"Perpetual Beta" Homiletics

    First, a definition of “perpetual beta”:  “Perpetual beta is the keeping of software or a system at the beta development stage for an extended or indefinite period of time. It is often used by developers when they continue to release new features that might not be fully tested. Perpetual beta software is not recommended for mission critical machines. However, many operational systems find this to be a much more rapid and agile approach to development, staging, and deployment.”(1)
    The Wikipedia article on “perpetual beta” quotes publisher and open source advocate Tim O'Reilly to say:  “Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be released under an open source license.) The open source dictum, 'release early and release often', in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, 'the perpetual beta', in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.”(2)
    Two features of the “perpetual beta” orientation highlighted by Mr. O’Reilly seem especially fitting for homiletic endeavors: control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them, and trusting users as co-developers.  One characteristic of what is termed “web 2.0" was that, instead of controlling resources, dribbling them out according to demand, companies shared control with users, discovering that products became better as customers participated in their fine-tuning development, and that both ends of the delivery stream benefitted as a result.  Thus did the interactivity of the web influence the mechanisms of economic activity.
    Among many other developments in this interactive, online age, profoundly new forms of democratization have appeared, and are indeed evolving by the month.  An older model of owner-delivery-consumer has shifted to a highly mutual-participation model.
    Similar shifts are happening in sermonic interactions, influenced as well by the presence of the Web.  Older homiletic models of “content delivery” are in radical flux.  Of course, one can well argue that every age encounters a clash of homiletic models, as (especially younger) avant garde attempts spring up.  In the 1960s, for example, innovations such as “dialogue sermons” and collaborative groups arose, questioning older one-way communicative models.  So homiletic innovation alone is by no means a new thing.
    What does seem to be new are radically democratized forms of online human interactions; witness the immediate and widespread communications through Twitter during the recent freedom movements in the Arabic-speaking world.  Consumerist efforts merely seek to embrace these trends, in order to foster new “revenue streams.”
    Homiletics would be wise to listen to the process unfolding here.  What I do not mean here is simply exploiting the consumerist bandwagon by employing the web simply to reach more ears/eyes with a “holy [sermonic] product.”  That is already being done, following a long trend of swiping new technologies to assist the transmission of an old product.
    What I do mean is to suggest that the radical democratization of the web protends a more intimate form of social communication:  more interactive, more emotion-driven, more visual, with somewhat less permanence.  As is well known, orality bespoke (‘scuse the pun) the transience of sound; print promoted a sense of permanence.  The new interactivity, on many levels, promises the intimacy of sound, revealing interiority (see, e.g., Ong), melded with the give-and-take of ordinary conversation.  As regards homiletics and its practitioners, this might actually return us to our roots:  homileia, “conversation.”  The past two decades have witnessed a recovery of “conversational homiletics” (John McClure, Wes Allen, and others), bringing the hearers into not only the preacher’s internal preparation of the sermon, but as actual, living participants in its shaping.
    What if we envisioned the practice of homiletics as living in a “perpetual beta” state?  In one way, it has never been in anything but that condition, enduring theoretical innovations, ebbs and flows, and the occasional conflicts among theories.  Fundamentally, though, each innovation (think “The New Homiletic”) claims to be the latest, best way to preach.  What if we admitted that the craft of preaching is actually in constant flux, always has been, and ever shall be?  What if we conceived of the study and practice of preaching in a “perptetual beta” state – as normative?  What if those who want to improve their craft of homiletics actively sought interactive input from the “cloud” (of online witnesses)?  How might such a reconception of homiletics affect its development?

Notes

(1) Wikipedia, “Perpetual beta”; accessed online on 1/3/14 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_beta
(2) Ibid.

The Lure of the Saints

    And here we come to another observance of “All Saints Sunday.”  Or is that “All Souls”?  Or both?  For many of us, confusion reigns.  A few definitions first, a bit of history, and then we shall trace a trajectory within which we might find ourselves.

    First, let’s define a key term:  “saints.”  For many of us, that word dredges up sepia images of anemic holy over-achievers, hands piously folded, eternally floating just about an inch off the ground – or ossified museum pieces stuck on a pillar, displayed as an example to roll out annually to hold over the heads of the rest of us ordinary slobs.  Why on earth would anybody in their right mind want to create a day like “All Saints”?  Every few hundred years, the Catholic Church must clean out the rolls, clear away the accumulated underbrush of saints days on the calendar, as this or that Famous Christian Hero acquires his or her own special memorial day.  Sainthood is always in danger of becoming merely a kind of holy merit-badge.  And then the phenomenon itself leaps into the realm of cult mysticism.  I remember in the 1990s, a bakery discovered that one of its rolls, when viewed from a certain angle, bore an uncanny resemblance to Mother Teresa.  Made the newspapers, the evening news.  Hundreds came to venerate, or at least to check it out, the half-baked image of a saint.  Which is where all too many of them remain – an oddity, packaged up for public consumption.  Dorothy Day is reported to have once growled, “Don’t call me a saint.  I don’t want to be dismissed so easily!” (quoted in Joan Chittister, The Liturgical Year [Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009], p. 191).

    When the Church created a commemoration of “saints,” it’s just possible that it may have had something else in mind.  What is a “saint”?  Delve into the New Testament, and you will find Paul tossing that word about with gleeful abandon when he’s talking about – ordinary Christians (see, e.g., Romans 1:7; I Corinthians 1:2; Philippians 1:1).  “Called to be saints,” he says, by which he means each and every one who follows Christ.  We didn’t just up and decide one day to follow Christ – we were summoned by God to live into the new reality created by Christ’s life, death, and new raised life, and in that reality we are made holy – formed into a new people to exhibit to the world the new “way” of Christ.  Animated by the spirit of the crucified-and-risen Jesus, we now live toward the new social reality of God (which some call the “kingdom of God”).  Made “holy” by the living spirit of Jesus – we did not achieve such on our own; indeed, we cannot do so by our own devices.  “Sainthood” is not an accomplishment, but rather a new orientation which grips us like a powerful magnetic field.  You could say that “saints” are ordinary people grabbed by God, ignited and now burning with a holy passion to become everything God calls them to be – and to reorient human society itself to God’s New Way of love.

    It wasn’t too long before such a single-minded devotion to God’s New Way got them in trouble.  Those who refused to renounce their faith were executed, of course, in spectacular ways.  But each went to her or his death intending for it to be a public witness serving notice that God’s Way was the best way for all.  The very word, “martyr,” means “witness” – as in, my death = my final act of evangelism.  Each congregation kept a roll of those who died, on “diptychs,” two tablets hooked together by leather straps, which they pulled out and read aloud every week at Eucharist.  By so doing, they declared:  “these ‘witnesses’ shared their Lord’s witness to the love of God.  We will remember them and their witness.”  As in, “gone but (most definitely) not forgotten.”  Their “witness” lives on to inspire our own.  In fact, a martyr’s death was called their “baptism by blood,” and viewed as their “birthday” into life eternal.  And so the Church began to remember those whose passion for Jesus and his way led them to join the Passion of Jesus.  By reading aloud the roll of  martyred “saints,” the Church offered role-models to show the rest of us how it can be done.  As in, “now go and do likewise, in your own idiom.”

    After a millennium, the Church formalized this remembering of saints, and then adding a second date for the rest of us second-stringers whose lamps of faith may not have burned quite as brightly.  Despite the inherent hierarchy of “All Saints” followed by “All Souls,” one fact remains:  you will not be forgotten.  Just as God has promised, “I will not forget you.  See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands” (Isaiah  49:15-16), so the community of God will not forget those in Christ who have died.  The “communion of saints” extends beyond death; those who have died are “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).  They are kept safe.

    And so we gratefully remember those who have died, who are gone from our midst, all “saints” and all “souls,” in the confidence that the final breach of death will be healed.  We remember them in hope, as gifts from God.  “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1).  The presence of the “saints” challenges us to imitate them.  On one level, of course, they offer their holy flame to ignite our own.  We can dare to believe ever more deeply in the Way of Christ, because they did.  Every year’s commemoration spurs us onward in our own faith-journey.  More deeply, though, their faith confronts us with a stark choice.  We, too, are “called to be saints” in this time and place.  As they did in their day, we today can resist the cascading “society of spectacle” (Guy Debord) in which the media seduce us into an attention span of a strobe light; we can protest the reduction of human beings made in the image of God to either commodities or enemies.  Their faith in God propels us toward our own faith that the future is not closed, but rather open in God: un-finished, un-managed, possessed of multiple options.  We declare with them that every last human being is precious, a beloved child of God’s heart.  And that the love of God has already occupied Wall Street, and every other street.  We remember in order to rehearse for our own faith-filled activity.  The pressure of their bestowal urges us to labor toward making real in this world the New Reality of God proclaimed by Christ.  With poet Nelly Sachs, they announce:  “Someone/ will take the ball/ from the hands that play/ the game of terror” (O the Chimneys [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967], p. 153).  And they are looking at us.  We honor them best not by warming our hands in the fire of their faith, but by burning afresh.  The memory of their contribution presses us to ask ourselves, “what is my own contribution?”

    It is, after all, the same God we worship, the same Christ we follow, with the same agenda for all of Creation.  The annual commemoration of “All Saints,” of “All Souls,” can be, of course, a time to dust off those museum-piece relics another year.  We’ve heard those sermons time and again.

    But . . . what if, to swipe an image from Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić (Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia, trans. Celia Hawkesworth, [N.p.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003], p. 220.), what if those “saints”  we remember are “not a message in a bottle, but bait,” dangled by the hand of God?

Language for Preachers

Once again, what you heard in Seminary:  K.I.S.S.:  "Keep It Simple, Stupid."  There, don't we all feel uplifted!  More seriously, as we who would preach something resembling the Word of God -- or a word from God through our poor words! -- know all too well, techno-speak is murder to comprehension.  This is why storytelling is so fabulously popular.

But ordinary language is what folks use in everyday conversation.  So conversational language is what best carries the freight of the words of our sermons.  This entry in Paul Krugman's blog, "Conscience of a Liberal" simply underscores this notion, coming from the flying keys of a Nobel-winning economist:  "But, And, Why." 

Preaching to the soul of our hearers is work -- as preachers know all too well.  But we are not left alone.  That Word hurled to the world (Isaiah 55:11) is doing most of the work for us already, and the One who stepped into human skin -- technical term:  "incarnation" -- is also carrying the heavy end of the load (check Matthew 11:28-30).  Just as the Word eternal (John 1:1) landed on planet earth as a back-woods Galilean, in a land occupied by Roman power, so now that very Word inhabits our words.  Let's make it easier for God to get the Good News across to contemporary ears, by K.I.S.Saints.
Bob

Preachers' Bibliography for Sundays After Pentecost (Ordinary Time)

(* 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.”

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.

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.

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).