Co-missioners,
Once again we pass along some timely observations from our editor.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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Trinitarian Notes
by Jerome Burce
I write this in the week before the Feast of the Holy Trinity, 2025. This is the functional midpoint of the Western church calendar. It bears recalling how this calendar is divided fairly neatly into halves. In the first we spend our shared liturgical hours rehearsing the story of Christ. In the second we ask how Christ’s story shapes and forms our own unfolding lives.
This, at any rate, is how I’ve put it in the past to folks who are learning about the church’s liturgical habits for the first time. In my final years of parish ministry I would also rehearse it on the First Sunday of Advent, a season I came to regard somewhat idiosyncratically as the overarching headline for the entire church year. (“Let’s start this year by hearing what God has planned and promised for us and for the world. Then, come Christmas, we’ll begin remembering all over again what God has done and continues to do to keep those promises and effect those plans.”)
Andrei Rublev (–1430) – Holy Trinity (Troitsa)
From Wikimedia Commons
And, in the middle of all this, when the thematic focus shifts from then to now—from God’s doing in the Jesus-story to God’s doing in and through Christ this very year: amid this we pause to remember how the Holy Spirit has invited us to name and to know and above all to trust God as the One in Three and the Three in One, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
Comes a question I can’t help but ask: How will God be named and known this Sunday in the ELCA circles I’m connected to?
I’m nearing the end of my third year of retirement from full-time pastoral work. There’s a demand in my synod—in most every synod these days, I presume—for supply preachers. When at last I began responding to the demand, I was introduced to a diet of liturgical language circulated by Augsburg Fortress through its congregational worship resource, Sundays and Seasons (hereafter S&S). The little fading congregations I tend to supply rely on the online version of S&S to generate their Sunday bulletins. All it takes is making a few choices between options. Then you hit a “Print” button, and voila, there’s the bulletin!
Now as one quickly discovers, these bulletins are not constrained by the language assigned for liturgical expression in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW) and still less by the language of the older Lutheran Book of Worship (LBW). Yes, ELW forms are adhered to quite strictly. For example, services begin as a rule with a Rite of Confession. But the content of the Rite is not what the ELW framers presumably agreed on twenty years ago. Instead somebody else—to most all of us, someone unknown—has been granted license to write a confession that conforms to whatever she, he, or they have been grieving about of late. Too often what emerges is something that misses the deeper problem of the sin that genuinely troubles us all and needs to be faced week in and week out. What spills instead from the mouths of the people reading from their bulletins can come across as glib or even silly. But more on this and other lesser grievances some other time.
For now, there is something more pressing to groan about. It has everything to do with how the God we are given to worship and adore is being identified by those S&S bulletin composers. Among them there seems to be a bending over backwards to avoid identifying God as the creeds do—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The problem, I suppose, is with the term “Father”—regarded, I imagine, as a patriarchal imposition. I hedge these thoughts as a person must when they haven’t paid due attention to the feminist critiques in recent decades of the language we use. Mea culpa.
Still, I can’t guess why else the S&S bulletins seem insistent on avoiding the classic way of naming the God we’ve gathered to worship and meet and hear from. Of late, services have typically begun along these lines: “Blessed be the Holy Trinity, one God”—an ELW suggestion, as it happens—who, depending on the season, is “the Word made flesh, our life and our salvation” or “who journeys with us these forty days and sustains us with the gift of grace.” And so forth. Aside from wishing vainly that one could get folks with mainline Protestant leanings to quit using “journey” as a verb, it strikes me that constructions like these fail to recognize the fullness of God. In the instances just cited, the Trinity’s Second Person gets the bulk of the attention. Yet if one is to bless the holy Trinity (as opposed, strangely, to being blessed by the holy Trinity—the preferred option, I should think), then shouldn’t we be pointing not only to the One who sat in the wilderness for forty days but also to the First-Person-ed One who dispatched the Second Person into the world, not forgetting the Third-Person-ed One who drove Person Two into the wretched wilderness for our sake (Mk. 1:12), all three of them thus contributing with unanimity to “our life and our salvation”?
From Canva
It struck me the other day that formulations like these identify God in terms of God’s relationships to us. By contrast, the classic formulation identifies God in terms of God’s internal relationships, one person to the others. I think the former approach tempts us to think about God in unitarian ways. (Is this the trend it seems to be in the ELCA?) The latter makes trinitarian thinking unavoidable. It also secures a richness and complexity in our adoration of the God with whom, as it happens, we have a profoundly complex relationship. This, for example, is the God we repeatedly oppose and Who, in turn, steadfastly opposes our opposition. Thus the everyday reality that older labels like “sin” and “judgment” no longer manage to identify—or, perhaps, are no longer permitted to identify.
Comes then the altogether startling news, masked by the tired label “gospel,” that this oppositional God is at one and the same time profoundly on the side of his opponents, above all in the person of Christ Jesus, crucified and risen; and that this same God is also absurdly for us in the person of the Holy Spirit who grants the power to trust the impossible and to stake our lives on it to the glory of God and for the sake of neighbors we get to serve.
Such things ought not to be obscured. I’d argue that we insult God when we deny God the right to be upset with us and reduce Jesus to not much more than an example to follow as we go about our self-appointed job of saving the world because God hasn’t done it yet. This too seems to be a channel that lots of mainline-style conversation is flowing in these days. Dumb God down, and that’s what you get.
For my part, I’ve begun to improvise when leading an S&S liturgy. Let the Name be named, I figure; and by Name I mean the one that God has picked for Godself. See Matthew 28:19, a passage I continue to read with quaint old-fashioned piety. It strikes me that those who are most eager to adjust that name would take huge umbrage at anyone who tried to adjust their names. That’s doubtless a petty observation to make, and it’s altogether possible that my aversion to adjusting our naming of God is driven in part by curmudgeonly old age. Even so I’m quite convinced that the classic terminology will serve the church and the world and the purposes of the Triune God far better than any innovation could hope to.
I commend these thoughts to your thinking too as you praise Almighty God this weekend.
JB
Roaming Shores, Ohio
P.S. For further Trinitarian reflection I suggest taking a look at an old Crossings text study for Trinity Sunday by Timothy Hoyer. See Step 6 in particular.
Thursday Theology: that the benefits of Christ be put to use
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