and creation. Even without fully understanding Jesus’ words, Nicodemus is caught up in the tide of conversation and can’t stop himself from asking, “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” Jesus doesn’t back down. With Jesus’ response, we 21^st century readers are no longer merely observers of a late-night conversation. Jesus’ reply vibrates and echoes from the pages of the Bible to us, today. “You must be born from above.”

Jesus tells us to move beyond dualistic thinking into a Trinitarian way of being, the place where our bodies, mind, soul, and spirit meet. Jesus calls Nicodemus, and all of us, to live in the realization of all that we are. We are not just machines, a body moving by habit and functionality. We are not just spontaneous balls of unaware reactivity to the life being lived around us. God made us to be part of the Movement. While we struggle with discernment, wondering what God is truly calling us to, remember that the answer will always involve our full selves, it will involve our transformation (often over and over again), it will involve us physically moving, following the example of Jesus, and getting into it.

Source: https://vtn.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/parkland-survivor-emma-gonzalez-holds-powerful-moment-of-silence-at-march-for-our-lives.jpg

Consider the social movements we witness in history books and the news. These movements do not appear from nowhere. They are products of an accumulation of factors, but we often wonder where they came from. Like the wind, we hear the sound of it, see the effects of these movements, but we do not always know where they came from or where they will go. Isn’t this just like the movement of God? Isn’t this exactly what Jesus is calling Nicodemus, and all of us, to join?

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_mysticism#/media/File:Grunewald_-_christ.jpg

Jesus knows we are suspicious. Jesus knows we are trapped by our need for tangible, provable facts. Yet, in this conversation, Jesus doesn’t stop there. We are called to join the Movement. Despite ourselves, we are made witnesses. We are not witnesses of our own understanding, but of God’s action, movement, in the world, for the world. Receive the testimony given to us by the Living Word who walked among us. Bear witness. Wake up. Be moved with your full self – your emotions, your mind, soul, and strength. Rise up. Join the movement of God.

Casey Cross serves as Young Disciples Director at Hope Lutheran Church in Eagle, Idaho. She can be found in the kitchen with her husband, walking her black lab, Lola, listening to music, drinking coffee, reading too many books at once, and sitting around, thinking about stuff that might eventually get written about on her blog: http://caseykcross.wordpress.com.

Trinity Sunday: Faith in the Trinity

John 16:12-15

By: The Rev. Canon Manoj Matthew Zacharia

“I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…” (John 16:12)

This essay is written with the aim of helping our preparation for Trinity Sunday. Our context is decidedly a Christian theological community. My particular position is that of an Episcopal cleric who is informed by global Anglican sensibilities. As an Anglican, I am informed by a tradition that takes incarnational theology and social Trinitarian model as a springboard for deep reflection. The Anglican theologian Leonard Hodgson noted that “the doctrine of the Trinity is the result of God opening the eyes of men to see the theological significance of those divine acts to which the Bible bears witness.”[1] In a context of increased interaction with those who are religiously, spiritually, and socio-culturally different, how does one understand the deposit of faith that is conveyed through the doctrine of Trinity?

This essay will not focus on the intricacies of the doctrine of the Trinity. Rather, I would like to focus specifically on inroads that can deeply inform the reading and interpretation of this doctrine in light of increased pluralistic and multicultural interactions. I believe that that in order for us to get a glimpse into the “truth” to which the Spirit of truth comes to guide us, perhaps we must take into account theological resources beyond the traditional grammar of Christian “scripture and tradition.”

St. John’s use of the imagery of “light” and truth” stands in contradistinction to darkness TrinityFlyer and inauthenticity. Such a contradistinction significantly points to a reality that Jesus came to be the word as the icon of the living God (Colossians 1:15). The farewell discourse pivots around Thomas’ question, “how can we know the way” to where Jesus is going. Jesus’ reply is seminal: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6). This signifies that approaching God is emulating the path of Jesus by walking “the way” and grappling with truth. Thus, living an authentic life is centered on movement towards kairos and communion with God rather than marking time superficially.

The movement that Jesus proposes leads to an authentic life grounded in getting a glimpse of the God primarily through the person of Jesus and guided by the spirit of truth. In the words of Archbishop Michael Ramsey, “The dogma of the Blessed Trinity speaks of the Christian life, both as son-ship and fellowship with the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, and as adoration of the Triune Name of One God, indivisibly Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier.”[2] From this I understand that “life” is centered on Jesus and is about fellowship with God and with each other; yet, if God is the Ultimate Mystery and it is the spirit of truth that continuously reveals new truths that have the potential of offering glimpses of this Ultimate Mystery, might such an understanding of the Trinity enable us to be more open to truths in other religions as systems that enable us to get a grander glimpse into the Ultimate Mystery?

It is the Spirit of truth that enables one to recognize and live out the following:

1. Jesus is “the way” of the mystery we call God. As the Word made incarnate, we believe that Jesus fully reveals the mystery of God. The basis of our soteriological understanding is the full revelation of God through the kenotic crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Many Christians, including Anglicans, bear witness to and profess this mystery through the celebration of the sacraments. It is the power of the spirit of truth that transforms material substance into the means of grace whereby Christians receive foretaste of heaven through a deeply embodied relationship with God. In The Episcopal Church’s theological statement on interreligious relations entitled, Toward Our Mutual Flourishing, we read, “professing salvation in Christ is not a matter of competing with other religious traditions with the imperative of converting one another. Each tradition brings its own understanding of the goal of human life to the interreligious conversation.” One particularity of the Christian faith, as expressed in the catholic creeds, is our understanding of God as Trinity.

2. The Christian life is essentially about fellowship rooted in a Trinitarian understanding. Such a rootedness necessitates that those following the “way” of Christ live into the way of Christ and encounter the perceived other as pointers to the Ultimate Truth. The experience of the Christian community as reflected in Peter’s encounter with Cornelius (Acts 10) wherein the Holy Spirit was received by Cornelius prior to baptism as well as Paul’s encounter with the Athenians wherein he co-relates the “altar to the unknown God” (Acts 17) with Jesus are signifiers to the reality that the mystery of the Ultimate Truth, while understood for the Christian through the grammar of Jesus and the creeds, is much more than we imagine. We need the spirit of truth to continuously disclose to us movements where the Ultimate Truth can be witnessed and experienced.

3. Within the corpus of the Christian tradition are both the apophatic and cataphatic approaches. The utilization of tools from other resources can offer enrichment into a cataphatic engagement with theological truths. The spirit of Truth enables us to reflect on contemporary pluralistic realities. From this we glean that the Christian experience is one of living in diverse realities and contexts. Perhaps the church in the West can learn lessons from churches in the so-called “Global South” of how Christian witness can be lived out amidst religious and cultural diversity. For example, the South Asian Christian theological context has consistently grappled with reflecting on theological paradigms. These are all prayerful experiences rooted in a deeply Trinitarian reflection. In the West, one constructive proposal underway is the work of Francis X. Clooney and the New Comparative Theology group. What New Comparative Theology and theologies from the South Asian context attempt to do is to prayerfully engage other religious traditions (scripture and commentary) textually alongside fundamental Christian texts in order to enrich their theological reflection. The goal is neither to appropriate other religious texts apart from their theological context nor to engage in religious syncretism. The aim of projects like New Comparative Theology is to point to utilize resources that enable us to approach a greater understanding of the Ultimate Truth. The point is that in a changing global context Western Christianity must come to terms with visible forms of multiculturalism and an emerging world view that “is spiritual but not religious.” One avenue for theology to be truly incarnational and contextual is to be in enriching engagement with other religious (theistic and non-theistic) traditions.

Our particular tasks as those engaged in the study of scripture is to truly rely upon the guidance of the Spirit of truth so that we can interpret and contextualize scripture and the deposit of faith with relevance. My proposal is that in order to accomplish such a hermeneutical task, we must, with openness to the Spirit of truth, engage with tradition and the wide breadth of scripture utilizing the richness of other traditions in order to either provide clarity or context to concepts that we expound upon. I believe that increased openness being rooted in our tradition but with humility that we only have a deposit of the Ultimate Truth is a movement that finds its inspiration from the Spirit of truth. There are resources from a variety of traditions that can enable us to get a grander glimpse of the Ultimate Truth. In a context that sees the hegemony of the “Christian worldview” on the demise, perhaps inspiration from other traditions as experienced by the Spirit of truth may enable us to get a grander glimpse of God.

[1] Leonard Hodgson, The Doctrine of Trinity, 1943, 7.

[2] Michael Ramsey, An Era in Anglican Theology, 1960, 184.

The Rev. Canon Manoj Mathew Zacharia is Canon Sub-Dean at Christ Church Cathedral in Cincinnati. Canon Zacharia also serves as the Ecumenical Officer of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio and is currently ABD from his Ph.D. program (University of Toronto) in the area Philosophy of Religion.