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The Worst of Times
Trinity Sunday
June 6, 2004
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The doctrine of the Trinity provides both a guide to healthy spirituality and a
series of clear warnings when spiritual life goes off the rails.
The Trinity is about flexibility and balance. Managing three different
relationships with the persons of God is like a three-ball juggling act. If we pay too
much attention to one ball, we drop the other two and lurch out of control.
Thus, we have to stay on top of our relationship with God the Father, creator of
heaven and earth, who is before all, over all, beyond all—God outside our world. Then
there is God the Son, the human face of the divine, who is a bridge between human
incompleteness and divine fullness. Finally we have God the Holy Spirit, the
unpredictable infusion of God into our all too human lives.
Each person of the Trinity represents a very different kind of human relationship
with God, one at times seemingly incompatible with the others. Yet we need all three all
the time and we need them in balance with the needs and circumstances of our lives.
It’s a juggling act.
We need God the Father to keep us humble about ourselves (because God’s so
great and we’re so small) and to remind us that we’re part of something infinitely
greater than ourselves.
We need God the Son to keep us hopeful, loving and confident, and to help us
resist the temptation to get depressed about all that humility God the Father requires.
We need God the Holy Spirit to give us divine life and vitality and to prevent our
faith from becoming dry, meaningless or misguided.
The flexibility build into the Trinity is the special genius of Christianity. It
focuses our Christian spiritual walk on living healthy and successful spiritual lives
rather than on buying off God with mere sacrifice.
In another year, I would have spent the rest of our time elaborating the Trinity’s
positive meaning, but this year I’d like to spend our time talking about the warnings the
Trinity offers. Clearly, three aspects of God that point in the right direction can also tell
us when we’re headed in the wrong direction. Think of the Trinity as our spiritual
early-warning system.
What do God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, misinterpreted, misunderstood and
misused tell us about our culture? What direction do they point toward true faith
today?
My assumption throughout this sermon—one not necessarily shared by
everybody—is that our culture is profoundly saturated by Christian theology. Whether
it sees itself as atheistic, agnostic, hedonistic, apolitical or whatever, America can’t
escape God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, even as it flees from God’s church.
First, then, God the Father, who is best characterized in the twentieth century by
invisibility. Faith in science has replaced faith in religion, and science has no place in its
equations for infinite terms. Since God doesn’t fit into our calculations, we have happily
taken over management of the world from God. We’ve put God out of business, so
naturally God is invisible to us—even to many faithful church attenders.
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Yet all the things the biblical Israelites (and subsequent Christians) associated
with God still govern us. Despite the power science puts at our disposal, we’re no more
in control than we were when God was in the picture.
When I was young, global thermonuclear war stalked our hopes and fears with
the same godlike power that Attila the Hun once possessed. Today, lame by
comparison, we have to make do with mere terrorism. That, and street crime, drugs,
guns in high schools, epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, health care and social
security meltdown, while, over it all, the threat of environmental disaster hangs like
divine retribution for our mismanagement of the planet.
All these things accomplish what God the Father once did: they make us feel
humble and small in comparison to the great and powerful forces of the universe. They
are also the very things that once made God visible to people. They were perceived as
either tools appropriate to the magnitude of God’s wrath or as evils so great that they
cried out for God’s intervention.
As people in past times looked at the world’s power to see God, we look at the
same powers and turn against God. People in our time ask how God could allow
nuclear weapons to exist, and conclude that such evils mean God must not be real. By
this logic, God’s invisibility is neatly confirmed, along with our right to “manage” the
universe in God’s place.
We pay a price for such self-promotion. All these ungodly powers still do what
they’ve always done—they crush us, not God. They prove the non-existence of the only
god we know—ourselves. We may protest that we do not want to live in a world with
nuclear weapons, but we made them, not God.
No wonder, then, that contemporary humanity is plagued by anxiety. We walk
the planet nervously glancing around and trying to convince ourselves that the
bogeymen under our beds don’t really exist, while in our hearts we know they are not
only real, but that we have no compelling resource to manage them.
It turns out that not having access to God the Father isn’t exactly a formula for
spiritual health and peace.
Is it any surprise, then, that so many people turn to spiritualities that locate God
within us? Concluding that God the Father is absent from the world outside, many
wonder if we can’t find God the Holy Spirit within us where we can better manage
things.
Such an impulse lies at the heart of the spiritual renewal movements of the last
thirty years, as well as many of the self-discovery and self-actualization movements.
Reaching back as far as Freudian psychology at the beginning of the 20th century,
moving on through its successors in the self-help books and movements of our times,
wandering past Est, transcendental meditation, Maoism, rock and roll, the California
cults, the habits of highly effective people, groping through world religions—people
seek to find spiritual fire within themselves that can awaken divinity and godlike
power.
It’s no accident that Pentecostalism, the pure Christian form of Holy Spirit
religion, came with the dawn of the twentieth century, or that Charismatic Renewal has
been such a major force in our own uncertain times.
All these expressions of faith are looking for that inner spirit holy enough to
validate our existence so unconditionally that no mere earthly bogeyman can snatch it
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away. The mountains may fall on us, but we’re alive with the unquenchable inner fire of
God.
Yet immediately the dangers of a defensively interior spirituality jump up and
bite us. Such faith validates people as individuals, but at the cost of compromising their
relationship with the world around them. People gain the power to become sovereign,
disconnected. That’s the point, of course—to make us so holy that we don’t need to
worry about an exterior world we can’t manage.
Such a faith can be a little weak on ethics, morality and human relationship.
Though the example is extreme, I’m reminded of David Koresh divining the meaning of
the seals in Revelation while all the federal agencies in the world dropped down on his
compound for the killing of federal agents. Few go so far (though some go much
further!) as the Branch Davidians, but they are troubling precisely because they are the
logical culmination of so many of today’s idiosyncratic faiths validated by uncontestable
spiritual passion.
God the Holy Spirit—courted exclusively and spinning out of control—isn’t
necessarily a formula for spiritual health either.
We’re left yearning, then, for a bridge capable of reconnecting the world to God.
At such a point, we turn, inevitably, to God the Son. Bridgy stuff is his job description.
Both fully human and fully divine, Jesus is the one who connects heaven and earth.
Yet if the Father is invisible to us, and the Holy Spirit is out of control, God the
Son suffers from PTSD—Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. All the people who have gone
to war over Jesus have left him even more battered than he was on the cross. Judging by
the way we’re tuning up for another vicious round, things aren’t getting any better for
the son of God.
The battleground we make of Jesus is rooted in his dual nature as human and
divine. Lacking subtlety, most people prefer one or the other, finding diametric
opposites in one person a bit much to grasp. We like things black or white, not both.
On one side, people line up to fight for a Jesus they see as mostly divine. These
are the folks who want to locate Jesus as far from ordinary life as possible.
Consequently, humanity is seen as depraved and nearly worthless, while Jesus is
divinely self-sacrificing. The contemporary icon for this version of Christianity is that
gift of Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ. In this film, the face of Jesus is so abased by
human evil that we get the clear message that Jesus can’t really live among us in human
form.
The humanity of Jesus is lost: not exactly the bridge we were looking for, but a
good reason to go to war with those who believe otherwise.
On the other side are those who line up to fight for a Jesus more human than
divine. These are the folks who believe Jesus is so close to human nature that humanity
is entirely good rather than depraved. Why else would Jesus have loved us and taught
us to love each other?
The icons of this liberal Christianity are the various movements focused on rights
to ennoble individuals and groups. The danger in seeing Jesus as exclusively “one of
us,” however, is that people will rest content in the achievement of their rights and
strive for nothing holier (which, heaven forbid, might seem “judgmental.”) The divinity
of Jesus, which calls us to seek always to be more than we are, can easily be lost.
Again, not exactly a bridge, but a good reason to go to war.
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Both sides have validity and truth. I would never argue that we should forget
that Jesus died for our sins. Nor would I ever argue that we should shortchange the
theology of liberation and human rights.
Both sides are valid and true, but both sides are wrong when they claim that the
other has no validity. It isn’t the beliefs themselves that are false, but the claim that they
are exclusively true. Jesus is, after all, both human and divine.
The evils of conflict over the humanity and divinity of Jesus are upon us now in
the Episcopal Church. Our battle over the rights of gays and lesbians and the authority
of church conventions to alter traditional belief is the same old war for the divinity or
the humanity of Jesus. Unless we pull back from the brink, the Episcopal Church will be
divided into two lesser churches, each worshipping a partial vision of Christ as though it
were the whole.
That’s the very definition of heresy. The Son of God divided against himself is
not exactly a formula for spiritual health either.
Those are some of the alerts the Trinity’s early warning system raises. You
probably think, now, that I’m going to tell you how to fix all this, but hey, we’re almost
out of time. If I’ve made you think these are the worst of times, I’m afraid I’m going to
have to leave you just exactly right there, and for good reason.
I don’t think God’s agenda is necessarily to fix the messes we get ourselves into.
Could it be that God might want to let us struggle through the disasters our human
nature create, be taught by the pain we cause ourselves, and grow to a higher level of
spirituality?
Let me, instead, put these times in a larger context. Then maybe it will be
possible to discern a way toward faith in times like these.
God the Father invisible. God the Son divided against himself. God the Holy
Spirit out of control. These feel like the worst of times. What could be worse, we ask?
Well, Catholics and Protestants slaughtering each other wholesale in the Thirty
Years War and the Wars of Religion. That could be worse.
Christians assaulting Islamic lands on Crusade, plundering and slaughtering
Muslims and stealing their lands in the name of God. That might be worse.
Christians buying, owning and enslaving other human beings and basing it on
biblical principles. Worse, perhaps.
Christians running horrifying Inquisitions against other Christians, branding
them as heretics, literally, with branding irons. Before they burned them at the stake.
That could be worse.
Christians putting women in tanks of water to see if they float, and if they do,
then burning them as witches. Worse, maybe?
Christian leaders denying lay people en masse the right to read the Bible while
trading on their faith to become as wealthy and militarily powerful as any other prince
or duke of the Middle Ages.
Christians burying the life-principles of Jesus as deeply as possible in order to
provide good civil order to keep the Emperor happy.
Let’s face it: Every time qualifies as the worst of times for real Christian faith.
If we think our era should be different—if we think that these should be the best
of times even though other eras have been the worst of times—then that’s our ego
speaking.
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Remember, in the 20th century we took over management of the world from God
which means that the world reflects on us now. If these are the worst of times, then we
look bad—like maybe the world ought to be turned back over to its previous
management. That’s tough on our modern egos, but such is the disease of our times—
the modern ego.
Maybe we ought to begin by taking the evil of our times seriously. Perhaps we’ll
find, as good and faithful people always have, that, when we are honest with ourselves,
God brings us back again and again to our knees and to our senses. As we take
seriously a world without God yet chock full of anxiety-stricken, unrealistic, inflated
selves and true-believer warfare, we are driven to ask, “What have we done?”
As we come to our knees in genuine penitence, bereft of our cocky egos and our
political agendas, we remember again the simple humanity that we forget in our
ambition—a humanity so simple and compelling that it is divine in its holiness. That
divine humanity we so cherish gives us a glimpse of how it could be that the humanity
and divinity of Jesus are united in one person, thereby making God the creator of it all
visible to us again, and awakening the true Holy Spirit of life and truth within us.
The Trinity is restored.
The fact is that we are not judged by how well we manage the world. That’s
God’s job, not ours. The world can be going to Hell in a handbasket, and Christians
everywhere can still be OK with God.
We’re not judged by how well we run the world. We’re judged by how well we
respond to the world, even (maybe especially!) in the worst of times. The Trinity tells us
that we should not take control of the world but respond flexibly with holy integrity to
the power the world has over us.
When we’re able to let God be God, let the world be what it is and accept that we
are just passing through and don’t own the place ourselves, maybe a more healthy
balance will occur to us.
The Rev. David Hoster
Copyright © 2004, St. George’s Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas
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