SunJun72009
Scripture: ISAIAH 6:1-8
Today, as much as preaching, I want to do some teaching. I want to lay out some things about the Trinity and about the passage from Isaiah that we read earlier. It may not be everyone’s need, but I have a sense that among a number of you, there is a desire to learn more about some of the basics of the faith. So that’s what we’re going to do today.
First of all, today is Trinity Sunday, the day we explicitly celebrate that, even though God is One, the faces of God are many. The great Jewish prayer, the Shema, begins, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” Like Judaism and Islam, we’re a monotheistic religion. There are not lots of Gods. Just one.
At the same time, though, Christians have always believed that this one God is manifest in countless ways. The doctrine of the Trinity grew up as a way of summing up this fullness of God. It was a way of saying, “Here’s some of what God is like.” “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” is a traditional formulation of the Trinity. “Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit” is a more recent one. What readers of the novel The Shack tell me is that, in that contemporary tale, what we call “the first person” of the Trinity is a black woman. I haven’t read The Shack, but what its author, William Young, has right is the fluidity of metaphors for the unknowable at the heart of the universe.
The notion of the Trinity grew up to express something else crucial about God, as well, and that is that God is a God whose very being is relational. There is no solitary God, only a connected God, no God who’s alone, only a God who’s in community. So the Trinity affirms both that God has many faces, and that God is by nature connected—both in the proverbial heavens and also with us.
If you’ve grown up in a liturgical tradition in which images of the Trinity were prominent, you may be surprised to learn that there is no explicit mention of such a concept in the Bible. Nowhere in the scriptures is God described as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” or any other threesome. That conceptual, theological way of articulating the Trinity grew up in the later church. The doctrine of the Trinity was simply the formal way of saying that God confronts us a variety of ways. We sense God, for example, as above us and beyond us—hence the notion of a powerful, transcendent God. We also sense God, though, as among us, as one of us—what we remember as God walking the earth and becoming a person, Jesus. And we sense God as within us and coursing through our veins—the mysterious conviction that some sacred presence inhabits us, a presence we call the Holy Spirit. God takes many different shapes in our lives. Having a sense of the Trinity is not unlike sensing H2O as ice, water, and steam. We sense God in a variety of interlocked ways.
So, as we say, there is no developed doctrine of the Trinity in the Bible. There are only hints of what later took a firmer shape. One of those places with hints of the Trinity—and they are only hints—is the passage we read earlier from Isaiah. There are two main reasons we read this story on Trinity Sunday. One is the “Holy, holy, holy” that one of the seraphs calls out in Isaiah’s presence (6:3). Three “Holy’s” in a row—a shadow of the Trinity. And when God finally speaks, the question God asks is, “Whom shall I send, and who will go [not “for me” but] for us?” (6:8)—plural. As I say, these are the gentlest of hints, but they point to the fullness of God.
So that’s a little bit about the Trinity. I want to shift gears now and look more directly at that passage from Isaiah. One of its distinctive elements is that it not only opens up a sense of the breadth and richness of God, but it has also been, over the centuries, something of a model for Christian worship. Some of you have been to thousands of worship services in your life, many of which may well have been hugely different from each other. What you may not have noticed is that, as different as those services may be, there is a general shape they tend to all share. Look at the basic outline of today’s story: first, Isaiah comes to God (6:1); next, the seraph—an angel, really—praises God—“Holy, holy, holy” (6:3); then Isaiah confesses his unworthiness—“Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a person of unclean lips” (6:5). Isaiah then hears the word of God and knows himself to be forgiven—“your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out” (6:7). And finally Isaiah is sent out on the mission God has planned for him.
And that, in a nutshell, is what we do here this morning. First we come here in hopes of being confronted by God. Then we praise God: look at our opening sentences—“Ascribe to God glory and strength”—and our first hymn—“To thee, great One in Three, eternal praises be!” (“Come, Thou Almighty King,” v. 4). So we come, and we praise. Then we confess our sins and shortcomings—look at the beautiful prayer Susi Kawolics wrote for today: “we confess that we have turned a deaf ear to those around us.” Next, by way of the assurance of pardon and the reading and proclaiming of the Word, we hear again the promises of God to let our sin go and give us a fresh start. Finally, in light of that unparalleled and magisterial gift, we are sent forth from here to bring the gift of God to wherever it’s needed in our homes and neighborhoods and workplaces. Isaiah has given us a pattern that still shapes much of what we do in worship: gathering, praise, confession, assurance, listening, sending.
Strikingly, the lion’s share of this little drama is the confession section. Now if you’re like me, there’s something a little irritating about that part. Why even think about it! It’s just a big downer! I wish I didn’t have to name my failings. It seems to make them too real. There’s something slightly horrifying about realizing that, despite my best efforts, I always fall short. And there’s something about acknowledging these faults that too often makes me feel as though I’m a miserable failure. So I resist confessing and naming my sins.
Most of the time, I’m reluctant to admit I did anything wrong. In fact, what’s way cool is that, in my eyes, there’s always a really good reason for my blunders. My wife Mary is fond of quoting writer Ellen Langer as saying that a person’s behavior—even their worst behavior—always makes sense to them. ‘I yelled at you because what you did was so obviously wrong.’ ‘I forgot to pick you up at work because I was way too distracted by everything else going on. It’s not my fault!’ I don’t need to apologize, in other words, because I didn’t really do anything wrong. There was a reason for my behavior. It can all be explained. Something or someone else was really at fault.
What confession asks us to do is to look at the world from another person’s point of view, but also from God’s point of view—to see the breakdown, and to say, “I contributed to that.” Years ago, a woman came to me and told me that she was upset that no one from the church had called her after her father died. I remember defensively telling her that I didn’t even know he had died—how could I have called her! She tartly replied that his obituary had appeared in the local paper. I remember thinking, “I didn’t even notice it, because your married name is different from his.” I could have gone round and round with her and come up with umpteen reasons why I couldn’t have been expected to call. Suddenly, though, I realized that she was simply hurt and sad, and I said, “I’m sorry I didn’t call.” In other words, ‘in a perfect world I would have called you; but it’s not a perfect world; and I didn’t call. So I’m sorry.’ Immediately her anger subsided, she forgave me, we had a warm conversation about her father, and she left feeling connected and whole. It was a vivid reminder to me that, yes, I had fallen short; that no, I wasn’t an awful person because of it; and that with my confession and her forgiveness, we had cleared the air and connected in the love of God.
We don’t say a prayer of confession at Federated every week. Maybe we should. Whether we do it every week or not, though, it’s really important that we regularly ritualize our accountability before God. Until we acknowledge our complicity in the world’s evil and silence and insensitivity and selfishness, we remain in a fantasy state. The fact is that we regularly let God and each other down. To be able to say this is a kind of freedom, because we no longer have to carry the hidden burden of the lie of our perfection around with us. We can put that burden out on the table.
And then we can let it go, because God lets that burden go for us.
Sometimes you hear people say, “Forgive yourself.” Now you may disagree with me on this, but I don’t think that’s really possible. Forgiving yourself is a little like tickling yourself. Or, as someone once said, it’s like trying to sit in your own lap. You can’t step outside of yourself enough to do it. What you can do is listen for and absorb the forgiveness that God offers to every single one of us. The way the great twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich put it seems just right: God accepts us as we are; our job is simply to accept our acceptance. The work of faith is none other than this: to take in that, no matter how badly we may have behaved, God accepts us. We may need to change our behavior. But God hasn’t rejected us. For “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).
Our confession and God’s forgiveness can become, then, a freeing template for our whole lives. We can let go of the heavy load of our responsibility and guilt, recognize that God carries it for us, and move on with a lightness of spirit. When, in the final act of worship, we are sent forth, this is at least part of what we’re sent to do—to enact, in everyday settings, the same forgiveness that God has offered us. Mother Teresa once said, “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” We can take in the way we’ve been freed from our own errors and missteps, and say to each other, “I forgive you.”
Kate Braestrup is a chaplain with the Warden Service in the state of Maine. One day, her cousin George used some gasoline to ignite some backyard brush and the pile exploded in the faces of George and her own children. They were all badly burned, and Kate rushed them to the hospital in her car amidst hellish sounds of cursing and crying. “George was cursing and crying because his burns hurt and because he knew that the fire that had injured these children was his mistake, his fault. He was the adult who had decided to use gasoline to start the fire, and his was the hand that struck the match. . . .
“George, beside me in the passenger seat, said, ‘Oh my God. Oh hell. I am so sorry. I am so sorry.’
“[My fourteen-year-old son] Zach was sitting behind him in the backseat. In the middle of his own loud litany of ‘Oh God’ and ‘Oh hell,’ Zach leaned forward. He reached out with his burned arm, an arm blistering and shredding before my eyes, and put his burned hand on George’s shoulder.
“‘It’s all right, George,’ he said. ‘We love you.’
“If you are living in love,” says Braestrup, “you are in heaven no matter where you are” (Here If You Need Me, pp. 135-6). And we might say the same about forgiveness: if you’re swimming in the waters of forgiveness—receiving it and giving it—you’re swimming in the pools of God. The God of the Trinity, the God of relationship, bestows forgiveness. Worship ritualizes it. And we’re sent forth to make it real with others. May we go, and spread that love and that forgiveness.