Trinity Sunday 2011

June 19, 2011

The Rev. John A. Baldwin

When Easter comes late in the year, as is the case in 2011, two important dates coincide on a Sunday morning, Father's Day and Trinity Sunday. Happy Father's Day to all of the fathers here this morning, and happy Trinity Sunday to everyone else.

Father's Day receives a lot less hoop-la than Mother's Day, with florists and retailers not enjoying nearly the same level of business they did earlier in May. Father's Day is nonetheless an important occasion, because it recognizes the great blessing children receive when they have a father who is caring, nurturing, protecting and affirming. The role model our fathers play in our lives can be wonderful, powerful, and life-affirming.

On the other hand, relationships with fathers for many people are often complex. Far too many fathers are absent from their children's lives physically and/or emotionally. My relationship with my own father (who died 3 years ago) was far more complicated and difficult than I would have liked it to have been. Even well into my adult and professional life he felt he had free license to be critical, believing that in doing so he was helping to make me a better person. It was hard to live with at times.

More recently I have been deeply blessed to become a father figure and role model for my grandson, Landon. I am trying to be for him what I longed for my own father to be for me, affirming and nurturing. We'll see how successful I am in doing that as the years go by.

How we view our fathers & their role in our lives does affect our language and understanding of God, the creator & maker of Heaven and Earth, whom the Church down through the centuries has traditionally referred to as "the Father". This was brought home strongly to me when I went off to seminary at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and encountered Feminist Liberation Theology for the first time.

It was unsettling to have the images of God I'd grown up with, challenged at their very roots. How can people have a positive, loving relationship with the divine, it was asked, if we've had abusive, hurtful, painful experiences with our biological fathers, and we limit our language about the divine to "Father God"? If a father has been absent from our life, how can we feel any warmth or intimacy with God as "Father"? How much pain and suffering has been inflicted on humankind, it was contended, by patriarchal dominance that relegates women to second-class citizenship? I was stretched & pulled in seminary to become more of a "feminist"  man... that is to say, someone secure in my own masculine spirituality, not threatened by feminine spirituality....and instead, aware of & nurtured by the feminine that resides in every complete and whole male person.

Later in time, here in the Diocese of Southern Virginia, I was blessed to experience, unpolluted, feminine spirituality in all of its glory, when I served as the only male clergy person on an all-female Cursillo weekend. Just a few years later I was also blessed to serve on an all-male team, and to savor masculine spirituality at its very best.

At seminary, after some of the initial shocks & challenges to my theological framework, I found I could cope intellectually with an expanded range of images. Of course God is not male or female, but rather both, and much more. How foolish we really are, when we diminish the awesome power & majesty of God by seeking to make God too small, trapping God in language that fools us into feeling like we are in control.

And yet, how is it possible for us not to use human language and images in our theological discourse, and have any kind of intimacy. Praying to an amorphous cloud of gas has no appeal whatsoever. It's only as we personalize God that our religion, our faith, our hope, has the power to move us inwardly and deeply. By referring to God as "Father" (or "Mother" as feminist theologians might prefer), we are making possible a personal relationship with the divine. It's important not to let our less-than-perfect experiences with our parents color those terms too deeply, but to envision what fatherhood or motherhood at its very best is all about, and then focus on that as we envision God as loving, nurturing & affirming. 

One of the theologians who really connected with me in seminary was John McQuarrie, who convinced me that the world religions are not as different & disconnected from one another as some would like us to believe. All religions may be placed upon a continuum, McQuarrie asserted, from God as Transcendent (unknowable, beyond us, distant) at one end, to God as Imminent (in all things, close at hand) at the other end of the continuum.

So for example, atheists would be at one end (transcendence) - God is so far removed from us that there's no evidence God exists at all. At the other end of the continuum (Immanence) would be primitive religions (animism and fetishism) in which God is so close at hand that the divine is present in the good luck charm I hold in my hand, or the idol in my living room shrine.

MacQuarrie views Christianity as being rock-solid in the center of this continuum, affirming both the otherness & transcendence of God, and the closeness & imminence of God, with Hinduism & Buddhism being more focused on God's imminence, and Judaism & Islam focused more on God's transcendence. Thus in the Christian faith we can refer to God in personal terms, yet also being fully cognizant of God's power and might.

Now I know I'm straying here into a lot of theology on Father's Day and Trinity Sunday, and I hope your eyes haven't glazed over yet. Hang with me just a moment longer. The Holy Trinity is one of the unique contributions that Christianity has made to world religions. The transcendent God and creator of all things, becomes fully present and imminent in a human life, Jesus of Nazareth. That presence is not just a once upon a time, historical event, but is an ongoing, ever-present reality in the Holy Spirit of God, which is present in every worshipping community, and in every human heart and life. Although the feast day of Trinity Sunday might seem to be about an abstract theological doctrine, it's really about a reality of our universe. One way of affirming this is with these words, God beyond us, with us, and within us.  Amen.