Matthew 28:16-20
Trinity Sunday/Father’s Day, June 19, 2011
Experience teaches me that worship leaders need to pay close attention to both the secular and the sacred calendars. The sacred calendar is the one issued by our denomination that identifies special days and full seasons in the liturgical year. By “liturgical” I mean pertaining to public worship. For example, this calendar tells Mary Elizabeth, Robin and I when the seasons of Lent and Advent begin. It’s a calendar for keeping our faithful community enriched, informed, and uplifted. For today, June 19, 2011, one week after Pentecost, this calendar encourages us to celebrate the Holy Trinity.
On our secular calendar -- the one with pictures of kittens, or golf courses, or flower gardens on it -- today is designated as Father’s Day. President Johnson made this recognition of fatherhood official in 1966, though attempts had been made since 1913. It’s a day, quite honestly, that for half my life I tried to avoid acknowledging since I’ve never had a relationship with my own father. Since I became father to Anna and Rebecca, however, old hurts have been abundantly blessed with healing love and so today is quite a wonderful day.
As a preacher, I always want to consult and to consider both the sacred and secular calendars when deciding what biblical message to offer week in and week out. Some of my colleagues rather adamantly avoid acknowledging secular holidays in worship. I’m not in this camp, but nor am I in the camp of offering messages that celebrate the secular at the expense of solid Scripture study. So there is always a bit of an inner tension about what exactly to address on days like today.
Tuesday of this week, I resolved this tension by deciding to teach what the Bible says about God the Father. Focusing on this Person of the Three that make up the Holy Trinity seemed quite a logical fit. But then, by Wednesday evening, I had read a really excellent article in this month’s Presbyterian’s Today magazine. It is titled, “Reclaiming the Trinity” and persuasively argues in favor of using fresh language in worship to talk about the central threefold identity of our God. It does so as a reminder that we need to consistently refer to the Trinity in order to keep from becoming “functional Unitarians,” as the author of the article puts it. After reading this, I felt it rather wrong to only focus on God the Father, even though it’s Father’s Day.
So where did this leave me? First of all, I reminded myself to stay anchored in our lesson from Matthew’s Gospel. These wonderfully familiar words from the 28th chapter are known as the Great Commission and are thoroughly Trinitarian. We who are baptized in the name of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are constantly being sent out to disciple others in the name of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. How well you understand what this means depends on your understanding of “discipleship” as well as on how well you comprehend that our God really is Three-in-One, One-in-Three. I’ll have more to say on discipleship on other days, but today let’s use some fresh language about the Trinity to help all of us gain a greater appreciation for why we should always think and speak about God in this way.
The Presbyterian’s Today article offers several biblically based metaphors to freshen up the traditional, familial language of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There is no disrespect for traditional language here, just an acknowledgement that interpreting the Trinity in new ways might be helpful. We’ll focus on one of those suggestions, and, since it is Father’s Day, along the way I’ll offer some witness to how faith in the Trinity helps me as a dad.
The new biblically based and also imaginative way to consider and talk about the Trinity I was most drawn to in the article is to consider God as Our Sun (as in the star), Our Ray, and Our Warmth. Each one of us is drawn into divine life through these three distinct but interdependent identities that interpret the divine work of our Triune God.
Traditionally, God as Our Sun (again, as in the star) is called the Father or the Creator. I find this metaphor of the sun spawns nicely from Psalm 84, verse 11, which states the “Lord God is a sun and shield.” Just think about humankind and our entire planet’s relationship to the sun. Most all earth life forms are completely dependent on it. Its heat and light provide the engine of growth. Thus, the sun generates and regenerates life and is central to our survival. It is fully present to us every single day and thus its existence is impossible to ignore or deny.
In the same way, God is forever our fully present, not to be ignored or denied source of all life. If we get into the habit of thinking about and appreciating God the way we consider our sun, every moment of our days can be a devotional one. God is the great and good generator of life in all its abundant diversity.
Now if we only regarded this Earth’s sun as being up and out in space, it would be rather hard to relate to. Its relevance would seem remote to us. We would not deeply comprehend our dependence upon it. Science tells us that our sun is some 93 million miles away[i] from Earth and so what helps us know that this distance is not just beyond us, but bridged to meet us right where we are?
Well, we talk about the sun’s rays. Rays help us realize the sun’s power is shining directly upon us. They are the brilliant bridge between up there and down here. Every single picture of the sky drawn through the years by my daughters illustrates them. And what an inspiring delight it is to capture a representation of them when taking photos! Rays remind us that the great sun is connected to us and taking care of our lives.
And so considering Jesus as Our Ray makes tremendous sense to me. He is, of course, traditionally referred to by the familial term Son and the theological term Redeemer. Jesus is God’s ray, God’s reach, God’s direct divine touch upon humankind. Our Lord is the brilliant bridge who illuminates, exemplifies, and make real God the Sun’s life generating and saving power. Through Jesus, Our Redeeming Ray, we are liberated from feeling as though we’ve been abandoned by our very life source. We are saved from darkness and decay and death. We are regenerated. And we partner with Our Ray to bring hopeful, healing light to all the self-destructive cycles human beings and our planet experience. Thus we faithfully sing, “Lord the light of love is shining, in the midst of our darkness shining, Jesus, Light of the world, shine upon us, set us free by the truth you now bring us … shine, Jesus, shine!”
God is Our Sun -- our great source of life. God is also Our Ray -- our illuminator, liberator and regenerator. This brings us to the third part of how we understand God’s identity. God is Our Warmth, traditionally referred by the theological terms Holy Spirit and Sustainer.
Can you recall a time when you were hustling and bustling about your day and then suddenly paused to let the light and warmth of the sun soak your skin? Do you recall that moment as being energizing and restorative? Even on hot days, pausing for a few seconds of radiant, reassuring warmth can be a welcome experience. And on frigid days it feels like salvation itself! This warmth is what we experience when being touched by sun and ray, and it positively impacts our whole body.
God as Our Warmth is the personal loving touch of God Our Sun and Our Ray. Nothing is more life affirming and life transforming than personally experiencing the powerful presence of Our Warmth. This warmth of divine love – in all the ways it is expressed and experienced – sustains and energizes us. It locates and connects us to Our Ray and Our Sun.
When I consider what fatherhood means to me, I begin with Our Warmth. My human father was not present for me, for reasons I regret I’ll never get to hear about directly. And because I was not raised being taught the Bible, I didn’t have language for understanding how God is a much greater and reliable kind of Father. Yet from as far back as I can remember, I felt Our Warmth with me. It manifest itself in my intuition, helping me know the goodness of Our Sun and Our Ray before I had any traditional names for them. It was comforting. It was loving. It was saving. I just knew a benevolent spiritual presence was a deeply important reality and not at all remote from my circumstances.
This Warmth remained with me through the years, most especially keeping me constant company as I experienced my greatest anxieties as a dad two years ago. All in all, I live for the myriad of ways this Warmth is alive in my ever growing relationship with Rebecca and Anna. It is named more directly for them than it was for me growing up, but still there are many times when silence falls, hands and bodies get held, and our Holy Trinity is simply but fully felt.
Three-In-One, One-In-Three. You wouldn’t explain the sun without also talking about rays and warmth, right? So too we can comprehend and experience and teach God as Trinity. Let us go from here today, as disciples, seeking to shine in the holy company of Our Sun, Our Ray and Our Warmth. Amen.
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