Co-missioners,
Today I share some work I did on a Trinity Sunday sixteen years ago. When I retrieved it from my files recently, I was struck by some of the language I had used and the approach I had taken, the aim being to talk about God in God’s Trinity not as an abstruse doctrine to swallow but as down-to-earth Good News for us to trust. This, of course, is what preaching is for—delivering Gospel. “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Godself…” (2 Cor. 5:19). Such is the astonishing assertion that lies at the heart of the Trinitarian formulation. To make this and other astonishments stick as words that people can trust and, better still, exult in is why the formulation was developed in the first place. Exploring the formulation as formulation is what one does as a teacher or participant in a class. Proclaiming the astonishment is what Sunday is for.
So that’s what I did or tried to do on this particular Sunday. To that end I played with language to drive home a few key points. I’ve highlighted some of this below on the chance that you’ll find it of interest. Should this prompt you to share words and images you’ve used on Trinity Sundays to get the Good News across, drop me a note. I’d be very glad to see it.
Peace and Joy,
Jerry Burce, Co-editor
for the Crossings Community
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The Jesus Glasses: An Example of Pew-Level God Talk on a Trinity Sunday
by Jerome Burce
First Move: From a quick general intro to an immediate surface issue—
From Canva
So today we celebrate God. Not any old god, but the specific God we get to know because of—guess what?—Pentecost.
We thanked God for Pentecost last week. Pentecost is when lots of people started tumbling for the first time ever to who God truly is; and after that they tumbled to how God truly is when all else is said and done. And when they got the “who,” when they got the “how,” then they tasted joy like they never had before.
They tasted joy because they knew they had a future—a future with God; and they knew this future would be very, very good.
I don’t see lots of joy in America today, do you? I see lots of worry instead. I see a thick toxic cloud of fear and anger billowing up from millions of worried hearts. It pollutes our politics, it pollutes the air waves, it pollutes the conversation that ordinary citizens have, one with the other . . . .
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Second Move: To an issue with God. Not always acknowledged, but there it is. Lurking. Huge—
Back we go to that first Christian Pentecost. That’s the day God the Holy Spirit persuaded 3,000 people to trust what they were hearing about Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God. The minute they did, they couldn’t help but think in an entirely new way about the One who had sent this Son into the world to do what he did, this astonishing God whom Jesus himself referred to as “my Father.”
Back then people did not as a rule think of God as their father. As a rule, people today don’t think of God that way either. If they think about God at all, it’s as the remote and distant Somebody or Something on High to whom all of us are in some way responsible. Or to put that another way, God is the one to whom we’ve all got to answer at some point.
And this, you see, presents a problem. The problem is that if I’m responsible to somebody then I’m also subject to that somebody’s expectations of me. It means I’ve either got to please that somebody or else I’ve got to suffer whatever comes of that person being disappointed in me. I get a bad grade, I lose my job, I get dismissed as a nobody. This kind of thing happens all the time in our dealings with the human beings we’re responsible to. This in part is why almost all of us work hard to do well. We try to impress.
But what if the person you’re trying to impress has higher standards than you can meet? What if that person says, “Be holy, even as I the Lord your God am holy?” What if that person goes on to say, “The soul that sins, the one who fails to satisfy my holy expectations—that person shall die?” Well, that’s the point at which all kinds of people can’t help but turn around and walk away. As they go, they badmouth the one they’re walking away from. They call him a phony. They insist that there’s really nothing to him. And then they die; only in dying they call it natural. What they will not do—what they cannot do—is fess up to the fact that the One in charge of life has just fired them from living.
Even church-going people have a hard time facing up to that much truth about this One we call God.
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Third Move: Saving grace on steroids, as in the unthinkable wonder of God-in-Christ—
For Pentecost people it’s a different story. By Pentecost people I mean people who even today are listening to the same good news that Peter and his fellow apostles talked about in Jerusalem so long ago, and they’re not just listening to it. By the grace of God they find themselves trusting it too. . . .
You might say that Pentecost people are cross-eyed people. When they look at the world, when they look at each other—above all, when they look toward God, they insist on doing so through a strange pair of glasses, glasses that have the cross of Christ Jesus etched squarely in the middle of the part where the eye looks through.
And here I can’t help but think of those 3-D glasses that pop up every so often as a movie-going fad. They’re designed for use with certain movies. As you go into the theater they hand you a cardboard frame with colored plastic lenses, and when you put them on the screen pops. Suddenly there’s a depth, a richness, a new dimension to what you’re seeing. It’s almost as if you’re looking at something completely new.
Something vaguely similar to this has been happening for the past 2,000 years whenever Pentecost people have put their Jesus glasses on. Suddenly they’re seeing with cross-eyed vision, as you might say. And when they turn that vision in God’s direction—oh, my goodness, the picture pops. You might say on this Trinity Sunday that they’re seeing God in 3-D.
Before, all they could see was what people usually see when they look in God’s direction, this drab, unhappy, sometimes bitter picture of the Being way out there somewhere who expects us to answer to him for the things we do, and for all the things we fail to do.
With the Jesus glasses on, what you suddenly see is not a different Being, but a deeper, richer Being. What you see is not another God, but even so a far, far better God—better in the sense of being better for us.
Again, with the naked eye all we saw, all we could see, was the ever-so-distant God on high looking down as if on a scurry of ants and holding us each accountable for who and what we are.
But with the Jesus glasses on something different pops out. Suddenly we see the God who held himself accountable for us. What we see is a Being of so much depth and so much dimension that he was able to fire himself from living, why?—because he dared to live for us, he dared to answer for us, he dared to make himself responsible for who we are and who we are not. He bore our sins as we Christians say in our old-fashioned church talk. Because he did that, he paid the price. And because he was and is and always will be a God of such great depth and so much dimension, this God who paid the price was also able to reward himself for doing that. I’m speaking of Easter of course, when the living God brought himself back to life in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, so that today this Jesus might live for us and we in him—we in him because of the Spirit of God that binds us to him by getting us to trust him.
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Fourth Move: Faith in every-day action. The Church as God’s response to the initiating issue—
From Canva
This too is what you see when the Jesus glasses are on, how the Spirit of God is moving and working in the world right now, first and foremost in groups like this one where people get together in Jesus’ name to praise and celebrate the God they aren’t afraid of any longer. With the Jesus glasses on you see how this God is not only far away, way off in the distance, the silent void. He’s also right here. You can hear him in the voice of the person next to you as she prays and sings with hope. You can see him, almost, in the line of people coming up most every Sunday to meet their Savior in the sacrament. You can find him in homes where families practice the art of forgiving each other’s sin. And then at night they commend each other to the hours of sleep and darkness in the certain confidence they have nothing to fear because nothing but nothing out there is big or bad enough to snatch them away from the everlasting love of God for them in Jesus Christ their Lord.
This, of course, is what Pentecost people do. It’s how they live. With their Jesus glasses firmly in place. With steady hope in a God they trust with all their hearts, a God they dare to think of as their Father too. Don’t be afraid, they say to each other. He’ll treat us like his children, his dear, dear children. He’ll clean us up. He’ll fill our bellies. He’ll heal our hurts. He’ll bring us home. All for Jesus’ sake, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and nothing but nothing is going to keep our God from getting this done, for us.
“And it’s not just for us that God is doing it, but for the rest of you too.” This is another thing Pentecost people keep saying. It’s their major gift to the rest of the world, a gift that you and I are being handed all over again this morning not as something to keep for ourselves but rather to spread around in whatever corners of the world God puts us in this week. What did we just hear Jesus say again? Go! Make disciples of all nations, and not just the folks who look and sound like you. .
Here’s a thought: how about you and I remember this week that Jesus-trusting Pentecost people are the anti-pollutant that God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is dumping into our anxious, fearful, angry land. We have a special vocation. It’s to use those Jesus glasses the Holy Spirit has given us not only for looking at God but also for looking at our neighbors. With them in place, what do we see? Not just people we agree with or disagree with, people we like or happen to dislike. What we see instead are other human beings that God Almighty has set his heart on. Each of them is another instance of the magnificent creating we heard about it today’s first reading. Each of them is also somebody Jesus died for, somebody the Holy Spirit is aiming to infect with a fresh and healing dose of trust in God. Could be they don’t believe this, but you believe it. You know it be true. So yes, you get to treat them that way. You get to surprise them with a graciousness they don’t expect, and if nothing else, you get to leave them wondering if there isn’t more to the world and a whole lot more to this God-thing than they had ever thought to guess.
Such are the seeds from which our God Almighty, Father, +Son and Holy Spirit, continues to bring great things into being.
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Thursday Theology: that the benefits of Christ be put to use
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