May 30, 2010 - Trinity Sunday, Year C (RCL)
Today is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday after Pentecost, the Sunday in the church year
when we celebrate the Trinity,
that is, God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Trinity Sunday
is described by some people
as the only church feast day
that focuses on a doctrine, that is, that focuses on religious philosophy or theory.
Which is all very well and good
if you are one of those people
who spends their time
thinking about what God is like in theory.
But most of us here, I suspect,
have far too much going on in our lives
to sit round idly speculating.
What matters to us about God
is not the theory
but the reality.
Not “Who is God?” out there in some abstract theoretical sense,
but “Who is God?” here, in our everyday lives,
who is the God
who we know and love.
Today, our focus is on God,
the God we know and love, the God we believe in.
Which is nothing new.
Because we focus on God
every week in our worship.
But on Trinity Sunday
we stop for a moment
and remind ourselves of that.
We remind ourselves that yes, we believe in God,
and this is what God is like.
And to be remind ourselves
what God is like
we turn to Scripture, to the bible.
And you know as well as I do
that we could be here all day
exploring who God is in scripture.
Because God is way bigger
than can be captured in just a handful of words
or even a page or two.
God is so much more
than we can ever know,
so much more
than we can ever fully understand.
It’s like standing on top of a mountain
and looking at the scenery in front of you,
and it’s just too much
to take in all at once.
Most weeks
we just focus on a small detail in the landscape,
one rock
or tree or hill.
On Trinity Sunday
we try to look at the overall panorama.
though even then
what we see
is limited by where we’re standing.
And so next year
on Trinity Sunday,
we’ll move a few feet to the right,
and the year after a few feet to the left,
and over time
we build up a picture
of this God that we know and love.
So, back to God.
On Trinity Sunday
we celebrate God the Trinity,
God whom we know
as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the primary ways we know God;
they are the names we have for God.
It’s as if they are the views we have of God
from the three most well known lookouts on our mountain.
But each of those views
overlaps some,
and today
our Old Testament reading and our Psalm
show us something of where our pictures of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit
overlap.
And that’s in
creation.
In our Old Testament reading
we hear the voice of wisdom.
Wisdom
is one of the attributes, the characteristics of God,
and here it seems to be personified.
Sometimes in the bible,
Jesu id described as wisdom;
at other times, it seems to be the Holy Spirit.
But here what matters
is that wisdom points us
to God as creator.
Wisdom
was a witness
to creation.
Wisdom was a witness
to the depths and the watery springs,
to the shaping of the mountains and hills,
to the earth and fields and soil.
Wisdom was a witness
to the establishment of the heavens
to the bounding of the earth
to the skies and the deep
to the limiting of the seas
and the marking of the foundations of the earth.
Wisdom was there on the first day,
when God created the day and the night
and on the second,
when God created the sky.
Wisdom was there on the third day,
when God created the earth and seed and fruit and trees,
and on the fourth,
when God created the sun and the moon.
Wisdom was there on the fifth day,
when God created fish and birds,
and on the sixth,
when God created animals
and human beings.
And wisdom was there on the seventh day,
when God rested,
wisdom delighting
in the whole of creation
and delighting
in human beings.
Wisdom is a witness
to the wonderful creation
of God.
And that creation
includes us.
Wisdom singles us out
as a focus of delight,
we who are created
in the image
of God.
And if wisdom is somehow
intimately connected with, even part of
God
then God himself
delights in us.
We are
the good creation
of God.
And from the very beginning
our relationship with God
has not been the same
as the rest of creation.
Because, as the first chapters of Genesis remind us,
humans are singled out by God
and given special responsibility
over God’s creation.
We were given
the task of naming everything,
and in giving humanity this task
God affirmed that responsibility
and power
over all creation.
We are God’s stewards
sharing with God
the task of caring for this world.
The way the psalmist put it,
if you think in terms of hierarchy,
we are made just a little lower than God,
but above creation.
We are given a place
of glory and honor
and we share in the work of God
with this world of ours.
We’re bound together,
us and God
in the care of creation.
And that’s been on my mind this last week,
as attempts to stop the flow of oil in the Gulf
have failed yet again,
and as we see pictures of hundreds of thousands of tiny fish
washed up on the shore in Mississippi,
and gobs of oil on the sand in Louisiana,
and no one seems to know
how it can be stopped.
In his news conference on Thursday,
President Obama told this story.
“When I woke this morning and I’m shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, ‘Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?’ Because I think everybody understands that when we are fouling the Earth like this, it has concrete implications — not just for this generation, but for future generations. I grew up in Hawaii where the ocean is sacred. And when you see birds flying around with oil all over their feathers and turtles dying, that doesn’t just speak to the immediate economic consequences of this; this speaks to how are we caring for this incredible bounty that we have.”
In Bay St Louis,
twenty members of a church stood hand in hand strung out along the shoreline
praying to God
for help.
Not just for a miracle, but for the strength
that they know they will need in the days and months and years ahead
for the clean-up and for the rebuilding of businesses and lives,
and the regeneration
of creation.
And under all of that
an awareness
that we human beings
are charged by God
to care for creation
and sure God must be weeping
at this disaster.
There is no delight here.
And it forces me to ask myself,
how am I caring for creation?
How do I share with God in this task?
I’m not an oil producer
but I’m a consumer,
and so my need for gas for my car
means that somehow
far along the chain
I’m part of that disaster in the Gulf.
And it’s not just oil.
How do I care for the creation around me?
Do I bother to sort my recycling?
Do I care what natural resources I waste?
They aren’t easy questions,
and nor are the answers easy.
But if what we know
from this slice of Scripture,
what we know
from this picture of God
is that God is not only the creator
but continues to care for
and delight in it,
and if God has shared with me
both the care
and the delight,
then I have to ask those questions.
And not only ask them, but answer them,
and join with God
in caring for this created world.
Knowing that God, our creator,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
delights in us
and rejoices in creation
and in the
human race.
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2010