6/7/20
(Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Ps. 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20)
Since the beginning of the shutdown three months ago, and we all started communicating through the internet (as we are doing now), I’ve been part of a group that has met online at the beginning and end of every day for the Prayer Book services of Morning Prayer and Compline. The group was organized through our Northwest Region of the ECCT, but there are people in it who participate from hundreds of miles away: about fifteen in the core group, though not everyone makes it to every service. We have taken to referring to ourselves as the Zoomastery, because it’s a like a little monastery and we meet on a Zoom call.
Those two services each provide time built in for personal prayers, and we also share our responses to the different Bible readings that we hear every day. So there are opportunities, which we take, to talk with each other how we see the world today: how it’s reflected in Scripture, how the Spirit is moving in us, every day; and where we see God to be active in the world.
And there’s been plenty to say, because this has certainly been a very trying time, since the beginning of our little Zoomastery: under the lethal threat of the covid pandemic, and the radical changes it’s caused in the way we live, and our constant awareness that we don’t know how long it’s going to take to resolve, or what the new normal is going to look like when it finally does.
And then on top of all that, in the last two weeks, the murder of George Floyd, following so recently on the murder of Ahmaud Arbery: two African-American men, killed by white men; and the stark witness of those events to the racism embedded in our society, and culture; and the social upheaval we’ve all been watching, and living in the middle of, for the past two weeks.
So it’s a strenuous time – a chaotic and anxious time – for all of us; but especially, in a particular way, for us Christians: we who strive to see where God is in all this; where Christ is leading us; what we feel the Holy Spirit is moving each of us individually to do about what we see and hear. Because we try to live faithfully.
I’m going to get back to these questions: to our present circumstances, to the bewilderment and helplessness that we feel crowding in on us, and to something about all that which came up in the Zoomastery. I’ll get back to all that in a minute. But did you notice I just snuck something in there?
I just made reference, in a single sentence and one continuous thought, to God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. And I did that because today is Trinity Sunday. This day – one of the seven principal feasts in our church year – celebrates the foundational belief of the Christian faith: there is one God, who exists in three Persons, but one Substance (don’t get too hung up on the language for now.) This understanding took the first three centuries of church history to hammer out. A lot of smart people spent a lot of time and energy over those years trying to make sense of just what it was that had happened in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. These people all understood that those events had something essential to do with who God is, and therefore who all of us are, and how we live.
So the doctrine of the Trinity came about, not because it sounded nice, and made for pretty pictures: it described their actual experience of who God is, and what God had done, and was doing, in their lives. From the first days of Christ’s church, Christians have agreed that they experienced God – the one God – in three distinct ways. I once heard a description of the Trinity that I think puts it well.
God the Creator is God for us: God who loves us infinitely, God who gave us life, and created the world in which we live and thrive: God the Creator, God for us; God in Christ is God with us, God alongside us, in this life, God who teaches us, God who rejoices and celebrates with us, God who suffers and grieves with us: God in Christ, God with us; and God the Holy Spirit is God in us, working in us as we think and act and feel, as we grow in knowledge and love, as we make choices about our lives, as we try to do God’s will, every day, because we know that’s what best for us, that’s who we really are: God the Holy Spirit, God in us. We Christians say that God, the one God, is real, and alive, in each of these three persons, these three ways of being: God for us, God with us, God in us.
Now: back to the Zoomastery, and this embattled world we’re living in right now. In Morning Prayer one day this past week we were talking about the feeling of being overwhelmed, unable to get our bearings, as people of faith, because things seem so out of control, and the stakes are so high.
And a member of the group, an older woman who has bad asthma and sometimes has to literally gasp for breath but is relentlessly cheerful, said that what she tries to remember at such times is this: concentrate on doing the next right thing. Whatever it is. Just: do the next right thing.
So, what does the Trinity have to do with that?
Here’s the way I think of it. God the Creator loves me and will not ever stop loving me, even when I foul up. In fact, when I foul up, I just feel God loving me harder. This is my foundation, my starting point, every day: this is what enables me, no matter what, to get started doing the next right thing: God for me.
God in Christ teaches me to know how to look for the next right thing. In this connection I think of Jesus, in the gospel of Matthew, on the two great commandments: love God with all your heart and soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself; and how everything else flows from that, all the Law and the prophets. To love God means to love truth and justice and peace and joy and love itself. And to love your neighbor as yourself means to love that person as though that person were you; so what’s happening to them, is happening to you; and what are you going to do about that? That’s the knowledge that guides us to what the next right thing is: God beside me.
And it’s the Holy Spirit in me that actually identifies that next right thing, moves me to it, and gets it done: someone or something that needs help. A misunderstanding that needs clearing up. Something I’ve done wrong that I need to fix. The next right thing is in front of us all the time. And no matter how tiny it may look to us, nothing is tiny to the Holy Spirit. And neither is anything is too big, for God in me.
That’s how God, in three Persons, is alive in this world: alive for, with, and in each one of us. Let us live joyfully in that knowledge, and joyfully do that next right thing. Thanks be to God.