A
Reflection for Trinity Sunday All Saints’ Episcopal Church,
Southern Shores June 11, 2017 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Trinity
Sunday
It has been good
having Stephen here for his summer field placement for his seminary
training. I remember when I did my intern summer in the mountains of
North Carolina, I was anxious to see how I would do in a parish. I
had been attending Episcopal churches, serving on the vestry and as
Senior Warden, Sunday school teacher, youth group leader, college
ministry team leader, lay reader, Lay Eucharistic Minister. But I
had no real interest in serving as a parish priest, having seen how
parish priests were sometimes mistreated by the projections of some
usually really nice people in good churches. I had served as a
chaplain in a hospital the summer before, but this was the first time
I had served as “The Not Yet Quite And Far From Reverend Wilson”.
I found that one of the things that helped my anxiety was to go out
in the early morning or the late afternoon and retreat to a hilltop
in the mountains and look at the view while I reciting the opening
lines of the 121st Psalm - “I will lift my eyes to the
hills; from whence cometh my salvation? My help cometh from the LORD,
the maker of Heaven and Earth.” Now that I am at the shore far
from the mountains, I go to the beach and watch the tide going in and
out and recall the words of the 107th Psalm - “Some
went down to the sea in ships, and plied their trade in deep waters;
They beheld the works of the LORD and his wonders in the deep.”
I can tell you the
scientific and psychological explanations for mountains, hills,
valleys, beaches, and oceans, but that will not help me to understand
what happens to me when I enter into communion with them. I find I
need to be in touch with creation when I am in danger of losing touch
with my deeper self, my soul, my very being.
School is out for
the summer and we will have a bunch more visitors to the Outer Banks
on a regular basis because they want what we have. I love living here
and I know that I will have to share the beach with so many other
people. Sometimes I resent all of those people, but it is not mine
to hoard, even in my imagination.
God gave us this
beautiful creation. The story of the creation is told in two
different stories in the first two chapters of Genesis. One of those
stories we read as our first lesson for this day, the Feast of the
Trinity. The stories are both pieces of poetry and myth and not an
attempt at science. Wesley said that the Bible was not written to
give us details of the past but to lead us to God. The clue to the
messages of the stories is to affirm that all creation is a gift and
it was made good, very good, and we, made in the image of God, are
integral parts of God’s dream for Good Creation, to be in a deep
relationship of awe and working together to keep all things sacred.
I could give you a
sermon on the nature of the Trinity, but as one wag used to say, “You
will need all of your mind to understand the Trinity and you will
lose your mind if you try to explain it.” I can give you some
analogies that work some of the time for me, but I find that they
have their limits. However, at the center of the concept of the
Trinity is that God is relationship, and God is like all true
relationships in that they cannot be comprehended and fully
understood but can only be entered unto.
Let me give you a
human analogy. In the same way, I love Pat Wilson and I have known
her half of my life. She is my legal wife, my fashion consultant, the
co-signer of my property, my part-time cook, my argument partner, my
conscience, but I could not fully describe or understand her
completely. She is a gift wrapped in love, a mystery not to solve but
to encounter in real life.
It is the nature of
the living encounter with God that is important, not the abstract
theological or philosophical thinking about God as a thing we can
take apart with our mind. We begin and enrich our encounter with God
through Creation, the loving gift from God, which as St. Bonaventure
said was "not to increase his glory, but to show it forth and to
communicate it." God proclaims Creation good not because it is
something that can be used for our own glory but because it is how we
can communicate with God and with our deeper self.
The problem is that
we no longer see Creation as a gift of which we are stewards, but in
our darkness we reduce creation from something of which to be in awe
to only a thing, without deeper meaning, a mere storehouse of
resources from which we plunder to create short term benefits. We
have allowed our values to be shaped by our short term interests -
“What is in it for me.” We rape nature to become rich, pawning
our souls for that “which rust and moth consume and thieves break
in and steal.”
When Native
Americans make the stand against an invasion of progress for our
benefit, they say things like, “This is sacred land.” The media
treats those ideas as quaint and so far behind the times saying,
“Sacred, schamcred, we want what we want. It is about the survival
of the fittest and the strongest. That is the nature of the world; we
are here to exploit nature not to mollycoddle it. We are sure that
some technology, yet to be born, can save us from our excesses, but
in the meantime, it is business as usual for the benefit of the chief
stockholders.”
What happens in this
view is that we extend the understanding of us as masters, owners of
creation, so that we turn our fellow creatures into things whose
worth is determined by their utility to our agendas. People become
things out of which we get as much as we can, and those who have
nothing left to give to our agendas we consider as, to use a chilling
phrase so popular today, “collateral damage.”
To go further, we
look at ourselves and our relationship and determine the worth based
on utility. “What am I getting out of this?” When we enter into
the process of reification, the turning of subjects into objects,
just things, based on approval or disapproval, useful or un-useful,
we become strangers to others and to our deeper being.
To read the Creation
stories of Genesis presents us with a challenge - not the surface
challenge of science versus faith, because the stories are not meant
to be taken literally (for what is called in today’s newspeak
“Alternative Facts”), but for the deeper truth that creation is a
gift from God calling us to an alternative way of dealing with
creation, not as a fearful greedy taker but as a grateful joyful
steward. As St. Augustine suggested, we tend to “battle not for
the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching
to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that
of Sacred Scripture”
Students are
graduating and families going on vacation. Our prayer for them is
that they might learn what is not covered in school, where worth is
determined by performance, but that the world is full of gifts from a
loving God gracefully given even to those who do not deserve it or
who do not benefit our short term interests. Perhaps we will learn by
being in awe of creation that our purpose in life is not to consume
but to be faithful stewards of the gifts we have been given.
Trinity Sunday
She looked at the
creation and said that it was very good
but I looked asking
was it good enough to be good for
something to profit
me adding to my possession score
or at least pro
-vide me a piece of quo to get a rich quid?
What's in it for me?
How can I trade in an infinite beauty,
a complex ecosystem,
so that my stocks add a dividend
building up short
term gain, having someone else spend
their health and
treasure to clean up after me as their duty?
Yet, what if it
wasn't mine to give it away or to cash it in,
supposing that I was
not the owner or thief, but steward
who was to care for
it for our children, and avoid hubris
in order to pass it
on even better than when it was given?
There aren't magic
solutions or even science in the wings
only changing our
nature to love nature more than things.
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