The First Sunday after Pentecost-Trinity Sunday Year B

First Sunday after Pentecost-Trinity Sunday Year B May 27, 2018 In her book Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor writes about telling several anecdotes to her Atlanta friends to explain her decision to leave a large Episcopal church in the city to take up the call as rector of a small church in a small town in northern Georgia. She writes, “When my friends in Atlanta asked me how things were going in north Georgia, I told them that I was living in a Flannery O’Connor story. I would spend one afternoon visiting a septuagenarian who lived in an octagonal house that her late husband had built for her, eating kiwis that she grew on her clothesline and listening to her reminiscences of Isadora Duncan. The next day I would take communion to a man who was back in the hospital for the third operation on his knee, which was crushed when his pickup truck rolled backward and pinned him against his trailer. After church on Trinity Sunday, I came out to my car to find a miniature Three Musketeers candy bar on the hood. Underneath it was a note from the deeply eccentric woman who lived across the street from the church. ‘One for all and all for one,’ the note read. ‘Happy Trinity Sunday.’i Today, on this first Sunday after Pentecost every year, our church calendar designates this as a day when we focus on the Trinity. I suspect, like me, you have all had your own experiences of really good and really bad Trinity Sunday sermons. I feel certain you have heard, at least once, many of the theological concepts behind the doctrine of the Trinity: a Trinity Sunday sermon that consists of phrases like: “that the one God exists in 3 persons and one substance—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is one, yet self-differentiated; the God who reveals Himself to humankind is one God equally in 3 distinct modes of existence, yet remains one through all eternity.”ii Or “that the Latin word personae which we translate as person (as in the 3 persons of the Trinity) is the same word used to talk about the masks that actors used to portray different characters in the theater.” Or perhaps even: St. Augustine compared the Son and the Holy Spirit to processes of human self-knowledge and self-love. He wrote that the Son came from an act of thinking on the part of the Father and the Spirit was a result of the mutual love of the Father and the Son. But even more than intellectual constructs, the notion of the Trinity resonates more through metaphor over the years: “from the Desert Fathers comparing the members of the Trinity to the source of light (Father), the light itself that illumines (Son), and the warmth when you feel the light (Spirit) to Augustine's Lover (Father), Beloved (Son), and the Love shared between the two (Spirit).”iii There was even the hapless seminarian who once preached a Trinity Sermon Sunday comparing the Trinity to a fidget spinner. And metaphors are good. They do get us to dance a little better with the mystery that is the Trinity. But today, I want to talk about the implications of the Trinity in our daily life. What significance does it have for us? In the midst of life, at the beginning of this long, green season of Ordinary Time, today we stop and remember the important truth that our God is a relational God, a God who created us specifically to be in relationship with God and whose three different aspects exist in a kind of playful, joyful dance that really makes God more accessible to us. We remember that all of God delights in us, too, and invites us to participate in this joyful, playful, delightful dance with God. The German mystic Mechtild of Magdeburg says it this way when she has God saying to us: “I, God, am your playmate! I will lead the child in you in wonderful ways for I have chosen you. Beloved child, come swiftly to ME for I am truly in you. Remember this: The smallest soul of all is still the daughter of the Father, the sister of the Son, the friend of the Holy Spirit and the true bride of the Holy Trinity.”iv So instead of talking theology or doctrine or even more metaphor today, let’s talk poetry. I once read a poem that captured the notion of Trinity for me in a new and different way, and in my rediscovery of it, it has captured my imagination about how my life with my family, my prayer life, and all aspects of how I am in this world in relationship to God and others could be different. It is called Playtime by Michael Hare Duke. Playtime It takes a kind of courage To find time for play… Thank God for the dreams in which we mount our fiery imaginations and ride off into the misty mountains. Night takes to task the busy day; but why am I ashamed to claim the right to conscious play within the waking world? When I can sit and let my mind catch fire I understand how God sang for fun calling out of nothing all creation. Wagtails bounce and flip their feathers salmon leap, the world turns, the planets wheel, tiny or vast orchestrated into a joyful tune, the models of all making. Dreams, imagination and God’s laughter in creation invite me out of my industrious solemnity, to take the task of playing seriously until my marred manhood is recreated in the child I have denied.v Where have you encountered God’s laughter in creation or in other places in your life this week? Where have you tasted God’s delight in your life? That is the Trinity at work in your life and in the world: indefinable, unbridled laughter and joy that cannot be contained and that delights in you and creates, redeems, and sustains all relationships. That is what we remember, celebrate, and savor this day. So. Happy Trinity Sunday. Let’s have a little bit of play today and do something you may have never done before. Eat chocolate in church. I have Three Musketeers for everyone that I will pass out now, and I encourage you to eat yours while you pass the peace. May it feed you to look for God’s laughter in creation in your life in the coming week as you witness the delight of the Trinity at work in the world. And remember, “Happy Trinity Sunday! All for one and one for all!” i.Taylor, Barbara Brown. Leaving Church. Harper: San Francisco, 2006, o. 67. ii.Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. ed. F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone. Oxford: 1997, p 1641. iii.David Lose at http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=1617 iv.Fox, Matthew. Christian Mystics. 365 Readings and Meditations. New World Library, 2011, p 64. v.Playtime by Michael Hare Duke. Resources for Preaching and Worship Year C. Ed. Hanna Ward and Jennifer Wild. Westminster: Louisville, 2003, p 174.