The texts are Wisdom 7:22-30 and John 1:1-5, which you can read at this website if you're interested.
But why read a sermon when you can listen to it? A podcast of it is posted on Metropolitan's website, here.
Here at the Metropolitan Church, we are
in the middle of a sermon series called “Dancing Partners.” The sermon series
is about the Trinity, that characteristically Christian doctrine that names God
as Three in One and One in Three. It’s a tough topic, one that throughout the
history of Christianity has been the cause of many disputes, skirmishes, and
excommunications.
Now at Wesley Seminary, where I’m a
student, we have a year-long class called Systematic Theology, in which we
spend a rather significant amount of time poring over this idea of the Trinity,
rehashing what voices throughout the history of the Church have said about God
as Three in One, One in Three. Discussing whether this doctrine has scriptural
merit. Debating gendered language and metaphor and image.
This class took up a significant
percentage of my time last year, and so when Charlie asked me to preach this
Sunday my mind immediately went to that class and what I had learned. That
class really did help me makes sense of the Trinity, but not in the way I would
have expected.
You see, last December, I sat down in my
old house in Northeast DC to write my final paper for Systematic Theology. I
had the requisite stack of writings next to me—mainly church fathers and some
old German guys, with a few feminist and liberationist voices in there for good
measure. And I stared at the computer screen and, as seminarians are wont to
do, overthought the thing again and again.
My housemate, a more practically-minded
guy than me, was baking bread and listening to the radio in the kitchen. I had
sort of tuned the voices on the radio out, so I wasn’t really listening to what
was being said, but I noticed a sudden change in the tone. I don’t know how
many of you listen to NPR, but there’s this certain sort of cadence to
NPR-speak that tends to have a bit of a lulling effect on me. It’s always like,
“And now, with an unconventional take on a topic of interest, here’s a reporter
with a quirky name.” But the voices on the radio seemed to have sort of dropped
that NPR-speak, and so I started paying attention to what they were saying. And
I, along with many of you, began to learn about a shooting at a school in
Connecticut that most of us had never heard of before. An elementary school
called Sandy Hook.
When things like the shooting at Sandy
Hook—and I think it should anger us, it should disturb us, that I can say “things
like Sandy Hook” and you know what I mean, that we have a whole category of
events, Sandy Hooks and Virginia Techs and Columbines and Boston bombings, and
now we can add DC Navy Yards, a whole backlog of senseless violent tragedies—when
things like the shooting at Sandy Hook happen, my first response is always
silence. I never know what to say. And I sat, as did many others, by the radio
or by the computer or both, refreshing news websites, hanging on rumors and
misreported details, imagining the fear of children, and feeling paralyzed.
There was, of course, nothing to be
done. The time would come to talk about gun control, an important conversation
to have; and to talk about mental health, also such a vitally important topic. But
now was the time for shock, for silence, for not knowing what to say.
And there I sat, with a half-started Word
document and a stack of theological texts. And I didn’t know what else to do.
So I scrapped everything I had written and I started to write it again.
The very little that I could try to do
on that day is the same very little that I can try to do this morning. And that
is to try to make some sense of theology—that is, to make some sense of the way
in which we talk about God—in a world where kids are targets.
To try to speak about God in a way that
can make any difference in a world in which, from the suburbs of Connecticut to
the mountains of Pakistan, children can be pieces in the violent games of
adults.
--
So what I want to talk about this
morning is not exactly a doctrine of the Trinity, but instead the way that God
models for us and invites us into a way of being that overcomes alienation. By
talking about God as a Trinity, we are talking about God’s very self being
comprised of relationship, of community, of communion.
This idea is important because I think
that ultimately what I see when I see the news about Sandy Hook, and the DC
Navy Yard, and Syria, is alienation. It’s our ability to distance ourselves
from each other, and from God, and from ourselves, and from the Creation that
we are a part of. I see the chasms that
exist between us, the objectifications, that allow us to hurt each other. The
isolation that allows personal darkness to fester into violence.
This alienation is everywhere. It’s
in the loneliness that stalks the halls of Sibley Hospital and American
University. In the violence that we read about and see in our city and our
world. In the stigmatizing of mental illness. In sexism and racism and
heterosexism and all the other -isms that hold so much power in our world. In
the distance we feel from our neighbors in DC. In the reality of homelessness
in our city.
And then we look to God, and rather than
a distant, monolithic Other, another object separated from us by a chasm, we
can instead see a communal dance, an intertwining reality, the overcoming of
distance.
This sermon series is called “Dancing
Partners” because one of the ancient metaphors used to describe the Trinity is
a dance. The Greek word is perichoresis.
The word is from peri-, as in perimeter. That means “around.” And chorea, dance, from the same root as
choreography. So, something like, “to encompass with dancing.” So the idea is
that the mutual indwelling of the Persons of the Trinity, the way that they
deeply relate to each other without losing their personal distinctions, is like
a dance. There is movement. Moving closely with each other and then spinning
out. Opening and closing, stepping and leaping.
It’s a dance we’re invited into. Western
Christianity has gotten so used to thinking of salvation as a personal thing
that we forget it’s about reconciliation, an inherently communal act. We are
invited into the dance of the Trinity, invited to be reunited with
God-As-Community and thus to become part of a healed and reconciled community
here on earth. Liberation theologian Leonardo Boff writes, “If God means three
divine Persons in eternal communion among themselves, then we must conclude
that we also, sons and daughters, are called into communion. We are image and
likeness of the Trinity. Hence, we are community beings.”
Don’t worry introverts. This doesn’t
mean you can never be alone. In fact, it’s perfectly possible to be in a crowd
and still feel alienated, still feel isolated. It just means that as we live
more and more into the image of God-As-Relationship, we grow more and more
aware of how deeply we are all interconnected, how we are all intertwined. How
we are all dancing together.
--
We heard two passages of scripture today. One, if you’ve spent
significant time in churches, is probably pretty familiar to you. The other is
likely new. See, the second passage, the first words of the gospel of John, is
often read around Christmas. It describes Jesus as the Incarnate Word, present
at creation. John’s gospel goes on to tell us that this Word becomes flesh,
making itself known to us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s a radical
claim that John’s gospel makes, not found in any of the other gospels. That
Jesus is not just a human being but the manifestation of God, through whom all
things come into being.
Now, those of us who are comfortably ensconced in Christian
circles are so used to hearing this that we forget what an outlandish idea it
is. If you think about it, why anyone would choose to believe that a human
being, from a particular place and a particular time, is also somehow that
which brings the world into existence, is pretty hard to understand.
The first reading gives us some hints, though, about the paradigm in
which the gospel of John comes into being. It’s from a book called the Wisdom
of Solomon, a book that is not included in Protestant Bibles, although Roman
Catholic and Greek Orthodox believers count it as part of their scriptures.
It’s a Jewish text, but written, as is the gospel of John, from a distinctly
Greek thought-world. The text emerges not, as it purports to, from the world of
King Solomon, but rather from persecuted Jewish communities living in
Alexandria around the time of Jesus. In an environment of hostility and
violence, the author of this text draws on the ancient Jewish archetype of Lady
Wisdom--the Greek word is Sophia--to make the argument that devotion to
God is more important than the wisdom and philosophy of the day.
Ok. Here’s where things get really interesting. The Jewish image
of Divine Lady Wisdom is often understood as a predecessor to the Christian
image of the Holy Spirit. In Eastern Orthodox theology, the Spirit is often
understood as feminine, just like Wisdom in Jewish thought. In fact, later on
in the book of Wisdom, in Chapter 9, Wisdom is described as God’s holy spirit.
In the passage that we heard today, she’s described as “a breath of the power
of God,” images of breath also being characteristic of the Christian
understanding of God’s Spirit.
But notice that Wisdom is also described as the “Fashioner of All
Things.” In scriptural tradition, it was generally understood that Divine
Wisdom was present with God at the beginning of creation. Does this sound
familiar? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God.” This iconic description of Christ from John’s gospel sounds an awful
lot like the image of Divine Wisdom, which in turn predates the Christian image
of the Holy Spirit. Wisdom is also described in this morning’s passage as “a
reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an
image of his goodness.” This sounds incredibly similar to the description of
Christ found in the first chapter of the letter to the Hebrews, in which Christ
is called “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very
being.” So in describing Christ, the early Church was drawing on images of
Wisdom, which in turn were the predecessor to images of the Holy Spirit.
Oh dear, have I lost you yet? All I’m really trying to say here is
that, even before the early church agreed on a formal doctrine of the Trinity,
it had at hand images of God that were interrelated, that—while being distinct
images—moved in and out of each other. The early church already had a sense of
God as a community of diversity. And these interrelated understandings of God
were not closed off from humanity, a sort of distant doctrine to be pondered,
but rather were intimately related to creation. In John’s gospel, all things
come into being through the Word, the Word who becomes flesh in Jesus. We come
to being through Christ, are creatively connected to Christ. And in the book of
Wisdom, Wisdom is “penetrating through all spirits;” she “renews all things.” So
here we have God—God as Creator, God as the feminine Divine Wisdom, God as
Incarnate Word—intimately involved in God’s creation. Participating in our
lives. Overcoming separation and alienation and choosing, instead, closeness.
Relationship. Love. It is this God who we are made in the image of. One Charles
Wesley hymn describes us as “transcripts of the Trinity.” We are made to
reflect this communal God. We are made for intimacy.
But we wake up one morning to news of chemical attacks in Syria,
and another morning to news of a shooting at Navy Yard. We move through worlds
of loneliness and loss. We experience the division—including of our churches—along
racial and economic and political lines. In the face of all of this, it is a
radical claim to make that the world is meant, not for alienation and division,
but for community and relationship.
--
Part of the idea of this sermon series is to talk about Metropolitan
Memorial UMC, and Wesley UMC, and Crossroads at St. Luke’s, three particular
church communities that have become one church community in three separate
sites. We are still working out what that means and how that all works
logistically, and that’s ok. It will take some time. But what I want to point
to this morning is that our task is not just a logistical one, but a
theological one. We are not just working together by having one shared church
council or shared ministry teams. We are working together by trying to overcome
division. We are trying to create community across lines of age and race and
class. And we are trying to do so, not in a way that closes us off, but in a
way that opens us up to those outside of our walls—to the people of Brighter
Day ministries in Southeast DC; to the people of the Washington Interfaith
Network as we strive together for affordable housing in this city; to the
students of American University; to our mission partners in Nicaragua and South
Africa; crossing all of these separations to be in community with each other,
to be dancing partners with each other.
--
Friends, if any of you walk out of here not too sure about the
doctrine of the Trinity, that’s actually ok with me. What I hope, though, what
I would count as a God-given success, is if you walk out of here feeling a
sense of call into community. A call into intimacy, into relationship, by a God
who, in God’s very self, overcomes the alienation and distancing that is so
much a part of our broken world. Here at Metropolitan, we might begin living out
this call in small ways, taking steps across small barriers. So if you haven’t
worshiped at Wesley or at Crossroads, why don’t you give it a try? If you haven’t
joined the Campus Ministry team over at American University for one of our
monthly dinners, why not come along with us? Meet some of the folks across that
surprisingly wide barrier that is Nebraska Avenue. Learn some of their stories.
Take a little step to beat back the isolation that we fall so easily into.
In the face of great violence, I know it sounds like such a little
step. But little steps can make up a big dance. Little steps can bring us into close
step with the great divine choreography, with the dance of the Trinity. And we
read, today, that “against wisdom evil does not prevail.” We read, today, that “the
light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” So let’s
dance. Let’s dance in the face of gun violence, in the face of racism, in the
face of international conflict, in the face of hurt and loss and pain.
Sometimes it will feel like we are dancing, alone, in the dark. But God invites
us in, so that we are dancing together.
And the darkness does not overcome.
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