Thursday, June 8, 2017

Trinity Sunday 2017 Reflection


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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