Sermon on Trinity: How do we find grace, love, and the communion of the Holy Spirit?
To begin, Paul says to the Corinthians to “greet one another with a holy kiss.” In this time of pandemic, a “holy” kiss will be one of no physical contact—maybe a wave or a hand signal, but no less love.
More important for the day, though, is that the designers of our liturgical calendar have decided to name the Sunday after Pentecost “Trinity Sunday,” one of the seven principal feasts of the church year. The Trinity is a tricky subject about which people disagreed, but also fought and killed each other. Very few these days take it seriously; most Christians have decided not to make a fuss about it. We have more important things to worry about.
It might seem surprising that people worried about the Trinity at all. Neither is word Biblical, nor are many references made in scripture to a unity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The mention is Second Corinthians today is one of the few; and even that does not show how these three things are connected—indeed grace, love, and communion are different things from each other.
It’s also surprising how theologians could get the same information, but come up with very different ideas. They all had virtually identical scripture to go from (once they agreed upon which books were in the Bible—not until after AD 300, which is, of course, when the fight over the Trinity really got going). As they read the near-exact same New Testament texts (which were all in Greek (with a smidge of Aramaic), they had no problem of translation, only interpretation. Nevertheless, they picked out different words, separate sentences, mixed meanings to come up with vastly competing viewpoints about the Trinity.
But the Church could not tolerate divergence of opinion on this matter, for many centuries. And once the institutional Church had settled on the only “correct” belief, as I noted, it fought and killed people, labeled heretics, who disagreed with the approved position, deemed orthodox. Only when the fracturing, schisms, of the Church were no longer warred over, was tolerance for disagreement on the Trinity possible.
We might scoff at such violent passion over an idea that was meant to make people better. We might, if we didn’t live in such similar times today, when we have so much disagreement and violence about our political polity. The big difference is that we have a multitude of sources, ranging from the outright mendacious to the boringly accurate, some of which are intended to provoke discord. But even when people take in the same source (a speech, a news report, a video, and opinion piece) they’ve picked out different words, separate sentences, mixed meanings to come up with vastly competing opinions about the issues of the day.
And worst of all, in my opinion, is when people deny factual reality, saying certain actual events and statements did not happen at all. At least the theologians could not deny whether some phrase was in the Bible or not. Yet I see many people today disputing irrefutable facts, if they do not suit their feelings. Such stubborn blindness is sure to increase our troubles.
Paul tells the Corinthians to “Put things in order, listen to [his] appeal, agree with one another, live in peace.” Indeed we have failed to live up to this request. We have become more divided than ever. Now, how do we live in peace, where some people see “Law and Order” as code words for the oppression of people of color and others as a call to legislate a just society for all? Will we follow the path where authorities (such as the Church of old) imposes their interpretation through violence, or (the position of most Churches today) the path of charity toward our differences? How do we find “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit?”
Written for the parish of St. James & St. George 2020 June 7
URL: <http://therev.brianpavlac.org/srms/20200523.html