Sunday, 30 May 2010 12:33
“… but some things are better left unsaid.”
Festival of the Holy Trinity
Psalm 8 / Romans 5:1-5 / John 16:12-15
30 May 2010
Today – this Festival of the Holy Trinity – is a unique day in the life of those of God’s people the Church who recognize it within Word and worship. For this is the only day in the calendar year of the Church that we commemorate and recognize … not an event in the life of Jesus, not a happening in the history of the apostles or the early church, not a birthday or martyrdom day of a particular saint … no, the Festival of the Holy Trinity is the only time when we gather in worship and recognize … a theological concept.
Specifically, the Christian theological concept of the Holy Trinity … God the Father, God the Son – Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit.
And that … seems, well, at the least, strange, doesn’t it?
I mean, we do have a Holy Cross Day but we don’t have a “Theology of the Cross day.” Or a “Forgiveness of Sins Sunday.” And we Lutherans … wow … we don’t even recognize a “Festival of Justification by Grace through Faith.”
What’s up with that? Why is this Holy Trinity business so important anyway?
Well, it all has to do with … sssh … heresy.
And a 3rd century bishop named Arius.
Now Arius served as pastor and leader of the church in Alexandria, Egypt. He spent a lot of time thinking … specifically, about the nature of the Godhead … Father, Son, Spirit. He saw hierarchy all around him … in the Roman government, in the military; even in the young Christian church. He concluded that this hierarchy must be part of God’s natural order in all things, including within the very workings of God.
And so the theological concept Arius came up with was that, in contradiction to the Word being proclaimed in the early Church, there was no way that Jesus could be equal with God the Father. Jesus had to be subordinate—below, reporting to and under the command of… the Father … since he did the Father’s will … Jesus was the firstborn of God’s creation, to be sure, but to Arius there was no way Jesus could be co-equal with God. Arius had a phrase that he coined, which summed it all up for him: “There was a time when he (Jesus) was not.”
And there was a time when it looked like Arian Christianity would be the majority voice in the church … ah, but then came the Church Council of Nicea in 325 … a gathering of the leaders of the entire Christian church at that time, brought together by Emperor Constantine, to “regularize” in decree and doctrine the newly official religion of the Roman Empire.
Arius and his followers … including emperor Constantine … soon enough found themselves in the minority. One bishop … Nicholas of Myra … the one who we lovingly call “Santa Claus” today … did the not so loving act of hitting Arius upside the head during a particularly heated moment in the discussions and meetings.
The result of the Council of Nicea was the Nicene Creed … and Arius and his followers was roundly criticized and condemned, labeled as heretics and “there was a time when he was not,” named as heresy. The big foot of orthodox catholic Christianity came down hard on Arius and his followers.
Did you ever wonder why the Second Article of the Creed … the part about Jesus … was so intricate and involved? Well, it was written to condemn Arius. “God from God … true God from true God … begotten, not made, of one being with the Father; through him all things were made.” STOMP. Out goes Arianism. Or, at least that was the hope.
So over the centuries as the Church grew and grew, and the Word about Jesus spread across the world, Church leaders decided that the Nicene Creed … and its longer, even more intricately involved companion, the Athanasian Creed (which we’ve sometimes used on Holy Trinity Sunday) weren’t enough to combat the plague of Arianism. So they developed this Festival of the Holy Trinity, one Sunday after the Festival of the Holy Spirit … Pentecost … as a way of emphasizing what is true and right theology … thinking, writing, speaking about God … and condemning what is wrong.
And Arius and Arian Christianity became a footnote to the history of the Church. There are no “Arian” churches anymore; so we might wonder “what’s the big deal” anyway?
Ah, but that’s looking back through modern eyes. Put on our 4th century specs and we’ll see how condemning Arius was crucial to the growth and spread of the Church. If Jesus didn’t, doesn’t fully represent God in all he does and says … then, why did he have to come anyway? Be born, live, be tempted, suffer, die, and be raised? Send the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Comforter, the Guide to keep and grow the Church after he went away, back, ascended to the Father?
What, indeed, would have been the point to all of that? If God didn’t, doesn’t live in relationship within God, then, why should people live in relationship with each other?
Why should we not instead just strive to be Godlike all by ourselves, without needing Jesus, and without the messy intrusion into our lives of other people, their needs and wants and problems just making it more difficult for us to “get to God?”
Ah. So now I hope you see the point … and why Arius is on the outside of orthodoxy … the outside of our “what we believe” circle.
Condemning Arius, Arian Christianity and “there was a time when Jesus was not” was precisely the right thing to do.
But have we gone too far in our pursuit of orthodoxy … right praise, right doctrine, right practice of our faith?
On this Holy Trinity Sunday, this is a good question for us to ask ourselves.
Especially we who tend toward considering and calling ourselves the “thinking” or “educated” churches … denominations, church bodies with educated clergy with degrees behind our names … having creedal, confessional and doctrinal statements which we used to organize and delineate our differences from each other.
Remember that the whole point behind this day, this Holy Trinity Sunday, and the theological concept behind it … God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit … was not to advance and proclaim a dust-dry theological concept … no, Holy Trinity Sunday serves as a reminder to us, that even as God is in relationship within God … a relationship, a dance of love if you will between Father, Son, and Spirit … so, too, we who are followers of this God – as we have seen and experienced him in Jesus Christ, God in the flesh … we are called to live in relationship with each other, and others, in this world God has created.
This is a peculiarly Christian concept of God.
Islam, Judaism, even Buddhism … they all advocate for their believers, followers, disciples to become Godlike themselves … having a full and complete relationship with God … but where they can fall short is in engaging in the messiness of creation … getting “down and dirty” in the lives of others.
Living, suffering, losing our lives … figuratively, or perhaps, actually, for the sake of others … living in the shadow of the cross, walking in the footsteps of Jesus. True strength through suffering. Victory through what the world calls defeat. God’s success in what the world calls failure. And abundant life through what the world sees as quite the opposite … serving, giving, proclaiming the Word about Jesus.
Holy Trinity Sunday serves to remind us that even as our God is messy … because life lived in relationship is inherently messy … so we too are called to live in the mess and grey-ness, the ambiguity of life … this life given to us by God, to live and share with each other.
So how well do we do that?
Holy Trinity Sunday gives us a great opportunity to take stock, as I did this past week.
And it seems to me that we who call ourselves “Church” have our own error-prone tendencies … denying the love-relationship within God, denying the necessary humanness of the birth, life, suffering and death of Jesus, failing to live into the words of our own creeds, even today.
To be overly simplistic, I see two extremes or “ditches” into which we can easily fall, as church, God’s people, the body of Christ, here and now.
This first … has to do with how much room we leave for ambiguity in our faith communities.
Do we believe … show, by our actions … that church is only for “a certain kind of person?”
How well do we welcome … the seeker? The doubter? Those who are struggling, going through hard times in life, problems in school or job, home or family; or simply having what Luther called “a crisis of faith?”
Are we welcoming to those whose lives or lifestyles don’t fit into the neat little “church box” we have created? Pristine, clean, Jesus for some but not for all?
It’s like that commercial that’s been airing on the radio lately about mental illness … two friends, discussing and deciding where to have lunch, when the one confides in the other that she’s just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder … and the other one just goes on talking about different lunch choices, ignoring her friend completely.
How much of a “friend” is that being, anyway?
We recall, rehear and remember that Jesus didn’t avoid the messiness of life. He engaged it, head on … not just hanging out with, no, seeking out those who were on the “outside” of the “nice religion” of their time … the poor, the sick, the widowed and orphaned, the depressed, the mourning, the questioning, those who had made poor choices in their past.
As Paul writes in today’s word to the Romans, “We also boast in our sufferings … suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
That’s because … the Holy Trinity …. God, Father, Son, Spirit … means that God is all about relationship. In the very heart of God … and pouring out of that heart, to encompass and envelope all of creation. Even us. Even us.
And Jesus … fully God, fully human … feeling in his body everything which we feel … joy, doubt, pain, suffering, dying … yet fully God, conquering death forever … Jesus, the way we know this Triune God, the way God – Father, Son, Spirit – puts flesh and bones on God’s love for us … Jesus reminds us that, even as God is all about living in relationship, so we, too, claimed by that same love, forgiven and given full, abundant life in that love … we are called to live in that kind of relationship with others, too.
Yes, it’s messy … not neat and boxed in, controlled and controlling … but it is the way of our God. Our Triune God … Father, Son, Spirit. The love-dancers who call us into their dance of love, to and for the sake of the world.
There is a second ditch … and it’s just as prevalent as the first. And this one may cut some of us a little too close for comfort.
We don’t have to look far to find it -- right there in our Psalm for today, Psalm 8.
That’s a wonderful hymn to creation … to God’s making it, and declaring it good … and then, our call to honor the Creator in our wonder and worship.
And of course, that’s all well and good. We are “duty bound” as Luther puts it in the Catechism, to honor God for giving us all these good things, for making the universe and all that is in it, for our benefit.
But … there can be a tendency to elevate our care for creation to a new law … and to believe, somehow, that in treating creation with the utmost care and respect, we are somehow ascending the ladder higher and higher to God … much higher, much faster, say, than those awful bad people out there who don’t “do as we do.”
Somehow, as we religiously recycle and drive our Priuses and condemn the big bad polluting corporations, we can feel like we’re drawing closer to God through all of that. One could say that a religion of political correctness has arisen among us.
Ah, but where’s Jesus in that? Where’s the place of human sinfulness? Where is the realization that, once you seek salvation through the Law of God, there is no stopping the demands of the law? I mean, many are condemning and boycotting a Certain Large Oil Company, but I don’t see very many, if any of us, cutting out our use of petrochemicals cold turkey … leaving our cars on the side of the road … quitting jobs at Boeing or Microsoft … eating only the stuff they, we can grow in our own yards … and taking up residence in grass covered yurts in the forest.
All have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God.
And that very sentence, it draws us back into relationship. Relationship with others who sin and fall short of God’s desire for us, just as we do, each and every one of us, each and every day of our lives. We are all called back into a posture, a lifestyle of repentance, where we leave the judging and condemning alone and instead focus on living lives of love and service to one another which are the result of the freedom Christ gives us in his complete and total forgiveness of our sins, speaking fully and completely as God, God For Us, as he says in our Gospel reading from John, “All that the Father has is mine.”
The Holy Trinity. Yes, it may be a complex theological concept … yes, it may have gotten Arius and his followers condemned for being “outside the circle of what we believe” … but we don’t need to be like Nicholas of Myra and keep hitting people upside the head with the backhand of orthodoxy and Law … right belief, and right practice.
All we need to remember … is that the Holy Trinity means God in relationship. God in relationship … in God … with us … and in us. Calling us to live lives which reflect God … in the world … through our service to others … in a posture of humility and repentance … confessing, being forgiven, going forth.
Coming together … hearing God’s Word … eating Christ’s meal … being sent in the Spirit to serve once again.
For our sake … for the sake of God’s creation … and for the sake of God … Father, Son, Spirit, God, Three-In-One, living and loving in that eternal love-dance which spills out into all of creation … into each of us.
Come … join the dance of Trinity.
Amen.
Festival of the Holy Trinity
Psalm 8 / Romans 5:1-5 / John 16:12-15
30 May 2010
Today – this Festival of the Holy Trinity – is a unique day in the life of those of God’s people the Church who recognize it within Word and worship. For this is the only day in the calendar year of the Church that we commemorate and recognize … not an event in the life of Jesus, not a happening in the history of the apostles or the early church, not a birthday or martyrdom day of a particular saint … no, the Festival of the Holy Trinity is the only time when we gather in worship and recognize … a theological concept.
Specifically, the Christian theological concept of the Holy Trinity … God the Father, God the Son – Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit.
And that … seems, well, at the least, strange, doesn’t it?
I mean, we do have a Holy Cross Day but we don’t have a “Theology of the Cross day.” Or a “Forgiveness of Sins Sunday.” And we Lutherans … wow … we don’t even recognize a “Festival of Justification by Grace through Faith.”
What’s up with that? Why is this Holy Trinity business so important anyway?
Well, it all has to do with … sssh … heresy.
And a 3rd century bishop named Arius.
Now Arius served as pastor and leader of the church in Alexandria, Egypt. He spent a lot of time thinking … specifically, about the nature of the Godhead … Father, Son, Spirit. He saw hierarchy all around him … in the Roman government, in the military; even in the young Christian church. He concluded that this hierarchy must be part of God’s natural order in all things, including within the very workings of God.
And so the theological concept Arius came up with was that, in contradiction to the Word being proclaimed in the early Church, there was no way that Jesus could be equal with God the Father. Jesus had to be subordinate—below, reporting to and under the command of… the Father … since he did the Father’s will … Jesus was the firstborn of God’s creation, to be sure, but to Arius there was no way Jesus could be co-equal with God. Arius had a phrase that he coined, which summed it all up for him: “There was a time when he (Jesus) was not.”
And there was a time when it looked like Arian Christianity would be the majority voice in the church … ah, but then came the Church Council of Nicea in 325 … a gathering of the leaders of the entire Christian church at that time, brought together by Emperor Constantine, to “regularize” in decree and doctrine the newly official religion of the Roman Empire.
Arius and his followers … including emperor Constantine … soon enough found themselves in the minority. One bishop … Nicholas of Myra … the one who we lovingly call “Santa Claus” today … did the not so loving act of hitting Arius upside the head during a particularly heated moment in the discussions and meetings.
The result of the Council of Nicea was the Nicene Creed … and Arius and his followers was roundly criticized and condemned, labeled as heretics and “there was a time when he was not,” named as heresy. The big foot of orthodox catholic Christianity came down hard on Arius and his followers.
Did you ever wonder why the Second Article of the Creed … the part about Jesus … was so intricate and involved? Well, it was written to condemn Arius. “God from God … true God from true God … begotten, not made, of one being with the Father; through him all things were made.” STOMP. Out goes Arianism. Or, at least that was the hope.
So over the centuries as the Church grew and grew, and the Word about Jesus spread across the world, Church leaders decided that the Nicene Creed … and its longer, even more intricately involved companion, the Athanasian Creed (which we’ve sometimes used on Holy Trinity Sunday) weren’t enough to combat the plague of Arianism. So they developed this Festival of the Holy Trinity, one Sunday after the Festival of the Holy Spirit … Pentecost … as a way of emphasizing what is true and right theology … thinking, writing, speaking about God … and condemning what is wrong.
And Arius and Arian Christianity became a footnote to the history of the Church. There are no “Arian” churches anymore; so we might wonder “what’s the big deal” anyway?
Ah, but that’s looking back through modern eyes. Put on our 4th century specs and we’ll see how condemning Arius was crucial to the growth and spread of the Church. If Jesus didn’t, doesn’t fully represent God in all he does and says … then, why did he have to come anyway? Be born, live, be tempted, suffer, die, and be raised? Send the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Comforter, the Guide to keep and grow the Church after he went away, back, ascended to the Father?
What, indeed, would have been the point to all of that? If God didn’t, doesn’t live in relationship within God, then, why should people live in relationship with each other?
Why should we not instead just strive to be Godlike all by ourselves, without needing Jesus, and without the messy intrusion into our lives of other people, their needs and wants and problems just making it more difficult for us to “get to God?”
Ah. So now I hope you see the point … and why Arius is on the outside of orthodoxy … the outside of our “what we believe” circle.
Condemning Arius, Arian Christianity and “there was a time when Jesus was not” was precisely the right thing to do.
But have we gone too far in our pursuit of orthodoxy … right praise, right doctrine, right practice of our faith?
On this Holy Trinity Sunday, this is a good question for us to ask ourselves.
Especially we who tend toward considering and calling ourselves the “thinking” or “educated” churches … denominations, church bodies with educated clergy with degrees behind our names … having creedal, confessional and doctrinal statements which we used to organize and delineate our differences from each other.
Remember that the whole point behind this day, this Holy Trinity Sunday, and the theological concept behind it … God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit … was not to advance and proclaim a dust-dry theological concept … no, Holy Trinity Sunday serves as a reminder to us, that even as God is in relationship within God … a relationship, a dance of love if you will between Father, Son, and Spirit … so, too, we who are followers of this God – as we have seen and experienced him in Jesus Christ, God in the flesh … we are called to live in relationship with each other, and others, in this world God has created.
This is a peculiarly Christian concept of God.
Islam, Judaism, even Buddhism … they all advocate for their believers, followers, disciples to become Godlike themselves … having a full and complete relationship with God … but where they can fall short is in engaging in the messiness of creation … getting “down and dirty” in the lives of others.
Living, suffering, losing our lives … figuratively, or perhaps, actually, for the sake of others … living in the shadow of the cross, walking in the footsteps of Jesus. True strength through suffering. Victory through what the world calls defeat. God’s success in what the world calls failure. And abundant life through what the world sees as quite the opposite … serving, giving, proclaiming the Word about Jesus.
Holy Trinity Sunday serves to remind us that even as our God is messy … because life lived in relationship is inherently messy … so we too are called to live in the mess and grey-ness, the ambiguity of life … this life given to us by God, to live and share with each other.
So how well do we do that?
Holy Trinity Sunday gives us a great opportunity to take stock, as I did this past week.
And it seems to me that we who call ourselves “Church” have our own error-prone tendencies … denying the love-relationship within God, denying the necessary humanness of the birth, life, suffering and death of Jesus, failing to live into the words of our own creeds, even today.
To be overly simplistic, I see two extremes or “ditches” into which we can easily fall, as church, God’s people, the body of Christ, here and now.
This first … has to do with how much room we leave for ambiguity in our faith communities.
Do we believe … show, by our actions … that church is only for “a certain kind of person?”
How well do we welcome … the seeker? The doubter? Those who are struggling, going through hard times in life, problems in school or job, home or family; or simply having what Luther called “a crisis of faith?”
Are we welcoming to those whose lives or lifestyles don’t fit into the neat little “church box” we have created? Pristine, clean, Jesus for some but not for all?
It’s like that commercial that’s been airing on the radio lately about mental illness … two friends, discussing and deciding where to have lunch, when the one confides in the other that she’s just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder … and the other one just goes on talking about different lunch choices, ignoring her friend completely.
How much of a “friend” is that being, anyway?
We recall, rehear and remember that Jesus didn’t avoid the messiness of life. He engaged it, head on … not just hanging out with, no, seeking out those who were on the “outside” of the “nice religion” of their time … the poor, the sick, the widowed and orphaned, the depressed, the mourning, the questioning, those who had made poor choices in their past.
As Paul writes in today’s word to the Romans, “We also boast in our sufferings … suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
That’s because … the Holy Trinity …. God, Father, Son, Spirit … means that God is all about relationship. In the very heart of God … and pouring out of that heart, to encompass and envelope all of creation. Even us. Even us.
And Jesus … fully God, fully human … feeling in his body everything which we feel … joy, doubt, pain, suffering, dying … yet fully God, conquering death forever … Jesus, the way we know this Triune God, the way God – Father, Son, Spirit – puts flesh and bones on God’s love for us … Jesus reminds us that, even as God is all about living in relationship, so we, too, claimed by that same love, forgiven and given full, abundant life in that love … we are called to live in that kind of relationship with others, too.
Yes, it’s messy … not neat and boxed in, controlled and controlling … but it is the way of our God. Our Triune God … Father, Son, Spirit. The love-dancers who call us into their dance of love, to and for the sake of the world.
There is a second ditch … and it’s just as prevalent as the first. And this one may cut some of us a little too close for comfort.
We don’t have to look far to find it -- right there in our Psalm for today, Psalm 8.
That’s a wonderful hymn to creation … to God’s making it, and declaring it good … and then, our call to honor the Creator in our wonder and worship.
And of course, that’s all well and good. We are “duty bound” as Luther puts it in the Catechism, to honor God for giving us all these good things, for making the universe and all that is in it, for our benefit.
But … there can be a tendency to elevate our care for creation to a new law … and to believe, somehow, that in treating creation with the utmost care and respect, we are somehow ascending the ladder higher and higher to God … much higher, much faster, say, than those awful bad people out there who don’t “do as we do.”
Somehow, as we religiously recycle and drive our Priuses and condemn the big bad polluting corporations, we can feel like we’re drawing closer to God through all of that. One could say that a religion of political correctness has arisen among us.
Ah, but where’s Jesus in that? Where’s the place of human sinfulness? Where is the realization that, once you seek salvation through the Law of God, there is no stopping the demands of the law? I mean, many are condemning and boycotting a Certain Large Oil Company, but I don’t see very many, if any of us, cutting out our use of petrochemicals cold turkey … leaving our cars on the side of the road … quitting jobs at Boeing or Microsoft … eating only the stuff they, we can grow in our own yards … and taking up residence in grass covered yurts in the forest.
All have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God.
And that very sentence, it draws us back into relationship. Relationship with others who sin and fall short of God’s desire for us, just as we do, each and every one of us, each and every day of our lives. We are all called back into a posture, a lifestyle of repentance, where we leave the judging and condemning alone and instead focus on living lives of love and service to one another which are the result of the freedom Christ gives us in his complete and total forgiveness of our sins, speaking fully and completely as God, God For Us, as he says in our Gospel reading from John, “All that the Father has is mine.”
The Holy Trinity. Yes, it may be a complex theological concept … yes, it may have gotten Arius and his followers condemned for being “outside the circle of what we believe” … but we don’t need to be like Nicholas of Myra and keep hitting people upside the head with the backhand of orthodoxy and Law … right belief, and right practice.
All we need to remember … is that the Holy Trinity means God in relationship. God in relationship … in God … with us … and in us. Calling us to live lives which reflect God … in the world … through our service to others … in a posture of humility and repentance … confessing, being forgiven, going forth.
Coming together … hearing God’s Word … eating Christ’s meal … being sent in the Spirit to serve once again.
For our sake … for the sake of God’s creation … and for the sake of God … Father, Son, Spirit, God, Three-In-One, living and loving in that eternal love-dance which spills out into all of creation … into each of us.
Come … join the dance of Trinity.
Amen.
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