HomeBlog On the Ocassion of the Trinity: Swear words, communism and 9/11
On the Ocassion of the Trinity: Swear words, communism and 9/11
My mother knit for me this stole. She is an avid crochet fanatic but not very good. I saw another priest with something similar and asked her to do one for me. My mother was I think 80 when she started doing this project. She arrived to New York September 8, 2001 in her maiden trip outside the island. On September 10, we went to see the Twin Towers. Unbeknownst to us, we saw them the day before their day of destruction. Following September 11th, I had a memorial service and mother went to a church service for the first time in about 40 years.
Knitting is about the only thing that ties my mother to the stereotype of the old lady church-going and pious. You see my mother is a card carrying member of the communist party, when she swears, there is no difference with a truck driver. My mother is many things, she for instance is specially compassionate with those who have suffered for their political views or because they have decided to abandon the island. She was in charge of a program that voluntarily re-educated prostitutes for years, providing them with work skills so they did not have to go back to selling heir bodies for lack of education and opportunities.
She also, as I said, is not that good at knitting and the final result was not what I expected, she spent like 3 months developing the stole with the words Alleluia. Every time something went wrong I could hear her swearing. So this stole, symbol of the priestly order in the Christian church was knit by a communist, who went into a church service as result of the September 11th tragedy, in New York having almost every stitch woven together with a colorful and large repertoire of swear words, rather than prayed over. A visiting priest once, suggested I change stole because this one was ugly, I simply told him that it was knit by my mother.
In the first reading we hear of God the Father as a Creator God. In the world of the Old Testament, such a God can only be met by very specially designated individuals, chosen without physical defects, within a special blood line and free from ritual impurity. These encounters while the people where moving form Egypt to the Promised land took place on mountain tops. When the people built the temple then God’s presence became part of then clearly delineated perimeter within the Jewish camp. When the stone Temple was built in Jerusalem, then God resided in the Holy of Holies, once a year visited by the High priest on the “day of Atonement” Yom Kippur. The awesome Creator of all reality was always met a distance and with both fear and respect.
This high God, one that have to be pleased and appeased with sacrifice is at the center of the Abramic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Both in Judaism and Islam God remains within that early perspective of Creation, from outside, from a distance as the song by Bette Midler goes. This Creator God from on high send his prophets to warn the Creation of their misdeeds and ways to correct them. It is though unique to Christianity the notion that the Creator has send not just a messenger but a part of his own divine self to be mixed with his Creation to show his Creation a way out of their evil ways. It is unique to Christianity that God kills his one self, so we human do not have to continue killing to appease, our own fears, or own God or gods.
I was thinking as I wrote this, what is to my complex and challenging times of today the Trinitarian formula. Why are we Christians called to live a Triune life?
I have said before to you, that the world is in such a paradigm shift that all values are in flux. The changing of media from the text in which we were raised and in the latter part of the XX century the appearance of electronic communication and with it the diversity of modes of communication affects profoundly the message itself. As Marshal McLuhan used to say THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE. So far the only Meta-narrative -this super stories where things like democracy, freedom, faith, love are imbedded- standing is the narrative of the market, it seems that the Law of Offer and Demands still seems more or less intact.
It is not surprising that then we see terrorism growing exponentially. Terrorism is the response of a frighten world to paradoxically losing the ability to communicate within established values with each other due to the abundance of media to communicate. Before Internet, cell phones, fax machines, video conferencing: contacts among cultural groups took the form of dialogue between appointed and vested representatives, leaving the life of the group more or less intact, the results of contact slowly trickling down in the home world. The Internet has challenged that, and soon everyone on the earth will be able to dialogue with each other, making their own decisions about the exchanged information.
The core value now under greater duress is authority, because for authority yo need to have something that no one does. Now the results of the exchange spread like Ebola virus everywhere and is there is such a great deal of “noise” in the system. The people despair at losing traditional and reassuring values that will calm their fears. It is not surprising that the 15 who masterminded 9/11 where for the most part highly educated and many living in the West.
Some people turn to a higher God, one that is immutable, changeless, one that is away from the shenanigans of the World as to hold on to a center of gravity seeking stability. And in order to feed that their own fear wrapped in religious metaphor are willing to blow up two buildings with 3,000 innocent lives in it. Let’s face it, the Twin Towers were not just a phallic symbol of American World dominance but also a micro universe all in itself, with people from all over the world and all classes, including the illegal nameless Hispanics who died in the collapse.
In Christianity, different to Islam and Judaism, God is by design involved in the world and no matter how much we stretched our doctrinal roots, we can not escape the center fact of our faith. God was in Jesus incarnate, one of us, inhabiting him and inhabiting us.
With the coming of the Son, our relationship with God suffered a dramatic shift, and God’s own perspective changed as well. While in Genesis God sees his own Creation from the visual perspective of an outsider from above. An He saw it was good. The Incarnation of Jesus God’s perspective is then from an insider, from within the muck and joy of being human.
We experience a shift from the infinite timelessness of God to the finite time, space and abundant human wickedness submission of the Son. This is what I will call a 180 turn. Jesus did more, freed the access to God from the Temples, the priestly class or even complex rules. From the Ten Commandments and the many other ones developed by the rabbis he summarized the law in loving God and loving neighbor. Tongue in cheek, I have feeling that Jesus anticipated the Internet.
Jesus did even more, he painted a picture of the Deity, where now He has become not just approachable by all, but also intimate in his wish to relate to us, God does not want to be feared, he would like to be loved by us his creatures. He told us to call the Father Abba, like babbling small children call their fathers, Abba, daddy. He told us to call him friend. He is a master that serves his students like a slave when he kneels down to wash feet on Maundy Thursday and who told us to do likewise.
WHEN we hear the names, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, we sense that in the mystery of God there must be a wondrous community and as it alludes to family roles. As we heard last week, Zinzendorf an important theologian and one of the founder of pietism used to call the Spirit simply “Mother”. If we just replace it in the Trinitarian formula we get a very different effect Father, Son and Mother. The connection of the Trinity as metaphorical family is then made clearer.
More importantly, the confession of faith in the Divine Trinity, holds that God is no single Lord in Heaven who rules everything, as a temporal ruler would. Nor do we mean some sort of cold power of providence who determines all and cannot be affected by anything. The Triune God is a social God, rich in internal and external relationships.
It is only from the perspective of the trinitarian God that we can claim that "God is Love," because love is never alone. Instead, it brings together those who are separate while maintaining their distinct characters. From the perspective of the triune God, one can say, along with Dietrich Bonhoeffer the German theolgian executed just a few days beofre liberation of his camp by Allied Forces in world war II he said, "only a suffering God can help." The God who is with us and for us in his suffering love can understand us and redeem us.
The redemptive cross of Christ is always deeply involved in the divine mystery, The ancient formula rightly exclaims: "One of the Trinity has suffered." I would like to add "where one suffers , the others suffer along." The Son suffers death in our God-forsakenness, the Father suffers the death of his beloved Son and the Spirit binds the other two together through unspoken sighs.
So if we are to live lives grounded in the meta-narrative of the Triune God, we have to know that he came to us to be one of us and he took us with Him to the Godhead, so we are now family of God. He is our Daddy, one that patiently waits for us to get it together, that invites us to tune our hearts to his songs, one that by design is all-inclusive.
We enter into the trinitarian history of Christ through baptism. It is for this reason that the first confessions of faith are baptismal confessions. In both faith and in life, everything depends on the God-sonship of Christ. Those who lose sight of this lose their ability to be children of God. It is sonship that binds together God and Jesus and provides the foundation for Trinitarian faith.
If this connection were broken, then Jesus is merely one more good person and God is merely the unfeeling Lord of Heaven. In the 19th century, this led to a "Jesus-humanism." Today it leads to an "Islamization" of Christianity.
Even more important, however, is the recognition that if Jesus were not "God’s son," if God were not "in him," then his suffering would have no divine meaning for the redemption of the world, then his pain representative of our pain, will be utterly lost in the endless cycles of violence and wickedness. It would disappear into the endless history of the suffering of murdered people. But, if "one of the trinity suffers," then healing can come to wounded humanity and hope can enter a dying world.
The trinitarian unity of the Son and the Father through the Spirit is a model for the relationships of men and women in the Spirit of Christ. The unity of the Church resides neither in the monarchy of God, nor in God as a supreme, divine essence, but in the trinitarian communion of God. However, this trinitarian community is so wide and so open that the Church and the whole world can "live" within it. The prayer of Jesus that "you may be one in us" is a prayer that is answered. Whether we know it or not we not only believe in the triune God, but also "live" in the triune God.
The triune God is a "habitable" God: he allows us to become one within him. If the world becomes "inhabitable" for God, then the restless God of history comes to his rest. The Church is an icon of the trinity. Its community of freedom and equality illuminates the image of the triune God. In who whom we live and have our being as Paul told the Church in Rome.
W are not just family of God through the ministry of the Son, but we are now and for all eternity -until the end of time- in Him and He in us.
You may have forgotten the initial illustration of this sermon, my mother’s stole, woven with the her truck driver swear words, with her complicated journey into God, with the Towers collapsing, with her communism and her strong compassion for society’s outcasts. With her reeducation of prostitutes, her abandonment by my father with three children to care for and household to keep afloat. I think that this stole is good metaphor of all we are, that we let others know about ourselves, and that other self, not as exemplary, not as clean, not as pure, guarded from prying eyes, not as level headed as we would like to be, this failed self of ours, I know that is welcome into the habitation of God, never mind what you think how a proper stole should be made, nor even what necessary workmanship should go into it or what pious prayers should be said, I will guard this stole until the day I die as a reminder that God’s grace is far greater and encompassing than his justice, to that promise I cling, I suggest that you do the same.
Ibidem The Triune God: Rich in Relationships Jürgen Moltmann
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
The Rev. Canon Juan A. Quevedo-Bosch,
Rector
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Fr. Gilberto "Tony" Hinds has transferred to work as priest-in-charge at the Church of the Resurrection,Kew Gardens, New York, sadly we say goodbye to Tony, you can reach him at this number 718-847-2649
