Trinity Sunday — Andy James

What’s in a Name?

May 22, 2016 By Andy James

a sermon on Psalm 8
preached on Trinity Sunday, May 22, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I spent the past few days with four hundred Lutherans at a hotel out on Long Island, serving as the parliamentarian for their annual synod assembly. While I’ve been Presbyterian all my life, I have a special place in my heart for Lutherans—my grandmother’s deep faith that continues to inspire me was grounded in her upbringing as a Lutheran, even though she spent the last fifty years of her life as a Presbyterian! So when I first began working with the Lutherans a couple years ago, I made it a point to let them know my more formal name, C. Anderson James. They even put it on my nametag that way! Everyone pretty quickly picked up that I go by “Andy,” but they also figured out that I have good Lutheran roots through my Norwegian family name!

As I stared at my nametag occasionally over the last few days, I was reminded of that age-old question: “What’s in a name?” For us, maybe it is family or ethnic identity, as it is for me, maybe some historical figure, maybe our parents’ favorite writer or artist or sports star, maybe an embrace of creation, maybe something we don’t even know about. While we may think carefully about the origins and meaning of our names, do we apply the same question to God?

Our psalm for this Trinity Sunday lifts up this concern loud and clear for us today: “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” Nowadays, the name of God isn’t always that big of a deal, but in the psalmist’s day, this was a giant concern. One scholar remarks that in the ancient Near East of biblical times, names had unique power:

Names conveyed presence and the ‘nature, power, and reality’ of their bearers, especially in relation to their divine bearers. (Thomas W. Walker, “Trinity Sunday: Psalm 8: Exegetical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume III, p. 33, 35)

And for the Hebrew people, one of the divine names, Yahweh, was so holy that it was unspeakable. Even today, when it appears in scripture, faithful Jews replace it with another name for God so as to avoid saying it and compromising its holiness.

To a certain extent, Trinity Sunday as we celebrate it today is rooted in historic understandings of God’s name that had great importance in the culture and philosophy of the ancient world, but does that mean that we can pay less attention to the Trinitarian name of God today? I for one think that we can still learn a few things from this ancient and historic doctrine that we celebrate on this day.

For starters, in its very name this day reminds us of how complex God’s name has become in our Christian understanding—our Triune God, three in one and one in three, is made up of these three persons who each carry a different name, yet these three persons are interrelated in such a way that the works of one cannot be separated from the works of another. And the name of God in the Trinity is complicated further by the historic use of “Father” to refer to the first person of the Trinity. God does not have gender as we humans do, yet this historic name carries a connotation of maleness that disrupts that very understanding to its core.

God’s name gets even more complicated when we look at the incredible variety of names and characteristics attributed to God in scripture. Our last hymn gave us only a small taste of the different names scripture offers us for God, so it wisely reminds us “that no single holy name / but the truth that feeds them all / is the God whom we proclaim.” The issue of God’s name, particularly when thinking about the Trinity, is so incredibly complicated and confusing that it sometimes seems like it isn’t worth the trouble. And yet, amidst all this mystery and uncertainty and confusion, the psalmist demands that we confess the majesty of God’s name.

God’s glory is beyond all description, the psalmist declares, yet praises to it rise up from the mouths of babes and infants. God’s majesty is abundantly clear in the beauty and power of creation, and such incredible glory makes the limitations of our humanity stand out like a lump of coal in a field of diamonds. Even so, God still crowns us with glory and honor and entrusts us with the bounty of the earth so that we might share in the power of God’s name always. In all these ways, God’s name becomes real in the world—and we have the chance to bear it for ourselves, as we join in songs of praise.

But even the best human names for God can’t capture the fullness of who God is. Even our greatest attempts to capture God’s glory in human words will fall short. Yet we still must try. The Trinity is the best name we’ve been able to sort out based on God’s revelation in the Bible and prayerful reflection on this over the centuries, and it is still incredibly confusing, mysterious, and incomplete. And yet, we bear the name of the Triune God each and every day as we live in hope in our world. We bear the name of the Father, the eternal Parent, the first person of the Trinity, whenever we join in care for God’s creation, when we show God’s parental love in our relationships with one another, and when we cry out for justice for the fullness of God’s creation. We bear the name of the Son, a man named Jesus, fully human and fully God, whenever we work to understand God’s presence in the world, when we act to restore God’s intended wholeness to our world, and when we give of ourselves so that others might have the fullness of life. And we bear the name of the Holy Spirit, the eternal wind and fire, whenever we trust that God is present and at work in the world even now, when we embody God’s transformative presence in the midst of uncertainty or change or injustice, and when we step out in faith into the unknown wilderness yet with certainty that God will guide us along the journey.

But even beyond these incredible ways that we bear the work of the Holy Trinity into the world, we bear the name of the Triune God into the world whenever we live as the Triune God does. This living is at its clearest when we recognize that God is three and yet one and one and yet three—an incredible community of persons living and working together for the good of one another, three persons in an intricate dance that yet never gets out of step, three inseparable partners who do incredible work independently and yet for and with one another. And so we are called to bear this name of the Triune God into the world—not a God disconnected from other concerns or attuned to the needs of only a few but a God whose very being depends on being in relationship with others and joining with them to work for the transformation of the world.

This is an incredible and very different name to bear into the world. The complexity of this name can’t be spoken of or explained in only a few words. The community present in this name is difficult to live in our world where The wonder of this name can’t be whittled down to a checklist of steps to confirm our conformity to this doctrine in a matter of seconds. The mystery of this name can’t be figured out in a week, a month, a year, or even a lifetime. Instead, all that is in this name calls us to bear it differently. The complexity, wonder, and mystery of this name demand that we carry it with great care, with openness to different ways of encountering God because we ourselves have encountered God in so many different ways. The community in the triune name of God calls us to be people who aren’t about caring for ourselves so much as we care for others, focusing instead on how we live together as we embody God’s presence in the world. And the majesty in this name demands that in the midst of all this mystery and community we raise our songs of praise now and always. There is so much in God’s name—so much history and tradition, so much ahead for the future, so much reality, so much unknown, so much visible, so much still hidden, so much certainty, so much mystery. And thankfully, we don’t have to get the fullness of this name right all the time so long as we bear it into the world with us each and every day.

So may the majestic name of our Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, strengthen us and go with us as we bear this name into the world in word and in deed now and always. Amen.

Mystery and Mission

May 31, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 6:1-8
preached on May 31, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

We’re coming out of quite a festive season. Between the great church holy days of Easter and Pentecost, the more minor celebration of the Ascension, the various joyous Sundays of the Easter season, and the cultural celebration of Mother’s Day, we have been quite a festive group of people lately! Today, though, we shift from a season of festivals into that great season of green, Ordinary Time, with one final festival: Trinity Sunday.

Even though it is certainly rightfully considered a festival of the church, Trinity Sunday is not quite the same as all these others. While all the other festivals of the church celebrate moments in the life of Jesus or the church, Trinity Sunday celebrates something far more abstract: a doctrine. And of course this is not just any doctrine—it is the most misunderstood and most easily dismissed doctrine of the church! Far too many Christians either shake their heads and ignore this doctrine because it seems too complicated or actively choose to think and even preach against it because they think that it is an outdated, unnecessary, and artificial set of rules placed on our understanding of God. But the doctrine of the Trinity that we celebrate today has stood the test of time. It continues to shape how we think of who God is and what God does even as we remember that our understanding of God is limited by our humanity. And this doctrine gives us a dose of much-needed humility in a world where we seem to think that we can know and understand everything, for just when we think that we have this all figured out, the paradox of one-in-three and three-in-one crops up all over again!

Yet the gift of this day is not just in giving us a bit of humility, taking us back to this easily-misunderstood doctrine of the early church, or even the wonderful hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy!” that is practically required to be sung on this day! Through the wisdom of the lectionary, Trinity Sunday also leads us to thoughtful texts that look at the mystery and mission of God that stand at the center of this great and complex doctrine. Our reading from the prophet Isaiah today opens us to this mystery and mission so very clearly.

Here the prophet tells us the story of his call to serve God and the people of Israel that began with a strange glimpse at the mystery of God and ended with a call to serve the mission of God. In the midst of transition and turmoil in the life of the nation, Isaiah had a vision of God “sitting on a throne, high and lofty.” On this throne, God was surrounded by servant angels, ascending and descending by the throne, covering their faces and bodies with their wings as they proclaimed the wonder and holiness of their master:

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.

As these angels offered their songs of praise, the temple filled with smoke and shook with wonder and majesty. Isaiah was stunned by this sight. His mortality and impurity and humanity became abundantly clear alongside the holiness of God. He could not even declare God’s holiness as we did in our opening hymn but instead offered a prayer of confession:

Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!

But Isaiah’s impurity and humanity didn’t really matter in that temple, for everything there was centered in the holiness of God that could change everything for Isaiah. To make this clear, one of the angels flew over to Isaiah, carrying a live coal from the altar. The angel touched the coal to Isaiah’s lips and proclaimed,

Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.

In that moment, something changed for Isaiah. He went from being fearful of this mysterious God because of his sin to being called out to new life because of God’s wonder and glory. The mystery of God had opened just enough for the mission of God began to emerge. When another voice thundered through the temple, asking, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”, Isaiah knew that he could respond with confidence:

Here am I; send me!

Isaiah’s vision puts the mystery and mission of God on full display for us, too. Amidst the mysterious servant angels, we see God calling for someone to journey forth. Amidst the clouds of smoke that cover the glory of God, we see a revelation of God’s self that shows us that we must respond. And amidst the wondrous way of forgiveness opened by the fiery coal from the altar of God, we are freed to join in the mission of God without fear.

All this mystery and mission are a great fit for the mysteries of Trinity Sunday. After all, who really understands how God can be three in one and one in three? Who understands how the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit manage to be three independent beings of one God? How we can identify the actions of one person of the Trinity when we have enough difficulty recognizing anything that God is doing in our world anyway? How we can see such distinction in the actions of the persons of the Trinity even as their actions are indivisible? And what difference does it really make why God is trinitarian in the first place? Answers to these questions are far more complex than we have time for in a twelve- to fifteen-minute sermon, yet the fact that we explore them as Christians ought to show that we take the mystery of God seriously.

Even as we get a clear glimpse of the mystery of God, the mission of God also becomes clear for us here. Just as God emerges from the mysterious cloud to call Isaiah, so we too are called from the mystery of God’s being to participate in God’s mission in the world. Over the last several months, our church leadership has been thinking and talking and praying about ways to engage us in intentional mission in the world. We have always been a missional church, with substantial financial gifts given to support mission efforts locally, nationally, and internationally through the deacons and many of you regularly inviting us to join in working with organizations and projects that you care about. Even as we honor these deep commitments and long histories of engagement, we also recognized the importance of taking up mission together, so we discussed several possible projects where we might come together to be active as a congregation in supporting mission efforts in our community and world. We agreed on two new projects as a long-term commitments to new mission engagement in our community and world even as we continue to support the Grace Church Food Pantry, Heifer International, and other projects and look to welcome even more ways to engage in mission together from the passions in our midst.

First, we will work to build relationships with mission partners in Madagascar. Last fall, we welcomed Lala Rasendrahasina, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ in Madagascar, to speak with us about that nation and the church’s work there, and he sparked some initial interest. We will be supporting Daniell and Elizabeth Turk, two Presbyterian mission co-workers who assist the church in Madagascar with agricultural, environmental, and health projects. The session has already approved a substantial contribution toward their work, and we will be working to engage with them in other ways in the coming months.

Second, we will be supporting UNiTE, the United Nations Secretary General’s campaign to end violence against women and girls. Among other projects, we hope to “Orange Our Neighborhood” during sixteen days of international activism around these issues in November and December. You’ll be hearing more about these projects as the date nears and we have an opportunity to learn more about these important issues and help others in our community join in these efforts.

These are places where we have heard God calling us, and I hope and pray that you will find a way to join in responding “Here am I; send me!” just as Isaiah did.

Even amidst the mystery of what this mission will look like for us in the end, our mysterious God who works in so many different ways and is so well described in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit invites us to respond just like this, offering ourselves in service that reflects the incredible presence of this mysterious God so that the mystery might be peeled back for others and ourselves as we join in God’s mission together.

So as we join Isaiah and countless others in joyfully responding to God’s call, may God’s mystery and mission become all the more clear for us so that we might welcome others to join us in watching and waiting and working for God’s new creation to become real in the world as all things are made new in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.

The Path of Wisdom

May 26, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 for Trinity Sunday
preached on May 26, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Wisdom seems to be a fading gift in our world. In recent years, the volume of knowledge around us has increased exponentially, and we can now quickly Google whatever we want to know from the palm of our hands and have the answer in a matter of moments, no matter where we are.

Yet with all this new information at our fingertips, our ability to process all this knowledge has not increased at quite the same speed. I for one think this is related to the great dearth of wisdom in our world. We just haven’t honed our abilities to sort out all the information that comes our way. Every day, we find new and different options for handling a particular situation and bringing about change, yet we seem to resist it more than ever before, perhaps in large part because we can’t quite process how life might be different if we were think about it differently. Even though there are plenty more people who carry plenty more knowledge around with them, the share of people who possess the wisdom to figure out what to do with that knowledge has not increased quite so quickly.

And yet we hear from Proverbs today:

Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?

This voice of Woman Wisdom cries out from the hills, shouts from the crossroads, and clamors at the gates of the city for all people to heed her voice. This is good news in these days. We need someone stepping up and crying out, offering us a word of warning and hope when are overwhelmed with uncertain messages. We need a new way through the challenges of today. We need wisdom now more than ever before, so it is good to see her stepping up to offer her voice amidst the crowd.

Woman Wisdom then turns to establish her credentials for this kind of incredible action in the world. She doesn’t seem to exactly and directly be God, but it is clear that she is inseparable from God, perhaps embodying and living out an important part of how God interacts with the world or helping us to connect our lives with God’s ways. She has been around since the very beginning, created by God “at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.”

Before all the other stuff came along, before everything that makes life complicated started getting in the way, even before creation began and things started coming together, Wisdom was there. Wisdom was there, waiting for the moment to raise her voice, watching for all the things going on in the world, taking it all in so that she could gain understanding to share with us. As everything took shape and God gave the world its form, Wisdom was there, “beside him, like a master worker,” learning about the world and preparing to share her guidance and understanding as the journey continued. She took delight in what God was doing and rejoiced in the depth and breadth and true wonder of all creation.

But where is she now? Where is Wisdom when we are so overwhelmed with information that we have no idea what to do with it all? Where is Wisdom amidst all the pain and sorrow in our world? Just this week we heard of incredible destruction and loss of life after a tornado in Oklahoma, a violent and gruesome murder in broad daylight on the streets of London designed to bring the terror of war closer to home, and the rise of violence against gay men on the streets of Greenwich Village in Manhattan. All this strange news threatens us with what some have termed “compassion fatigue,” for the more we know about the pain and sorrow in our world, the less that we feel we can do about it. Amidst all this, Wisdom seems to be far, far away, silently watching from the wings, not close at hand, not giving us guidance and wisdom for how to live in these strange times.

Yet if we listen closely, I think we can hear Wisdom crying out in these days. If she has been around since the beginning, Wisdom has seen it all before and can help us sort out what to do. If she has been a part of the creation of everything, Wisdom can give us new insight into how we can work to renew and restore it. If she walks and works beside God, Wisdom can help us join in the things that God is doing to transform our creation.

While it is always a comfort to learn that we are not alone as we try to sort out how to live in this world, this is nonetheless a challenging word for us. If we take Wisdom seriously here, we must let go of our search for truth and knowledge and instead take up the path of wisdom. This path of wisdom steps back from the sensationalism of our world, turning off a news cycle that makes everything “breaking news” and chatters incessantly about nothingness rather than recognizing that silence might be the best response to tragedy or that we may have to a wait a bit before we know the real and true consequences of this moment.

This path of wisdom leads us to encounter people right where they are, listening carefully to their stories, sharing their suffering, and acting with them to bring change to their lives and our world. This path of wisdom shows us that knowledge is not everything but rather than knowledge invites us to a new way of life rooted and grounded in wisdom to sustain us and support us and upbuild all of creation. And this path of wisdom gives us opportunities to cry out with Wisdom’s voice “on the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads…, at the entrance of the portals,” to invite others to join us in this way that points to deep peace in our lives and in our world as we set aside the path of anxiety and take up the road of hope.

Wisdom challenges us to put our knowledge and experience together in context so that we can share a new and different way of life and living with our world, not bound by any the expectations of the past or the institutions of the present but unbound to imagine a new and different way, to discern what God is doing and open ourselves to the creative possibilities of God’s voice of wisdom here and now. Ultimately, Wisdom is one of the great gifts of the triune God we celebrate today, a gift that comes from all three persons, initiated by our Divine Parent, lived out in our world in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and fulfilled in power and glory again and again in our lives and in our world by the power of the Holy Spirit. So Wisdom invites us to join in deep and great rejoicing, celebrating the depth and breadth of what God has created, delighting in the wonder of the whole world which God has redeemed, and giving thanks and praise to the one source of all good things, of all wisdom, which sustains every day.

So may wisdom’s path unfold before us, showing us the fullness of God’s gifts, opening us to the abundance of God’s grace, and helping us to rejoice anew in the gifts of our Triune God, now and always. Alleluia! Amen.

A Day to Celebrate?

June 20, 2011 By Andy James

a sermon for Trinity Sunday on Genesis 1:1-2:4a and Matthew 28:16-20
preached on June 19, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Trinity Sunday is a day like none other in the church calendar. Most of our church holidays are built around important events described in the Bible – the birth of Jesus, the death of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, the coming of the Holy Spirit, to name a few – but Trinity Sunday is based on a doctrine, not an event. To make matters worse, the Bible says nothing explicit about this doctrine – we’ve simply constructed it over the centuries based on what the Bible tells us about God, but other than a few places like our reading from the gospel according to Matthew this morning, even the traditional naming and phrasing of the Trinity isn’t laid out for us in the Old or New Testaments. So Trinity Sunday is a pretty unusual day, one nearly universally disliked by ministers who are forced to figure out how to preach on this doctrine and most likely equally disliked by church members everywhere who must suffer through what often becomes a theology lecture instead of a sermon!

Nonetheless, we celebrate Trinity Sunday today, so what is there to celebrate?Are we supposed to celebrate the Greek philosophical world that created the strange dynamics that must always be kept in mind when talking about the Trinity, three in one and one in three, somehow united and yet somehow divided? Are we supposed to rejoice that God must be accurately described as having “persons” or “modes of being,” as my seminary professors insisted, not pieces of a pie or parts of a machine as I indicated on my theology exam on this subject? Are we to be happy that we worship a God whose very being is so complicated that more often than not we throw up our hands and give up trying when we must discuss the Trinity? Well, maybe those things aren’t the core of this celebration, but there is good reason to think about the Trinity today.

First of all, celebrating Trinity Sunday reminds us of how God’s incredible work in our midst takes so many different forms. We often reduce God’s work to the three core works of the Trinity – the creating work of the first person of the Trinity, often referred to as God the Father, the redeeming work of the Son, Jesus Christ, and the sustaining work of the Holy Spirit. Our first reading this morning lifts up that creating work in all its fullness and reminds us of how God makes all things and calls our world into being even now.

However, even with this incredible witness before us, God is working in ways beyond these simple descriptions we often use to describe the Trinity. We see God healing us from the illnesses that afflict us. We see God as we engage with one another in the human experience in this world each and every day. We see God calling us to greater faithfulness to God’s Word and God’s work in our world. And we see God transforming our world into something more than what we can achieve on our own, something that is far greater than we can even imagine. So the traditional images used in the Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – are then simply an opening to our understanding about God, a starting place for us to think about how God can be and already is at work in our world.

While this is a good place to start, God is moving and acting and working in countless other ways today, too. Trinity Sunday, then, is not just a time to think about the different ways that God is at work – it is also a good time for us to think about how we need to be a part of what God is doing to make all things new even now. This ancient doctrine, rooted in the needs of a particular philosophy, place, and time, can still speak to us in our world today.

In our world where individualism seems to reign and “me first” is the predominant attitude for so many, the doctrine of the Trinity invites us to think about the importance of action in community. In the Trinity, we see that our God is a God of and in community. In the Trinity, we see that any and all of God’s work is not done by just one person of the Trinity but by all three. In the Trinity, we are shown that each person of the Trinity is unique and different and yet united to the broader whole. In the Trinity, we are reminded that even within God’s own self, our world is best not when we are on our own but when we are at work together.

The Greek theologian John of Damascus first invited us to think about the Trinity as three people in a circle, sharing a dance. His concept is known as perichoresis, from the Greek meaning “dancing around,” because the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are like three dancers in a circle, holding hands and sharing the joy of the dance of life. The three persons are distinct yet one, for while they each have their own part, the dance is incomplete if we look at just one of the dancers. In this dancing Trinity, then, there is no hierarchy, no abuse of power, no ruler making decisions apart from the wisdom of the whole, but instead, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share everything with one another in a community of equals as the dance goes on.

And so it is with God’s work with us. We see from the Trinity that God does not lord power and wisdom over us but instead invites us to participate in the joy of living in the new creation. In God’s own internal life, God shows us a new way of relating to one another that wipes away everything that would place one over another. In the Trinity, God invites us to set aside our tendency to be lone rangers and instead join in the wonder and joy of life in community in the church and beyond as we join in God’s transformation of the world. God’s work with us should then show us how to be with others, too, setting aside our preferences to be the one in charge, recognizing the important part that we play while letting others join in too, and celebrating the incredible gift of life in community as we share in the dance of life.

So I think Trinity Sunday is a day worth celebrating, even if it means we have to sort through a confusing and often misunderstood doctrine and suffer through a sermon built less on scripture and more on the theology of the church, for this strange doctrine shows us the possibilities of life in the way that God intends – and in the way that God lives in God’s own life together. In this wonderful and powerful and holy name of the Trinity, God calls us to live in new ways, to be faithful together as we join in the transformation of the world, and to set aside the things that distract us from this greater whole so that we too might be a part of the amazing and wonderful dance that shows us how to live.

So may our triune God give us the wisdom and strength to live in in the fullness and joy of community, not only on this Trinity Sunday but until that day when the new creation becomes real in all its fullness when we will see with our own eyes the holy dance of the triune God forever and ever. Amen.