Romans 5:1-5
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Today is Holy Trinity Sunday. You know how a gift in a nice, neat, nifty box wraps up with folds perfectly creased? Everything straight, uniform, and square so you can even match up the pattern on the paper? The Trinity ISN’T like that. The Trinity is like the wrapping on a bicycle, or a rake, or one of those carpet covered cat condos. Can you gift wrap those things? Sure! And from far enough away… without your glasses on… it looks… okay? Ish? I mean, is it covered? Absolutely! Well, mostly. Sort of. It’s good.
The reason the Trinity only wraps things up “mostly” and “sort of” is because this is GOD we’re talking about! And because it’s God we’re talking about, God’s going to stick out of anything we try to wrap God in, Trinitarian or otherwise! Even today, on Holy Trinity Sunday, this Wisdom lady shows up to show us that. Where does she fit into the nice, neat, nifty Trinitarian packaging? She doesn’t… and yet… here she is causing trouble… as Women and Wisdom are want to do!
So… what do we do? Well, some folks VERY firmly, VERY adamantly, and sometimes VERY violently INSIST… through screwed up faces and clinched teeth that the Trinitarian wrapping of the Divine IS perfect! IT… IS… PERFECT! “But what about… ?” NO! You do NOT see that! THAT is NOT a thing, a problem, a contradiction or a piece of the infinite, unknowable nature of God sticking out of the Trinitarian packaging at a strange and completely unexplainable angle! NO! NO! NO! IT… IS… PERFECT!
The OTHER way is to move in close, glasses on, take an honest look at how well the Doctrine of the Trinity wraps God up and say, “Yup. Well. Folks have put A LOT of work into this. Centuries of work, by the very best theological minds out there and the Doctrine of the Trinity is VERY good. It’s super helpful in many, many ways. It’s not perfect. But… to be fair, they were trying to wrap up THE DIVINE. Which, honestly is like asking a barnacle to do differential calculus equations! So, as good as the Doctrine of the Trinity is… and it is incredible… God’s still gonna stick out of that Trinitarian wrapping all over the place, because this is God we’re talking about!
I’m actually super thankful that God doesn’t wrap up all neat and tidy because, on my mind just this last week was… let’s see… A president who admires dictators, a Gestapo style police force spiriting away random people… undocumented, documented, citizens, even fellow law enforcement officers. The National Guard and a battalion of Marine combat troops in Los Angeles deployed against fellow American citizens. The government of Israel bombing an Anglican Hospital in Gaza and then Iran because, I don’t know… World War III is what we need right now? Which inevitably leads to horrible antisemitic people who have no interest in seeing the difference between the Government of Israel and people of the Jewish faith, killing and burning Jewish people in our country. Then there is the democratic lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota gunned down and killed, and another shot but not killed in their homes by someone pretending to be law enforcement. There are my Latino friends who are all on edge, including the ones who are citizens, for good reason. There is half the US congress looking to strip food assistance and healthcare from millions of poor and elderly people, AND on top of it all there are too many damn mosquitoes for me to sit outside!
It is a lot. It is too much. I need… you need… we need… this world needs… a GOD who doesn’t wrap up so neatly! I need… you need… we need… this world needs a GOD who is big enough and wild enough to get us through THIS life! I need… you need… we need… this world needs… a GOD who, as Paul describes, will pull us out of Suffering into Endurance on to Character and finally into some Hope! A nice, neat, nifty wrapped up god just ain’t gonna cut it! We need an unwrapped, out of the box, out of the closet, out in the streets God, slogging it out with us and carrying us from Suffering into Hope.
The GOOD NEWS is… THAT… is the God we have! Our God can’t be wrapped up by human conventions, ideas, or doctrines… Our God can’t even be wrapped up by DEATH! Our God is anything but nice, neat, and nifty… Our God burns down hate filled fences, blows pepper spray back in the faces of the oppressor, and carries us into HOPE where the merchants of hatred, fascism, racism, nationalism, authoritarianism, lies, and propaganda will not stand. Our God is at work, wild in the world tearing down every abomination wielded by small, fearful, men used to demonize and victimize “the other.”
THAT is the God we have… not a god that fits neatly in a box, but a God, who in a fierce love, takes each of us by the hand in the depths of our suffering when the paranoia has struck deep, when fear has crept in, when we find ourselves always afraid and actively pulls us out of the loneliness of Suffering and carries us into HOPE. And HERE is where the Doctrine of the Trinity shines, because the Trinity reminds us that GOD IS COMMUNITY… Father, Son, and Holy Spirit… GOD IS RELATIONSHIP… Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier… and it is IN God, IN community, IN relationship that we find HOPE! We experience HOPE only when we are in relationship with others. We find HOPE only when we gather in community. We see HOPE only when three gather together as one. We are carried into HOPE only when one of us comes together with three.
I am… you are… we are… the world is… Suffering. The GOOD NEWS today is that the Holy Trinity, in spite of falling well short of perfectly wrapping up the Divine, DOES show us the antidote for all of our Suffering.
THE ANTIDOTE IS FOR US TO DO WHAT GOD IS…
DO relationship relentlessly… DO community obsessively… DO time with one another continuously. Because it is only when we are together, in community, in relationship that we have the opportunity to see the TRUTH… that God is relentlessly, obsessively, continuously carrying us all into HOPE. Amen.
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