Trinity Sunday, "Divinity as community process," May 27, 2018

B Trinity BFC 2018

Isaiah 6:1-8; John 3:1-9

May 27, 2018

            I grew up in a town and a local church that was highly suspicious of people who wanted to talk too much theology.  Folks were very suspicious of intellectual dialogue just for the sake of that dialogue.  After all, who really cares if Jesus is of the same substance of God, a similar substance of God, and if the Holy Spirit proceeds forth from one or two parts of the Trinity?  I could really give a flying fudgecake.

          One of the most prolific and authoritative theologians at a seminary of German ancestry, like my alma mater Eden Theological Seminary, was Jürgen Moltmann.  Moltmann is considered one of the most preeminent theologians on the Trinity, and I absolutely hated reading his material.  He made up, excuse me, he believed each person of the Trinity had distinctive tasks or roles and believed that their given names were Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Using theology better developed in the Eastern Orthodox church, Moltmann argued that no one person in the Trinity was God.  When those persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, came together in mutual love and community, however, they were the one in three, three in one God. 

          Moltmann’s Trinity was and is a critique of Western individualism.  If we understand God to be a single, free, individual monad, then do we not aspire toward divinity by being a single, free, individual monad—to stand alone, outside of relationship?  The Scripture passages we have before us today offer a similar critique.  The prophet Isaiah, critical of a nation that believes God is forever with them and in the midst of them, suggests that God sits on a throne as judge, transcendent, far removed from the injustice practiced by the Israelite people.  Isaiah’s God is a critique of his own nation’s domestication of God.  God was readily invoked to be whatever the people wanted God to be and, in the process, had lost a wildness, a fierceness, that could challenge the status quo. 

          In John’s Gospel, the Pharisee Nicodemus comes to Jesus seeking to keep all of his understandings of God intact.  Jesus suggests to Nicodemus that far more is required.  New birth is required.  New understandings are necessary.

          Theology is really about the task of making meaning, of deciding what we will give our lives to intellectually hoping our hearts will follow.  Some time ago our denomination, the United Church of Christ, did branding that suggests our faith must grow and evolve to remain relevant.  Some of that branding was a little cheeky, which made it all the more popular, “Our faith is 2000 years old.  Our thinking is not,” was one of those phrases printed on bumper stickers, pins, and t-shirts.    I think most of us agree that one of the meanings of that statement is that we did not stop making meaning long ago.  We continue to think about who God is and who we are in relation to God.  Faith also demands that we ask what that meaning making requires of us.  If God is not only Father but Mother and Father, what does that theological statement require of us?  If we now understand gender and sexuality as a spectrum and non-binary, how do we then personify what we know to be divine as faithful?

           People of progressive faith have yet to work out what the building blocks are for teaching our children progressive faith.  For so long we found ourselves caught between two poles.  One pole was to abandon all rite, ritual, and structure to teach our children other religious faiths, throw in some ethics and a mission trip, and make believe that all answers are beautiful, insightful, and worthy of praise.  Or  . . . we just abandon structure altogether and hope our kids come back to us when they turn 45.  Or . . .  teach our children the faith we learned and hope that they grew out of it like we did.   

          What if, just what if, instead we taught our children how to make meaning not only by the content we offered them each week but also by the process we offered?  What if we distinguished sacred time with structure that included a tent and a fire and a table and ritual and getting connected and hearing our own answers, with boundaries, offered in prayer?  Such that, our children knew that not every zany, wild answer was correct, but if you could be seen trying to make meaning, that was valued and cherished.  What if we repeated that we are a child of God every baptism over and against a culture that undermined your image and taught you to fear?

          What if we gave our children and youth not the right answers at every stage of development but the right questions—good, difficult, meaning-making questions?  And then we tried to answer those questions with our children, wondered aloud with our children, pushed them when we sensed immaturity, praised them for answers that showed hard and difficult work, provided space for answers different than ours,  put them in front of another set of adults who might provide an array of diverse but centered answers, and even showed ourselves growing by coming over to their well-struggled and discerned answers? 

          Talking theology is about making meaning, but talking theology is also about growth.  To begin talking about what we believe is to begin talking about what we will give our heart to, our will to, our whole being to.   We recognize, like so many of the saints who have gone before us, that we are caught somewhere between the world we live in and who we truly want to be in that world.  Like Jürgen Moltmann establishing the Trinity as a way of drawing us toward the community God wishes and wills for all of us, we must make meaning, do the hard work, to decide who God is, to be drawn toward that understanding of God.

          Though we tell ourselves we do not believe in a vengeful or cruel God, sometimes we do not do the hard work to make meaning.  And so, in difficult times, there we are again, finding ourselves straining to appease a vengeful and cruel God.  This time we will get it right, we tell ourselves.  We are just respectable enough now.  We are just starting to like ourselves now, that we reach out thinking that now this God will accept us.  And our hand withers reaching out for such a God.  We end up becoming the thing to which we aspire.  We end up becoming vengeful and cruel, other people unable to reach out their hand to us.

          That is why having a safe community where we can speak about such things is so important.  When we speak about a God we would never give our heart to in the first place, we have companions, accompaniers, people who walk the hard road with us to measure us and give structure to the meaning we make.  What new image or metaphor for God would call you to those values you truly do hold?  Who do we say God is for our children in a concrete but expansive way that helps them understand but also allows for them to spiritually grow?

The prophet Isaiah called his nation to a God who stood outside the nation’s courts, in a heavenly court that could not be co-opted by political power.  Jesus called Nicodemus to a God who did not want reform but radical transformation.

          We need to talk about who God is today—as a congregation.

          In a former congregation a parishioner shared with me that she was frustrated my sermons seemed only half-finished.  She said that just when she thought I was going to give the answer she had been waiting to hear, I stopped.  I shared with her that in a church based on congregational polity, I am not supposed to have the answers.  You, in conversation with each other, are supposed to have the answers.  That was in a dialog sermon where I asked the congregation, “Prove to me that David Koresh, the Branch Davidian cult leader, is not the Messiah.”  Even after we had practiced several dialog sermons to that point, had had interesting and lively discussions, nobody raised their hand for that question.  They did not have any answers.  So I walked back up into the pulpit.  With no answers.  And as I turned my back, this parishioner spoke up.  I could tell she was frustrated.

          I might say that no one of us has anything true to say about God but that when we come together in discussion, dialogue, and sharing, we truly express who God is and how God is moving in the world.  I think that is what Jürgen Moltmann meant when he shared that no one person of the Trinity is God but that when each person of that Trinity comes together in mutual love and community, that is God.  That metaphor, image, or concept calls us away from the individual salvation so long preached in our world today.

          Still, I am not really sure about this Trinity idea and how it all works.  I am sure that we should make meaning together, that we should ask ourselves what metaphor, what image, what name for God draws us out to a deeper reality, to a God who encourages our growth and life.  We should work on it and struggle with it so that we develop a critical skill and become very suspicious of easy answers.  We should grow.  If we still have the primary metaphors for God that we had when we were children, have we grown or is our faith a romance for what church used to be?  My experience is that many of us, myself included, worship at the altar of a god who is somehow connected to a romantic notion found in our past.  We would rather that God not be so wild, untamed, and undomesticated.  We’re really not too sure we have faith in a loving God.  Because if God gets away from us, will we be left behind?  You know, when the rapture comes? Or when God moves once again and we are called to spiritually grow . . . once again.  Like Isaiah called the royalty of Israel to do.  Like Jesus called Nicodemus to do.  “Come, don’t be afraid” God beckons, smiling from ear to ear, “you have forgotten how to play.  Let’s play.”  Amen.