Trinity Sunday Unity in Diversity The Rev. Nancy S. Streufert

31 May 2015

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In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Yesterday, several of us laid to rest our dear friend Sarah Kavasharov in the memorial garden at St. Albans. I first met Sarah in 2003, shortly after moving from southern California to Humboldt County. When I joined Education for Ministry (EfM) that fall, Sarah was in her last year of that four year seminar program designed especially for lay ministers, developed by one of the seminaries of the Episcopal Church. Throughout the academic school year EfM groups all over the country meet weekly to study Scripture, reflect theologically on current issues and events, and worship together.

Most people who know us both pretty well agree that the friendship that grew between Sarah and me was rather unlikely to happen. In some very important ways, we were quite radically different. Besides the difference in our family and ethnic origins she who grew up in Alaska, the daughter of a native Aleut mother and a stern, aloof father from Kansas in a poor family torn by alcoholism and abandonment . . . and me from a rather traditional, intact all-American Midwestern Protestant family we disagreed about issues related to . . . you guessed it, politics and religion!

For example, justice in the world was a hot topic. Not the ends, we both agreed on those, but it was the means through which these desired ends could be achieved that caused our heated discussions: things like just war and military action oversees: it was the early days of the Iraq war and I had just ended a long career in defense electronics at Raytheon in southern California. And then there was religion . . . a student of philosophy, Sarah questioned everything and was highly critical of Christian doctrine that seemed to declare with certainty things that in her mind were indefinable.

But as we became better acquainted in the trusted environment of EfM where we could share our innermost thoughts and wrestle with our beliefs with great intensity and disagreement, but without fear of disrespect or ridicule, Sarah and I came to understand that we could be good friends even if we disagreed heartily on big important things.

Beyond EfM and over the last decade our friendship deepened and our disagreements mellowed as we discovered all the things we shared in common: crossword puzzles especially the New York Sunday Times, detective murder mysteries especially those of Reginald Hill and Arthur Upfield; the three young Italian tenors Il Volo whose videos we watched together; Mozarts opera The Magic Flute; TVs The Good Wife; Vogue patterns we once used for making clothes in our sewing days; and that we both became lawyers.

What I am getting at here is that Sarah and I became united in friendship while retaining our unique and distinctive selves.

And that brings me to the feast day of the Holy Trinity that we Christians celebrate today. The doctrine of the Trinity deals with the relationship of the three persons of the one God: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit in unity, in distinctiveness, with love as the underlying essence of their Being.

Trinity Sunday Unity in Diversity The Rev. Nancy S. Streufert

31 May 2015

2

Every sermon I have ever heard preached on Trinity Sunday has begun with a lament about the difficulty of the topic, and I think that what these preachers have meant is not that they dont understand the doctrine themselves, but that communicating it to those in the pews is the challenge. And they are right about that.

Its a paradoxical notion that a god of three persons could also be a monotheistic god. But that doesnt mean that we cant make some sense of it without parsing the endless theological debates that have been going on since the earliest days of the Church . . . though some of us love to do this! And out of these debates over the first centuries came the basic contours of the Christian faith as formulated in the Nicene Creed that we affirm every Sunday.

Critics are right that the doctrine of the Trinity does not have an explicit biblical basis. The New Testament writers say a great deal about God, Jesus, and the Spirit, but no writer expounds explicitly on the relationship of the three that develops in later Christian writings. There are two instances that come close, though: Paul ends his second letter to the Corinthians with The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

And at the end of Matthews Gospel, the risen Jesus commands his apostles to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit . . .

But the doctrine of the Trinity does not hang on just these two examples. As the early Christians reflected on what happened at Calvary with Jesus death and resurrection and as they reinterpreted the Hebrew Scriptures in a radically new way, it was nearly impossible to explain away Gods Trinitarian nature a divine unity in diversity.

From the book of Genesis we learn that we are made in Gods likeness and image. Do you recall that the pronouns are plural? God says, We shall make humankind in our image. Of course biblical scholars and theologians have speculated and argued endlessly about what this means, but there is overwhelming agreement that we, humanity, were created to mirror the three persons in the divine Trinity in its relationship of harmony and love unity in diversity centered in love.

In our baptism, we become incorporated into the divine life of God, i.e., we are taken into the Trinity. And what does this mean? Br. James Koester of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist describes it this way: By our baptism we are invited not merely to understand, but to experience the Trinity. Every form of human community takes its cue from the Holy Trinity, he says. In community we bear witness to the social nature of human life as willed by our Creator. Human beings bear the image of the triune God and are not meant to be separate and isolated.

Today is the day we particularly celebrate Gods glory and that praise and celebration is permeated throughout our service today in the hymns, the Canticle of the Three Young Men, the Scriptures, and the prayers.

Trinity Sunday Unity in Diversity The Rev. Nancy S. Streufert

31 May 2015

3

Gods Trinitarian character: love in unity and distinctiveness. And that is why I told the story of my relationship with Sarah: to illustrate that in our differences we could still be united in loving friendship, reflecting however imperfectly the divine Trinity, a unity in diversity that exemplifies the life that God intends for His entire creation.

So here is what I propose to you today and in the coming weeks and months get to know someone who doesnt share your beliefs or your culture or who doesnt look or act like you; go make some unlikely friends and really listen to their point of view; build community in a way that has us living into the reality of the Trinity, our destiny as baptized Christians.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.