19 June 2011

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

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Mike, my spouse, will vouch for me. Each year, around St. Patrick’s Day, I break into an old, familiar rant. Don’t get me wrong – I love St. Patrick’s Day, with its good food, good drink (if you ignore the green beer), and good times. No, what I become unhinged about is the crop of four-leaf, good-luck clovers that springs up in ads, on lapels, sweatshirts, sweaters, t-shirts, ties, buttons and pins – and even on the underwear at Macy’s. I assure you – and anyone who will listen – that St. Patrick’s shamrock was most definitely not a pagan four-leafed talisman of good fortune. Patrick, legend holds, used the three-leafed shamrock to teach people about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Picture it with me – three identical leaves – one for the Father, one for the Son, and one for the Holy Spirit – all with their origin in a single stalk – the immutable love of God. No hierarchy or ranking between the leaves – and without the Love, the stalk, no God of Trinity – without any single one of the leaves – an incomplete shamrock, an incomplete God – without any of the leaves – there’s not really much of anything there, just a thoroughly indistinct stalk of something or other, who knows what.

So – just as we experience a shamrock as having three identical leaves that share one stem, the Church from its earliest days acknowledges that we experience the One God – Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One – we experience that same One God in a threefold pattern. And this threefold pattern stands out against three kinds of unitarianism.

Let’s take the unitarianism of the Father, the maker of heaven and earth. In this sort of unitarianism, the Father gets the whole thing going – is the first cause, the designer of the world, the one who sets limits and boundaries. But often this Father ends up being like lots of fathers are – loving but distant. Or cranky, overworked, and less than understanding. At its worst, the unitariansm of the Father leaves us with a God who is sometimes loving, sometimes filled with violent rage, and most of the time rather unpredictable. At certain times, this unitarianism has taken the form of an eclectic deism – like that of the framers of the Constitution, a deism that reduces God to philosophical aphorisms about individual liberty, justice, and equality (for white, property-owning males) while ignoring the God of Jesus who is concerned about how a people, the collective, treat the vulnerable and powerless among them, who is concerned that the weak not become prey for the strong. The Father, without the Son, is – well, sort of tough to pin down. The Son – equal to the Father – this equality, a stunningly odd wrench thrown into patriarchal tradition – deconstructs the distant Father whose love is abstract; the Son instead makes known the constancy of the unconditionally loving heart of the Father – a weird concept given Jesus’ time and place. Indeed, the Son comes along and, quite frankly, queers the Father – likens God the Father to a woman obsessed with her search for a missing penny, to a mother-hen sheltering her chicks, to a total wack-job of a male – remember the story of the so-called Prodigal Son? The loser who demands his inheritance, gambles it away, spends it on booze and drugs and sex for hire? This loser’s father, however, knowing full well what the son is going to do, with broken heart anxiously keeps watch for the day the son will come back home, broke and broken – and when he sees his errant son still far off down the road, the father forgets all about dignity and runs to greet him and forgetting about fairness, throws a welcome-home party like no other. No way for a father to behave – the father – a softie, a pushover, a patsy for love.

And God the Son, without God the Father – well that basically reduces Jesus to just another nice guy finishing last. This sort of unitarianism dispenses altogether with the Parent – the Parent, who out of love for a broken creation has put limits and boundaries upon us – for our own sake. And Jesus, no longer the co-equal Son of God the Parent – again, a most unconventional relationship – well, Jesus ends up being just the son of a nice Jewish couple from Nazareth, one who had good ideas that we should imitate. This Jesus, no longer one with the Parent in creating the universe, has no power to create life from death, a cosmos out of ashes and dust – and the death of this Jesus usually becomes just another sad death – and not the revelation that the Almighty, All-powerful One present and active in creating the cosmos, would rather die than hurt or destroy those who commit even the most heinous of crimes against God or humanity.

But we would know nothing of God the Father or God the Son without God the Holy Spirit – Odd Spirit – Odd Breath that works through spoken language to reveal the fullness of God to human beings age after age. The unitarianism of the Spirit, absent the other two Persons of the Trinity, yields a fuzzy spirituality, devoid of any specificity, though often accompanied by crystals, sage smudges, and breathing exercises. A unitarianism of the Spirit is often as not about personal experiences of healing and renewal that turn God into an enlightened therapist who leads us into participation in relationships, community, and institutions largely as a means to personal growth. Altogether absent is the God, who through the spoken word, puts the old to death and raises up the new – who comes to us from outside of ourselves – who tells us that by our own reason or strength we can know nothing of the immensity and specificity of the God who desires to be with us and all created things on beyond our sure and certain death. With the unitarianism of the Spirit – we’re pretty much left to our own inner resources – which history, if nothing else, shows us are rather meager – at best. And without the Spirit, without the life-giving breath of the Parent, the last breath of Jesus upon the cross is the last word, and the rest is silence. No resurrection, no stones rolled away.

In the Holy Trinity, by contrast, we receive the God who is active in our lives as the One whose womb gave birth to creation and who for our good sets limits; God active in our lives as Equal Son of God-the-Parent, whose Godly power is made perfect in weakness; and God active in our lives as the Spirit – who speaks the truth about God and about us. God, Holy Trinity: the Spirit, the breath of creation, who speaks the Promises as lived and died for by the crucified and risen Son in order that we know the loving heart of the Parent whose love never ends. One God – for you, for me, for us all, and for the whole creation – One God who knows you, intimately, as Created Child of God; as broken Child of humanity; as healed Child, risen from death – a new creation – in the image of Christ Jesus – perfect in God’s eyes in every way – while though not fully yet in human time, already completely so in the time outside of time of the Most Holy Trinity. You are one with the Holy Trinity – whether you always believe it or understand it or not. But don’t worry – God believes it – that is to say, is faithful to it – and God says it is so, and that’s all there is to it, thank you very much.

And so, it is my testimony, my witness to you this day: when I hear that God, the Most Holy Trinity, would so regard and promise such a one as I, unholy mess that I am – the only response that I can have in the face of such great grace is . . . . that words have reached their limit . . . . and with the disciples in today’s Gospel, all I can do is bow down and bend the knee, lost in wonder, awe, and praise.

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.