Matthew 28:16-20
Congregations in the United Church of Christ can pretty much do what they like. While all Christians observe Christmas and Easter, we are free to ignore Lent and Advent, Ash Wednesday and Christ the King, the latter a 20th century invention of the Roman communion.
There are, however, some advantages to aligning with the Christian calendar. We are a refugee church, full of folks from other communions. The majority of those church bodies keep the traditional cycle of seasons. If you are traveling and happen to worship while you are away, odds are that you will hear the same readings, though hopefully not better preaching.
And speaking of preaching, the schedule of assigned readings, called the Lectionary, forces a degree of discipline on the preacher. Every pastor only really has five or six sermons total, but making them work with the lectionary requires a little creativity. Pastors often gather to discuss the readings in small groups, and there are great resources available, including new material every month in The Christian Century.
There is, of course, a downside to tying yourself to this shared tradition. And that downside is Trinity Sunday, this Sunday, always the week after Pentecost.
Martin Luther said “To deny the Trinity is to risk our salvation; to try and explain the Trinity is to risk our sanity.” Less dangerous these days but still serious to some is the risk of heresy. So great is it, that seminarians are often thrown to the wolves of dogma and doctrine, forced into the pulpit to explain what some find inexplicable, and others illogical.
I, on the other hand, am a happy heretic, and embrace a theology that is fine with mystery, with allowing God to be God. A god that could be dissected and systematized would be dead.
If I am going to consider trinity at all, it is going to be through the question of why the early Christians constructed this way of understanding their experience of the holy, how it served them and contributed to human thriving.
I understand the problem they were trying to solve. Tradition has taught us that pre-Rabbinic Judaism was monotheistic, believing in only one god, pretty much from the time of Abraham. That is far from the truth. In fact, Jewish monotheism may have its roots in the failed religious reforms of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten, though that is a sermon or class for another day. They certainly remain polytheists through much of the period covered in the Jewish Testament. The monotheism of the Yahweh Temple cult was late in coming and hard won.
Though Jesus mostly claims to be the Son of Man in the gospels, a herald of the kin-dom of God first identified in the Book of Daniel, there is also material where he claims to be a presence of God. The Jewish Testament made reference to a personified Spirit of God.
Early Christians received the Holy Spirit, yet the Spirit was somehow still personified, which honestly made no sense. None of it made sense, the constructed definitions of the creating God, the competing understandings of who Jesus was and what he meant, this still present Spirit. Eventually, they just declared it all a mystery, which is to say they simply decided that the questions themselves are a sin.
The best theology I might come up with would be a merry modalism, the heresy that claims there is only one god experienced in different modes, or worse still, a unitarianism in one of its two classic forms, the soft form that accepts the unity of God without throwing Jesus under the bus, or the hard form that reduces Jesus to merely human, though this produces a pick-and-choose Christianity that is a bit lazy, a teacher who is wise and a con man or a religion that is worth preserving yet based on fraud.
The good news is that there are no heresy trials in the UCC, no pastoral pyres on which to burn those pastors who get trinitarian theology wrong. In fact, in this denomination, a pastor is more likely to be tarred and feathered for changing the church bulletin than for changing a core theology.
Maybe, just maybe, there is a better theology to be found in the American gospel according to Saint Walt Whitman.
We get to Whitman by way of Emerson, and we are right to remind ourselves of those voices that were not white men, Phyllis Wheatley, an abducted and enslaved person of the African diaspora, Emily Dickinson, a distinctive proto-feminist voice.
But Whitman was remarkable in his own way. He was as out as a gay man could be in the middle of the 19th century. Then there was his lifelong project, the slender volume that grew from one edition to another over the course of thirty-seven years, a work that incorporated the Gold Rush and westward expansion, more rightly westward invasion, a work that took in the Enslaver’s Rebellion and the assassination of Lincoln… “O Captain! My Captain!” Whose lips are pale and still.
It was this poet more than any other who captured the energy and noble intentions of the American spirit in the mid-19th centurty, the best of us, as imperfect as our national project might appear in hindsight.
While the deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass contains many powerful poems, I have to believe none surpasses “Song of Myself,” the source of this morning’s first reading. Untitled in the 1855 edition, it had taken on the familiar title by the time of the 1867 edition, had been divided into fifty-two sections, possibly reflecting the weeks in a year.
The voice is Whitman’s, but also every person. In Section Twenty, he writes:
In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them
In Twenty-One, we find these lines:
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men
Arguably feminist, certainly profane in its time, the poem was frank about sexuality, frank about the state of being embodied. It was anti-racist, at least in its own context, celebrating members of the African diaspora as well as the First Peoples of this continent.
Inspired, as were the Transcendentalists, by Eastern ways of thinking, he continues to expand the self, taking in animals, eventually all of creation, even death itself. Near the end of the poem we find these lines:
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every single one is sign’d by God’s name
This is not a Jewish text, not a Christian text, yet surely it praises and glorifies more than any ancient psalm.
And maybe, just maybe, this turns out to be a sermon about the Holy Trinity after all, for God could never be just this one being, co-dependent and violent, we find in ancient texts, could never be limited to this one man murdered by the power of empire and religion, but is that Pentecost fire that is in every believer and every non-believer too, that spark that calls us to love and creativity, that restless drive toward the might be of the next beautiful moment.
Maybe the mystery of Trinity is not in certainty and systems but is a “Song of Myself,” always the song of source, of one who called himself Son, of Spirit. Maybe, instead of trying to parse God into three bits still one bit, we can allow this simple fact to be… God will never fit in our books or our words or our moments. She is, and is, and is… and ever shall be. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Creating God,
the systems we have chosen
confine us, make us smaller,
make you smaller,
so that all might be controlled,
so that fear and greed and anger might rule,
growing until they are mighty,
terror in every shadow,
a collapsing economic battle royal,
violence in our streets.
We pray for those who refuse smallness,
who color outside of the lines
and love beyond the rules,
who see you everywhere,
in the forest canopy,
the orchid and the orchestra,
the least among us,
and our dearest loves.
Jesus called himself “Son of Man,”
Archetypal Human, or “Every Man,” “Every Person,”
Herald of your kin-dom already here,
if we would only see it,
so we pray as he taught us saying:
Our Father…
COMMISSION AND BENEDICTION
In “Song of Myself,” Whitman writes of everyone’s thoughts “If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing.” Maybe that is the beauty of Trinity, that the math doesn’t math, that like the beauty in all of creation, in birth and in death, the riddle re-entangles, May you remain entangled with Holy Mystery, even when you long for an impossible certainty. And may you be blessed, by Source, Son, and Spirit, this day and always. Amen.