The Family of God

Sermon for Trinity Sunday, June 16, 2019
Proverbs 8:1-4,22-31; John 16:12-15

As we celebrate Father’s Day today, the Church calendar tells us something different – that it’s Trinity Sunday.  Trinity Sunday is the only principal feast of the Church year that marks not an event (like Easter) or the example of holy people (like All Saints’ Day) but a doctrine – or, maybe I should say, the doctrine. 

On Trinity Sunday, we honor nothing less than the nature of God – and as soon as we do, we start stumbling all over ourselves to make sense of it without being heretical.  Because, of course, the nature of God is ultimately impossible for us to grasp.  Just listen to this snippet from the Creed of St. Athanasius, in the Historical Documents section of the prayer book:  “[W]e worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the Substance.  For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost.  But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.” (BCP 864).  Well, that clears it up, right?

So, why does the doctrine of the Trinity matter?  For me, there are two basic reasons, one theological and the other more practical.  First, theologically, this idea of one God in three persons sets us apart as Christians.  Despite all we share with other religions, especially the other Abrahamic faiths of Judaism and Islam, no other religion sees God as this delicate dance of unity in diversity.  Second, more practically, I think the doctrine of the Trinity is important because of this:  We follow the God we come to know.  How we see God’s nature determines what we understand about our nature and how we are to live, given that we’re made in the “image and likeness” of God (Genesis 1:26).  As God is, and as God acts, so we should be and so we should act as we relate to ourselves, and each other, and our world.

So, what does the doctrine of the Trinity tell us about God’s most fundamental attributes?  And what divine attributes might not take the spotlight?  Well, we could continue down the rocky road of abstract theology, but I think I caught some glimpses of God’s nature last week, in the house where I grew up.   

My mother is getting ready to move out of her house after living there almost 54 years.  I was there on Monday helping her clear out closets and pack things up, and I want to share with you two things I found there. 

First was a photo of my father and me playing catch in the backyard when I was about 10.  In this photo, the sun is setting, and the shadows have grown long.  I’m in the shade, with my back to the camera; and my father is in the bright evening sunlight with his glove open, his eyes tracking the baseball that’s about to hit the pocket.  He’s wearing slacks and a white button-up shirt, so I know he’s just come home from work.  And I wondered, as I looked at that photo – what had he been thinking just before we went outside?  My father was an academic dean at what’s now Missouri State University, and God only knows what stupid drama he’d been dealing with that day, administering the College of Arts and Humanities.  What burdens was he carrying as we put on our gloves and went out the back door?

Now, my father wasn’t great at hiding his frustration.  You knew when he was stuck somewhere he didn’t want to be or stuck doing something he didn’t want to do.  But I never remember that look on his face when we went out to play catch.  He may have been completely worn out, and worried about budgets, and stressed out by prima-donna professors, and behind on projects around the house.  But there he was, playing catch in the backyard, putting me first.  And I kind of think he loved it.

Now, that’s a great memory for a Father’s Day sermon.  But the truth is, this could just as easily be a Mother’s Day sermon.  As we heard in the reading from Proverbs, God is represented as a female figure in our Scripture and tradition, too, along with the Father from today’s Gospel reading and the Creed.  And cleaning out closets with my mother last week, I found something else to take home with me – a red mixing bowl.

This was the go-to mixing bowl in my mother’s kitchen as we kids grew up.  It seemed to me she used it making every dinner we had.  But it was also the bowl she and I would use to make chocolate-chip cookies.  It won’t surprise you to know that the pudgy little boy playing baseball in the backyard loved chocolate-chip cookies.  Even when I was small enough that I needed to stand on a chair, she would let me stir the flour and sugar and baking soda, and add the eggs and vanilla and butter, and combine it all with the electric hand mixer, a wondrous toy with which I sprayed cookie dough all over the counter.  We’d eat maybe half the dough raw and bake the rest, filling the house with the scent of heaven. 

Now, my mother had a home to manage.  She had three other kids to worry about, too.  She worked toward a master’s degree, and taught, and for a time served as the Episcopal chaplain at Missouri State.  And patience is not exactly my mother’s greatest gift.  When my family would be walking somewhere, what we kids and my father saw was my mother’s back, 20 feet in front of us, because we never could walk fast enough for her.  But there she was, in the kitchen when she didn’t have to be, helping me make cookies, putting me first.  And I kind of think she loved it.

So, all that sounds perfect.  Based on what I’ve told you, my childhood was a Norman Rockwell painting.  Of course, it wasn’t.  There was a lot of dysfunction, too; and like all of us, the baggage I carry is filled mostly with the sadnesses and failures of childhood.

But here’s why I’m sharing all this with you on Trinity Sunday.  I think in our best times – when we’re most fully alive, when we know joy that leaves us aching for more – in our best times, that’s when we most closely reflect the image and likeness of the God who creates us, and redeems us, and sustains us.  Because those best times are our times of relationship.

“God is love,” Scripture tells us (1 John 4:8).  And love, by definition, means sharing in relationship.  You can’t love without there being someone to love.  And people in a deep relationship create something greater than either of them, a power of nurture and creativity and joy that changes the world they touch.  Centuries ago, St. Augustine saw this, describing the Triune God as being like one who loves, and that person’s beloved, and the love that flows between and beyond them.  We stumble around with words to try to capture this loving reality, describing God as Father and Son and Holy Spirit; or as Creator and Redeemer and Sustainer; or maybe as two dancers and the dance that together they create.  Well, maybe a family is a good model, too – a family of any size or configuration or location; a family of biology or a family of choice.  Even a church family, on its best days.  Maybe God is family.  At least that’s one way to see it.

It matters how we see God because, like I said, we follow the God we come to know.  For many people, unfortunately, the God they grew up knowing was a God of rules.  God was the lawgiver who made the rules.  God was the sheriff who enforced the rules, and who deputized special people to help him knock heads theologically.  Now, this God of rules could be gracious if he desired, a judge dismissing our well-deserved sentence and sending us out on parole.  And, in the fullness of time, this God of rules even took our place as the prisoner in the cell, standing in for us when we violated our parole and taking the punishment we deserved.  And now, this God of rules runs the halfway house, continuing to monitor us and asking us to teach good behavior to other offenders, while we wait for him to impose law and order over all creation.  I was blessed because that’s not the God I grew up knowing.  Though I didn’t have words for it, the God I grew up knowing wasn’t the God of rules but the God of relationship.

Of course, it’s not that God has no rules.  All families, all households, all relationships have rules.  It’s just that the rules aren’t the point.  Instead, the rules are love’s operating manual, the steps that make the dance of relationship work without us tripping over each other’s feet.

I think the God of relationship is what Trinity Sunday is asking us to see.  If the Holy Trinity is, first and foremost, a relationship, then we who are made in God’s image and likeness ought to put our energy into living that way.  Because, it turns out, not only is relationship God’s M.O., it’s also the source of our joy.  As C.S. Lewis said, joy is “unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any … satisfaction.”¹  It’s connection with God and others that makes us long for deeper connection, a virtuous cycle of giving and receiving and giving again, an embrace that always draws you closer in.  The gift of the God who is relationship is not just the love you’ve known but love you keep yearning for – the batch of cookies or game of catch that never has to end.

1.      Lewis, C.S.  Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life.  1955.  Posted Oct. 4, 2015.  Available at: https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lewiscs-surprisedbyjoy/lewiscs-surprisedbyjoy-01-h.html.  Accessed June 13, 2019.

Jesus the CEO

Sermon for the Feast of the Ascension, transferred
June 2, 2019
Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53

Today, we’re celebrating the feast of the ascension, which may just be the most baffling celebration of the entire church year.  Ascension Day actually was Thursday, 40 days after Easter, because, as the reading from Acts tells us, it was 40 days after the resurrection when Jesus “was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of [the disciples’] sight” (1:9).

There’s so much that’s weird about the ascension that it’s hard to know where to start.  The story comes from a world view in which heaven is up, and earth is down, and hell is really, really down.  But, of course, we understand now that the earth is round, and that space is infinite, and that if Jesus rose “up” to heaven in Palestine, he would have been dropping “down” to heaven relative to the folks in South America. 

But more than getting hung up on God’s geography, we might struggle a lot with the fundamental claim that the ascension makes: that Jesus – the resurrected, embodied Jesus who is just as much human as he is divine – that Jesus took off and went to rejoin the other two persons of the Trinity, leaving us hanging as we wait for his return.  And along with that, we might wonder what it really means when we say, in the Nicene Creed, that Jesus now “is seated at the right hand of the Father” and that “his kingdom will have no end” (BCP 358-359).  What the ascension claims is that Jesus is nothing less than the supreme Lord of the universe – as the reading from Ephesians says, he is “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come” (1:21).

Well, here on this Sunday morning – as we dive into summer and worry how many tornado warnings we’ll have this week – what difference does any of this make for you and me?

I mean, most of the time, we’re standing right there with the disciples.  As they were enjoying their moment of connection with their risen Lord, they wanted answers to practical questions:  OK, Jesus, “is this time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6).  You defeated sin and death; surely toppling Caesar must be next on the list, right?  But Jesus says what must have been the last thing they expected to hear:  Nope.  The next act is yours, he says, not mine.  You will receive power from the Holy Spirit that will equip you to be my witnesses, to change people’s hearts and lives everywhere from here “to the ends of the earth” (1:8). 

And then, he was gone.  If we’d been there, I think we’d have been looking around like fools, too, wanting to know where the heck he went and why he hadn’t solved the problems that still made their lives so hard.

How can we stand here, now, and proclaim that Jesus is in charge?  I mean, if he is, he kind of seems to be making a mess of it, right?  It’s tempting to downplay Jesus’ sovereignty over creation and over our lives because, not only is there a lot wrong on any given day, but it only seems to get worse as time goes on.  You can fill in the blank here with your favorite example of how the world is going to hell in a handbasket: mass shootings, politics, the environment, personal responsibility, ethics and morals – the list goes on.  If Jesus is the king, much of the realm seems to be under somebody else’s not-so-benevolent control.

You know, there are lots of models for understanding the exercise of sovereignty or authority.  Our English translations of scripture come out of a social context of monarchy, so we read a lot about the “kingdom” of heaven or the “kingdom” of God.  That might make us imagine a monarch on a throne – and, more specifically, a male monarch, given the gender implied by the word “king.”  But the word in Greek that we translate as “kingdom” doesn’t mean a geographic location governed by a man wearing a crown.  That Greek word, basileia, means “reign,” or “rule,” or “realm” of God – the state of being in which God’s sovereignty is supreme.¹  That’s what Jesus is promising when he invites us to look for the kingdom of God among us or within us (Luke 17:21).  That’s what we’re actually asking for, in the Lord’s Prayer, when we say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  It’s our eternal hope, too, at the end of the story, when we look for Jesus to “come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end” (BCP 359).  What we’re looking for is life as we know it transformed and lived under the sovereignty of the God who is love.

If the image of kings and queens in castles doesn’t really work to capture the basileia of God, here’s another model of Jesus’ sovereign authority.  It comes from the English bishop and theologian N.T. Wright.  He explains that what we call heaven and earth aren’t two separate physical locations but “two different dimensions of God’s good creation.”  In this event we call the ascension, the embodied, risen Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, returned to that heavenly dimension of God’s creation.  Now, the really amazing thing about this isn’t the transport mechanism, or finding the door to the heavenly elevator, or figuring out which way is “up” on a sphere.  What’s really amazing about the ascended Jesus is this:  From the heavenly realm, he can also be present to anyone, anywhere in earthly time and space, returning into the mix from a dimension different from ours but still connected to it.² 

Now, if that sounds more like The Matrix than real life, you’re beginning to see what I’m talking about.  We have trouble wrapping our minds around this, in much the same way that a two-dimensional cartoon character, living in a flat world, would have trouble with one of us trying to explain the concept of “up.”  But in that heavenly dimension tangential to earthly time and space, N.T. Wright sees Jesus functioning not as a king sitting on a throne but as a chief executive officer sitting in a corner suite.  Heaven is earth’s “control room,” Wright argues.  “It is the CEO’s office, the place from which instructions are given.”²

I like that model.  Not only can we imagine a CEO’s office better than we can imagine an ancient throne room, but maybe we can also imagine how Jesus exercises power a little more clearly this way.  Ancient kings ruled by fiat, promoting their own self-interest first and foremost; and when people disobeyed, the king simply had them killed.  I don’t know about you, but to me that seems a little out of character for the Prince of Peace – the one whose mission statement was “love God, love neighbor, love one another”; the one who cast a vision of servanthood, asking all who worked for him to take up their crosses and follow in his footsteps.

Here’s another reason I like that model of heaven as the earth’s control room and Jesus as the CEO.  It helps make sense of judgment from a God who is love.  Hang with me for a minute:  In my years here at St. Andrew’s, I’ve had several savvy businesspeople try to help me with the hard work of terminating employees.  It won’t surprise you to know that I’m not really wired to be good at that, given how much I love confrontation and conflict.  Well, these folks – HR people and executives alike – suggested that I look at termination differently.  The advice went like this:  When someone’s being terminated, nine times out of ten it’s a direct result of choices that person made.  So, when you have the hard conversation, the bad news you’re breaking isn’t that you’re firing that staff member.  You say to the staff member, “You’ve fired yourself, and here’s why.”  To me, that’s Jesus at the Last Judgment, in a nutshell. 

Theology is mystery, but our CEO’s directions are pretty clear.  He equips us with the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of God, to turn, and transform, and grow our hearts to follow his agenda.  He sends us on a mission to love, across every aspect of our lives.  He casts a vision of servant leadership, taking up the cross for us and asking us to do the same.  And he deploys us precisely where he needs us:  “Repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed … to all…,” he says (Luke 24:47); and “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria,” and in crazy places like Kansas City, and Mission Hills, and Prairie Village, and Leawood, “and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). 

Jesus isn’t asking you to do anything for which you aren’t already equipped and deployed.  In your workplace, in your home, in your club, in your civic group, in your giving of time and talent and treasure, you are duly qualified and empowered to represent your CEO and to execute his mission.  You’ve got your assignment, and you’ve got what it takes.

So, when he calls you “up” to the executive suite someday, just a little advice:  Be ready for the performance review.

1.       Reid, Barbara E.  “Excursus: The Kingdom of God.”  The New Interpreter’s Study Bible. Nashville: Abingdon, 203. 1955.

2.       Wright, N.T.  Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.  111.