Trinity June
16, 2019 Proverbs 8: 1-4;
22-31 Romans 5: 1-5
Church
meetings run on Robert’s Rules of Order.
Motions are made and seconded, discussion ensues, and a vote is
taken. In a meeting, there is a
moderator, someone to bang the gavel, and people who get up to speak address
themselves to the moderator instead of one another. At the parliamentary level, the rules include
forms of address when one person is referring to another, like “the gentleman
from Aberdeen”. If it is a particularly
divisive debate that is going on, the person who refers to the other as “the
gentleman from Aberdeen” may be thinking about that man in terms of “that
filthy rotten scoundrel”…well, in this day and age, the language is probably a
bit more graphic.
In the
British Parliament, the distance between the government and the opposition is
just slightly beyond the distance of dueling swords, because dueling is how
disagreements were resolved.
There is a ceremonial mace that is brought in and laid down for the
conduct of business to happen, because the mace of battle was laid down that a
more peaceful way of government could take place. These continue the rules that Robert came up
with to provide for the peaceful conduct of the people’s business in the
English democratic system.
We have
rules like these in our own Congress as well, but we don’t have the age of the
British system to continue all these fascinating traditions to remind ourselves
that democracy is a system of peace and benefit to all people.
What we
do have in this country are laws on two levels.
We have the laws of the land, passed by the various levels of
government, municipal, county, state, and federal. But then we have a higher law that governs
how we do things. We have the
Constitution. We use almost religious
level language to talk about that document, how it is sacrosanct, a word that
is synonymous with sacred. The President
swears an oath to defend the Constitution.
And for more than two hundred and forty years, no man, no matter how
power hungry or partisan or doltish, has ever sought to overstay their
executive power.
Why is
this important? Because it is what we
humans have attempted to construct as a political system that is bigger and
better than ourselves. We have looked to
the lessons of the past, to the excesses of royalty and dictatorship and we
have determined, to mess up Winston Churchill, “Democracy is the worst form of
government, except for all the others.”
It is a system from the people, by the people, for the people.
This is
us, attempting to build something that is bigger and better than we are for the
benefit of everyone. Is the system
perfect? Of course not. That is the genius of checks and balances. But there are the best ideals of our Founding
Fathers built in, tinkered with and fought over in the years since. What we are trying to do here is build a
divine level system for the benefit of everyone. Ever looked up in the Capital Dome in
Washington DC? It is painted in the
style of the ancient Greeks, idealized and portraying the gods and their work
among humans, providing a vision of what is being sought.
Humans
have been attempting to create divine level systems from the earliest days of
our existence. How do we explain natural
phenomena? How do we explain who is in
charge here, in this region? There is a
deity behind it. How does the sun travel
through the sky? The Greeks thought it
was Helios in his golden chariot. What
happens after we die? The Egyptians
considered Osiris to be the judge of those seeking to gain access to the
underworld. Read the Old Testament and
there is reference to Baals in the plural.
There was more than one, he/they/it were connected to particular regions
of the world. It would be like if Perth
Amboy had a Baal, and Woodbridge, well, several, Baal-Avenel, Baal-Iselin, Baal-Fords,
Baal-Woodbridge downtown…
It
still shows up in popular culture. Thor,
God of Thunder-not the God of Hammers, is part of the Marvel Universe of movies
and comics. But he is evolved in our
perception from Viking days, not really a god, just an alien of the race of
Asgard, big, powerful, and really hard to kill.
The thunder and lightning makes him a good super hero, not so much a god
in the worshipping sense.
Why is
this so important? Why is it important
to seek to understand that humans, even to this very day, seek to build ideas
and concepts about things that are bigger than ourselves and couch them in
ideal, divine terms?
Today
is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday when we focus on the three in one thing that is
our religious focus. The trinity, the
three we are talking about is our God, traditionally formulated as Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. A more modern
formulation, seeking to remove the gender stigma, is Creator, Redeemer,
Sustainer. Our ancient creeds, the
Apostles and the Nicene both take pains to help us figure out who these
‘persons’ are.
There
is God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Genesis 1 is the story of God’s creative
power making everything. There are a lot
of “all” words attached to God the Father, all-mighty, all-powerful,
all-knowing, all-seeing, all-loving. One
of the crazy things about the world is that there is something of a universal
god-consciousness about this all-powerful being in the background of
everything. Most cultures with a lot of
gods had a nebulous, powerful God the Father kind of figure in the
background. Sometimes, it gets very
close to us. When missionaries first
contacted the Inca’s in South America, they found that there were hymns to such
a figure that was part of their worship experience and the missionaries
thought, at first, that these people were already a part of Christianity.
But
notice how we humans create things on a deified level. We construct these things to serve a
purpose. It is either to explain a
natural phenomenon or it is to construct a way of doing things that is better
than our baser instincts. These deities
or deified ideals serve a purpose in our lives.
It may be relatively easy to worship something as the all-powerful God
who created the heavens and the earth.
It may be easy to say things like “God is love”, but it is a whole lot
harder to translate that hugeness into decisions of everyday life.
Which
is why God has done that for us, in the person of Jesus, God’s only begotten
Son. He is the embodiment of what it
means to love one another. He is
integrated into the creation story in the Gospel of John, in the beginning was
the word and the word was with God, and the word was God… He loved us so much that he died for us. We have the results from our passage in
Romans. We are justified by faith,
because of Jesus, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. He has given us access to the grace in which
we stand, the grace that led to the forgiveness of our sins and our reuniting
with God as God’s children with the gift of eternal life. It is such that even if we were to suffer,
according to verse 3, Christ turns even that to our advantage.
There
is a reason we push the question “What Would Jesus Do?” when it comes to
considering this life.
But
there is one more to the three in one, God the Holy Spirit. And Proverbs gives us a beautiful rendering
of the Holy Ghost. The first verses
speak of the Holy Spirit as Wisdom. I do
need to point out some trouble here.
Wisdom is designated female in this passage. Some have used it to balance the maleness of
Jesus and the male-pronouns of God the Father with the female of the Holy
Spirit. That is another sermon. Just remember that God is without gender, and
don’t have that fight again, but rather, that we are doing the best we can with
the limits of human vocabulary to understand “God”.
In
verse 22, we have yet another rendering of the creation story, this time with
the Holy Spirit, Wisdom, describing their presence at that event in a first
person accounting. “When he established
the heavens, I was there…when he drew a circle on the face of the deep…when God
did all those things, “I was beside him, like a master builder…”
And
whereas Jesus was born into our presence, with the Holy Spirit, “The lord
created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago…” We confirm that in the language of the Nicene
Creed where the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (and the Son).
What is
the Holy Spirit? She is wisdom. If God is the Creator of All, Jesus the
Redeemer of All, the wisdom of the Spirit sustains us all. The thing that the bible keeps describing as
the Holy Spirit of God is this Godliness that descends upon those to whom it is
granted. Jesus received it and it began
his ministry. The disciples received it
at Pentecost and it began their ministry.
Moses received it and began to lead the people, as did Joshua, and
Elijah, and the craftsmen who built God’s house, and David.
Whereas
Jesus shows us how to live in the divine way appointed by God for Christians,
the Holy Spirit does something more. It
gives us the capacity to do so.
What
does that mean? Well, use the example of
our Constitution. It sets up our nation,
as I said, with checks and balances. The
President and the Congress and the Supreme Court are the tops of the three
branches of government. This is built on
the premise that humans are sinful, self-absorbed beings and there must be
balance in force to keep us on the journey to the American dream.
The
Holy Spirit gives us another way to do the right thing. That is to have the wisdom of God indwelling
our souls to help us live the life of love, the law of love, the path of
forgiveness and grace, over and against the life of sin and evil. Instead of being balanced by others to do
what is right, the Spirit opens that possibility to each of us directly.
Yet we still run our meetings on Robert’s
Rules of Order, even with the gift of the Holy Spirit, of wisdom, granted to
us. We still have rules in place to do
the right thing even though we have been shown the right way to do things by
the life and example of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We follow a system that can seem slow and convoluted when we gather as
servants of the All-powerful God who art in heaven. And we do so because we are human.
And we have the gift of Jesus, so
that when we do hurt someone else, we have His death and resurrection giving us
the gift of divine forgiveness, that we may make things right and move forward.
And we
have God the All-Mighty Father, the All-Powerful Mother, the creator of everything
, who reveals God’s self as Son and Holy Spirit for our benefit, to know more
powerfully who our God is and experience more personally God’s love for us all.
Amen
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