(Prior to
preaching I cut 2” wide long strips of red, gold, and white fabric and tied the
strips together to make longer strips about the length of each pew. There was a
long multicoloured strip at the end of each pew when people entered their
seats. As people entered that morning, the ushers told people the strips were
there for the sermon.)
Today is Trinity Sunday, one of the principal feasts of the
church year.
Trinity Sunday is a day of celebration,
a day when we honor and celebrate God in three aspects, or persons, or beings, or
perhaps ways of being and acting. One of the other things I love about the
Trinity is the concept grew mostly from the bottom up rather than the top down.
Bishop Frederick Borsch, retired bishop of Los Angeles, who died in April of
this year, had this to say about the Trinity:
There are probably a
number of people who imagine that the idea of the Trinity was thought up by
ivory-tower theologians who, typically, were making things more complicated
than they needed to be and were obscuring the simple faith of regular
believers. In fact, it seems that the process worked pretty much the other way
around. Practicing believers and worshipers were driven by their experiences of
God’s activity to the awareness that God related in several different ways to
the creation. Thus what those believers came to insist upon was that God had to
be recognized as being in different forms of relationship with the creation, in
ways at least like different persons, and that all these ways were divine, that
is, were of God. Yet there could not be three gods. God, to be the biblical God
and the only God of all, had to be one God. This complex and profound faith was
then handed over for the theologians to try and make more intelligible. They
have been trying ever since.[1]
The Trinity is (are?) complicated to understand, and for
some of us the more we think about it the more confused we get. Trying to
comprehend something that is three separate and co-equal beings, yet at the
same time is (are?) inseparable, is about as confusing as it gets. See, you can
even get tangled up in the grammar if you over think it.
This Sunday, Trinity Sunday, let's think about what the Trinity means for us and our faith. At
its essence, the Trinity is about a relationship, or perhaps relationships
plural. That is, the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Or, if
you prefer, the relationship that exists between the Creator, the
Redeemer, and the Sustainer. All three are in that relationship as co-equals,
each with a way of being and operating, yet so far as we know, there is no
arguing about who does what. And while these three co-equals operate
independently, they are at no time separated. They are always and forever
joined in relationship, to one another and to us.
Throughout the centuries various
theologians have used different metaphors to describe the relationship between
the three aspects or beings of the Trinity. Legend has it St. Patrick used a
cloverleaf to describe the Trinity. The church continues to use metaphors such as interlocked circles, or overlapping rings. There
are many ways to describe something none of us fully understands, and probably
never will, at least in a way that communicates to everyone in the same way.
This feast day I’m going to ask you to do something a bit different to remind us of what Trinity does for us and for our
relationships with one another. I think sometimes our faith can be just a
little abstract, a little separated from us. And often, when we get the rest of
us, more than just our brains, involved in our faith, surprising things happen.
At the end of most pews or row of
seats, there is a pile of fabric strips. What I’d like you to do is start in
the pews on either side that are closest to the front. Some of you may have to
move forward to pick up the strip. Whoever picks up one end of the strip passes
the rest of the strip to the next person. And so on. The important thing is
that everyone is holding on to the strip. What we’re doing is connecting us to
one another by using this strip. When the last person on one pew gets the
strip, pass it back to the person behind you. This may involve some moving
around. When you run out of a strip, tie the strip to another strip and keep
going. There are enough strips to connect us all, but you still might have to
(Oh my goodness!) be a little closer to one another than you normally are on a Sunday morning.
Keep adding strips, and keep holding on to
those long strips as you keep tying on more strips and the strips keep getting
longer. It’s fine to go back and forth across the aisle. When we finish we’ll have everyone
throughout the church connected along one big long strip that goes back and
forth and across the aisles and around the church, and everyone will be holding part of the
strip.
Remember Karen at the organ. And
the ushers in the back will move forward to join everyone. The Eucharistic
Ministers at the altar will come down to join the congregation too, as so will I. That long
strip will connect all of us so everyone is touching some part of the strip. (I waited until all the strips were tied together and everyone was connected.)
Now, that is what I know about the
Trinity, God in three persons, blessed Trinity. The Trinity connects us to God
and to one another through an inseparable relationship that none of us can
destroy. We can part from one another, the strip can even look a little frayed,
but the Trinity still holds us, separately and together. We can move to a
different place on the strip, but the tripartite or three-part God in
relationship with God’s self is in relationship with each of us and and all of us, and never lets us go.
And God’s relationship with us and within us connects us to one another. We are
connected, one to another, by a blessed Trinity that nothing can separate. And
we are connected through that blessed Trinity to family, workmates, housemates,
spouses, partners, lovers, friends, enemies, acquaintances, those
we have met, and those we have not, the alien, the poor, the prisoner, the
living and the dead.
Is this astonishing? Is this comforting
or uncomfortable or both? Is this challenging? This is the God in Jesus Christ
who tells us in this morning’s Gospel that even though we may doubt, we are to
go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And this is the God who gives us
strength to do this by reminding us God is with us, even to the end of the age.
Look around you at the people holding their part of the strip. This is what
holds us together: this is God in three persons, blessed Trinity. AMEN.
The Rev Nicolette
Papanek
©2017
[1] Bishop Frederick Houk Borsch, The Episcopal Diocese of
Los Angeles (Retired 2002). www.textweek.com/Trinity. Accessed 06/12/03.
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