1st Sunday after Pentecost-Trinity Sunday

The First Sunday after Pentecost-Trinity Sunday June 7, 2020 When I was growing up in Mississippi, there was a question that people I knew would often ask. I wonder if it’s a question that most Southerners ask each other? They would say to me or to others, “How’s ya’ mamma and them?” Sometimes, it was said as a greeting; others, it was asked as a legitimate question. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I began to think about this question and what it really means. “How’s ya’ mamma and them” is a question about connection. It connects the one asking with the one being asked through a person or other people being asked about, creating a sort of trinity of connection. The question draws connection and meaning through kinship, lifting up the relationships that are most dear and showing a desire for connection even there. Today is the 1st Sunday after Pentecost, the day every year in our church calendar when we celebrate Trinity Sunday, the mystery of a God who is unified in three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who are together, One. On this Sunday, desperate preachers often resort to quoting the church fathers who hammered out the doctrine of the Trinity, or we draw on imperfect metaphors or language. I even once heard a desperate preacher use one of those fidget spinners to try to illustrate the Trinity. The temptation for preachers when faced with the Trinity is to try to appeal to our intellect, but our intellects fail us in the face of the mystery that is a Triune God who is completely unified. So, instead, on Trinity Sunday, I think the invitation is really to engage our hearts: “how’s ya’ mamma and them?” The trinity, at its most pure essence, its deepest truth, is about relationship. It is the relationship of God which inspires God to create-to bring order out of chaos, to invite us into the part of being co-creators with God in our relationship with all of creation and in our relationships with each other. In addition to its being Trinity Sunday, over a week ago (but man, does it seem longer), our Presiding Bishop invited us to pray prayers of lament and remembrance for the over 100,000 people who have died of Covid-19 in our country, and if possible, to participate in ecumenical prayers for all those who have died and continued to die. In just a few minutes, we’ll pray those prayers together in lament and in remembrance and to remind us that, even if we do not personally know someone who has died from Covid-19, we are all connected, related, and the deaths of so many diminish all of us. And yet, even so much more has happened this week, last week: the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis which was videoed and shared around the world; protests; riots; stories of police doing harm; stories of police doing good; political machinations on all sides….In some ways, it feels as if we have descended into utter chaos. Many of us just want things to get back to “normal,” but it is hard to imagine or picture what that would even mean at this point. In the midst of our chaos, we have Trinity Sunday, the invitation of God to co-creation, to relationship; we have the reminder from our Genesis reading that each and every person has been made in the image and likeness of God and the kinship that creates among us. And we have in our gospel reading for today Jesus’s parting words to his disciples, the end of Matthew’s gospel, what is known as the “Great Commission.” In the last line of this passage, we have what another preacher has said is the summary of the Trinity: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” If we really believe this, how does this affect how we are in the world? It is the promise of the abiding, relational presence of God in our lives and in our world, always connecting, always creating order and goodness out of chaos and disorder and inviting us to participate in that. So, what does that even mean to us in our current moment? How can we, people of faith, respond to the invitation of the Triune God to be in relationship in this time of isolation, fragmentation? How can we become, even now, co-creators with God, in the face of such chaos, disorder, upheaval? I think the first step has to be to remember the roots of our kinship and delving into what that means. This past week, Richard Rohr quoted the Jesuit priest, Greogry Boyle, who founded the transformation community of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, “to assist individuals and families affected by the cycle of poverty, drugs, gangs, and incarceration. Along with many Homeboys and Homegirls, he believes the healing process can only happen when we are in relationship with one another.” Boyle writes, “Mother Teresa diagnosed the world’s ills in this way: we’ve just ‘forgotten that we belong to each other.’ Kinship is what happens to us when we refuse to let that happen. With kinship as the goal, other essential things fall into place; without it, no justice, no peace. I suspect that were kinship our goal, we would no longer be promoting justice—we would be celebrating it.”i Kinship is the remembering that we belong to each other that is rooted in our creation in the image and likeness of God. It is strengthened in recognizing that each one of us is vulnerable in these mortal bodies, vulnerable to violence, vulnerable to the sickness of this global pandemic, even as we continue to try to protect the most vulnerable among us. It is found in recognizing that kinship can never be remembered when one person has his knee on the neck of another child of God, even as we recognize that deep within each of us dwells the potential for that decision for violence and harm in that situation. Kinship, for those of us who are white, means dwelling in our own discomfort during this season. Kinship means beginning to do our own inner work of learning and of peeling back the layers of systems from which we have consistently benefitted for our entire lives, even for generations. Kinship means us listening to people of color who have consistently been oppressed and persecuted by those systems simply because they were not white. Kinship means that we stand and look and bear witness, albeit uncomfortably, in the face of the chaos of shame and rage that is pouring forth now that those things which have happened for hundreds of years in the darkness have had the light shone upon them. Maybe the first step for us in the kinship the Trinity invites us into is not flinching from our discomfort, not judging, not allowing ourselves to be distracted by politics or Netflix or shopping or fill in the blank here, not saying “yes, but” or arguing or justifying. The invitation to kinship for us in this moment is to continue to be uncomfortable in this present moment and to listen. This past week, I started reading a book titled White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. I’ll confess that even the title makes me squirm with discomfort. It’s written by Robin Diangelo, a white woman who is a sociologist and a long-time trainer in anti-racism. I’m only a few chapters in, but I’m struck by how she says that part of the problem is that we, white people, have an overly simplified understanding of racism. We think that racism talks about a person who is racist, and we know that is bad, and we do not think that we ourselves are bad, or racist, so we reject talking or thinking about it because we don’t think we need to. She goes on to distinguish racism from prejudice writing, “Prejudice is pre-judgement about another person based on the social groups to which that person belongs. Prejudice consists of thoughts and feelings, including stereotypes, attitudes, and generalizations that are based on little or no experience and then are projected onto everyone from that group. Our prejudices tend to be shared because we swim in the same cultural water and absorb the same messages. All humans have prejudice; we cannot avoid it.”ii She continues, “When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism, a far-reaching system that functions independently from the intentions or self-images of individual actors… ‘Racism is a structure, not an event’.”iii Our invitation for this week is to spend some time with our discomfort around issues of prejudice and racism in the light of the kinship we are invited into in and through the Trinity. One way to do this, which is the path I’m going to take, is to reflect on some questions Diangelo poses in her book, and I’ll share those with you in a moment. Another way is to read a book or an article or to watch a movie or program or listen to a podcast. We can help you with a list if that is something that you would like. Just ask. A good place to start is by reading the book or watching the movie Just Mercy, the book we read for our Lenten study a couple of years ago. The movie has recently been made free to watch on a number of streaming platforms, and it is another way to dwell with your discomfort as you discern what more you need to do. Here’s are the questions Diangelo offers, to help us dwell with and reflect on our discomfort: “The racial status quo is comfortable for white people, and we will not move forward in race relations if we remain comfortable. The key to moving forward is what we do with our discomfort. We can use it as a door out—blame the messenger and disregard the message. Or we can use it as a door in by asking, ‘Why does this unsettle me? What would it mean for me if this were true? How does this lens change my understanding of racial dynamics? How can my unease help reveal the unexamined assumptions I have been making? Is it possible that because I am white, there are some racial dynamics that I can’t see? Am I willing to consider that possibility? If I am not willing to do so, then why not?’”iv Friends, I know that what I am asking of you is difficult and challenging work. Know that it is work that I’ll be doing alongside you, and I hope that there will be a way for us to continue this work in person when circumstances allow. In doing this difficult work to live more deeply and fully into the kinship of God, we have the promise of Jesus and the Trinity: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” i. Richard Rohr’s daily meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation: Being One with the Other Thursday,  June 4, 2020. ii.Diangelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Kindle page 19. iii.Ibid Kindle page 20 iv. Ibid Kindle page 13