For Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2010

Dear friends: grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ

Let's pray: Father, Son and Holy Spirit - we don't undersand why, but you are concerned about us. You have come to have dinner with us, to sit with us sinners and eat with us. Bless you, Lord Jesus. Without you we are weak, we are sinners, we are your enemies. Without you... we are left to our own destructive appetites. Speak to us now – come, calm our hearts, still our striving, give us your peace. Amen.

We've just had Pentecost, where, in the words of Garrison Keillor, the flames lit on their little heads and bravely and dangerously went they onward. That was last Sunday. Today is the Sunday in the church year in which we celebrate the Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Three in One. God in three persons, blessed Trinity. There's not a story from the life of Jesus or the church, or of the Old Testament mothers and fathers of the faith. The word Trinity isn't even it the Bible. It is just a doctrine – called Trinity – how we understand God has revealed God.

It wasn't something that we conceived in ourselves, this Trinity. This Trinity – there from the beginning, as God who spoke at creation, the Spirit who hovered over the waters, and the Son, through whom, John wrote, through whom all things were made – this same Trinity comes to us. We would never think of Three. We might think of one. But we'd never come up with Trinity. But this word of God comes to us, Luther says, as a verbum externum – an external word. Left to ourselves, Paul says, we are weak, we are sinners, we are enemies of God. But God comes to us, this strange dance of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This God comes to us, inviting us to join in the relationship of Father Son and Holy Spirit, as brothers and sisters.

Without God coming to us, at best God is ... ummm... large. Distant. Uninterested. Without God coming to us, we are left with this watchmaker God who winds up the world and sets it running. Without God coming to us, we may be stuck with God as old, bearded white man, reaching out to but not quite touching Adam, like Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel. As that great theologian, Bette Midler sang 20 or so years ago, in a song written by Julie Gold, “God is watching us from a distance.” If God does not come to us, that's the kind of God we can come up with, if we come up with any God at all.

But this Three-in-One God is not distant, not an uninterested watchmaker, this God is not an old, bearded white man, reaching but not connecting. This God - this Trinity - is very present, because Jesus – God-come-in-person , who lived briefly, died violently and rose unexpectedly - Jesus is the one who comes to us. While we were weak, while we were sinners, while we were enemies of God – this Jesus came, breaking all conceptions of God.

“Show us the Father,” Phillip said to Jesus, “and we will be satisfied.” What is the Father really like, he's wondering. What did Moses see? What was Isaiah' vision? We wanna see, we wanna hear the Holy, Holy Holy of the angels. Phillip speaks for us all, when he asks to see the Father.

Joan Osborne sang this: If God had a name, what would it be
, And would you call it to his face
 If you were faced with him in all his glory
. What would you ask if you had just one question?What if God was one of us? 
Just a slob like one of us
? Just a stranger on the bus
, Trying to make his way home

This Trinity – this God did become one of us. The God-come-to-us is this unemployed carpenter from Nazareth – so unremarkable in his appearance that when we went to arrest him, we needed Judas to kiss him, to differentiate him from his followers. “Can you tell those people apart? I can't. Which one is Jesus? Judas, go kiss the one that's Jesus.” That man is God-come-in-person.

“Have I been with this long, and you still don't get it, Phillip?” So Jesus patiently explains, “If you have seen me, you have seen the father.” If that's true, then God is way different that what we thought. God is not angry with us. God seeks us in love. God is not distant. God comes to us. God is not an indifferent watchmaker. God is angry at sin and its effects. So God-come-in-person did something about sin, about our hatred, our lying, about our adultery, our stealing, our coveting, our pride. God-come-in-person did something about our exclusion of others, about our self-centredness, about our hiding our true selves behind religious niceties, about our living off the faith and actions of our parents and grandparents, about our lip-service, our hypocrisy, about our greed.

Jesus took upon himself our weakness, our sins, our enmity, bearing the wounds we inflicted, the death we dealt him. That's the God we get in this Jesus, and without Jesus we would not know this Trinity, this God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

In our weakness, in our sin, in our striving against God – there God comes. Seeking, loving, calling, saving by dying for us. Did God want to die? No – Let this cup pass from me, Jesus said. But God loves us enough to allow us to do our worst - and we did our worst. “While we were enemies of God, Christ died for us,” Paul says.

When Jesus, God-come-in-person, came, where did we find him? Was he in church all the time, hanging with the pastor, helping the ushers, singing with the choir? No, he was out there, with the sinners, with the poor and poor in spirit – the hookers, the drunks, the outcasts. This Jesus shows us the Father's heart, and it is completely other than what we'd expect

(And here's where I finished this sermon, but misplaced the last hand-written page - but it ended with a flourish and a bang...)