It is that wonderful feast day where rectors force assistants and
seminarians to preach. As a result, or at least a part of the result,
congregations learn not to value the “doctrine” we celebrate today, are often
confused, and, in many cases, get a healthy dose of heresy added to their
menu. I used doctrine in air quotes because that is how the Church
defines the day and how the secular world refers to the uniqueness of the
feast. A quick read would teach all of us that this is the only Sunday
during the Church year where we celebrate a doctrine rather than an
individual’s witness or specific act, or set of acts, of our Lord Christ.
I see the nods. The problem, of course, is that we are not celebrating a
doctrine. We are celebrating a reality to which all of us, all of us
baptized Christians, are called to witness. Our Sacraments, our rites,
and our theology are all informed by the revelation that God is Father, God is
Son, and God is Holy Spirit.
It is a day, of course, where we
try to rationally explain a mystery. How many of us have sat through
sliced apples or weird Father’s Day examples of the Trinity? I cannot see
the virtual hands, but I’m sure we have all endured some . . . challenging
sermons that did their best to explain the underlying doctrine. The
problem, of course, is that, on top of the fact that it is a revealed holy
mystery and we will never fully grasp it this side of the grave, such sermons
fail to address the “why” God revealed Himself to us as three persons in one
unity and generally devolve into one or more heresies.
Oh, I see by the shifts in the
pews I have your attention now. Yes, this will be a bit different for
you. And that is a shame. If we as preachers are not addressing the
why’s and “what does it mean to/for me” questions, we are not doing our
jobs. With all apologies to Jim and his evil twin Robert, we spend a
great deal of time in Wrestling with Faith discussing the “what is it”
questions of the Trinity. You might say it’s one of our on-going
discussions.
One of the complaints from those
who really struggle with the what is the idea it’s unnecessary. Why do we
insist on the Trinity? It’s too hard to understand, let alone explain to
others. On more than one occasion Jim has suggested that we drop
it. I say that cognizant that I think his heart is in the right
place. It is difficult to understand, harder to explain, and, at least in
the minds of some, unnecessary. By way of educating us a bit, I have
included in the Orders of Worship this week a copy of the Athanasian Creed.
By way history, y’all should
know that the Athanasius Creed is the third Creed in our church. For
those of you who are easily bored by my sermons, it’s there in the historical
documents. What? You don’t think I used to get bored by bad
sermons? Interestingly, a liturgy and worship committee, our first
actually, led by Bishop Seabury—Oooh! I see the lights coming on!—thought
it far too long to be used in worship. Without so much as a by-your-leave
to Archbishop Thomas Becket, who instituted its use way back in 1100AD, and
over the objections of Bishop Seabury, our Liturgy & Worship Committee
jettisoned its authorized use in the Episcopal Church.
I learned that the hard way this
week. As I was studying to help formulate a sermon, I came across the
facts that the Athanasius Creed has been used by the Church in worship,
particularly on feasts that focus on the Holy Trinity, for close to fourteen
centuries. The Episcopal Church is one of the Anglican churches that does
not allow its use in worship. I had this wonderful idea for a service
where I would have us recite the creed in your handout and spend some moments
in silent prayer or meditation letting the words speak to us. Bishop
John, of course, believes he is bound by the rubrics of the Prayer Book.
His thought is that if we are not praying the same, we are not believing the
same. Since the creed is not authorized for principal worship, he cannot
grant permission.
Now, I am not busting on the
bishop or our church today. John is doing his job to conserve the church
and the idea that we use a Book of COMMON Prayer to shape and define our
worship. And, at the national level, many of us who attend Advent today
remember the great fights of the Zebra book and the adoption of the 1979
BCP. One of the minor controversies, compared to others, was the
re-inclusion of the Athanasian Creed. From the late 18th century until
the 1979 BCP, the Creed was not acknowledged in our church. So we have
come a long way in a couple centuries. We re-discovered what most of our
Anglican brothers and sisters and other Western Christians never forgot.
As you can all read from the
text today, the Athanasius Creed is rather long. It is four pages, for
those of you worshipping from home without a PDF. I included a couple
paragraphs about his history, its formulation, and its purpose. As I not,
it was meant to help differentiate Christians from Arians, but its construction
helped defend against a number of other heresies over the centuries, even the
heresy of Nestorianism with which I teased our seminarian Zach a couple weeks
ago and some of you thought I made up! The Creed is explicit both in what
it says it is and what it says it is not. I commend it, of course, to
your prayerful study this week.
What the Creed reveals, what all
three Creed reveal, of course, is that doctrine which you and I call the
doctrine of the Trinity. I hate that word choice because it implies that
it is an intellectual assent or understanding. The Trinity is not
something to which human beings could reason. The Trinity is not
something that we apprehend in its entirety and say “oh, that, of course I
understand and accept it.” The Trinity is not something that smarter
theologians have failed to consider and not retained just because they were
lazy or superstitious or whatever. Nothing of God is ever just
theoretical. His truths lead to consequences of behavior and action on
our part. So, what does it mean for us, living in 21st century Nashville,
that the Trinity is true.
I said a couple minutes ago that
the Trinity informs our Sacraments, or if you want to be good little Anglicans,
our Sacraments and Rites. The Trinity teaches us about love, about grace,
and about community. Understand, I could go on and on and on about each
of the Sacraments and Rites of our church, but I want my sermon to be shorter
than the Creed that is often used to celebrate this day. When we gather
at the altar, we first remind ourselves about the why of creation. Heck,
we heard today the bulk of the beginning of Genesis. Why did the Father
create us? In Your infinite love You made us for Yourself.
Sound familiar? Of course it does. It is the part of the Eucharist
that follows the sanctus. Each and every time we gather and celebrate the
Eucharist, we remind ourselves that God created us.
And that is not an intellectual
truth. That claim is a fundamental reminder to each one of us gathered
that the Creator of heaven and earth, the Maker of all that is, seen and
unseen, thought His creation needed a you and a me. We don’t explore that
reminder as we ought to outside pastoral care conversations. But one of
my little jobs is to remind you that God thought the world needed you. We
speak in terms of nepes and souls and those distinguishing characteristics
which God combined in you to make you. Some of us have dashes of
artistry; others have a main course. Some of us have funny senses of
humor; and many of us think we have a sense of humor. Some of us were
gifted with particular insights; and some of us have frustrating blind
spots. We are each unique, but we know God created each one of us as a
masterpiece, as mortal beings fashioned to point the way to Him. Our job
was to glorify Him in everything we did, but we rebelled. We
sinned. Somewhere along the way, we rejected or forgot our calling.
So what did God do?
You, in Your mercy, sent
Jesus Christ, Your only and eternal Son, to share our human nature, to live and
die as one of us, to reconcile us to You, the God and Father of all.
God could have, in all righteous indignation, left us to wallow in our
sins. There is no way we could have reconciled ourselves to Him.
What could we have offered Him in exchange for all our sins against Him and our
neighbors? It took a perfect offering. It took Him coming down from
heaven and assuming our nature. Jesus was fully human. We have a
season which reminds us of that fact. He suffered temptations just we
suffer temptations. We have another season when we remind ourselves of
that truth. And make no mistake, His temptations were even more
diabolical than our own. If You are the Son of God, come down . . .
But in His Incarnation and work
we are revealed God’s heart. God is a forgiving God. Yes, God is a
just God, and His justice cannot overlook sins; but He makes it possible for us
to be reconciled to Him by our faith in Him and His actions. We are not
reconciled by our work. We are not reconciled by anything intrinsic to
us. He does the work of making it possible for us to be restored to Him
and to one another. More in that, of course, in a minute.
Lastly, His redeeming work makes
it possible for us to receive faithfully this pledge of our inheritance, to
stand before Him, and to go into the world in pace to love and serve Him in
those whom we encounter. We gather here to remind ourselves of His
redeeming work in history, to remind ourselves of His redeeming work in our
lives, to prepare ourselves, to encourage ourselves to do that work out
there. We gather in community not just because He calls us to gather in
community, but because we recognize in the Trinity that community is important
to God, that community is reflective of God’s relationship in the Trinity.
Any arguments? I know I
have skipped across our Eucharist and have ignored Baptism and the other Rites,
but hopefully you see God’s love, God’s grace, and God’s community in those as
well. It is certainly easy in baptism and confirmation, in marriage, in
confession and absolution. And even in a funeral, we remind ourselves
that our loved one is passing into glory, that their relationship with God and
with us is changed, but not over. They have received their inheritance
for which this meal is a simple pledge and promise.
I am so glad I cannot see the
computer screen. Some of your faces range from confusion to “I’ve never
thought about this like that before,” and everyone has a mask to hide the
entirety of their expressions. As always, feel free to discuss this in
the days and weeks ahead, if you find yourself struggling with my touch stones
this morning.
So, if the Trinity underlies
everything God reveals to us and underlies our Sacraments and Rites, it must
have a good practical application, right? My answer is that the practical
application is not necessarily for our benefit, though we do, but rather for
the world, which knows Him not nor acknowledges His claim on them.
Our reading from Corinthians is
instructive, even if our work is not within the church. I have touched on
Corinth on several times. Corinth was founded by a legion granted
citizenship and sent to the east to guard the frontier of the empire by the
Emperor Julius, I think it was. We take citizenship for granted in modern
America, but experts estimate that fewer than 100,000 individuals were citizens
of Rome at its height. The emperor shrewdly recognized that his former
troops would be good fighters and unwavering allies, politically and
militarily, if anyone thought to conquer Rome. Its location on the
isthmus caused industrious people to start a portage industry. The
isthmus was just over 3 miles across, but, by porting across, transporters
could save 3 weeks to a month of sailing time, never mind avoid the risks of
encountering storms at sea. As a result, restaurants, pubs, hotels, and
other businesses sprung up. Corinth was, by all accounts, a thriving
town, a privileged town.
That wealth and privilege
infected the church. We know from our first letter that the early church
in Corinth was not the best witness to the grace and love and community of
God. One leader was sleeping with his mom. It may have really been
what we call a step-mom, but Paul notes it was so bad that even the Romans,
Romans who were not known to squeamish about their sexual practices, found it
revolting and disgusting. The rich at the church in Corinth had
bastardized the agape meal. They feasted as if they were at a Roman
meal. To us, such sounds good. Instead of eating a wafer and a sip
of wine, maybe they were having roasts, and vegetables, and glasses of wine,
and desserts?! True, they were, but that was not the problem. No,
the rich ate, and ate lavishly, while the poor went hungry among them. In
fact, the rich ate until they threw up, and then they ate more. It was
considered a sign of wealth and refinement to eat until you puked. And
the rich were doing that in the midst of their brothers and sisters in Christ
who could not afford to eat, or could afford to eat only a small meal.
Think that caused some division?
The church in Corinth allowed
its social attitudes to infect the church. They ranked the gifts of the
Holy Spirit. Paul himself had taught them that whatever gifts they needed
would be present in the body because of the promises of God and the coming of
the Holy Spirit. The Corinthians, though, in typical Roman fashion,
decided to rank and esteem certain gifts, making those gifted with less
esteemed gifts feel less loved, less a part of the community. Heck,
Corinthians even took to bragging about who baptized them. They ranked
their clergy and decided that those baptized by the “better” clergy were, as a
consequence, better Christians than those baptized by “lesser clergy. You
are laughing, but Paul, you know, the Apostle who met Jesus on the road to
Damascus, Paul, often called the Apostle to the Gentiles, often thought of as
more responsible for the spread of Christianity than Jesus by the secular world
and by some in the Church, gives thanks in writing that he did not baptize any
of them!
What does Corinth have to do
with Nashville? In one sense, they are entirely different. Paul
writes a church that claims to be Christian, that claims to want to follow
Jesus as Lord. Nashville? Not so much, though there are some who
want to claim we are a Christian nation; there are likely few who would
describe Nashville as Christian. But the similarities are really
unavoidable. We live in a town that is experiencing protests and
riots. We live in a town where some are esteemed more highly than others,
with entertainers and professional athletes on one end of the scale and,
perhaps, law enforcement on the other, at least in these times. Like
Corinth, we seem to be cosmopolitan, which causes certain strains. The
country is in the middle of describing a great divide between blacks and whites
right now, but we in Nashville find ourselves settled with something like 86
ethnicities. Poverty plagues us as a city. We may not recognize it
yet, but those who work the service jobs upon which so many depend cannot
afford housing in our community. Our education system? It could be
significantly better. Our criminal justice system? Heck, we prayed
and lobbied politicians for a death row inmate, an Episcopalian by faith, whom
prosecutors admit was prosecuted and sentenced unjustly. Imagine what is
going on in poorer communities. Less connected communities. Our
list could go on and on and on. Make no mistake, I’d rather be planted
here than anywhere else, but we have issues and subscriptions that need to be
addressed. Most of us are left wondering where the answer is to be found.
Thankfully and mercifully, we
know where the answers are to be found. We live in a country that
strives, yes it fails, but it strives, to uphold God-given inalienable
rights. We live in a country that purports to accept that human beings
are equal. That understanding, of course, is rooted in the revelation we
call the Trinity. It is hard to grind down another human being when we
remember that they, like us, were created by the Father and gifted by Him
traits and characteristics unique to them and pleasing in His eyes. Just
as we were created in this vast cosmos because God thought creation needed us,
so too, He thought, creation needed them. If we believe that, if we have
internalized or inwardly digested it, can we ever accept others lording over
others? Can we ever accept a status quo that is not fair to
everyone? Heck, can we ever forget that our Lord came in humility?
That He was born in a backwater town of a backwater province? That He
demanded none of the adulation, worship, or service that was rightfully His to
demand of us, His creation? Can we ever forget that it was His love for
us which caused Him by force of will to hang and die on that Cross for our
sakes? Even when we tempted Him to come down, if He was truly the Son of
God?
I suspect for some of us, myself
included, this will be a long summer. This year, we will be focused on
the writings of the prophets during green season. Three years ago, we
chose the historical readings. So, even as our country is dealing with
the pain and hurt and emotional baggage of the simple fact that we have not
done justice for all, the prophets themselves will be crying out to us God’s
simple demand that we walk in humility and do justice, just as did our Lord.
All of that teaching, of course,
is rooted in the Trinity. It is through our feeble grasps of the Trinity
that you and I begin to see, however shadowy or dimly, the importance that God
places on love, on mercy, and on community. Just as He has modeled those
three characteristics for us simply by virtue of His being, you and I are called
to model to the world love, mercy, and community. Make no mistake, we
will make mistakes. But that is one of His calls on our lives. Look
around you. Listen to those around you. They have forgotten who
they are. Those around us have forgotten the simple truth that we were
each fashioned by Him, gifted by Him, made unique by Him! They have
forgotten that it was the Creator of all that is that caused them to be, that
causes them to continue by His will! Like us, they are loved deeply by
their Father in heaven. So deeply, in fact, that He came down from heaven
to rescue them and us when none of us could save ourselves. He could have
left us and them wallowing in the consequences of our and their sin, but that
love compelled Him to act mercifully. True, there could be no
shortcuts. True, He could not pretend our and their sin did not
exist. But He came down! He willed Himself to walk that rejected
path that led to Calvary! He modeled what He values and is!
Humble. And for His humility and faithful obedience, you and I and they
were given an opportunity to be restored to God. And to serve God.
We have each experienced that
love and that mercy offered by the Trinity, and now we understand ourselves
called into community. We gather at Advent not because our liturgy is the
best or because the people are the most popular or the smartest or best
looking, though those descriptions may be true. We gather because He
calls us together to serve Him in the world around us. We sing, we pray,
we are taught, we struggle with our doubts, we eat, and we drink. And it
is in the midst of this gathering, of this community, where we meet Jesus and
begin to understand the breadth and depth of His promises and love, not just
for us, but for those out there who have forgotten Him or never heard of Him.
It is in the midst of this
community, and others like it, where we can have meaningful conversations,
share mournful and joyful experiences, and do the hard work of discerning God’s
call on His people. It is impossible in this community, a community that
is rooted in the call and teaching of God, to treat another as anything but
equal. It is impossible in this community, where we remind ourselves of
our sins, and of His cost to forgive us, to look down on others as beneath
us. It is impossible in this community not to want to walk softly and do
justice, just as did our Lord Christ when He came among us.
And, reassured by His words,
soothed by the liturgy, harangued and encouraged by our clergy, we are sent
back out into the world to tell people God loves them, to tell people they can
be forgiven for all those “unlovable” things they have done in their lives, and
to invite them into the community that reflects His love and mercy, that they,
too, might become His heralds and inviters.
Brothers and sisters, the world
needs the reality of the Trinity today. The world needs to know that
there is a better way, that they truly are loved, that even those who have
acted wrongly can be forgiven by God and their neighbor. In truth, my
friends, the world needs our witness to the Trinity more than ever. The
world needs to know they are loved. The world needs to know they can be
forgiven. The world needs to be reminded that we are in this together for
His purposes, not our own. How we model that may differ
significantly. Some of us may engage in heartfelt conversations.
Some may be called to engage in the protests. Some of us may have the ear
of our elected leaders and be able to speak God’s wisdom into their
deliberations. Heck, one or two of us may be called to stand for
election. The great news, the Gospel news, my friends, is that success is
not up to us, only faithful obedience. But if we strive to live as if we
believe the Trinity and the teachings which flow from our understanding of God
thanks to His revelation are true, He promises that we will be vindicated for
our willingness to follow. We will be vindicated for our wise choice and
faithfulness, and we will dive even deeper into that amazing relationship into
which He calls every single human being.
In
Christ Peace,
Brian†
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