(* indicates a good place to start)
Dunn, James D. G. Jesus and the Spirit: A Study of the Religious and Charismatic Experience of Jesus and the First Christians as Reflected in the New Testament. London: S.C.M. Press, 1975.
González, Catherine, and Justo González. "Babel and Empire: Pentecost and Empire." Journal for Preachers 16/4 (Pentecost 1993): 22-26.
Moltmann, Jürgen. The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.
*Rouwhorst, Gerard. “The Origins and Evolution of Early Christian Pentecost.” Studia Patristica 35 (1999): 309-22.
Saunders, Stanley P., and Charles L. Campbell. "Anything But Ordinary: Worship and Preaching in Ordinary Time." Journal for Preachers 18/4 (Pentecost 1995): 25-31.
Social Themes of the Christian Year: A Commentary on the Lectionary, edited by Dieter T. Hessel. Philadelphia: Geneva Press, 1983, 210-53.
Trinity Sunday:
Alfs, Matthew. Concepts of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: A Classification and Description of the Trinitarian and Non-Trinitarian Theologies Existent within Christendom. Minneapolis: Old Theology Book House, 1984.
Brown, Sally A. “Speaking Again of the Trinity.” Theology Today 64 (2007): 145-58.
Hayden, Hilary. “The Trinity in Liturgy: Reflections on God for Us.” Liturgy 13/1 (Winter 1996): 51-59.
*LaCugna, Catherine Mowry. "Making the Most of Trinity Sunday." Worship 60 (1986): 210-24; reprinted in Between Memory and Hope: Readings on the Liturgical Year, edited by Maxwell E. Johnson, 244-61. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000.
Lee, Jung Young. The Trinity in Asian Perspective. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.
*Liturgy 13/1 (1996) – special issue: “Trinity Sunday and Beyond.”
Living Pulpit 8/2 (April-June 1999) - special issue.
MacKenzie, Charles Sherrard. The Trinity and Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 1987.
Marsh, Thomas A. The Triune God: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Study. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1994.
Moltmann, Jürgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.
The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, edited by Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O’Collins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Wainwright, Geoffrey. “The Ecumenical Rediscovery of the Trinity.” One in Christ 34 (1998): 95-124.
All Saints/All Souls Day
Alexander, J. Neil. “Rejoice in the Glorious Company of the Saints.” Liturgy 14/3 (Winter 1998): 1-15.
Costa, Nathan. “‘For All the Saints’: A Feast for All People and All Time.” Worship 81 (2007): 482-508.
*Delooz, Pierre. "The Social Function of the Canonisation of Saints." In Models of Holiness, edited by Christian Duquoc and Casiano Floristán, 14-24. Concilium. Vol. 129. New York: Seabury, 1979.
Johnson, Elizabeth A. Friends of God and Prophets: A Feminist Theological Reading of the Communion of Saints. New York: Continuum, 1998.
Lamberts, Josef. “The Reform of the Roman Calendar.” In Christian Feast and Festival: The Dynamics of Western Liturgy and Culture, edited by P. Post, G. Rouwhorst, L. van Tongeren & A. Scheer, 461-84. Liturgia Condenda, v. 12. Leuven: Peeters, 2001.
*Liturgy special issues: 12/2 (1994-95) – “All Saints Among the Churches;” 14/3 (1998) – “Souls, Saints, and Services.”
Lochman, Jan Milič. The Faith We Confess: An Ecumenical Dogmatics. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984, 209-17 ("The Communion of Saints").
McBrien, Richard P. "The Saints: An Ecclesiological Reflection." Theology Digest 48 (2001): 303-17.
*Prevallet, Elaine M. “The Communion of Saints: Challenge of a Dangerous Memory.” Weavings 14/6 (Nov-Dec 1999): 41-48.
Steere, Douglas V. On Beginning from Within. New York: Harper, 1943, 33-64 ("The Saint and Society"), 65-86 ("The Authority of the Saint").
*Talley, Thomas J. “For All the Saints: A Brief History.” Liturgy 12/2 (1995): 39-46.
*Whalen, Michael D. “In the Company of Women? The Politics of Memory in the Liturgical Commemoration of Saints – Male and Female.” Worship 73 (1999): 482-504.
White, James F. “Forgetting and Remembering the Saints.” In Between Memory and Hope: Readings on the Liturgical Year, edited by Maxwell E. Johnson, 401-14. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000.
Witczak, Michael. "All Saints, Feast of." New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship, edited by Peter E. Fink, S.J., 41. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.
______. "All Souls, Feast of." New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship, edited by Peter E. Fink, S.J., 42-43. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.
Reign of Christ Sunday
González, Catherine Gunsalus. “At the Doorway to the Church Year.” Liturgy 13/2 (Spring 1996): 21-25.
*Liturgy special issue: 13/2 (1996) – “Christ Reigns.”
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Saturday, June 25, 2011
Thursday, June 23, 2011
What the Heck is “Ordinary Time” (and Why Should We Care)?
If you trawl lectionary-helps resources for long enough, you will discover during “the season after Pentecost” (see my explanation of that phrase here) a peculiarity in the naming of the Sundays. Any given Sunday may have several names: “Xth Sunday after Pentecost,” “Xth Sunday after Trinity,” or “Xth Sunday in Ordinary Time,” to name the three most common designations. On some lectionary lists, you will find all three of these, a source of confusion to many.
The earliest schema was to count Sundays after Pentecost Sunday, a practice which dates from the infancy of the Church. A peculiarity arose when the Festival of the Holy Trinity was introduced in the Middle Ages (eventually settling on the Sunday after Pentecost Sunday): due to its popularity in the churches of northern Europe, Sundays in the season after Pentecost became numbered with reference to Trinity Sunday, rather than Pentecost Sunday. This was for centuries a distinctively (though not exclusively) Lutheran practice, which remains to this day, at least in vestigial form (my source concerning the practice of counting after Trinity Sunday is Luther D. Reed, The Lutheran Liturgy (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1947), p. 521).
Another way of counting Sundays is “the Xth Sunday in Ordinary Time.” Commonly, you will find explanations that the Sundays following the Epiphany and Pentecost Sunday are not “special” or “festive” Sundays, but slog through the common “ordinary” time of the liturgical year. The fireworks of Easter and Pentecost are over, summer has arrived (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), school is out, vacations are taking their toll on worship attendance, so we touch on the ordinariness of Christian living. Thus the logic of all too many explanations.
Not so! “Ordinary” time is time counted by means of “ordinal” numbering. You remember your elementary school math classes, right? Cardinal numbers are: one, two, three, and so on. Ordinal numbers are: first, second, third, and so on. As the dictionary says, “ordinal” means “marking the position in an order or series.” So, at a first, more superficial level, “Ordinary Time” simply refers to a numbering system that counts Sundays during non-festal seasons, after Epiphany and after Pentecost. Thus, the “fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time” (A source which explains this handily, and is a fine theological introduction to the liturgical year is Laurence Hull Stookey’s Calendar: Christ’s Time for the Church [Nashville: Abingdon, 1996], esp., for “Ordinary Time,” pp. 133-35).
Plunge deeper, though, and the very notion of “ordinal” opens theological depths of meaning for this long stretch of liturgical year territory. “Ordinal” implies some sort of relationship – something is “third” from something else. They are linked by some sort of order implied in the very means of counting. With the liturgical year, that relational link is temporal. The very terminology, “Ordinary Time” involves a “from-to” dynamic, automatically placing every Sunday of our “ordinary” worship in the narrative schema of God-with-us salvation, from Creation to Consummation. Most particularly for Christian worship, “Ordinary Time” allows sustained exploration of the Christian community of faith as “body of Christ,” that is, the living embodiment of Jesus Christ’s ministry, fueled by the Spirit of the Risen Lord to perform that ministry in the world. And that includes each and every member of said community of faith.
Let me make some connections, roping in John Knox’s Jesus: Lord and Christ (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958) to help. The Christian faith declares that the human Jesus of Nazareth was the very revelation of God to us humans. Common knowledge. Knox plays with that assumption, claiming that the “event” of Jesus Christ embraces “the personality, life and teaching of Jesus, the response of loyalty he awakened, his death, his resurrection, the coming of the Spirit, the faith with which the Spirit was received, [and] the creation of the community” (p. 217). The “Christ-event” includes all of these, which means that, for the earliest followers in the infant church, this “event” was still happening in their living as a community of faith in the power of the Holy Spirit (p. 226). It was decidedly not “Jesus died for me (long ago) and I shed a fond tear for dear old Jesus.” No, the “invasion” of God’s love into the world God has never stopped loving, in the life, words, death, resurrection, and exaltation of Jesus, was now bestowed upon the community of faith – and every last blessed soul in it – with full authority and power to act like Jesus. In fact, it was understood that Jesus himself continued to serve his beloved sisters and brothers in the world through our hands, feet, and voices. Knox claims that “God through Christ brought into existence a new people – a people in which [God] could be known, in precisely the way [God] is known there, as righteous love, as grace and truth,” and this is the means by which God is actively reconciling the world to Godself (p. 267, emphasis his). The glory – and the terror! – is that the community of faith is the God-chosen continuation of servant Jesus Christ in the world, in the power of the Holy Spirit.
“Ordinary Time” injects into our “ordinary,” quotidian lives, trapped in a world rife with suspicion, exploitation, and the horrors of wars, the extraordinary excess (J-L Marion) of God, overflowing into our world, and offers to make us “new creations” (II Corinthians 5:17), “co-worker[s] in Christ” (Romans 16:9), remaking said world.
So, how do you preach during the Sundays of “Ordinary Time”? Looking through the “lens” (John Calvin) of scripture, you show how my face can show the face of Jesus, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23), to the faces of God’s beloved in the world, across the street or across the globe.
The earliest schema was to count Sundays after Pentecost Sunday, a practice which dates from the infancy of the Church. A peculiarity arose when the Festival of the Holy Trinity was introduced in the Middle Ages (eventually settling on the Sunday after Pentecost Sunday): due to its popularity in the churches of northern Europe, Sundays in the season after Pentecost became numbered with reference to Trinity Sunday, rather than Pentecost Sunday. This was for centuries a distinctively (though not exclusively) Lutheran practice, which remains to this day, at least in vestigial form (my source concerning the practice of counting after Trinity Sunday is Luther D. Reed, The Lutheran Liturgy (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1947), p. 521).
Another way of counting Sundays is “the Xth Sunday in Ordinary Time.” Commonly, you will find explanations that the Sundays following the Epiphany and Pentecost Sunday are not “special” or “festive” Sundays, but slog through the common “ordinary” time of the liturgical year. The fireworks of Easter and Pentecost are over, summer has arrived (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), school is out, vacations are taking their toll on worship attendance, so we touch on the ordinariness of Christian living. Thus the logic of all too many explanations.
Not so! “Ordinary” time is time counted by means of “ordinal” numbering. You remember your elementary school math classes, right? Cardinal numbers are: one, two, three, and so on. Ordinal numbers are: first, second, third, and so on. As the dictionary says, “ordinal” means “marking the position in an order or series.” So, at a first, more superficial level, “Ordinary Time” simply refers to a numbering system that counts Sundays during non-festal seasons, after Epiphany and after Pentecost. Thus, the “fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time” (A source which explains this handily, and is a fine theological introduction to the liturgical year is Laurence Hull Stookey’s Calendar: Christ’s Time for the Church [Nashville: Abingdon, 1996], esp., for “Ordinary Time,” pp. 133-35).
Plunge deeper, though, and the very notion of “ordinal” opens theological depths of meaning for this long stretch of liturgical year territory. “Ordinal” implies some sort of relationship – something is “third” from something else. They are linked by some sort of order implied in the very means of counting. With the liturgical year, that relational link is temporal. The very terminology, “Ordinary Time” involves a “from-to” dynamic, automatically placing every Sunday of our “ordinary” worship in the narrative schema of God-with-us salvation, from Creation to Consummation. Most particularly for Christian worship, “Ordinary Time” allows sustained exploration of the Christian community of faith as “body of Christ,” that is, the living embodiment of Jesus Christ’s ministry, fueled by the Spirit of the Risen Lord to perform that ministry in the world. And that includes each and every member of said community of faith.
Let me make some connections, roping in John Knox’s Jesus: Lord and Christ (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958) to help. The Christian faith declares that the human Jesus of Nazareth was the very revelation of God to us humans. Common knowledge. Knox plays with that assumption, claiming that the “event” of Jesus Christ embraces “the personality, life and teaching of Jesus, the response of loyalty he awakened, his death, his resurrection, the coming of the Spirit, the faith with which the Spirit was received, [and] the creation of the community” (p. 217). The “Christ-event” includes all of these, which means that, for the earliest followers in the infant church, this “event” was still happening in their living as a community of faith in the power of the Holy Spirit (p. 226). It was decidedly not “Jesus died for me (long ago) and I shed a fond tear for dear old Jesus.” No, the “invasion” of God’s love into the world God has never stopped loving, in the life, words, death, resurrection, and exaltation of Jesus, was now bestowed upon the community of faith – and every last blessed soul in it – with full authority and power to act like Jesus. In fact, it was understood that Jesus himself continued to serve his beloved sisters and brothers in the world through our hands, feet, and voices. Knox claims that “God through Christ brought into existence a new people – a people in which [God] could be known, in precisely the way [God] is known there, as righteous love, as grace and truth,” and this is the means by which God is actively reconciling the world to Godself (p. 267, emphasis his). The glory – and the terror! – is that the community of faith is the God-chosen continuation of servant Jesus Christ in the world, in the power of the Holy Spirit.
“Ordinary Time” injects into our “ordinary,” quotidian lives, trapped in a world rife with suspicion, exploitation, and the horrors of wars, the extraordinary excess (J-L Marion) of God, overflowing into our world, and offers to make us “new creations” (II Corinthians 5:17), “co-worker[s] in Christ” (Romans 16:9), remaking said world.
So, how do you preach during the Sundays of “Ordinary Time”? Looking through the “lens” (John Calvin) of scripture, you show how my face can show the face of Jesus, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23), to the faces of God’s beloved in the world, across the street or across the globe.
What About Preaching During the Season after Pentecost?
A couple of points to make here. First, perhaps from the liturgical OCD department: the proper terminology is “the season after Pentecost,” not “the season of Pentecost.” As in, this Sunday is “the Xth Sunday after Pentecost.” Why be so picky? Well, there are actually good theological reasons for the distinction. Pentecost (“fiftieth day” in Greek) is the culmination of the grand intervention by God in human affairs called the crucifixion-resurrection-ascension-sending of the Spirit. The earliest Christians wisely perceived a unity in these separate activities of God, namely, the event of salvation bestowed by the God of Love through Jesus Christ. These events were understood to display just how far God’s love would go – as Paul reminded the Philippians (chapter 2) of an early hymn about Jesus sung by Christians:
6 who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death —
even death on a cross.
9 Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
A few decades later, historian and theologian Luke stretched these events over a 50-day spread, culminating in the return of God/Jesus in the form of God’s Holy Spirit to the community of faith during the Jewish festival of Pentecost, which had evolved to become a celebration of God’s gift of the Law at Sinai, God’s revelation to the Hebrew community of faith of God’s plan for human societal life in harmony. At Luke’s prompting, Christians quickly latched onto the gift of the Spirit precisely on that festival not so much as “you got the Law, but we got the Spirit (so there!),” as much as the Spirit animating a community formed around the crucified Jesus as the embodiment of the living God, now given to the community of faith, and shoving it to the ends of the earth to create precisely that divinely-intended New Humanity.
The liturgical season after Pentecost developed to explore the variegated dimensions of this movement of God the Holy Spirit animating the community of faith. Paul called this community the “body of Christ,” by which he meant not a particular status to be lorded over others, but as a task: the community of faith was, and still is, the living embodiment of the ministry of Jesus Christ in the world. What Jesus did, he helps us do, through the Spirit of the risen Lord.
I guess you could say that, in a way, “after Pentecost” does stand as a reminder of our status: we who are recipients of the spirit of the crucified, raised, and exalted Lord – who, let us remember, deliberately chose to retain the nail cuts in his hands and feet (see Luke 24:40 and especially John 20:27) – serve the One who came among us “not to be served, but to serve” (Mark 10:45). Pentecost catapulted us into a new room, so to speak. The season after Pentecost gives us a long stretch of time to explore its nooks and crannies.
6 who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death —
even death on a cross.
9 Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
A few decades later, historian and theologian Luke stretched these events over a 50-day spread, culminating in the return of God/Jesus in the form of God’s Holy Spirit to the community of faith during the Jewish festival of Pentecost, which had evolved to become a celebration of God’s gift of the Law at Sinai, God’s revelation to the Hebrew community of faith of God’s plan for human societal life in harmony. At Luke’s prompting, Christians quickly latched onto the gift of the Spirit precisely on that festival not so much as “you got the Law, but we got the Spirit (so there!),” as much as the Spirit animating a community formed around the crucified Jesus as the embodiment of the living God, now given to the community of faith, and shoving it to the ends of the earth to create precisely that divinely-intended New Humanity.
The liturgical season after Pentecost developed to explore the variegated dimensions of this movement of God the Holy Spirit animating the community of faith. Paul called this community the “body of Christ,” by which he meant not a particular status to be lorded over others, but as a task: the community of faith was, and still is, the living embodiment of the ministry of Jesus Christ in the world. What Jesus did, he helps us do, through the Spirit of the risen Lord.
I guess you could say that, in a way, “after Pentecost” does stand as a reminder of our status: we who are recipients of the spirit of the crucified, raised, and exalted Lord – who, let us remember, deliberately chose to retain the nail cuts in his hands and feet (see Luke 24:40 and especially John 20:27) – serve the One who came among us “not to be served, but to serve” (Mark 10:45). Pentecost catapulted us into a new room, so to speak. The season after Pentecost gives us a long stretch of time to explore its nooks and crannies.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Trinity Refined
A clarification of my last post, about "That Trinity Thing," if you please. First, some clarification of terminology. Specifically, my mention of the "economic Trinity." We are not talking about the flow money, whether into your own checkbook, or on a societal scale. The term comes from the Greek "oikonomia," which derived from the management of a household (which, yes, includes finances). In this case, the term was extended to embrace God's "management" ("plan") of the salvation of creation (as in, for example, Ephesians 1:10: "... as a plan [oikonomian] for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth." The notion occurs elsewhere in the letter as well, "the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God..." [3:9]). So, relating all this to the Trinity, the phrase "economic Trinity" refers to said plan for the salvation of all Creation, begun in Jesus Christ (God the Son), and spurred by the indwelling of God the Holy Spirit in the community of faith, forging a force of reconciliation that will simultaneously display among themselves God's reconciliation (internal) and struggle for reconciliation between humans in the world (external). This redemptive activity begins with God, comes to us from God, animates us to participate in God's activity of salvation in our world, and promises that what God began, God will wind up in splendid style at the Consummation (rather than the far weaker catastrophic end-of-the-world visions in which a special few escape destruction and don't give a whit about the other poor slobs).
The "immanent Trinity," or internal relationality in God's being, in turn displays God as endlessly relating in creative-love/creating-love, endlessly reaching out to create new relating among us creations, and endlessly drawing-us-in to new relations with God and each other. An obscure bishop and theologian (ca. 394 C.E.) named Amphilochios of Iconium mused that all we can really say -- or even hope to know! -- about God is not God's "whatness," but rather God's "howness"; that is, all we know of God is not the essence of what God is, but only "how" God is experienced by us (the reference to Bishop Amphilochios comes from Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001], p. 115 note 17). Thus, for preachers, it is much more useful to begin any attempt to plumb the depths of the doctrine of the Trinity from the standpoint of the economic Trinity (see clarification above).
The "immanent Trinity," or internal relationality in God's being, in turn displays God as endlessly relating in creative-love/creating-love, endlessly reaching out to create new relating among us creations, and endlessly drawing-us-in to new relations with God and each other. An obscure bishop and theologian (ca. 394 C.E.) named Amphilochios of Iconium mused that all we can really say -- or even hope to know! -- about God is not God's "whatness," but rather God's "howness"; that is, all we know of God is not the essence of what God is, but only "how" God is experienced by us (the reference to Bishop Amphilochios comes from Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001], p. 115 note 17). Thus, for preachers, it is much more useful to begin any attempt to plumb the depths of the doctrine of the Trinity from the standpoint of the economic Trinity (see clarification above).
Thursday, June 16, 2011
That Trinity Thing
Trinity Sunday. Ah, yes, the first major milestone in the Liturgical Year which celebrates a doctrine, rather than a specific event in our Judeo-Christian heritage. For "free-church" Protestants -- including the Campbell-Stone-heritage Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), which claims me -- the doctrine of the Trinity is not only a head-scratcher, but also already dismissed by Alexander Campbell's disdain for anything speculative in theology. So we don't do "Trinity" very well to start with (but see John Mark Hicks' article on Campbell's take on the Trinity here). Furthermore, the postmodern skepticism of any "grand narratives" lends its suspicion to calcified doctrines -- like the Trinity.
Besides, there are all the arguments hurled at us that "the Trinity isn't biblical" (well, true, the word itself does not grace the pages of scripture, the the relational reality sure does); and the objection, "isn't that a Catholic thing?" To which we reply: and Orthodox, and Reformed, and Lutheran, and Alexander Campbell himself took it on.
Suffice it to say, any preacher who feels the urge to take on the Trinity this Sunday is already facing a steep challenge.
All too often we hapless preachers start at the top, and tangle ourselves trying to explain the mechanics of the Trinity. Our acrobatics fall flat: "Well, you see, the Trinity is like...."
And the sermon is D.O.A. Harry Emerson Fosdick once observed that folks rarely come to church "desperately anxious to learn about the Jebusites." Truth is, many might actually prefer the Jebusites over laborious explanations of "The Doctrine of the Trinity."
So, all too often, we'll just avoid the whole scene, thank you very much.
What may help the preacher who bravely dares to navigate these theological waters, is to start with our own perceptions. Specifically, to answer the question: "Trinity: so what?"
Yes, the doctrine is a part of the Church's theological heritage, and we do need to educate folks about the "deposit of faith handed on to us." Absolutely. But our challenge is to make it make sense, and to reveal its significance for ordinary slobs like us. This is not to advocate a trite "making the Trinity relevant," a little holy "3-in-1 oil" to make life easier. Please! To the contrary, what we try to do is to show how the Trinity is plowed into the theological air we breathe; how it animates the ecclesial life we aim for (at our best).
How to pull it off?
Start with the person in the pew. In fact, preacher, go ahead and sit in the pew, and ask yourself: what's the big deal about "Trinity"?
Then you start thinking, reading, and pondering some more. We have had handed to us two chief perspectives on the Trinity -- which all the theological Leading Lights have addressed, in some way or another: the "immanent" Trinity and the "economic" Trinity. As many of us know, the "immanent" Trinity seeks to understand the internal divine interrelations between God the "Father," God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and that takes us, of course, to the notion of "perichoresis," a gift from the Eastern church: the "divine dance of mutual love" within the immanent Trinity. How love is swapped back and forth (to be irritatingly superficial). If we preachers start here, we've already lost the homiletic game. We contort our sermons into pretzels, trying to find analogies which will do justice to the subtleties of this Mystery. If we have a screen, we may try a Venn diagram to help.
Or we can start with the "economic Trinity": how we understand that God shows Godself in the activity of salvation in our world. Ah! Here we can touch on human experience, to relate us to God, God to Jesus to the Holy Spirit, and all of those disparate characters to Divine Love invading this earth. Creator God creatively weaving things back toward the original dream, using Redeemer Son to show us the human face of God -- and the lengths to which Love will go, and Holy Spirit God flooding the community of faith with Divine Energy to become invited participants in the redemption of all Creation back to God.
Hmmm. That includes me! You mean that the Trinity is not some dusty doctrine up on a shelf, to be brought down once a year whether we need it or not? You mean, it might have something to do with how I interact with folks at work, at home, at Wal-Mart? You mean that the "Trinity" might actually have something to do with real life? Who'd have thought!
Only then do you bring out the immanent Trinity. This is what God is like: relationships, the best kind. Who doesn't wish for that, I ask you? Animated by a self-giving love for the Other that just won't quit -- and celebrates the "otherness" of that Other. In a world obsessed with drawing lines between insiders and outsiders, obsessed with denigrating people of color, bent on "ethnic cleansing" of any who might threaten paleface dominance, the immanent Trinity radical love for the not-like-me Other comes as a prophetic challenge indeed. Also, you find within its perichoretic dance of love: reconciliation, cooperation, harmony -- all of those noble goals we like to sling at each other. The immanent Trinity displays them, not as impossible ideals, but as the very heart of Creation, as example, as inspiration -- and as power-to-accomplish its demand. If "because He lives, I can face tomorrow," as the song says, then even more because They love, we can become God's agents of love in a world starved for it.
That might just preach.
Besides, there are all the arguments hurled at us that "the Trinity isn't biblical" (well, true, the word itself does not grace the pages of scripture, the the relational reality sure does); and the objection, "isn't that a Catholic thing?" To which we reply: and Orthodox, and Reformed, and Lutheran, and Alexander Campbell himself took it on.
Suffice it to say, any preacher who feels the urge to take on the Trinity this Sunday is already facing a steep challenge.
All too often we hapless preachers start at the top, and tangle ourselves trying to explain the mechanics of the Trinity. Our acrobatics fall flat: "Well, you see, the Trinity is like...."
And the sermon is D.O.A. Harry Emerson Fosdick once observed that folks rarely come to church "desperately anxious to learn about the Jebusites." Truth is, many might actually prefer the Jebusites over laborious explanations of "The Doctrine of the Trinity."
So, all too often, we'll just avoid the whole scene, thank you very much.
What may help the preacher who bravely dares to navigate these theological waters, is to start with our own perceptions. Specifically, to answer the question: "Trinity: so what?"
Yes, the doctrine is a part of the Church's theological heritage, and we do need to educate folks about the "deposit of faith handed on to us." Absolutely. But our challenge is to make it make sense, and to reveal its significance for ordinary slobs like us. This is not to advocate a trite "making the Trinity relevant," a little holy "3-in-1 oil" to make life easier. Please! To the contrary, what we try to do is to show how the Trinity is plowed into the theological air we breathe; how it animates the ecclesial life we aim for (at our best).
How to pull it off?
Start with the person in the pew. In fact, preacher, go ahead and sit in the pew, and ask yourself: what's the big deal about "Trinity"?
Then you start thinking, reading, and pondering some more. We have had handed to us two chief perspectives on the Trinity -- which all the theological Leading Lights have addressed, in some way or another: the "immanent" Trinity and the "economic" Trinity. As many of us know, the "immanent" Trinity seeks to understand the internal divine interrelations between God the "Father," God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and that takes us, of course, to the notion of "perichoresis," a gift from the Eastern church: the "divine dance of mutual love" within the immanent Trinity. How love is swapped back and forth (to be irritatingly superficial). If we preachers start here, we've already lost the homiletic game. We contort our sermons into pretzels, trying to find analogies which will do justice to the subtleties of this Mystery. If we have a screen, we may try a Venn diagram to help.
Or we can start with the "economic Trinity": how we understand that God shows Godself in the activity of salvation in our world. Ah! Here we can touch on human experience, to relate us to God, God to Jesus to the Holy Spirit, and all of those disparate characters to Divine Love invading this earth. Creator God creatively weaving things back toward the original dream, using Redeemer Son to show us the human face of God -- and the lengths to which Love will go, and Holy Spirit God flooding the community of faith with Divine Energy to become invited participants in the redemption of all Creation back to God.
Hmmm. That includes me! You mean that the Trinity is not some dusty doctrine up on a shelf, to be brought down once a year whether we need it or not? You mean, it might have something to do with how I interact with folks at work, at home, at Wal-Mart? You mean that the "Trinity" might actually have something to do with real life? Who'd have thought!
Only then do you bring out the immanent Trinity. This is what God is like: relationships, the best kind. Who doesn't wish for that, I ask you? Animated by a self-giving love for the Other that just won't quit -- and celebrates the "otherness" of that Other. In a world obsessed with drawing lines between insiders and outsiders, obsessed with denigrating people of color, bent on "ethnic cleansing" of any who might threaten paleface dominance, the immanent Trinity radical love for the not-like-me Other comes as a prophetic challenge indeed. Also, you find within its perichoretic dance of love: reconciliation, cooperation, harmony -- all of those noble goals we like to sling at each other. The immanent Trinity displays them, not as impossible ideals, but as the very heart of Creation, as example, as inspiration -- and as power-to-accomplish its demand. If "because He lives, I can face tomorrow," as the song says, then even more because They love, we can become God's agents of love in a world starved for it.
That might just preach.
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