May 24 | “Transcending Transcendence,” (Trinity Sunday Sermon, May 22nd 2016)

Note: This was a sermon I preached at the 8am service on Trinity Sunday. I used two of the assigned readings, which you can find here and here.

 

One of my favourite online resources for sermon help is a Lutheran website called “Working Preacher,” and my favourite contributor is David Lose, current president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

When I checked out what he had to say on Trinity Sunday, David wrote not to preach on the Trinity. His advice was to preach on hope instead, because it would be more accessible, since the Trinity was a doctrine, and preachers today preach to post-doctrinal people.

I don’t know if I’d go that far. And if he’s right and we are, should we be?

Now don’t be alarmed. We Christians have argued for generations about how a God can be Three-in-One, and I’m not about to twist us into knots for an hour for the sake of proving David Lose wrong. But I do want to talk about the Trinity, specifically because of something else that Lose says later in the same essay, which is that we need to talk more about hope because, living in a secular world, we suffer from a loss of transcendence. Well what better way to regain transcendence than by reflecting on the one God who transcends divinity, omnipotence, and one-ness?

The world in which we live is strikingly materialistic. I’m not speaking of materialistic in the usual sense of being overly concerned with material objects; I mean in the philosophical sense. The pendulum of Western civilization has swung from the dualistic privileging of spirit over physicality back to a more Aristotelian “What you see is what you get” worldview. We still retain echoes of that dualism – think of every diet, fitness, and beauty commercial you’ve ever seen which promised the latest elixir to help you control, maybe transcend your fragile aging flesh – but I have also perceived a struggle for the immaterial, the spiritual, in our age: a dismissal of the subjective in favour of being objective; a denigration of alternative cosmologies (many of which are, tellingly, non-Western) that proclaim unseen but very real dimensions in which spiritual and emotional energy has weight and can interact with the physical; and an almost primal focus on living in the here-and-now over and above the future which may or may not exist if we don’t get our act together.

I think this pendulum swing is necessary – even Spirit-guided – and I think we are beginning to swing back. Balance, however, is the key that we always seem to be searching for. And this is how God, transcending the image of the absent clockmaker so popular for the last five hundred or so years, becomes prophetic in our time.

Think of the image of Wisdom in our first reading. This is no airy, abstract, academic portrayal. This is a woman who stands on the street corner shouting for people to come to dinner. Everyone in the world knows what that looks like! If you read the whole chapter, you will see that she does not privilege any one people or philosophy, other than careful speech and good relationships. That last one is key. She loves company, and sings rhapsodically of her intimate relationship with the Creator, which is characterized by playful skill-sharing instead of competition. She is not to be grasped and hoarded as a treasure, because she is anything but passive. Not for her cages or pedestals, which are both dehumanizing as they deny agency on the one hand and vulnerability on the other. No, this is biblical proto-feminism at its finest. She’s an agent. Like the woman in the Song of Songs she is active in her pursuit of lovers, not because she needs them in order to be whole or loved but because she is by nature invitatory. She has an identity and life completely independent of any who would seek her out, and yet she chooses to do so because why would she not share her joy and strength with all? She is the anti-Hollywood hero: rejecting proud solitude, dominant posturing, and bootstrap thinking for open arms and an open table.

No wonder biblical commentators believe that the Gospel of John portrays Jesus as a cipher for Wisdom. God transcends solitary magnificence, transcends transcendence, even, for stuffy upper rooms, crisp roasted lamb, and barrels of cheap wine.

And that’s what Trinity Sunday is all about. The hypostatic union, the nature of natures, metaphors, similes, heresies – let’s leave all that aside and focus on this mind-blowing truth: that even as we poor, frightened, fragile creatures born from dust have sought to transcend our fleshiness through any means necessary, up to and including the eating of the one forbidden fruit in the whole garden, God is transcending perfection, transcending divinity, through the creation of something utterly unlike Godself; through freely offered invitation; through entering into time and flesh in Jesus; through the continued breathing of wisdom, truth, and love upon the earth; through the constant and evolving interaction with the cosmos. God in God’s infinite wisdom and recklessness sought to transcend omnipotence, and when that invitation was rejected, God, loving the world as recklessly as a child and as fearsomely as a parent, dug in deeper. God transcended transcendence to become immanent, and in resurrection gives us the power to transcend immanence and evanescence and become transcendent.

How can we possibly respond to such a momentous gift?

Well, in the spirit of that wild, untamed, and boundary-destroying love, in the spirit of the one who scatters our foolish boundaries like toy blocks and laughs with joy at the birth of stars, in the spirit of the one who is somehow three, I commend to all of you the following slightly edited piece of wisdom from Angel Silvermain Strange, a witch and friend of mine from my days in the Vancouver Goth scene:

“Love people unabashedly, without imposing expectations on their behavior, without the necessity of being loved in return, without the requirement of labels, with the joy of giving in your heart. Do it like a child would. Get raw. Be kind. Be unembarrassed. Forgive. Tell them you love them. Dig the **** in.”