May 18, 2008
Trinity Sunday (Year A)
Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20
Fifty years ago, in 1958, a band of stalwart people, most of whom had attended St. George’s Church in Maynard, met in the Town Hall, to hold Episcopal services, no doubt Morning Prayer. Right up the street!
From that first meeting grew the church we are today, Church of the Good Shepherd, Acton. It is customary to name a church after the saint or feast day that is closest to the day it begins, but I would imagine the fact that our grandparent, Trinity Church, Concord, was already a “Trinity” Church, helped make the decision to call us the Church of the Good Shepherd a more appealing idea. But nonetheless, Trinity, Concord, beget St. George’s, Maynard, and St. George’s, Maynard, begat Good Shepherd, Acton, all of which shows the close ties we are automatically a part of when we become part of an Episcopal church. It is never about joining one congregation; it is always about being part of something bigger.
So fifty years ago we began to be a community of faith in the woods of Acton. It didn’t happen overnight, of course, but by the grace of God and the power of the Trinity we are.
If you asked most people what they love about being here at Good Shepherd, they would tell you it is the community. The music or the preaching may get voiced as things that people like, but always they are at least second and usually third or fourth to community, to the relationships that people build with one another in this place.
That is, of course, true of many church communities, but I think it is especially true of us. And I would like to suggest that one of the reasons that may be so is because the apple does not fall from the tree! We are not named Trinity, but we were formed on Trinity Sunday. And the whole point of the Trinity – or as I have been singing all week, “Holy Trinity, one God” – is that God is not a single, powerful, autocratic deity, but three persons, one being, one God, three persons in relationship with one another. Together they form the God head.
Now I realize that we have all heard wonderful descriptions of the Trinity, trying to explain how anything, especially God can be three and yet one, from the handy, “a man is a father, a son and an engineer” – three persons, one man – to all sorts of other contortions. But for me it is all extraordinarily simple, God is love, God is relationship, however that mystery gets worked out in theological language. God is love and God is relationship and God always was in relationship. That is the whole of who God is so the fact that we at Good Shepherd, formed on Trinity Sunday, “Holy Trinity, One God” Sunday, love our relationships and hold onto them most dearly, those relationships with each other and God that call us to this congregation, seems perfectly natural to me.
We are after all, created in God’s image, so we try our best to be as God is, in relationship with others, each other, God, creation. And as we all know, we are not nearly as good at relationships as God is! For God not only maintains perfect unity with in God’s own self, but God loves, adores, and cherishes, each and every human being, even those who are the least lovable. God is in relationship with God’s self all the time, since before time and will be after time, and maintains relationship with all the created order all the time. That is for me the impenetrable mystery of God.
And it is the thing that is most challenging, I believe, about being created in the image of God, maintaining relationships. Living into the love for each other as God does ceaselessly in the God head is our call as Christians. Yet, we all know that relationships are the most wonderful and the most challenging reality of living a human life, every mother, daughter, son, father, spouse, friend, and acquaintance, will tell you. Human beings and our need for control, being right, our competitive nature, our selfish desires and lusts, all these get in the way of the Imago Dei, the Image of God, out of which we come. The “Holy Trinity, One God,” on the other hand, maintains love and only pure love ceaselessly.
Think about that. Imagine that. It is too wonderful for words. “Pure love ceaselessly!”
Modern physics now tell us that the order of the world is kept by energy particles that are in relationship with each other. The atom is held together by a force, a relationship force. What one particle does impacts the action of the other and together they hold up the world. It is as if God created the world in God’s own image, Imago Dei, not as we first thought by creating an anthropomorphic icon. We are not like God because of our form, rather because we, like God, are our finest and best when we are in holy relationships.
Think about that. Imagine that. That, too, is too wonderful for words. Too full of mystery and wonder.
“Holy Trinity, One God” is the blueprint of creation and the blueprint of Christian life. For Jesus taught us that it is in forgiveness and reconciliation that we find eternal life with God, the eternal relationship with a living Trinity of relationship.
So we have a holy heritage this day to think about. We have seen this church grow as it invites new people into the holy relationships that come out of this holy space. We have seen it burst, at least three times, and shrink back down to a more contained, manageable size with more “like” people as opposed to more “diverse” people (for humans, “people like us” are far easier to maintain relationship with than those who challenge us and who are not like us). Each time we bounce from larger to smaller we lose people whose voice and faith and frankly whose love is needed to be the church we set out to be that Trinity Sunday fifty years ago.
And we are at it again, a crossroads. We will celebrate and we will remember the past, rejoice in what this community has given to us and to many before us. And as we celebrate the Eucharist this morning, we will remember that this is a proleptic moment, one of those moments out of time when all who have been here and celebrated the holy meal, since 1958, even since the time of Jesus at the last supper, and all those who will come to Good Shepherd in future generations, are here with us in that mysterious, wonderful, moment of relationship which we share with our God, “Holy Trinity, One God”
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd