Father Carlton Kelley is the Rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Grayslake, IL.
This sermon is based on Genesis 1:1-2:4a, which you can read by clicking here; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13, which you can read by clicking here; and St. Matthew's Gospel 28:16-20, which you can read by clicking here.
During this time which many have called unprecedented, though there have been any number of times throughout history where similar circumstances have prevailed, we as a church and society have been faced with challenges we have not had to meet in recent memory.
Not only has a global pandemic of death swept across the world causing distress, discomfort, and confusion, but the long assumed, but seldom rigorously tested, solidarity of western civilization and, indeed, of the United States, has been called into question.
We have been given daily images of violence and discord in our streets, witnessed the tragic result of centuries of white supremacy toward people of color, and watched in disbelief as our once-cherished institutions of government have been completely unable or unwilling to respond to the crises that are before us in a spirit of unity and peace, healing and solidarity; in short, in the spirit of healthy and robust community.
We have watched as a president of the United States, once an office that was respected around the world, has acted in ways that have not healed but further wounded our national identity. He has sought through his, at best ill-considered, though often, it must be assumed, deliberately inflammatory words and actions, to divide black from white, man from woman, rich from poor, gay from straight, Republican from Democrat.
He has been unable and unwilling to respond to peaceful demonstrators exercising our cherished right of free speech and peaceful assembly with anything but bluster and gross misunderstanding, demonstrators who were protesting the murder of yet another black man at the hands of our police. That there have been, very unfortunately, people who have sought, and always will, to take advantage of difficult situations by engaging in violence and theft, does not, for one moment, mitigate the necessary right to peaceful assembly and the gathering and growing call for a more inclusive and just democracy.
People of color, and black men in particular, have long been regarded in this nation of ours as objects of fear and mistrust by white people who have sought to perpetuate the absolutely worst kind of privilege.
Many people of all colors, political affiliation, economic status and religion, believe that in order for our country to reclaim the best of our heritage as enshrined in our foundational documents, we must peacefully protest and demonstrate so that the unmistakably clear signal is given that black lives matter, most especially as we watch the all too frequent and sickening display of violence against them for any and no reason at the hands of those who are governed by their unreasonable and completely unfounded fears.
This does not mean, and has never meant, that all lives are not important. It does mean, as a truth that is all too easy to verify, that black lives have not mattered as nearly as much as white ones— even in our churches.
We might even say that, for some, black lives have not even counted as lives.
As Christians, we must, without hesitation, cherish all life, because all life is from God and all are loved by, in, and through Jesus Christ. That is a truth that must never be subject to negotiation, and it must be said most especially in this time when obvious truth is carelessly and destructively discarded for political expedience.
We have watched in disbelief as armed forces and tear gas have been used to disperse peaceful demonstrators simply in order for this president to have a photo opportunity in front of a church.
This photo-taking publicity stunt in front of St. John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square, was condemned by the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington in no uncertain terms, her voice breaking with the emotions of anger and violation.
Later, the Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington responded to a similar event at the Shrine of St. John Paul II, descrying the cheap use of religion as a prop for nothing more than an excuse to engage in the basest of partisan political maneuvering.
The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church has also condemned this stunt.
And now, the voice of a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has been added to this growing chorus of outrage calling the president's manipulative use of the Bible "an act of idolatry."
We have heard from a growing number of distinguished and high ranking, bipartisan leaders in the military and other governmental service, both past and present, of their belief that our country is headed in what is not simply a wrong direction, but a disastrous one.
We have been presented, again and again, with evidence that this president is simply not fit to lead a society that has proclaimed liberty and justice for all as its irreplaceable cornerstones, and takes as its unofficial motto the prophetic words printed on the Great Seal of the United States— "out of many, one."
And I, my sisters and brothers, am convinced that he does so out of his own desperate and unexamined fear and need. Those are states that should call forth our best and most sincere prayers for his conversion, his amendment of life— something which we all daily stand in need of doing for him, for ourselves, and the world. However, his various and uncontrolled demons are not an excuse for him to be permitted to exercise executive authority in such a grossly irresponsible way and, most especially, in this time of deep national division.
I know, as many of you may as well, what it is to be controlled by demons. Many of us have been subject to the terrors of drug and alcohol addiction and other debilitating conditions. And many of us have known the joy of being released from them. We also know the painful, though joyful truth, of being told plainly, directly, and lovingly, of our possession by forces whose only object was to kill. We must pray that our president may one day know the joy of freedom from his compulsions so that he may know the freedom exercised in and for freedom. As St. Paul reminds us in Galatians 5:1: "for freedom Christ has set us free."
What then are Christians to do? What are we who have been called to build community at all levels, in ways both small and great, to build koinonia— communion— a community of abundant love, committed and merciful justice, and lasting peace, to do?
There are too many competent, generous, and bipartisan voices saying that to continue on this path is fool-hearty and destructive. We must not continue to ignore what is clearly before us. May I propose an answer, or the beginnings of an answer, that is deeply rooted in the foundational theology of the Christian Church?
Today is Trinity Sunday, or to give it its grandest title, the Feast of the All Holy and Undivided Trinity. It is a feast of a reality of living realities who are incomprehensibly and infinitely greater than the ideas in which they are enshrined. This Trinitarian reality, this recognition of community at the very heart of God whom we proclaim as three in one and one in three, was brought to fruition by faithful prayer, daily witness, and the reflection of great minds, all firmly based in the life of the people of Israel, God's Chosen Ones, and the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ, and all supported by the life-giving Holy Spirit.
Some have said that this day celebrates a doctrine and a formulation of ideas rather than an historical event or a person, as is the case for all the feasts and fasts of the Church Year. However, I believe it is more accurate to say it is a feast of the intimacy of God with God's people. It is a feast of the divinely-given and loving intimacy that should be reflected in all human communities, because all have been created and are sustained by God.
As Israel's consciousness of God began to grow with the call of Abraham and Sarah, she was centuries later able to reflect on how the creation came to be and how God began to reveal God's self to the world. Drawing on the stories of other cultures for a beginning of inspiration, Israel gave us the majestic accounts of creation we find in the first two chapters of Genesis. However, and very importantly, this story of creation was significantly different from others in that it was unitary and loving, not based in the competitive violence of a myriad of gods. In this account, God creates simply because God has chosen to do so. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
As her creative religious thought matured, Israel and the Church of the New Covenant understood that God did not create out of some sort of inner compulsion but did so only out of self-emptying and self-sacrificial love. For love and only for love, God created that which God was not. Israel and the Church were led to this knowledge by a growing awareness that the presence of God, God's Spirit and Wisdom, continued to move in the lives of men and women just as the Spirit of God had moved over the original waters of creation to bring order out of chaos, life and light from darkness and disarray. This process of God's completely gracious self-revelation reached its climax in Jesus Christ, a person we Christians came to see as uniquely divine, God's only Son.
After the completion of Jesus' earthly ministry and his resurrection, ascension, and the giving of the Holy Spirit, Jesus' disciples very quickly came to recognize that God revealed God's Self as a Trinity of Persons in Unity of Being, as the Collect for Trinity Sunday implies. While it is impossible to know the exact date of the writing of any of the Gospel accounts, most scholarly opinion places the composition of Matthew, our Gospel reading for today, somewhere between 40 to 70 years after Jesus' earthly life. Matthew's Gospel closes with Jesus saying to his disciples, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And, remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age."
And so, a short two to three generations after the earthly life of Jesus if not before, the early church was using the Name of the Trinity as an important and irreplaceable part of our worship. The nascent church recognized that God's life was a union of utterly inseparable equals, though a fuller, though always incomplete, knowledge of that union took some centuries to develop. Therefore, what appears as almost a footnote in Matthew's account, written more than 2000 years ago, becomes a blueprint for the life of Christians even now. Let it never be said that the Trinity is not relevant.
The Trinity gives us a clear, though admittedly veiled, indication how we are to live as God's people. While the theological language describing the Trinity is often difficult and complex as befits its subject, suffice it to say that the Father is unique, the Holy Spirit is unique, and the Son is unique— utterly different from one another, yet utterly dependent on the other, and all three creatively loving and abundantly life-giving because all three are truly God. The Three are One because they are united in absolute Love. There is no possible division though there is difference. As one formulation has it "The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father, but each is God individually and yet together they are One True God."
We are to live in unity— though clearly recognizing that each of us possesses our own utterly unique personality and character, thinking utterly unique thoughts and performing utterly unique deeds— for the good of one another. Our lives are to be informed by the lives of all those around us. We are never to dominate or coerce, but are instead to take the more difficult path of mutual responsibility one for the other. We are to live as though our very lives depended on the presence of the other. We are to live as though my life completes your life and yours mine. In short, we are to live as though we were, for we are, members of the Trinity. This is true regardless of any outwardly different circumstances such as color of skin, economic status, sexual and gender orientations— or political affiliation. Yet we know all too well that those are the differences the world chooses to amplify and highlight, and does so only to gain coercive power and control, all brought out of fear of the other.
But, as our Lord said to his disciples on the night before he died, he now says to us: "It is not to be so among you." And so we must move forward in a "reasonable and holy hope" that we might forge a more merciful and just society, a society more firmly grounded in love, because we have been given all the tools by our loving God to do so.
As we have been created in the image of God as trinity, we have the tools of creative loving at hand. We have the tools of self-sacrifice and denial for the good of the other. We have the tools of refreshment and renewal by and for the other.
Some of us will work in the political process to bring about desperately needed changes. Some of us will march. Some of us will write. All of us will love those we have been given to love in the quotidian round with integrity and compassion.
Those of us who have been immeasurably blessed to hear the voice of the Lord's call to be his disciples will take up the Cross that has been presented to us in this moment and carry it as if the world depended on it. Those of us who are the Lord's sisters and brothers will know that everyone is our brother, sister, father, and mother through the love of Jesus Christ.
In this time of challenge when it is all too easy to despair and become cynical, let us always remember that "if God is for us who can be against us?"
The Trinity by Andrei Rublev ca. early 15th century
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