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!”

Still in Pharoah’s Fields: Pentecost 2008

Acts 2:1-21; Numbers 11:24-30; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13;
John 20:19-23; Psalm 104:24-34, 35b

Pentecost is perhaps the first festival appropriated from an ancient tradition to serve the purposes of the new Christian Way. In the midst of the celebration of “the Church’s birthday,” with glib assertions that “Christ is our Passover,” thoughtful Christians may want to consider that the Jewish Festival of Weeks was really about life after liberation. See Leviticus 23:15-21. Fifty days after the commemoration of an archetypal deliverance from oppression and injustice, the Hebrew people were directed by the priests (God’s representatives) to make holy offerings of grain, bread, lambs, and incense. In a very practical acknowledgment of the normalcy of human civilization after liberation is accomplished, the purposes of the ritual sacrifices were for sin (a goat), and for well-being (two male lambs). After that, it was party time, and work was forbidden. But just in case the people might forget why they were liberated in the first place, the priests made it clear that “when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God.” In the midst of a holiday, certain that sins had been forgiven and that future well-being was assured, the people remembered that God’s kingdom, God’s reign, God’s imperial rule, means that God’s people live in distributive justice-compassion.

What is missing from most Christian Pentecost celebrations is a sense of purpose, ownership, liberation, and commitment. Theologically, Jesus’s death and resurrection supposedly replace any need for a “scape-goat” as a sacrifice for sin, and reconciles humanity with God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion. But sin, and guilt about sin, continues to plague church-goers, as though Jesus’s death and resurrection didn’t really do the trick. The reconciliation that Jesus’s life and teachings illustrated was a profound one-ness with a kenotic god, in a realm of distributive justice-compassion. Such an identification with God’s Kingdom conveys a sense of integrity, and thus the power to address systems of injustice. Sacrifice then becomes a symbolic action that bears witness to a transformed life. But post-modern Christians are separated from God’s realm, unable to open our eyes and ears and look and listen. Most of us have no personal stake in the conditions in which we live, or in which we observe others to be living. We have reduced “sacrifice” to an “offering” of money. We are unable to act with personal power.

The liberation struggle – for the ancient enslaved Hebrew population of Egypt and for any population held in thrall anywhere in anytime – is first to realize that one is indeed oppressed. Those who collaborate with the oppressors (bibically, “tax collectors and sinners”) are especially prone to blindness about the extent of their involvement. The end begins to justify the means. Fruit growers and small farmers, priced out of the market, sell their land to developers and commodities speculators. Employed single mothers, with no skills, keep quiet about unsafe working conditions and below-minimum wages. High-priced law firms construct elaborate “Chinese walls” around the bankers on the third floor who fund the real estate developers on the 4th floor, supposedly preventing leaks of information to the litigators on the 2nd floor, who are representing plaintiffs of unfair business practices. All are “enablers” of oppression, just as those whose friends or family members are addicted to drugs or gambling or alcohol, but cannot bring themselves to intervene. The struggle with denial and personal justification becomes a struggle against depression, apathy, and victimhood. After that, comes the struggle to realize that something can and indeed will be and is being done about the oppression. Only after reaching the depths of despair, the bottom of the addictive cycle, the nothingness and the void, is it possible to turn around – repent – and find the way out into the light once again.

The commemoration of liberation must include the acknowledgment and acceptance of the bitterness of existence under oppression. Only after that experience is it possible to celebrate forgiveness of sin, the grace of God’s kingdom of distributive justice-compassion, and the certainty of future well-being. The original Pentecost festival was held after the commemoration of liberation in the Feast of the Passover. For the primordial Hebrew people, God brought deliverance from injustice by direct action in the world. For the new Christian movement, God’s direct action was manifested in the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

So once the Passover commemoration is complete – including the acknowledgment of the bitterness of the oppression and the wandering in the wilderness of uncertainty about what to do about it – then it is time for true celebration. The spring mowing is done, and the hay is gathered. The fields are cleared and the seed is sown. The first spring vegetables and berries are ready for harvest. The time of hope has come. Party On! But don’t forget the ones who still live in oppression – the widow, the orphan, the alien seeking hospitality.

If the New Testament is interpreted as the actualization of the Old, then Moses’ wish in the passage cherry-picked from Numbers that all the people could be prophets comes true on the day described by the writer of Luke/Acts. The Holy Spirit, first given by John’s Jesus, descends in tongues of flames on the Christian community gathered in Jerusalem. They are empowered to tell the story of Jesus – the new paschal lamb – in every language of the known world. Peter quotes the prophet Joel, that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Paul proclaims, “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

The imagery of fire represents the outpouring of the presence of sacred being and of creative power. Fire transforms, destroys, purifies, enlightens, inspires, and protects. But post-modern, “first world” people have no experience or appreciation for that kind of power. In order to live with and through the Pentecost fires – whether of ancient commitment and sacrifice, or of the certainty of a transformational message – would-be prophets must remember that fire does not care what feeds it. Fire can be fed by injustice as well as justice-compassion. Perhaps that is why the ancient Priests were careful to remind the people to leave something for the poor and for the alien seeking hospitality in a hostile world. Prosperity can obscure the truth about one’s condition.

Most Americans, Christian or not, have no concept of the struggle for true liberation that continues world-wide. Vast numbers of humanity are oppressed by imperial regimes, and by the unwitting and unwilling supporters of those imperial regimes. Prophetic voices have recently suggested that American society also suffers from imperial oppression. Wherever there are shortages of what is required for sustainable living, oppression exists: health care (not dependent upon commercial health insurance); affordable, safe, housing; healthy food. The ground-breaking work done by the Union movement of the 1930s for protections for all workers has been all but overturned. Meaningful work that pays a living wage is non-existent in many areas of the country. Women especially are oppressed in this regard, as they earn seventy cents on the dollar compared to men in comparable positions. Workers in many low-paying industries and service-sector jobs must comply with unreasonable working hours and dangerous conditions. As for strictly “political” oppression, the U.S. Supreme Court has now opened the flood gates to state restrictions on voter registration; the Transportation Safety Administration – using soft lights and soothing music – lulls airline passengers into ignoring the fact that the new total body “security” scan is a violation of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution; arbitration clauses attached to everything from automobile purchases to credit card agreements prohibit the right to jury trials; equal protection under the law is denied to anyone deemed an “illegal immigrant.”

The ones still living in oppression are not the ones who do not yet know that Jesus is Lord. The ones still living in oppression are those trapped in various aspects of empire: those who believe that loyalty to a political system is paramount; who believe that love of country can only be expressed with some outward sign such as a pin or scarf or loyalty oath; those who take government assurances of personal security at face value, and believe that if they have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear from imperial authority.

21st Century American Christians are hardly ready to celebrate a true Pentecost. We’ve not yet left Pharoah’s fields.

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