Sound Bites: Trinity Sunday

Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20

The finale to the Easter Season, with the Church established at Pentecost, is Trinity Sunday. Liturgically, the year now looks to beginnings, as we are directed to read the first part of the Genesis story and its confirmation in Psalm 8. “God said, ‘let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’”’ The Psalmist confirms this by asking, “what are human beings that you are mindful of them? . . . Yet you have made them a little lower than God . . . You have given them dominion over the works of your hands.” But Matthew’s Jesus claims, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.” We, as disciples of the Christ who supersedes all other manifestations of divinity, are to make followers of all people, by baptizing them in the name of the Trinity. On this day we have the ultimate statement of faith in a three-part god: Father (creator), Son (Christ – Anointed One), and Holy Spirit (Holy Ghost), and the Apostle Paul closes his second letter to the Corinthians with a blessing in the name of the three-in-one.

This is cherry-picking par excellence on the part of those politically correct Elves. It is sound-bite theology, worthy of news organizations and partisans of all colors world-wide. In order to get your point across, whether it is marketing widgets or electing a president, concentrate on the shortest message with the greatest impact. Like the front-runner in a 2,000-year long political contest, Jesus and his message have been defined by what has been said about him by the loudest and most well-connected of people in the shortest and most memorable ways. But before we join the vast army of Christian soldiers, carrying the cross of Jesus as though into war, we might wonder if that is who Jesus really was.

From the brief benediction at the end of 2 Corinthians, the eye strays back to the enlarged numerals marking chapter 13, and there in verses 1-2, the Apostle Paul is apoplectic: “This is the third time I am coming to you” Paul roars, “. . . . I warned those who sinned previously and all the others . . . if I come again, I will not be lenient . . . .” Shades of Mom threatening dire consequences once Dad gets home from work. What’s going on here? What happened to baptizing cute babies and blessing everyone in the name of the triune God?

Any seminarian with a decent New Testament professor, or lay-leader with access to a study Bible, has noticed that Paul likely wrote many more than two letters to the community in Corinth, and that the Corinthians were a recalcitrant bunch. What they were recalcitrant about is debatable among some Biblical scholars, but John Dominic Crossan suggests that the problem was that the folks in Corinth were so deeply involved in their own 1st Century version of bumper-sticker living that they could not imagine what Paul was trying to tell them about the Way of Jesus.

Roman life was a highly structured form of patronage in which all classes of society participated, from slaves to the Emperor. Political, social, and commercial life was carried out in a complex hierarchical system that could not be circumvented without causing disturbance. So when Paul came along and reminded Philemon that his slave Onesimus must be welcomed back into the community as an equal brother in Christ, the reverberations were felt for a considerable distance up and down the social strata of 1st Century Corinth. When the good wealthy folk of Corinth came to participate in the Christian common shared meal and ran the risk of eating with people to whom they either owed social/political commerce (banquets and public sacrifices), or who owed to them, it made sense to eat at home first, and simply take a symbolic token of Jesus’s common table.

When Paul baptized the family of Stephanas, and Crispus and Gaius (1st Cor. 1:14-16), the Community Paul had founded thought he was acting as a patron, representing Jesus as a supreme patron, and acting in competition with others who may also have baptized followers of Jesus’s Way. What the Corinthians had so much trouble understanding is that Jesus’s Way lies outside the normalcy of Roman (or any) civilization. Jesus’s Way has nothing to do with normal, accepted social custom: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28. Jesus’s Way leads into the realm of God, where justice has nothing to do with payback, retribution, or what is or is not earned, owed, or deserved because of one’s social, political, or legal circumstances.

Paul taught that participation with Jesus’s program of restoring God’s Kingdom of distributive justice-compassion means living Kenotically. It means a radical abandonment of self-interest; a radical inclusiveness, in communities, business dealings, and political structures, that functions on a very different footing from the normalcy of civilization. So long as nobody asks any questions, civilization rolls nearly effortlessly into the normalcy of empire. But, as John Dominic Crossan has put it, the ancient Hebrew people, who knew that God is just, and the world belongs to God, were in the habit of looking around and saying, “but the world sucks! What’s wrong with this picture?” If God is just, and the world belongs to God, but the world is not just, then God – if God is indeed God – will have to act to do something about it. In Paul’s brilliant realization, God’s infinite grace is available to all who participate with Jesus in restoring that impartial, distributive justice to the world. The question then becomes, what does it mean to participate in that program?

Was Paul suggesting some kind of trinity with his blessing at the end of 2 Corinthians? Or was the Trinity somehow “anticipated” in the beginning of 2 Corinthians (21-22)? No. The number 3 is a prime number, and has had mystical connotations for thousands of years before Christianity appeared on the Planet. The aspects of Goddess form a Trinity (maiden, mother crone); the Moon has three phases: New, Full, Dark; ancient Celts turned around three times to raise protection of the elements around them; Brigid – a Celtic Goddess who made the transition into acceptance as a Christian saint is a triple Goddess governing poetry, healing, and the art of metal working. Paul certainly spoke in threes – any good preacher does the same. He says in 2 Corinthians 21-22, “But it is GOD who establishes us with you in CHRIST and . . . giving us his SPIRIT in our hearts as a first installment.” It is God’s action, through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus (another triad), that conveys the Spirit – that numinous, mysterious aspect of human consciousness that inspires and directs life outside the realm of ordinary human understanding.

At the end of his letter Paul invokes the GRACE of the Lord Jesus Christ, the LOVE of God, and the COMMUNION of the Holy Spirit upon the community at Corinth. This is not a God divided into three equal parts. This is a three-part blessing with Grace, Love, and Communion. When all three are present, God’s Kingdom is found in the midst of that community, whether among the followers of Jesus’s Way or not. In that elusive realm of distributive justice-compassion, where Grace, Love, and Communion are found there is no room for injustice.

The Elves selection of the readings from Genesis and Psalm 8 is not so irrelevant as it may seem at first. While the sound-bites are distracting (Dominion! Trinity!), a deeper reading suggests that one way to step into God’s Kingdom is to act with sustainable justice in our relationship to Planet Earth and the creatures that dwell there – including ourselves.

Psalm 8 (NRSV) says, “Yet you have made [humans] a little lower than God.” The Hebrew word is elohim, meaning divine beings or angels, which is the term used in the KJV. Angelic dominion is not about the physical space they control, but the human quality they have mastered and have become associated with. For example, The Arch Angel Michael is a warrior; other angels are known as “Hope” or “Peace” or “Love,” and may be called upon to act within their particular expertise. Guardian Angels are frequently credited with intervening to save lives or property. So rather than taking God’s granting to humans dominion over the earth as meaning domination, oppression, or subjection, the angelic meaning is closer to management, or “stewardship” – as the greener Christian denominations have long suggested. God’s Earth has been placed in our hands as a trust. To accept the responsibility for its sustenance means acting for eco-justice in sustainable kenosis – the radical abandonment of self-interest. What would impact would kenotic environmental attitudes have on oil, mountain-top removal, development of alternative energy resources, and the survival of endangered species – including those portions of humanity threatened with extinction by natural disaster?

The Priests for Equality of Brentwood, Maryland have the last word from The Inclusive Psalms: “From the lips of infants and children you bring forth words of power and praise, to answer your adversaries and to silence the hostile and vengeful . . . . You have made us responsible for the works of your hands, putting all things at our feet . . . Adonai, Our God, how majestic is your Name in all the earth!”