God the Prequel

So I came up with this very clever sermon title this morning.  And as I made my commitment to this sermon by faxing it to the church office, at least to the title of the sermon, I had this sinking feeling.  “What if nobody in the Rutgers Congregation knows about Star Wars?”.  I don’t remember having a conversation with any of you twenty years ago or two weeks ago about Star Wars, so just to set the record straight, how many people got the title and connected it to Star Wars?  Not everybody.  Okay.  For the uninitiated and those of you who don’t read the movie reviews and Time Magazine, let me tell you a little bit about this phenomenon of Star Wars that we’re experiencing this Spring and Summer.  There were three Star Wars movies a generation ago.  They were produced by George Lucas and written by him and they started in the middle of a story, which, as any good playwright knows is a good place to begin because it creates a lot of curiosity and imagination and so forth.  So there were these three movies, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes back and the Evil Empire.  I think I may have gotten them reversed in order but there were three of them.

 

So what we’re experiencing now is the first Star War movie which pre–dates these three in the trilogy, comes before it and the name of this concept of coming before is called a “prequel”.  It’s a new word, you won’t find it in the dictionary.  It’s a “prequel”.  So in this “Episode 1: The Phantom Menace”, viewers bring to the watching of that movie, the story of the sequels.  All those 3 Star Wars movies that were so much part of our culture a generation ago.  The prequel introduces all the main characters, it sets up good and evil.  Interestingly enough, the little boy who turns out to be Darth Vader is really a good person in the prequel.  And the prequel sets the stage for all that is to come.  And we know how the story unfolds, those of us who have seen the other three movies, know what is going to happen, but somehow knowing what is going to happen and how the story is going to unfold, doesn’t detract at all from the suspense and the power of the Phantom Menace.

 

So what does this have to do with our Scripture you might ask?  The word “prequel” may be a new word, but the concept of prequel is very old indeed.  The passage we read from Genesis , the Creation Story, really really, really is a “prequel”.  From our recent foray with PBS on the whole discussion and study of Genesis, the book of Genesis, and from Byron’s [Shafer] own classes on Genesis, we know that the people who heard the creation story, when they heard that story, they had already lived through the Exodus, the Rise of the Tribes of Israel, God’s faithfulness to them, their disobedience to God, they lived through the threat of foreign powers, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Exile in Babylon.  The Creation Story is a prequel.  It was written after this extraordinary experience of the people Israel.  And it was written at a time, 6^th Century, Before Christ, when the people Israel were demoralized, society as they knew it was practically dissolved, they had suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of their enemies, they were depressed, despondent and practically destroyed as a people.  And then they heard this story of the Creation.  This prequel to the events that they had lived through.  And it reminded them, it reminded them that in spite of all their failures, in spite of their wicked ways and their disobedience, in spite of the number of times that they had turned their backs to God, it reminded them that they were still a part of God’s splendid Creation and t not only were they a part of that creation, but that they bear the very image of God.

 

And so the story to those who heard it, gave this battered people a sense of renewed purpose.  It gave them a sense of their own dignity and their own possibility bearing the image of the Creator.  Today we celebrate the mystery of our trying God.  This is Trinity Sunday as you have no doubt noticed by the prayers and the hymns we have said and sung.  The scriptures lead us from the moment of Creation through Jesus’ resurrection, His appearance again to the eleven, with a certain built-in expectation, that by the power of the Holy Spirit, we have the possibility of being partners with God.  This is the one Church day that does not celebrate an event, it’s the one Church day that is something imposed upon the Church.  There is no event called the “Trinity Sunday”, there is no Saint.  Those of you who have been teachers in the Sunday School have a little advantage about Trinity Sunday.  The curriculum we’re using is, I think, one of the best I’ve ever seen and it’s called  “The Whole People Of God” and it takes the children through the whole history of salvation in one church year, beginning with Advent, the Birth of Jesus, the discovery of the disciples about who Jesus is; the necessity of Jesus’ suffering, His death, His resurrection, and then as we celebrated last Sunday, the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church.  And that, in effect, is what Trinity Sunday is set to do.  Trinity Sunday is the culmination of all of the events of our salvation history, and it is a moment when the Church pauses to reflect and to try to capture once again what it means to have a God reveal to us in these many many different ways.

 

I’ve preached on Trinity Sunday before and I was tempted to either use an old sermon or deal with one of the texts in a more narrow way.  But there is something compelling and something deep within us that strives to try to understand what this meaning of three-in-one, one-in-three, what this triune God means and what it can possibly mean for our living everyday.  In my struggle this week, I happened to speak with a colleague of mine who is a Roman Catholic Priest and so after the discussion he said, “Laura- Just get over it!  Tell them it’s a mystery and be done with it.”  Easy for him, thought I.

 

St. Augustin, who is my favorite 5^th Century Theologian, spent 20 years working on this matter of the Trinity and trying to figure it out come up with language that might somehow convey the depth of this mystery.  Do you know that you can get the whole “De Trinitate” on the Internet now in Latin and in English, I mean, its phenomenal that so many years ago he wrote this treatise and here we have it with the push of a button.  In any event,  there’s a story about St. Augustin, it’s I’m sure a legend, but it’s a comforting story for those of us who dare to preach on the Trinity.  St. Augustin was out walking by the seashore and he came across a little girl who was dipping her pail of water into the sea and pouring the water out on the sand and she was dipping and pouring and dipping and pouring and St. Augustin watched her for a while and said finally “What are you doing?”.  And the little girl said “I am emptying the ocean onto the beach.”  And St. Augustin said “Silly, silly child, you could never accomplish that feat.  There is too much water in the ocean for you to ever be able to do that.”  So the wise little girl looked at St. Augustin and said “You watch and see.  I will finish emptying the ocean of its water before you understand the trinity”.

 

Our doctrine of the Trinity is no accident.  It is the result of 300 years of thought and struggle in the early Church.  When Church fathers and mothers wrestled with these three distinct manifestations of God.  And we know those manifestations in our own heart.  We know God is the Almighty One, The Creator, the Maker of Heaven and Earth. We know God as the one Jesus called “Abba”, Father.  And there was Jesus, the logos, the word behind the Creation, St. Paul tells us, the Only Begotten Son, The Christ.  And there is the Spirit, Power Flame, Wind, Fire, Communicator, Spirit of Truth, Paraclete, Comforter, God present in us.  As diverse as all these images are, there is a unity and it is that unity that the doctrine of the trinity strives to lift up.  So the Church began to speak about three faces of God.  The three different ways God has been revealed to us.  The three different ways we experience God. 

 

Unfortunately, in English, we translate that Latin word “persona” into “person” and we begin to get in trouble with the Trinity because when we think “person”, we think “individual persons” like you and I and we slide easily into the trap of exactly what the doctrine of the Trinity is trying to avoid.  We slide into thinking three distinct persons and lose the unity.  So God in three faces is better in thinking about the Trinity, really, better than God in three persons, God in three relationships, we experience God as the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the one Jesus taught us about Love.  But behind our experience of God is Jesus the Savior, and behind Jesus the Savior and behind God is the Spirit.  And you see how away we go in the kind of language which gets to be very difficult.  But the idea is still compelling and so across the ages, people try to think up symbols of how we can more easily convey this magnificent understanding of God.  So, some of you know that the Shamrock is a traditional symbol of the Trinity.  Three leaves, but all connected.  Once I did a children’s sermon where I used double mirrors so that the children would see actually three images of themselves.  Dante used the image of three interlocking circles of light.  We are surrounded by these symbols.  If you look at our windows up there, the circle around the middle circle, those tri-foils are a symbol of the Trinity.  In our replication of the Cathedral at Salisbury in our sculpture here, you see very clearly the two bottom circles are an attempt to symbolize the Trinity, and to have the Trinity at the center of our worship experience.  Some use the image of a triangle.  Three points.  Three planes.  Equal, but yet one, a triangle.  All of the symbols fall short.  If we take the symbol of the Shamrock, we might focus on one leaf, or we might focus on one circle of the tri-foil, but when we do that we have an awareness that it’s only one part of a whole.  No matter how God is revealed to us, it tells us that there is much more.  But we do get into trouble with any of these symbols, because it is hard for us to hold these three manifestations of God in equal tension.  Even when we try to hold it like the symbol of the triangle for example, something is on top.  There is a point on top.  Many choose the Creator, the Father, traditionally, we Presbyterians particularly fall in this category where we emphasize God the Creator at the expense of God the Christ, God the Holy Spirit.  In fact, I would guess that we really, most of us, have to concentrate very hard on thinking of the wholeness of our Triune God.