Lost and Found: Sermon for Proper 19C, September 14, 2025

Parables of the Lost Coin and the Lost Sheep, Gary Roulette, 2013

Does God change God's mind?

There are those who claim God does not-- that God has already foreordained everything that happens-- and they often voice this idea, almost without thinking about what they are saying-- at the most inopportune times, such as when a calamity has occurred. "It's God's will," they will say, and sure, for some, that provides comfort. But I heard someone say that at a funeral for a toddler who had died in surgery. The parent erupted with a quiet fury and grief. "I don't believe in a God who would do such a thing." And I told him when we talked later that I didn't believe in that God either.

People who believe that God never changes God's mind also have a tendency to believe that God has already decided who is going to Heaven and who is going to Hell-- even before those people are born. To most of us, this exposes the enormous flaw in their thinking. First how can they discount the dozens of incidents in scripture and in experience when God is shown to be seeking us out, since God always initiates revelation?

Then there's this: If God already knows if we are going to be believers and disciples or stumbling blocks and unrepentant doers of evil, then what is the point of our lives? And frankly, is there really any need for God at all? Is there any sign of God's love, God's grace, or God's mercy if God can set in motion the eternal torment of millions of people without care? Is it any wonder that so many people have turned away from this very common depiction of God?

No. The foundational characteristic of God is love and care, seeking relationship with us, and seeking our flourishing. The intricate abundance of creation itself is testament to that. Stories like the one we hear in our reading from the Book of Exodus makes it clear that God does indeed change God's mind-- and also provides evidence that God has NOT foreordained everything that happens. It also implies that intercessory prayers are not just a waste of breath, as Moses pleads for his stubborn, and spiritually lazy, people. God does NOT, actually, lead us into temptation-- we can find it on our own, thank you very much. We humans have got it favorited in our spiritual GPS.

This is a word I think many of us desperately need to hear after a week from Hell, here in America. Wednesday, September 10 saw a heinous, repugnant, targeted assassination of a far right political activist, Charlie Kirk, on the campus of a university in one of the most conservative areas in Utah. It was a profoundly unAmerican and evil act. Jesus instructed us to pray for our enemies and those who hate us. Not deprive them of life.

That was bad enough. But consider that before that vile incident, there were 31 incidents of gun violence already that day, which resulted in 11 deaths and 21 injuries. After the assassination, there was another 27 incidents of gun violence all across this nation, with 9 dead and 22 injured. These numbers include an incident in St. Louis in which a 15-year-old was shot and injured at a McDonalds, and a ten year old child was shot and injured in his own bedroom when someone sprayed his apartment complex with more than 40 rounds in St. Joseph. These numbers exclude those killed by police without shooting anyone, of which there were 8 incidents and 8 deaths.

On a single day, 67 gun violence incidents, resulting in 29 deaths and 42 injured. And since 2022 firearms have been the number one cause of death in children ages 1-19. More than car crashes. More than cancer. And yet the elected leadership of this country lacks the will to act to reduce this scourge of gun violence, and we do not hold them accountable for it.

Did God foreordain or "allow" these things to happen? Of course not. In every case, human beings made the choice to buy a gun, pull a trigger, often multiple times, and attempt to take a life.

The stories from Exodus, and our Gospel, show a God who is deeply invested in God's relationship with God's people. A God deeply involved in human flourishing. A God who is affected when we choose to worship our own wills, when we set ourselves in the place of God, thinking we should have the power of life and death over other persons. A God who knew that those around the Israelites who worshipped human-made idols usually appeased those idols with acts of cruelty, even human sacrifice.

Trying to imitate those around them, the Israelites had made for themselves a golden calf, made by their own hands from their own golden jewelry and plate. They then claimed that that calf was God-- a God they could reduce into a small statue, a God they thought they could contain. A God who could be ignored most of the time while they did what they wanted. They worshipped a God of their own making. And that is always the danger, then or now. For far too many in this country, guns are a golden calf, and they are worshipped above human life.

No human-made system, no tool, no possession should be placed over our love and obedience to God, to the debt of forgiveness and mercy we owe God. Placed side-by-side, these two readings remind us to place our relationship with God first in our lives, and to make our relationships with each other centered around restoring the lost and the vulnerable to their place within our community, and being willing to sacrifice ourselves to do that.

God can change God's mind, and God calls us to change our hearts, especially our inaction in the face of violence, dehumanization, and exploitation of others.

Being a disciple means getting our priorities, and our hearts and wills, aligned with those of God: "thy kingdom come, thy will be done," we will pray soon. Love of God, and obedience to God's will for us to truly love each other, are to take priority over self-centeredness and estrangement. We are never to substitute the works of our hands or the systems we've devised as objects of worship in place of God, not economic theories, not money, not power, not tools or weapons, not tribalism, not our own delusions of grandeur and invincibility nor our fears and insecurities over the love and lordship of God in our lives.

Our gospel poses an important question for all of us: what is the value of a person, a single living, breathing human soul? What should we be willing to risk or to spend or regulate to prevent the loss of innocent life, or to reclaim those who have turned away from God's command that we love each other and instead worship one of the many modern idols like guns, or political power, or wealth, or prejudice, or contempt for creation? How can we truly take these questions seriously, and how might it affect our views on violence, on justice, on respecting the dignity and worth of every person?

Our gospel indeed insists that God does not, in fact, will anyone to be lost, anyone to be forsaken, and God will exert every effort into calling us back when we have turned aside and wandered off, or worshipped other things. Instead God is portrayed as a shepherd who leaves the 99 behind to go find the one who is lost. God is also portrayed as a woman who searches unceasingly for a single lost coin.

And so the emotional arc of today's readings shifts from rejection by the Israelites, anger by God, pleading by Moses, grumbling by the critics of Jesus, to God and the heavens rejoicing. Rejoicing, because Jesus, the Son of God, exemplifies the life of faith as one that reaches out to the lost, standing up for the vulnerable and oppressed, even to the point of self-sacrifice. That is the path of a disciple and believer in the peace he preached and the path he called us to follow.

Our communities, and our nation, are in crisis. We are in crisis because we have rejected the love that is at the center of human flourishing. We were made for God, and we were made for each other. The love and interdependence that sustains us, and all creation, requires us to melt down the golden calves that we've built, and instead recover our own humanity and will to stand together. Let us pray for that revival within ourselves. Pray, yes, for the strength to ACT-- then act to live our faith boldly and for the blessing and well-being of us all, friend or foe, saint or sinner, in the name of love, and in the name of our Savior.

Amen.

Readings:

Exodus 32:7-14
Psalm 51:1-11
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15:1-10

Preached at the 505 on September 13 and the 10:30 Eucharist on September 14, 2025 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Ellisville.

The Momentum of Love-- Sermon for Proper 18C, September 7, 2025

    

There's a sweet little video making the rounds right now. About a month ago, at the halftime for a WNBA game in Las Vegas, the team held a baby crawl race. Ten babies were lined up by their dads on one end of the court on the top of the key, and encouraged to crawl to their moms on the other end of the court. It was NOT a short distance. One little girl really took off, crawling steadily and with great concentration.

Just past midcourt, she suddenly stopped, scooping up one of the stuffed animals that were being slid onto the court as incentives. How could she continue, and keep the toy? In an amazing bit of problem-solving, she then stood up wobbily clutching the stuffie, and took her first little steps for all the world to see. The crowd went wild, and even the other mothers nearby celebrated as she hesitatingly but unfailingly walked into her mama's ecstatic arms.

I think about how determined that baby was--- to stand up on a slick basketball court in her stocking feet, while people all around her were cheering, clapping and screaming, flashes going off all around her-- and then she walked all the rest of the way. She was willing to take those first steps certain of her mom's loving embrace at the end. 

I think she was propelled by the momentum of love. Now she's internet famous, and she has brightened the days of millions of people who have watched the video. This kid is a risk taker, no doubt about it.

Our readings from Philemon and Luke are also about taking risks, and taking our first steps for living out our call to be disciples of Jesus, rather than mere worshipers of him, no matter the cost.

The brief letter to Philemon is notable, because in it, Paul demands, while pretending to ask, that one of his wealthy converts, Philemon, free an enslaved young man who had run away from Philemon and made his way to Paul, imprisoned at the time. Paul not only asks for the freedom of the slave, but asks that Philemon henceforth treat the formerly enslaved young man as a brother. At that time in the Roman world, slaves cost between one year and ten years' worth of the daily wage, a denarii.

Then in our gospel, Jesus, turning his face toward Jerusalem, tries to let the enthusiastic crowd following him know what the risks and costs of discipleship can be. The word "hate" here may be better translated as "turn aside from." This may sound harsh indeed.

The admonition to deny ourselves and take up our cross to follow Jesus is just as scary to us as it was in the time of Jesus’s earthly ministry. The idea that we have to be willing to suffer for our faith seems especially harsh here, too, especially after we have been hearing some harsh words from Jesus the last few weeks.

How can this be good news? It may sound to us at first glance like Jesus is telling us to be willing to throw our lives away—after all, the cross was a symbol of criminality and death. Trust me, to Jesus’s followers, crucifixion was no empty metaphor.

After all, the cross, when Jesus speaks of it in our gospel passage today, was a ROMAN execution method used for those who threatened their death-grip on power. It stood for brutality. It stood for the power of empire to crush and literally squeeze the breath out of those who opposed that power of domination and brutality. How can it be that, in too many people's minds today, they cynically and hypocritically claims that the gold crosses they wear around their necks gives them the power to do the same thing to others?

Theologians from Paul up through today remind us that, after Jesus's execution and resurrection, the cross has been transformed from a symbol of shame to a symbol of the victory of love over death, thanks to Jesus’s willingness to embrace it. That cross has been transformed into a symbol of God’s grace-- and we as Christians must be willing to fight to keep it that way, rather than let it be transformed into a symbol of those who embrace the cruelty and violence of the Roman Empire among us now, just as the Ku Klux Klan attempted to pervert the cross in its campaigns of terror.

And that’s important for us to think about as we try to make sense of what Jesus is saying. Jesus is not asking us to embrace death, but instead, to truly embrace a life grounded in God, who loves us no matter what. To be willing to sacrifice, and in sacrificing, to strive to trust in God completely-- which is an aspiration for us all, given the cynical, even cruel world in which we live that makes us mistrustful of almost everyone and their motives. Jesus is asking us to be willing to use our God-given lives for the good of others and for the good of the world. As we begin today to observe the Season of Creation,

Deep in our hearts, many of us have a hard time believing that God’s love is that limitless for us. It is a fact that every love we experience in our lives changes us in some way. Choosing to embrace God’s love for us will change us, too.

Now, change can be a scary thing. It’s scary, because any real change in our lives involves embracing a death of our former selves- letting go of all that is familiar to us, that made us who we have been in the hope that we will become something better.

It’s like when we went to the circus when we were kids. I was always fascinated by the trapeze artists. Sure, there was a net stretched below them. But even with that, I was always amazed by their willingness to let go of the first trapeze, and for several heart-stopping moments to be clinging to nothing at all as they tumbled through the air. There was always a moment when their hands were empty, with nothing but a net far below. But through trust in the laws of physics and their own skills, they have the courage to let go-- and are rewarded with the ability to fly.

Our own lives are often just as risky at times too. We move from one swinging perch to another throughout our lives, as we develop and grow. In between the letting go and the grasping, there are those heart-stopping moments when we are holding on to nothing. But without the momentum of love, without opening our hands, we have no way to grasp the new life-change coming toward us. This is also true of our lives as followers of Jesus. Unless we empty our heads, hands, and our hearts in a similar manner, letting go and emptying ourselves of all that has tied us to the way we have been and the way we were, we cannot take hold of the abundant new life to which we are called through the loving voice of Christ.

Listen. We are given the gift of each day from God. We are given the abundance of the Earth for our flourishing, and for the flourishing of all the living beings who depend upon it. We are given the gift of this parish and its ministries as gifts of God to us and to the world. Caring for each of these things will cost us, but it's a cost worth paying.

Jesus calls us to use each one of those days as much as possible making the most of that life by living our lives for God and for others. It means that the only life worth living is one in which we are willing to be transformed by the power of God’s grace to live for others.

Jesus stretched his arms wide upon that cross as God Incarnate to remind us that God’s arms are themselves stretched wide to encompass the entire world—no exceptions. Jesus stretched his arms wide upon that cross as a fully human person to remind us that we are all capable of loving each other that much, that abundantly. God loves us into being and breathes love into us from the moment of our births, and we are called to try to breathe that love and grace into a world that, through our own human folly and selfishness, is gasping for it. We just have to be willing to take the risk of love, and take that first step onto the path of discipleship, without fear and with an open sacrificial spirit. The momentum of love will propel us forward.

Amen.



Readings:
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 1
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33

Preached at the 505 on September 6 and the 10:30 Holy Eucharist on September 7, 2025 at St. Martin's Church in Ellisville.

God's Concerto: Sermon for Easter 6B

This weekend, Bill and I were able to hear Yo-Yo Ma perform live with the St. Louis Symphony. Together, they gave a stirring performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor. Bill and I and hundreds of others in the audience sat enthralled as we watched the master cellist bring to life the beauty of this musical composition. Because this was a special, gala performance, Bill and I were not in our usual seats, in the second row right in front of the cello section, which is my favorite spot, as someone who played cello starting in 4th grade, through youth symphony and a college music scholarship myself. Instead we were all the way over on the very edge of the fifth row at the rear of the first violin section.

But no matter. Perhaps this was even a blessing, since if I had been sitting right in front of the great master, I might not have been able to take my eyes off Mr. Ma to perceive the entire experience. There were moments I could even close my eyes and focus on the skillful weaving of sound and silence, of melody and harmony, of soloist and ensemble, of individual sound and combined chords that is music.

We humans seem driven to break things down into their constituent parts. And that is natural—that’s the way we learn how some things happen, and gives us an appreciation for even the smallest of things. And at first, my attention flitted from one sensory detail to another.

From my vantage point, my lack of ability to focus on the great Yo-Yo Ma visually, allowed me to experience a profound truth: the performance of a concerto, or any piece of music, is never about just one thing. Music starts with sounds—and silences. It is timeless yet held together logically in each specific moment. In between those sounds and silences there are sounds that are fortissimo, and sounds that are so soft you miss them. There’s the great master, playing the melody on his cello—and then that melody is handed off or harmonized or even held in opposition by the players of other instruments in the orchestra and the appreciation of the audience. 

Every single person on that stage is vitally important for the piece to flower into its fullest potential beauty—and since this is a world-renowned orchestra, everyone from the concertmaster to the last chair of the second violins to the lowly timpani player who spends 95% of his time counting silently are in their own rights incredible at their instruments and contributors to the whole. All this is held together by the depths of knowledge and the sensitivity of the conductor, who is himself actually being led by the soloist and his interpretation of the piece. Each performer is also a listener, responding to those around them. The production of the piece of music is collaborative, unified, organic, bound within a set duration of rhythm and time yet transcending those limitations to lodge in the imagination of all who receive the gift of that music.

We see the same truth from observing the soloist himself. He holds against his body a hollow wooden box, upon which wires have been fastened and tightened in specific ways. The length of those wires has been expanded by the addition of a stick upon which the strings can be shortened through pressure upon them at specific places along the stick. The great soloist pulls sound from that box through the use of his fingers, a bow made of wood and horsehair made grippy with cured tree sap. But the precise placement of the hands—perfected through thousands of hours of practice, produces nothing without the strength of the arms, the firm planting of the feet and gripping by the knees, yes, as well as the prodigious memory (for he used no sheet music for either his performance nor for his encore), but also, most importantly, with each breath and beat of his heart. 

Yet the training and control of the gift of his body is not enough, for—and this is clear with such a great artist as Yo-Yo Ma—the very beauty of his spirit and soul are just as much engaged in the depth and richness of the music he makes: his humanity, his generosity, his activism in the promotion of understanding between cultures and world peace. This humanitarianism is evident in the choice of this concerto, which itself was created by the composer as a plea for peace after the horrors and aftermath of World War I. Yet even if we are unfamiliar with the context of the particular piece of music being performed, as we attend carefully to the swirl of sound around us we begin to make sense of it, to discern certain phrases or themes that get repeated, and that expand through variation and expansion to form the whole, just as a vine is inseparable from branches, just as the wave is inseparable from the ocean.

What if we applied this organic understanding as appreciators of music as a metaphor for our common life together—our common life together, that itself makes music possible? Then the sounds and the silences produced in those brief moments on Friday night become holy reminders of God’s image in all of us, of the wonders of the human soul and imagination in seeking to create things of beauty like concertos and believing that the sounds and silences in music can actually call us to contemplate our mutual humanity and our place within the web of creation. 

The same hands that drew music from their respective instruments were being employed in the cause of beauty and peace, rather than division or hatred, as is implied in today’s psalm that insists that creation is joined in a concerto of praise and love for and by God. And the magic is, even though music works in partnership with time, even though it has a beginning in time and an ending in time, the beauty and sensation the music produces lingers long after the last note has faded away. All works together for the sake of the whole, and in so doing, becomes far greater than the sum of any of that concerto’s constituent parts.

It is, my friends, the same thing with our lives together in this world. Perhaps you have been sitting here wondering about why this preacher is droning on and on about a classical music performance and engaging in flights of fancy making everything perhaps more complicated than it has to be. Perhaps you have been sitting here during the last few minutes looking at the readings for this Sunday and wondering how many MORE times we can hear the word “love” repeated as often as the notes in a concerto during our readings? I mean what is this-- week three already of hearing the word “love” ricochet throughout the week’s chosen passages? Isn’t this constant harping on this theme indicative of a profound lack of imagination on the part of the lectionary developers and the authors of our scripture passages?

It is at this point I want to urge ourselves to step back a bit from the atomistic dismissal or cheapening by repetition of that word “love.” With our hearts, let us look to the whole, instead. Let us be led to begin to recognize the wonder and glory of the beating heart of the gospel that has been being presented to us by the various passages we have been reading and hearing not just in this season of Easter but throughout the scope of our lives as human beings and disciples and members of the ensemble of creation, if we attend properly. 

These last weeks we have been being presented with the core theme of the ministry of Jesus upon this Earth—a ministry that seeks to reveal to us who God is, and, getting a small glimpse of that, who that then makes us? Jesus became incarnate and lived and worked and healed and especially LOVED in order to get us to lift our eyes from our own narrow perceptions and divisions to instead focus on something as richly profound as the beauty, the glory, the unity of our existence. There is a beautiful theme or melody running through our lives that we are often too fragmented, too distracted, and yes, too afraid to acknowledge unless we do have it repetitively placed before us, over and over again.

That word “love” is a single note in the concerto that has been shot through the universe since God originally sang all that is into being.  Our psalm for today begins with the command, "Sing to the Lord a new song, for god has done marvelous things." Yes we are called to sing just as God sings – God sings this universe, this planet, this human family and all that lives and moves into being with the same lyricism and joy in the creative act that we get a glimpse of in the face of a musician who is a master at their craft. Moving from the parts to the whole of the gospel, and perceiving it organically as we seek to perceive any work of art or music leads us to one theme that rings out repeatedly, handed off and shared in the various genres of scripture—in stories, in analogies, in prophecies, in proverbs and parables, in poems and songs, and in bald-faced statements.

We may think that the end and purpose of religion, of being religious, is to love God. And some people emphasize what they describe as the “loving God” part so that they can somehow de-emphasize the loving each other part. Like that is less-than. Like that can be separated from the melody and theme of our existence as beloved children of God made in God’s image. But God insists that the way we love God best is to love one another.

We may look at the imperative of the gospel, and desperately try to find the limits of the demands God places on us through love. We may want to slice and dice and divide things into parts, or worse, “sides” that are in competition with each other. 

But the life of faith calls us into the truth of the Mobius strip that I used in the children's message a few moments ago. The Mobius strip shows that the two loves we are called to embody-- love of God and love of each other-- is actually ONE love. Trace your finger around a Mobius strip, and you see the two "sides" are all one continuous loop.

There is neither beginning or ending for God’s love for us, and we are called and created to love as God loves. Like a Mobius strip, in the faithful performance of our lives lived in concert with God and each other there really aren’t two sides of existence, the worldly and the spiritual, the sacred and profane, the Godly and the human, that compete with each other. There is just ONE side that flows together infinitely. There is one melody that binds all existence together, and calls us all to play our parts mindfully, intentionally, and collaboratively, understanding that we are all part of the whole, conducted by God.

God IS love, our readings insist again. God is relational. There is no personal love of God without lending your heart, your body, your very essence to The theme, the melody, is this: “love one another.” That commandment is repeated more than any other in scripture. It repeats in those specific words, that boldly and that insistently, fourteen times between the gospel of John and the letters of John. And when we take a step back, we see Jesus insistently MODELLING that commandment in all the spaces and actions in between. Love one another. Love one another. Love one another. Love one another. Love one another.

Love one another when they are similar to you. Love one another if they are wildly different from you. Love one another whether you judge them worthy or not. Love one another in words, but love one another in action. Love one another loudly when the world seeks to silence love, and love each other in the silences and the gaps when all that comes at us tries to drown out this thread, this melody that holds all things together. Love one another when it costs you nothing, but love one another even when it means laying down your life for another.

We humans are certainly driven to break things down into their constituent parts. We get too caught up in breaking things down into sides. Once again, this is how we try to make sense of all the data and sensation coming at us. But when we use that breaking down of things from the whole to the part in order to place limits on this foundational obligation in the life of faith we reduce the beauty of God’s love within us into discordant notes and cacophony, rather than the demandingly beautiful coherence and unity of playing our parts within God’s concerto of creation.

Readings:

Acts 10:44-48

Psalm 98

1 John 5:1-6

John 15:9-17

Preached at at 505 on May 4, 2024 and the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist on May 5, 2024 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville.

The World According to God: Sermon for Lent 4B

Today’s gospel brings to mind two distinct memories from my childhood. One is seeing somebody sitting in every end zone on Saturday and Sunday and Monday nights, holding up a sign that said simply “John 3:16.” 

I am sure it inspired many people to either nod their heads knowingly, or maybe to have enough curiosity to finds out what that sign referred to. Nowadays it would be as simple as pulling out your phone and using a search engine. But certainly some people looked up that verse, and were intrigued. Those that were destined to be Episcopalians would then look over the entire section of at least John 3:1-21, knowing that a few words—in this case 27 words—pulled out of an enormous book will lack a certain contextual depth and precision. Those are OUR PEOPLE!

Especially with this famous verse, context is vital. If you just stick with those 27 words, following Jesus is simply a matter of assent, a magical formula like abracadabra, a spiritual get-out-of-jail free card. But it’s not—assent is required, and commitment to not just saying some words, but living and loving like Jesus, who embodied God’s love in human likeness to be a model for our lives.

For many, this verse is a full and complete summary of the gospel. Martin Luther summarized this verse like this: “For the world has me; I am its God.”

But I think the next verse is just as important. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

God so loved the world, the world God made through speaking God’s wisdom into the world, that God sent God’s beloved Word to be incarnate—to take on human flesh to show us all how to be fully human and fully God’s children. Jesus is the embodiment of God’s wisdom in the world. Wisdom that can be lived in our own human lives-- if only we choose to follow.

That brings me to the second of my childhood memories, in the sweet little Methodist Church in which I was born and baptized, and that we attended until I was five. At Southern Hills Methodist Church, I remember singing this lovely hymn that so engaged my heart’s certainties, because it described the world according to God:

This is my Father's world, and to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.
This is my Father's world: I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas; His hand the wonders wrought.

This is my Father's world; the birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white, declare their maker's praise.
This is my Father's world, He shines in all that's fair;
In the rustling grass I hear Him pass; He speaks to me everywhere.

This is my Father's world. O let me ne'er forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.
This is my Father's world: why should my heart be sad?
The Lord is King; let the heavens ring! God reigns; let the earth be glad! (1)

My own experience even as a very small child resonated so strongly with this hymn. Sharing the same sense of wonder and awe out in nature, delighting in the elephantine clouds slowly processing overhead down to the busy industry of ants moving among the moss on the north side of a tree, a tiny world humming with life beneath our feet, often too small to notice. I knew that God loves this world from clouds to ants to you and me, and made it a source of awe and wonder. I resolved never to lose that wonder—especially when things were hard. The signs of God’s love are shot through creation—and in our yearning hearts.

The message we hear in John’s gospel and in our Psalm is one of wonder and awe and gratitude, yes. But it is also a reminder that the Church goes astray when it puts limits on who God loves and who God does not. Our gospel also makes it clear that merely saying you believe in Jesus as a hedge against condemnation means nothing. Believing in Jesus means following Jesus in embodying that love into the world-- each of us.

Our first reading can lead us down a rabbit hole, with all its talk about God loosing poisonous snakes upon his maddeningly complaining people during the wanderings and discontent in the desert--unless we know the background behind it. The Priestly writers telling of this event is meant to support their belief that God smites and condemns those whose faith falters. Notice that Jesus does not repeat this belief in his referencing to that same event—he only talks about the cure. This aligns with his claim that God seeks always to save and redeem the world we have mangled through our own short-sightedness. Never to condemn it or all the living things who share this planet with us.

Last week we heard Jesus compare his body to the Temple, and we were reminded that God blessed and sanctified us in our bodies, too. In taking on our flesh, our human life, God continues to tear down the walls WE build to separate ourselves from God, and to remind us that God lives and loves within each of us right now, and through Jesus God keeps reaching over those walls and pulling us all over the top and never giving up on us.

In today’s readings, we hear about the blessings of light, of healing, and especially of love.

Light and darkness are important signs or symbols in John’s gospel, which makes sense, because they are important symbols to us. Our gospel today starts in the middle of Jesus’s conversation in the middle of the night, in the darkness, with a Pharisee named Nicodemus. Nicodemus comes in the night also because he lacks true understanding of who Jesus is, but at least he is straining toward the light.

When Nicodemus first approaches Jesus, in verses we don’t get to hear to help us understand the context, it is clear that Nicodemus is drawn to Jesus. Nicodemus is beginning to be drawn to the light of Christ, for at that start of chapter 3, he states: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who is coming from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” As a Pharisee and yet a seeker, Nicodemus is a man torn between two worlds, just as the church members in Ephesus were, and frankly much like many of us are.

Jest before our reading, Jesus tells Nicodemus he must be born again, which Nicodemus rightfully does not understand. Yet thinking about being born to a new life in Christ is a fruitful metaphor. We are born with an abiding hunger for connection, and for meaning even from the time we are infants. Babies want to be embraced, and they want to be fed. God helps this along by making babies helpless and also adorable, which goes a long way toward making up for the smell. With our poor eyesight, as infants we experience the world mostly through out hearts, and our bellies. Babies get anxious when either of these are not full—and I am persuaded that frankly, those feelings of hunger, especially spiritual hunger, remains one of the driving forces in our lives—one that we ignore or misuse at our peril.

Our own hunger for God within us brings us to this point, and calls us to repentance, to change. That change is scary. It means letting go of the familiar. But what will we gain? Only the certainty that we, and this whole world, are beloved by God.

How are our lives changed when we embrace Jesus as Savior? In our epistle, Paul states here that it is the difference between death… and life. We are asked to embrace our brokenness, and allow the light of Christ to wash over it. The world according to God is filled with reconciliation, discernment, self-honesty, and abundant beauty and grace. Paul’s words attest to the abundance of God’s love—abundant beyond our imagining, especially.

And here we see the blessing of healing that runs through all our readings, as well. Living as one of us, and dying as one of us, Christ in particular can reach into the shattered places in our spirits, and restore us from the shadow world in which we have lived into newness of life. Sometimes those wounds we bear were inflicted on us. Yet, other times, our own choices have wounded us. But God is always there.

Eternal life starts right now. It starts with understanding ourselves as living—right now-- in the presence of God. Right where we are. God loved us in this way, that God gave us God’s only Son. And why? So that NO ONE feels hungry, or empty, or lost—so that everyone can have a whole and lasting life. That Son didn’t come into the world to condemn us, but to save us, and remind us of who we are: Beloveds of a God who loves us and longs for us so much that God continually reaches out to us, asking us to align ourselves with God’s economy of abundance, grace, and peace.

The world according to God is one of grace, not condemnation. And as God’s Beloveds, we are called to bear God’s light into the world. The world that God so loves.




(1) Maltbie Davenport Babcock (1858-1901), American clergyman, poet, and hymn writer, “This is My Father’s World.” From the United Methodist Hymnal, 144.

Image: The famous "Big Blue Marble" photograph taken by the Apollo 17 crew on December 7, 1972 as the crew traveled toward the moon. This was the first photo of Earth that showed the southern polar ice cap. Image credit: NASA.

Readings:

Numbers 21:4-9

Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

Ephesians 2:1-10

John 3:14-21

Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, on March 9-10, 2024, the Fourth Sunday in Lent.

A Case for Love: Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Epiphany (Annual Meeting)

This last Tuesday, some of us throughout the diocese and all around the country attended the theatrical premiere of a documentary entitled A Case for Love(1), which examined the teachings of our own Presiding Bishop Michael Curry on the Christian call to live lives centered on what he calls “The Way of Love.”

The documentary included a handful of vignettes of ordinary people who have been transformed by the power of love—both of receiving it from others, and offering it to those they have encountered in the course of their lives. Stories included people who have fostered and adopted traumatized children; women who have been supported in leaving lives of crime and violence on the streets through the work of Thistle Farms around the country; soldiers and Marines dealing with trauma and healing it in the lives of so many; a family who had their eyes opened to racism and its effects after adopting—and later losing to cancer—a child with a different ethnicity, and more.

One story in particular which filled the heart was from Bishop Curry’s own childhood, as he grew up himself the child of an Episcopal priest. He introduced us to a pivotal figure from his own life named Josie Robbins. Ms. Robbins wasn’t even a member of the Curry family’s parish; she dropped off one of her neighbor’s children there on her way to her own Baptist church. But she heard of the pastor struggling to take care of two small children with his wife fighting cancer in a hospital miles from their home, and asked what she could do. 

Overwhelmed, he asked if she could iron a room full of clothes—they covered two twin beds in a spare room-- that he had been able to launder but not finish while juggling all his duties as priest, father, and husband. The children we told to leave her alone and remain upstairs while she lovingly worked on this task.

Then one day, Bishop Curry’s father was running late and asked if she could make the children lunch, to which she graciously agreed. She later remarked that after that lunch, young Michael pulled up a chair in the doorway and started talking to her until the moment she left for the day, and for every day afterward.

Josie Robbins was there for the Curry family when Michael’s mother later succumbed to cancer. Josie Robbins soon was taking the children to the drug store to see the parakeets and hamsters, just as they Mommy had done. She attended every recital, every graduation, every celebration. Here was a stranger who saw two children under the age of 8 and a devoted young husband who were losing their mother and their wife to a terrible disease. 

“Josie Robins is what love looks like,” Bishop Curry later recounted in his book Love Is The Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times. Through Josie Robins, love embodied in action arrived to help iron the laundry of a family in crisis, and stepped into Bishop Curry’s life as a mother figure for the rest of his life, and she remains so even to this very day (2).

In the trailer for the movie, Presiding Bishop Curry’s prophetic voice comes to us, saying: “We were made for each other, and I believe we were also made for the God who made us. And that’s the ultimate community: all of us together and the God who made us.”

In our reading from 1st Corinthians this Sunday, we have the question of whether it is lawful for Christians to eat food that has been sacrificed to idols. What’s interesting is the way that Paul frames this discussion. In vv. 1-3, which we do not get to hear in our reading, Paul starts with a discussion of which is greater: knowledge or love. 

It reminds me of a question I used to ask my middle schoolers: If you could only be one thing, would you rather be the smartest kid in school, or the kindest? It was always an interesting discussion, and often the first time they had had a discussion about values. And basically, Paul comes down with something that many of my students stated: being truly loving can have more of an impact than self-serving knowledge. The question comes down to being inwardly or outwardly focused.

The Corinthians lay out a logical argument about why, since the Greek gods do not really exist, it is permissible to eat meat from Greek temples. But Paul asks them to consider the greater good: what happens to those who SEE Christians openly eating meat sacrificed to idols? Might this lead people astray by appearing to still engage in the ways of the pagan world around them. Christian are, after all, called to live a life different, a life that even in commonplace things demonstrates their allegiance to God, not the world around them.

Paul points out that knowledge is rooted too often in the self, while love only exists in community, and love must be in a community to build it up. But love always comes first, both in time and as a priority in our relationships with God and with each other. Paul argues that even if what we do is legal, if it causes another to be led astray, the demand of love must take precedence. Could it be that the Corinthians—many of them former pagans by default cultural practice—might be unwilling to really change their lives that much even while claiming to follow Christ?

But that is a question for us as well: how much are we really willing to change in order to live out the values of Jesus in our everyday lives? And yet, by calling ourselves Christians, how we live and love—or not—is a profound testimony to the rest of the world.

We live in a world that does NOT prioritize real, self-giving love.
Yet that is exactly the main ethical demand God calls us to live by as Christians.

To live not in fear, or by vengeance, or by indifference to the suffering of others—but to live by love. Jesus calls us into community—parish, diocese, denomination, or as the universal Body of Christ, to remind us that love always comes first—from God to us, and from us to the hurting world in which we live.

A Case for Love aligns perfectly with Paul’s argument, which was Jesus’s as well, that sometimes love calls us to a higher standard than knowledge and logic alone. Knowledge may be good, but LOVE as an act of the will and freedom in the world is most important. 

As we open our parish annual meeting for this year, I invite you to consider all the ways that St. Martin’s exists not just as a community for its members—but as a sign of Christ’s love in the world. There is much to celebrate here—and everything that we do in love is ONLY possible through each and every person here. How do we all make a case for love—the love of God and love of each other—in our own lives each and every moment? And how can we continue to grow that in the days and months and years ahead?

At the end of watching A Case for Love, each viewer was challenged to engage in a thirty day challenge. We were directed to a companion website, where there are supplemental materials for deepening our engagement from being merely spectators watching a documentary to following in the footsteps of those ordinary people who were featured in the film. There is a journal for engaging for thirty days in doing one selfless act of love and recording it and reflecting upon it each day. 

I hope you will join me in starting this challenge as part of your Lenten devotion starting on Ash Wednesday--- even if you didn’t see the documentary. We will discuss this in a later adult forum. But for now, let us consider the way St. Martin’s parish, through YOUR actions and support, makes a case for love in the world every single day.

Amen.

Preached at the 9:00 Holy Eucharist and Annual Meeting 2024 for St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

Psalm 111

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

Mark 1:21-28

Citations:

1) A Case for Love, documentary film by Grace Based Films, 2024.

2) Michael Bruce Curry, Love Is The Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times, 13.

The Wisdom of Love: Sermon for Proper 9A

I am pretty certain that, if you don’t remember hearing them and studying them before, the readings we just heard may have you a bit mystified. Our gospel itself is puzzling—except maybe for the last bit which at least offers some hope. But if you look closer, our readings today are about two things: the wisdom of God, and the love of God. Scratch that—it’s all actually one thing. God’s wisdom IS God’s love- love which ignores human expectations or limits.

Today’s passage from the prophet Zechariah might ring a bell. It predicts that the Messiah will enter Zion, or Jerusalem, riding on a donkey’s colt—and if you think back to Palm Sunday, that is exactly what Jesus did as he triumphantly entered the city to the waving of palm branches and shouts of “Hosanna!” Anyone hearing that in Zachariah’s time would have considered a leader doing such a thing to be incredibly foolish—it’s like someone trying to race in a Formula 1 event while driving a minivan. Great leaders should ride impressive animals—not donkeys.

This detail, though, has an important purpose: the reign of this Messiah will not be based on military strength, one where “might makes right.” Instead, his humility reveals God’s wisdom and values: that prisoners will be set free, and that hopes will be fulfilled rather than lying empty and unfulfilled. This God does not seek dominion but restoration—not overawing people with might, but working to relieve burdens and enabling a culture of shared plenty, of gratitude and rejoicing.

Then there’s the reading from the Song of Solomon, a passage known as “Springtime Rhapsody” a beautiful collection of very frank love poems that most of us hardly ever remember is even IN the Bible. And here’s why it gets skipped over when it comes time for Bible study or preaching: it’s kinda steamy. It’s like Danielle Steele was suddenly invited to turn in a couple of chapters to Holy Writ. Strangely, God is not mentioned anywhere within its verses—instead, we get a conversation between two lovers. This is also unusual because it gives the woman her own voice, and she admits her passion for her beloved—in fact, in a world in which women were often silent, she is the one telling the story. Hers are the opening words in chapter one, imagining the kiss of her sweetheart.

According to our puritanical forebears, this passage isn’t about desire and human passion in all its enthusiasm, bodies bursting to discover each other. Nope. According to our 16th and 17thcentury friends, this passage is about “the Church’s love for Christ” and “Christ’s love for His Church,” with Christ as the bridegroom. This understanding is based upon the idea that the covenant between God and God’s people is similar to the covenant of marriage.

I’m not sure about that. First of all, marriage was much more often NOT about love throughout most of human history than it was about the security of property and inheritance. But there is a second and more obvious problem here: that of faithfulness and passion on the part of the Church.

While I am certain that this passage could be interpreted as Christ’s never-ending, deep, passionate love for the Church, too often the Church seems to fail to return the favor, if you know what I mean. Fallible, distractible, self-deluding, foolish, frightened, wounded humans that we are, too often we are concerned about our own wants, needs, power-madness, and concern about authority to truly love Christ to the depth that we should-- especially if one takes this passage as a guide. But we can do better. We just have to remember that real love puts the Beloved Other ahead of its own selfish satisfaction, and takes delight and finds completion and true bliss in that self-giving love.

Our failure to love stems from a conflict within ourselves- between our worldly concerns versus our spiritual aspirations. What if we were to unite these understanding rather than untie them? For we fail to love each other for the same reason we fail to love God—because we get afraid, because we lose faith in our ability to give of ourselves. Yet the Song of Songs holds out the hope that love CAN be mutual and deep and intimate. Our love for each other can be deep and lasting. Our love for God can fill us completely, and our longing for intimacy is one we need to set free in our relationship with God.

Our failure to love stems from a conflict within ourselves- between our worldly concerns versus our spiritual aspirations. This leads us to our passage in Romans, which then meshes well with our gospel. Paul talks frankly about knowing what he SHOULD do, which is to act lovingly in the world, but being unable to follow through due to his weakness to sin, which leads him to act selfishly.

Paul almost sounds like a member of a twelve-step group here, admitting his powerlessness over his addiction to sin. And that may be a really good analogy to make to describe the power that sin can wield in our lives, especially when we lull ourselves into taking our eyes off the horizon of love that we have to work toward in our lives as children of God. Real love, and true holiness, do not come naturally. Yet there is hope. Paul cries out: “Who will rescue me?” and immediately, he gives the answer: God, through the Incarnate One, our Savior Jesus Christ. He then continues to point out that our intellectual assent to be disciples is often at war with our own weaknesses.

What all our readings are seeking to do is remind us that what is considered wise or clever in the eyes of the world is usually the exact opposite of what God’s wisdom is.

Our gospel passage takes this up especially at the end. And what is absolutely vital is that here. Jesus is speaking, literally, as the Wisdom of God, personified. And there’s an interesting tie to the Song of Solomon here: in the Hebrew scripture, Wisdom was personified as female—possibly because wisdom gets rejected as an authority as much as women did, then, and now.

Jesus is actually paraphrasing a passage from the Book of Ecclesiaticus, known as a wisdom work that appears in some Bibles.

It was allegedly composed about 200-175 BC by a scribe named Ben Sira in Jerusalem, which means Jesus could have known of it. Speaking as Wisdom, a traditionally female character in scripture, we hear Jesus tracing much the same argument as the author of Ecclesiasticus:

51:23 Draw near to me, you who are untaught, and lodge in my school.
51:24 Why do you say you are lacking in these things, and why are your souls very thirsty?
51:25 I opened my mouth and said, Get these things for yourselves without money.
51:26 Put your neck under the yoke, and let your souls receive instruction; it is to be found close by.
51:27 See with your eyes that I have labored little and found myself much rest.

The wisdom that Jesus seeks to give us makes the need for asuffocating load of regulations pointless—those same regulations Jesus’s opponents loved to enforce on others as the self-righteously religious. Jesus’ load is in fact quite light compared with the heavy burdens the scribes and Pharisees place upon others: “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.”

The wisdom of God does not seek to punish but to enlighten. In place of oppression, it offers love and cooperation. And I believe this speaks of a need in our time as much as in the time of Jesus. Just like now, self-identified “religious folk” were especially good at pointing the finger at others and justifying themselves. They would use the 613 commandments in Torah to denigrate and oppress others, laying burdens upon their backs, while overlooking the parts of the Law that would require themselves to be burdened or to sacrifice what they wanted to do.

And boy, does that resonate for today. How many people do you know who justify lying, cheating, violence, misogyny, or turning a blind eye to the suffering or poverty of others in the name of their own comfort—yet who will scream about how “sinners” who act or love differently than they do deserve being cast out, oppressed, dehumanized, and punished? As if being in a marginalized group isn’t hard enough? And they justify it more often than not in the name of “religion.”

Yet Jesus, speaking as Wisdom herself in our gospel verses, identifies with the oppressed and marginalized. Jesus, speaking as the Wisdom of God, invites all to come unto him, especially those who are weary and feeling burdened by the numerous strictures of the religious leaders.

How is Jesus’s yoke “easy?” First, a yoke is meant to be shared—it works by two creatures sharing the burden and pulling side by side. And rather than lay burdens about hundreds of laws on our backs, Jesus offers to get into the yoke alongside us and help us bear the burdens of being a disciple—a burden that is already lighter because it is based on love, not fear. Christ’s yoke is easy because he takes away the yoke of the Law by making us wise in love and generosity.

That is certainly an easier burden in comparison to the way the religious leaders were apply the law to those around them.

Yet the most important thing to remember is that Jesus refers to a yoke, and not just a harness. And a yoke is meant to be shared. Christ’s yoke is the yoke of Love. And sharing burdens with each other—in the name of love—is all we need, as the Beatles sang. All those great songs of our youth insist the same thing: “Lean On Me,” by Bill Withers. “He Ain’t Heavy—He’s My Brother” by the Hollies. “Climb on a Back That’s Strong,” by Shawn Colvin. “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” by Simon and Garfunkle.

What matters is our care and empathy for each other. As we live in Christian community, we are yoked to Jesus and to each other, and we all pull together. We share each others’ burdens. We literally “pull for each other.” As Jane Siberry wrote in her song “The Life is the Red Wagon:”

The life is the red wagon rolling along
The life is the red wagon simple and strong
…oh, it's no big deal
But when the feet are dragging
you pull for me, and I pull for you,
you pull for me, and I pull for you…

Have you ever experienced the grace of someone pulling for you when you feel that you just can’t go on? Have you ever received a random act of kindness? That’s living life under the Wisdom of God.

We have a lot in common with the cultural landscape of Jesus’s time. Believe it or not. Just think: we have those who seek to divide and conquer, and they are not unashamed of using religion to further their schemes, and to oppress and denigrate marginalized groups by pulling little bits of scripture from here and there to justify their hatefulness and sense of superiority.

We see legal systems being used to oppress people—to take away their ability to be redeemed for injury, to allow a small minority to try to impose their wills on others because they have the ability to buy their way into the system.

Jesus would be the first one to object to this scheme. If your faith causes you to hate and judge and hurt others, you are doing it wrong. As Jesus points out, those “others” were exactly the people he hung out with, ate with, and taught among. Even more than that, those are the ones to whom he encouraged to take up his yoke. So that he could pull alongside them and help carry their burdens. Not condemn them.

Throughout the gospels, Jesus consistently points out that the wisdom of God, and the way it orders our lives, turns worldly wisdom upside down. He is very clear to go even further: the “wisdom” of the world is very often absolutely contrary to the wisdom and ways of God, as he himself exemplifies. Jesus, as the Wisdom of God personified, lives and acts in very specific ways to show US how to live and act.

The way of wisdom, the way of welcome into God’s household, is also the way of mercy, grace, and above all, love. It’s the wisdom that is embodied in our baptismal covenant. This is the wisdom of welcome, beloveds, that we are called to commit to as disciples. Wisdom that doesn’t seek advantage or calculation, but, always and everywhere, serving each other in purity, gentleness, and love.

We worship a God whose wisdom is often seen as foolishness in the eyes of that very same world. A God who tells us to love people the world sees as broken, and love them fully.

May we all be so wise.

Preached at the 505 afternoon service on July 7, and the 10:30 am service of Holy Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO, on July 8, 2023.

Readings:

Zechariah 9:9-12
Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Likes and Loves: Sermon for Trinity Sunday, year A, 2023

A pilot and a priest have died and are waiting in line outside the gates of Heaven for entry. When they reach the front of the line, St. Peter beckons the pilot forth.

"Who are you, so I may know whether or not to admit you to the Kingdom of Heaven?" he asks.

"I am Steven Armstrong of Houston, Texas." St. Peter consults his list.

"Ah, Captain Armstrong! You were an airline pilot for Southwest Airlines for 32 years. Take these silk robes and this staff of gold; you may enter the Kingdom."

St. Peter then beckons the next person in line forth—the priest. He repeats the same question again: "Who are you, so I may know whether or not to admit you to the Kingdom of Heaven?"

The priest straightens out. "I am the Reverend Denise Ford of Stanford, Connecticut," she replies. "Episcopal priest for the past 32 years."

"Reverend Ford," St. Peter says as he flips through his list. "Pastor of the Trinity Church for the last 12 years, honest, supportive, kind, diligent in study and always willing to help. Ah, yes. Take these wool robes and this wooden staff and enter the Kingdom," St. Peter says. The priest shrugs and accepts them before entering.

Later, she finds St. Peter out fishing by a crystalline stream. "Sir, I'm just curious, but the man who stood in front of me outside the gates of Heaven was just a pilot, but he got silk robes and a gold staff. I preached and spoke the word of the Lord for most of my life, but I received these wool robes and this wooden staff. What gives?”

St. Peter turns to the priest. "Well, Mother, up here, we go by results. While you preached and gave your sermons, people slept.

"While he flew, and especially during landings, people prayed and called out to Jesus unceasingly."


Welcome to Trinity Sunday. It’s a day so dreaded for preaching that the Rev. Shug and I flipped a coin and I lost. I am hoping that I will neither bore you, put you to sleep, nor make you scream in terror over the next few minutes. It’s a pretty low bar, you might think. But Trinity Sunday is a day dedicated to a concept that is so famously difficult to preach about that seminarians are warned that no matter what they do, they might either bore their audience, put them to sleep, or commit heresy. All choices one normally would like to avoid.

So why do it? Even better, why have to do it every single year????

This is a question I also ask myself every year.

We start with understanding that the basic definition of the Trinity is that there are three “persons” within, but one God, and all three persons as equal.

But just putting it into words, which are finite in meaning on their surface means there are many ways we end up limiting God when we try to talk about God. For instance, I made a distinct choice there not to use the pronoun “him” just there, because God is beyond gender. God has no need for gender. Our *language* does, though, but if we constantly default to speaking of God as male, or female, we prioritize certain expectations about how God operates over others.

Some people claim that the Trinity doesn't even show up in the Hebrew scriptures. Untrue. But sometimes subtle. For instance, where was the Trinity in our creation story? You might discern it right there where God referred to "us" making God in "our" image. Some claim that the story in Genesis about three visitors who came to Abraham under the oaks of Mamre were actually the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That's the basis for the painting on the cover of our bulletin at this service, by the way. When Jesus is baptized, the Son goes down into the water, the Father's voice rings out, and the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus like a dove.

But even artists struggle with to depict the Trinity. They often show the Holy Spirit as fire, or a dove. When I was younger I saw a medieval painting that showed one figure with three faces overlapping-- there were four eyes because the faces overlapped and three noses anti was truly the stuff of nightmares. Thank God a pope declared that one a heresy itself. Yuck.

Last night I used two different artistic representations in the bulletin for the 505. The first one depicted God as three male figures. The Holy Spirit was shown as a young African man in the foreground. The Son was depicted as an 8-year-old Middle-eastern boy. And the Father was depicted as an elderly Australian Aboriginal man. It’s a beautiful painting by a Welsh artist who deliberately depicts Biblical images as diverse races.

Then elsewhere in the bulletin I used an icon by Kelly Lattimore that updates the famous 14th century Russian icon of the Trinity as three angels sitting around a table that is on the cover of our bulletin today. Many people today love the original icon because it is actually ambiguous as to whether the characters are male or female—as it should be but is pretty much impossible to do, especially in art. Mr. Lattimore goes one step further and, like the painting I just mentioned, has his figures be recognizably from different continents—one is possibly Latin American, one is Asian, and one is African. He also depicts them as more obviously feminine.

As time has gone on, I have become persuaded that those of us in Lectionary-based churches are challenged each year on the Sunday after Pentecost to address the Trinity because it keeps us humble. It reminds us of the limitations of our ability to express great mysteries, whether in words or image or music. It reminds us that God is a great mystery—the greatest mystery of all—and yet also a mystery that at various times reveals Godself to us in our times of greatest need and greatest wonders and joys.

Language, for instance, contains notions of gender. In French and Spanish and German, nouns can be male, female, or neuter. English makes the neutral option kind of “less-than” and privileges a binary way of thinking about gender--one that is frankly not helpful to reflect the realist of gender expression in all of life. And that limitation has fueled the culture wars over people’s personal pronouns right now. Even though no one is aiming their pronouns, or living their lives, for God’s sake, *at” anyone else.

Especially as we enter Pride Month, that understanding right there might go a long way to cooling down the hatred we have been seeing lately directed at our LGBTQ kindred.

What I find fascinating is that people who resist giving people the dignity of being the final arbiter of who they are also espouse a Christianity that does not see God as Trinity—as three persons but one God, and all three persons as equal. They often privilege Jesus, since he was born a human male, or God, since God was often referred to as “Father.” The Holy Spirit is often waaaaaay too squishy to deal with for these folks, usually. I mean, hey, even artists usually depict the Holy Spirit as a bird or as fire rather than in a figural way. Language-wise, however, the words used 99% of the time for the Holy Spirit in both Greek and Hebrew are female. The words for “breath” and “spirit” are female in those original Biblical languages. So then, we are called to consider that the Trinity, mystery that it is, is also a powerful reminder to us that God is NOT gendered, either.

Further, by extension, we are being shown that God’s image is fully present in ALL people-- regardless of what gender—or no gender-- they claim. Thinking about the Trinity as containing a variety of genders or none at all also has deep implications for how we understand human beings. So NOW we might be getting an idea of why this yearly discussion might be useful, after all, for the world in which we live.

And so, we are stuck with using analogies to describe God. Even “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”—or, if you are old school “Holy Ghost—are imperfect analogies. So we use that formula, but also perhaps consider others, acknowledging all are imperfect. Alternatives include:

There’s “Abba, Christ, Paraclete,” for the Greek-minded.
Source, Word, and Spirit.
Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-Giver, from the New Zealand Prayer Book.
Wisdom of God, Love of God, Grace of God, from a common blessing.
Majesty, Word, Spirit.
Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier
The Lover, the Beloved, and Love Overflowing (from St. Augustine)

We struggle as we use a variety of ways to talk about what God is “like.” That’s fine—except analogical thinking is in short supply nowadays. It’s not being encouraged in our schools or in a public sphere. Too many people believe that things have to be black or white, up or down, right or wrong. And it’s okay to think that way—if you are a child. As we get older, though, most of us begin to observe that life doesn’t come at us in two options, just like ice cream doesn’t come in just two flavors. As long as we remember that whatever we think God is “like”—whether that’s a three leaf clover or a raindrop or three heavenly beings seated around a table, that God is still MORE yet, besides. God is like…. And off we go, metaphors and similes coming fast and furious. And yet God is so much more besides.

As I mentioned last week, we returned the Creed to our liturgy last week, after the Great Fifty Day Feast of Easter ended. This was a deliberate choice. The Creed came about to try to describe the Trinity, and how it worked, so it’s good to hear it again with new ears. I hope you do. Because if you DO hear it anew, and actually examine what is in the Creed. You will notice that there are a BUNCH of analogies in it to try to describe the three Persons of the Trinity and yet maintain their full equality: "God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, one in being..." Think of that again: to recognize the differences among each person of the Trinity, and yet to honor them as equal. Perhaps practicing this with God would help us practice this with each other.

Wouldn’t that be great?

To recognize that despite all the diversity of the way God touches our lives, that ultimately that diversity is still all part of ONE God. That diversity in unity is a strength. A blessing. A gift for living our own lives with each other.

Just as the Trinity is intimately bound up in each other to ultimately be One, so were we created by God. As we begin Pride month, Trinity Sunday calls us to remember that love is the most powerful force in the universe, and we should always stand for MORE love, not less. Or consider that the Rev. Shug and I are wearing our orange stoles to symbolize our hope to work to end gun violence. If we truly took seriously our invitation into the Trinity’s divine dance of love as children of God, would this madness even be possible?

Sure, some might scoff. Not everybody will do it. But how would it change the world if those of us here and those all around who profess to follow Christ would take the power of that Trinitarian love and mutual support seriously?

What would that be like? Isn’t it worth it to try?

St. Patrick was a missionary to the Irish, and we will hear part of one of his poems to the Trinity in one of our songs today. One of the ways he is depicted in icons is holding a shamrock, which he used to try to explain the Holy Trinity to the Celts in Ireland (which is also a heresy if you stop there, but hey, you have to start somewhere….) He was so good at this that the Celts place the idea of the Trinity at the center of their spirituality. And so perhaps we can learn something from them.

In Celtic Christianity, the concept of the Trinity reminds us that the heart of God is about relationship. It’s not about like—it’s about love. It’s about friendship. It’s about community. It’s about those three persons in the Trinity bound together in love, dancing around each other, taking turns stepping forward or stepping back so that different aspects are revealed about God as is right or necessary. That the heart of God is love, and that we, as God’s children, are drawn into that love. That, if we are made in God’s image, just as the three persons in the Trinity depend upon each other and rely upon each, so too we are called to give up our ridiculous notions of isolation and stubborn pride and realize and even celebrate how much we are made for each other. To love each other. To affirm each other. To see our differences as strengths, not as something that separates us, or worse, calls us to attack each other. 

The Trinity models for us what it is like to love and understand each other at the deepest level. As the great proponent of Celtic spirituality John O’Donohue wrote about the love at the center of the Trinity, and our relationship with that One God:

In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul. This recognition is described in a beautiful line from Pablo Neruda: “You are like nobody since I love you.” This art of love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person. Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person’s individuality and soul. Love alone is literate in the world of origin; it can decipher identity and destiny.

…The Christian concept of God as Trinity is the most sublime articulation of otherness and intimacy, an eternal interflow of friendship. This perspective discloses the beautiful fulfillment of our immortal longing in the words of Jesus, who said, Behold, I call you friends. Jesus, as the son of God, is the first Other in the universe; he is the prism of all difference. He is the secret [soul friend] of every individual. In friendship with him, we enter the tender beauty and affection of the Trinity. In the embrace of this eternal friendship, we dare to be free. (4)

Remembering that we are all beloved of God, all marvelously and wonderfully made by God, made for love in all its true, generous expressions, may we give thanks for being invited into the beautiful mystery of the Trinity, who invites us into the dance of life, or creation, and of celebrating difference and diversity.

Amen.

Preached at the 505 on Saturday June 3 and the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist on June 4 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

Psalm 8

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Matthew 28:16-20

Citations:

1) Holy Trinity icon by Andrei Rublev, ca 1425. 

2) "Christ with Three Faces" image of the Trinity by the Netherlandish school ca 1500. 

3) Kelly Lattimore's icon of the Holy Trinity (used by permission-- all rights reserved). 

4) St. Patrick icon with a shamrock.

5) John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, pp. 14-15, kindle version.