!1 Trinity Sunday, Year C, 2010 St James Episcopal Church, St James NY The Rev. Dr. Raewynne J. Whiteley Today is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday after Pentecost, the Sunday in the church year when we celebrate the Trinity, that is, God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Trinity Sunday is described by some people as the only church feast day that focuses on a doctrine, that is, that focuses on religious philosophy or theory. Which is all very well and good if you are one of those people who spends their time thinking about what God is like in theory. But most of us here, I suspect, have far too much going on in our lives to sit round idly speculating. What matters to us about God is not the theory but the reality. Not Who is God? out there in some abstract theoretical sense, but Who is God? here, in our everyday lives, who is the God who we know and love. Today, our focus is on God, the God we know and love, the God we believe in. Which is nothing new. Because we focus on God every week in our worship. But on Trinity Sunday we stop for a moment and remind ourselves of that. We remind ourselves that yes, we believe in God, and this is what God is like. And to be remind ourselves what God is like we turn to Scripture, to the bible.
!2 And you know as well as I do that we could be here all day exploring who God is in scripture. Because God is way bigger than can be captured in just a handful of words or even a page or two. God is so much more than we can ever know, so much more than we can ever fully understand. It s like standing on top of a mountain and looking at the scenery in front of you, and it s just too much to take in all at once. Most weeks we just focus on a small detail in the landscape, one rock or tree or hill. On Trinity Sunday we try to look at the overall panorama. though even then what we see is limited by where we re standing. And so next year on Trinity Sunday, we ll move a few feet to the right, and the year after a few feet to the left, and over time we build up a picture of this God that we know and love. So, back to God. On Trinity Sunday we celebrate God the Trinity, God whom we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the primary ways we know God; they are the names we have for God. It s as if they are the views we have of God from the three most well known lookouts on our mountain. But each of those views
!3 overlaps some, and today our Old Testament reading and our Psalm show us something of where our pictures of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit overlap. And that s in creation. In our Old Testament reading we hear the voice of wisdom. Wisdom is one of the attributes, the characteristics of God, and here it seems to be personified. Sometimes in the bible, Jesu id described as wisdom; at other times, it seems to be the Holy Spirit. But here what matters is that wisdom points us to God as creator. Wisdom was a witness to creation. Wisdom was a witness to the depths and the watery springs, to the shaping of the mountains and hills, to the earth and fields and soil. Wisdom was a witness to the establishment of the heavens to the bounding of the earth to the skies and the deep to the limiting of the seas and the marking of the foundations of the earth. Wisdom was there on the first day, when God created the day and the night and on the second, when God created the sky. Wisdom was there on the third day, when God created the earth and seed and fruit and trees, and on the fourth, when God created the sun and the moon. Wisdom was there on the fifth day, when God created fish and birds,
!4 and on the sixth, when God created animals and human beings. And wisdom was there on the seventh day, when God rested, wisdom delighting in the whole of creation and delighting in human beings. Wisdom is a witness to the wonderful creation of God. And that creation includes us. Wisdom singles us out as a focus of delight, we who are created in the image of God. And if wisdom is somehow intimately connected with, even part of God then God himself delights in us. We are the good creation of God. And from the very beginning our relationship with God has not been the same as the rest of creation. Because, as the first chapters of Genesis remind us, humans are singled out by God and given special responsibility over God s creation. We were given the task of naming everything, and in giving humanity this task God affirmed that responsibility and power
!5 over all creation. We are God s stewards sharing with God the task of caring for this world. The way the psalmist put it, if you think in terms of hierarchy, we are made just a little lower than God, but above creation. We are given a place of glory and honor and we share in the work of God with this world of ours. We re bound together, us and God in the care of creation. And that s been on my mind this last week, as attempts to stop the flow of oil in the Gulf have failed yet again, and as we see pictures of hundreds of thousands of tiny fish washed up on the shore in Mississippi, and gobs of oil on the sand in Louisiana, and no one seems to know how it can be stopped. In his news conference on Thursday, President Obama told this story. When I woke this morning and I m shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy? Because I think everybody understands that when we are fouling the Earth like this, it has concrete implications not just for this generation, but for future generations. I grew up in Hawaii where the ocean is sacred. And when you see birds flying around with oil all over their feathers and turtles dying, that doesn t just speak to the immediate economic consequences of this; this speaks to how are we caring for this incredible bounty that we have. In Bay St Louis, twenty members of a church stood hand in hand strung out along the shoreline praying to God for help. Not just for a miracle, but for the strength that they know they will need in the days and months and years ahead
!6 for the clean-up and for the rebuilding of businesses and lives, and the regeneration of creation. And under all of that an awareness that we human beings are charged by God to care for creation and sure God must be weeping at this disaster. There is no delight here. And it forces me to ask myself, how am I caring for creation? How do I share with God in this task? I m not an oil producer but I m a consumer, and so my need for gas for my car means that somehow far along the chain I m part of that disaster in the Gulf. And it s not just oil. How do I care for the creation around me? Do I bother to sort my recycling? Do I care what natural resources I waste? They aren t easy questions, and nor are the answers easy. But if what we know from this slice of Scripture, what we know from this picture of God is that God is not only the creator but continues to care for and delight in it, and if God has shared with me both the care and the delight, then I have to ask those questions. And not only ask them, but answer them, and join with God in caring for this created world. Knowing that God, our creator,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, delights in us and rejoices in creation and in the human race.!7