God – St. Michael's Church

June 7 2020

June 7, 2020 – Sermon and Service

Denise Butwill Sermons God, Reverend Dr. E. Bevan Stanley, Sermon, Trinity Sunday

Trinity Sunday
E. Bevan Stanley

June 7, 2020
Year A

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

From Genesis: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. In the name of the one, holy, and undivided Trinity. Amen.

Okay. I guess I really should say something about the Trinity. This after all Trinity Sunday.

For many people the idea of the Trinity just seems like unnecessary gobbledy-gook. And then to be expected to say you believe it is off-putting. In this time of COVID19 and the response to the killing of George Floyd, it may seem irrelevant to be focusing on the arcane doctrine of the Trinity. Is that not merely a flight from the difficult issues of the day? Or might thinking about the Trinity provide a context or lens through which we might see our current context more clearly?

As a definition or description of God, the Trinity is confusing. As a statement of belief, it is such an oversimplification that it is incredible. The problem is that it is often presented or perceived as a doctrine that one has to believe to be a Christian. If you can’t believe some part of it you may feel excluded or as lacking in integrity if you participate in Christian worship. Part of the problem is that the Trinity is often seen as deductive or top-down theology. In 1901 and 1902 William James gave the Gifford lectures, and these became his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. In that book he describes a lot of, you guessed it, varieties of religious experience. It was the first major effort to think about religion inductively, from the bottom up. Let’s collect a lot of stories about how people experience God and then see what that might tell us about religion or religious human beings.

I think the Trinity is better understood as the result of such an inductive process. Here is what I make of the Trinity:

People have all sorts of different experiences of God or of the divine or of the realm of the Spirit. Many people think of a Creator who made all things. This may also be a law giver or not, but at the very least this is an Originator, as Source. Maybe a parent.

Then people have experiences of being nudged by an unseen force. New ideas come into their minds that are not the result of the person’s own mental processes. Courage or energy or wisdom come to them far beyond their own capacities. Despite being self-centered, they suddenly are able to love. Despite an instinct for self-protection, they become brave. George Lucas captured this intuition in the idea of the Force in the Star Wars movies. This is the unseen breath of God, the Holy Spirit. By the way, in the Bible in both Hebrew and Greek the word for spirit is also the word for breath, and in Hebrew also “wind.” Furthermore, in Hebrew the word for God can also just mean “really big.” This means that the phrase “the Spirit of God” can also be translated:

The Wind of God

The Breath of God

A really big wind

A really big Breath

A really big Spirit.

Then there is Jesus. People who knew Jesus during his earthly ministry experienced him as a truly exceptional human being. When asked who the disciples thought he was, Peter blurted out that he was the Son of God.[1] He didn’t know what that meant then, but he was right. And after the Resurrection there was even more of a sense that when you are with Jesus, you are with God.

When you pile up all these different ways of experiencing God and you want to say there is only one God, then you find yourself saying that God is Source and Spirit and Jesus, and they are all one. In the culture and time when this summation occurred, the language that was natural was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Nowadays, many find that overly patriarchal. But all language about God is metaphorical, so any other names we may use will also be inadequate.

Christians also want to be clear that these are not merely aspects of God or different ways God seems to us. There are within God exchanges of love that are part of God’s essence. We want to avoid saying they are parts of God, or that there are three divine beings. We need to hold onto the idea that God is one, and yet God is complex. God is not a monad but a community, or better, a communion. In an effort to avoid saying all the things we don’t want to say we can tie ourselves up in theological knots.

Although the author of the first chapter of Genesis was certainly not a trinitarian Christian, we who are can discern in the very first verses of the Bible these different dimensions of the divine. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth . . Here is the god who creates all that is. This is the transcendent origin and maker of the universe. “ . . . the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” This is the Holy Spirit, the power of God operating inside the universe. “Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.” Here we have the Word of God, the expression of God, the mediation of God to the earth. Later, this Word that goes forth from God will take human form in Jesus of Nazareth. As the Gospel of John puts it, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God . . . The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

Of course it took Christians over three hundred years to actually nail this down to a teaching in the Nicene Creed, and even then not all Christian signed on. Again this is not a requirement to be a Christian. It is just a short hand summary of all our different experiences of God and the affirmation that in all these differing experiences of the divine it is the same single unite God loving us and inviting us into a relationship.

In our current situation of COVID19 and concerns about racist abuse of power, we believe that all this world is the creation of God and it is good. We believe that the courage of people working in essential jobs, caring for the sick, and fighting for justice is evidence of the Spirit of God, the Wind of God, and the Breath of God moving human beings to risk themselves for others. And we understand that in Jesus, who lived among us and experience human life first hand and human mortality, God shared our suffering, our fear, our hopes, and our uncertainty. God is with us in our humanity. And it is all the same one, holy, and undivided Trinity to whom we give glory, honor, and praise every day.

November 22 2019

November 10, 2019

Denise Butwill Sermons God, Relationships, Reverend Dr. E. Bevan Stanley, Sermons

The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost E. Bevan Stanley

November 10, 2019

Proper 27, Year C, RCL

Haggai 1:15b-2:9
Psalm 17:1-9
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38

Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to God all of them are alive. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

OK. So the Gospel reading we just heard has got to be one of the most puzzling ones there is. Let’s take a closer look and see what we can find that’s useful in it.

We will begin with the Sadducees. They are a group within the Judaism of Jesus’ day that focused their attention on the cultic practices of sacrifice in the Temple. They did not believe in the resurrection of the dead or in an afterlife. They come to Jesus to challenge him and propose a hypothetical case in an attempt to show how silly this idea of resurrection is. There is in the Mosaic Law the requirement that if a man dies without an heir, his brother is to marry the widow and produce heirs for the deceased. This had to do with managing the land allotments assigned to each family and at the same time made provision for the welfare of the widow who would otherwise be destitute. So the Sadducees make up this improbable case of a man with six brothers, who all die in sequence with the widow becoming the wife of each in turn. “So Jesus, in this resurrection you talk about whose wife will she be?” It is not a real question, but a rhetorical one to show that no one can be expected to believe in the resurrection.

Jesus responds in two different ways. First he states that marriage is a phenomenon of this world not the next. In the resurrection no one marries. “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.” Marriage in Jesus’ day and culture was a social construct in which the woman was regarded almost as property. This social construct was designed to make the inheritance of property tidy and orderly. It was not primarily about a live-giving and nurturing personal relationship. When the next world comes, or when we enter the next life, such social constructs will no longer be in effect nor be useful. In fact, since in the resurrection, no one dies, the question of inheritance or of passing on widows to brothers will not arise.

This response offer us a line of thought that can be challenging. If the institution of marriage is not important in the next life, what other institutions, allegiances, and duties may not matter either? What structures that we value for the stability and security they give us will we be asked to let go of in the next life? What Patterns and commitments that undergird our sense of identity will be irrelevant in the next life. In fact, who will I be when I be in that life when my family, career, and nationality no longer matter? Who will I be when I stand before God without all these marks of who I am? Who will I be when I stand before all the other people in the Kingdom, those beloved of me, those known, those unknown?

The second response is more to the point, for now Jesus, having parried the Sadducees attack, now ripostes with his own thrust. He now offers a text to show that the dead are raised. When God identifies Godself as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, God is referring to people who are alive, for God is the “God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”

Now you may find this use of the scriptural proof text a little weak. Still the point Jesus is making is important. The direction of the causality is significant here. We are not in a relationship with God because we are alive, and then if we die, we lose that relationship. Rather, we are alive because we are in a relationship with God, and because that relationship will never fail, death cannot hold us. “For to God all of them are alive.” To God all of us are alive.

So what will take home from these texts today? It is not that somehow we must crank up our conviction that the resurrection is true, that we have to believe a particular clause in the Creed. No. I think what Jesus is implying, is that if we have a vibrant personal relationship with God, then we will simply know that we shall see God, that we shall experience that life that is so rich and deep and full that we call it eternal, that we shall enter that mode of existence in which all artificial structures of relationship will be removed so that we can give and receive love as universally as God does.

Yesterday Alinda and I attended the memorial service of my uncle, Stan Davies. The service consisted mostly of remembrances given by ten of his children and grandchildren. They were all beautifully done and under three minutes. One of them comes to mind in this context. One of the grandsons recalled a time when he was visiting his grandparents in the summer at their farm. As they were sitting on the patio, the young man asked his grandfather what was the secret to a long and happy marriage. The older man did not answer. Then the lad’s grandmother appeared with a tray of iced tea. The grandfather looked up and saw his wife. He smiled and said to his grandson, “Pick the right girl.” So what is the secret to eternal life filled with love and joy? Pick the right God.

As is so often the case in life, it’s not about information, it’s about the relationship.

Amen.