Tag: Holy Trinity Anglican Church

Reconciliation in the Name of the Trinity

Trinity Sunday, 2015 – joint service of Trinity Lutheran Church and Holy Trinity Anglican Church

I am grateful for the opportunity to be in this pulpit today, on a Trinity Sunday which holds special meaning for me. I have had many years of close association with the ELCiC, including the privilege of preaching and participating in the laying-on-of-hands at my sister-in-law’s ordination to the Lutheran pastorate. More recently, I have developed a closer relationship with some members of Trinity Lutheran, including Pastor Ingrid. The date is significant because I was ordained a deacon on May 31, and preached my first sermon as an ordained person on Trinity Sunday, 1987.

About a year before that, I was beginning Clinical Pastoral Education at the Royal Alexandra Hospital. One of the nursing units to which I was assigned was in maternity, where I made one of my very first pastoral visits. When I introduced myself to a young woman seated on her bed, she first said she was just waiting to be discharged, and then said, “What church do you belong to?” I gave her the standard hospital answer: hospital chaplains served everyone without denominational distinction. That wasn’t good enough for her: she demanded to know what church I was associated with when I wasn’t in the hospital. When I told her “Anglican,” her response was immediate and negative, something like “That’s one of those churches who believe in the Trinity! It’s not in the Bible, so you can just leave.” I started to argue with her (major mistake!), but quickly realized that nothing would be gained by proceeding.

It was a real surprise to me that there were people who called themselves Christians who denied the Trinity, something I had understood as an essential tenet of the faith. In the decades since, then, those few minutes by a hospital bed became foundational as I strove to understand what we mean by “I believe.”

Our faith is Trinitarian in shape: the Nicene Creed which we will recite in a few minutes has a three-part structure: we believe in God the Father; we believe in his Son Jesus Christ; we believe in the Holy Spirit. But what do we mean by the word “believe,” and where is that belief grounded? Lutherans and Anglicans share a history of being rooted in Scripture as well as the traditional teachings of the Church, going back to the time of the Church Fathers, who were expounding doctrine well before the Canon of the Bible was agreed upon. Don’t get me wrong: scripture is important, but we should remember that the Church came before the Bible, not vice versa.

As members of two congregations dedicated to the Trinity, we are reminded of the doctrine’s centrality every time we enter one of our buildings—you can’t escape the name. I don’t recall hearing of either congregation spending much (if any) time debating the nuances of the doctrine, but members of both certainly devote ample time to living out the faith in church activities, and in ministries beyond our walls.

We tend to understand belief as a kind of “head exercise,” giving intellectual assent to propositions about God and God’s works. The question asked of the church is often “What do we believe?” In her ground-breaking book “Christianity After Religion,” Diana Butler Bass has suggested that we rephrase the question as “How do we believe?” Pointing to the German root of the verb, she says that belief is less about the head than the heart—what we believe is where place our trust, as we set our hearts to follow God in the divine mission.

How do we live into a Trinitarian faith? That’s a huge, life-changing, and life-long question, because it encompasses the whole of God’s being. St. Augustine wrote:

“If we speak of God, what wonder is it is you do not comprehend. For, if you comprehend, He is not God. Let there be a pious profession of ignorance rather than a rash profession of knowledge. That one’s mind only touch God a little is great happiness; to comprehend Him is utterly impossible.”
St. Augustine, Sermon 67 on the New Testament – http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/160367.htm

Seeking to know God and to follow God’s ways is the task of a lifetime, the ongoing process called progressive sanctification, the continuing work of the Holy Spirit in making us ever more holy.

There are many aspects to growth in holiness. Let me focus today on only one: the work of reconciliation. Paul expressed the importance of this ministry in these words:

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself,
2 Corinthians 5:18-19a NRSV

This week in Ottawa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada will deliver its final report on the Residential Schools. The Anglican Church has been deeply involved in this process for years. I note that the ELCiC has held some recent events focusing on the on-going work of reconciliation with our indigenous brothers and sisters. At the TRC’s event last year in Edmonton, Mayor Don Iveson proclaimed the next year to be a “Year of Reconciliation.” Well and good, but a year is a short time to work on a century-old issue. It’s very tempting to take shortcuts, like the person who responded to an appeal for the Residential Schools Settlement Fund by walking into my office, slapping a large cheque on my desk and saying, “There! I hope that’s the last we hear of this.” Not by a long shot! Justice Murray Sinclair, the chair of the TRC, has said

Reconciliation is about forging and maintaining respectful relationships.
There are no shortcuts.
http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=3

The Residential Schools created a gulf between indigenous and non-indigenous people in this country. I heard a great deal of that pain in my time in Brandon, which brought me into contact with many survivors and their families. Reconciliation—building respectful relationships—will take time in listening, in walking together, in working together. It is important work for our nation and for our churches.

Reconciliation goes against the flow of human behavior. We’re very good at building walls and creating enclaves in which to live. We’re less good at reaching out across those walls, and learning to see those on the other side as God’s children deserving of every bit as much respect as we are.

One sign of the ongoing work of reconciliation is the continuing and developing relationship between our two congregations. It is truly the work of the Holy Spirit as we seek to build and maintain a respectful relationship.

There are no shortcuts to the Kingdom: relationships must be carefully fostered and lovingly maintained, whether between Lutherans and Anglicans or between indigenous and non-indigenous people. We have been entrusted in the name of the Trinity with the ministry of reconciliation, hearing the call of the God who called Isaiah, seeking to follow the one who reconciled us to God through his death on the cross, and always and ever empowered by the Holy Spirit.

May it be so.

On Earth as In Heaven

Notes for a sermon preached on July 27, 2014 at Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Edmonton.
Text: Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Recent world and local news has given me occasion to give thanks.

Two weeks ago, my spouse & I were at a family gathering, which included a BBQ on a beach. No incoming artillery threatened the crowd enjoying the BC sun. Thanks be to God.

This week, we will travel by air to Vancouver Island. We can be quite sure that no one will aim a surface-to-air missile at our flight. Thanks be to God.

The reports about the condo fire in SW Edmonton made me grateful that we live in a building with a full sprinkler system and a non-combustible exterior. Thanks be to God.

None of these—or any other bits of dire news—point us toward God’s Kingdom, except in a negative sense. This is not what God desires for his people. For that, we turn to the Gospel—the Good News!

That gospel passage we just heard could almost make us a bit dizzy, with its repeated refrain “The kingdom of heaven is like…” We hear it five times, associated with five very different images: a mustard seed, yeast, treasure, a merchant, a net—images with no apparent connection with each other—they are just piled up together. The closing comment about the scribe trained for the kingdom adds another layer.

We’re talking about parables here, most of them coming without any explanation. As Fr. Paul Fromberg said from this pulpit last Sunday, explanations actually go against the nature of parables, which are less like object lessons than Zen koans: they just sit there, challenging us to find meaning in them.

The theologian Sally McFague says that parables open “cracks in reality,” to allow us to see things freshly.

As Leonard Cohen wrote:

There’s a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

Jesus uses parables to open cracks in our carefully built world-view, challenging us to see things in a new light. He takes the stuff of ordinary life, and gives it a twist, and all of a sudden new light is streaming!

He asks his disciples if they have understood, and they answer “Yes.” I recall a saying of Albert Einstein:

If one is asked “Do you believe in God,”
the answer least likely to be understood is “Yes.”

Even the shortest parables have multiple layers and shades of meaning.

Recall that Jesus says “The kingdom of heaven,” a term found only in Matthew, generally in contexts where Mark and Luke use “the kingdom of God.” Matthew’s use of this term is widely believed to be a circumlocution: Jews avoid misusing the name of God by avoiding talking directly about God. It is one of the reasons many scholars believe this Gospel was written for a church composed mainly of Jewish converts. The two expressions mean the same, so it is important not to assume that “heaven” points to something entirely beyond this world. Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for the coming of the kingdom:

Your kingdom come, your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.

God reigns in heaven—he always has and always will—but our prayer is for God’s reign to come in its fullness on earth. God’s kingdom will be fulfilled when the holy will is done in all of creation—on earth as in heaven.

When will that be? How will we know it? The five short parables have one thing in common—they all involve action, as people do things that point to what life looks like when we seek to allow God’s will to govern our lives. Let’s take a look at just the first two of them, beginning with the mustard seed.

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field…

It sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? It has a “standard” interpretation, stressing how the very small becomes the very large. That’s correct, as far as it goes, but if we end there, we’ve missed the point. Mustard gives useful seeds and oil, but it is actually a weed—a fast-growing, invasive plant that is almost impossible to eradicate once it is established. What sane person would sow mustard in a field, where it crowds out the wheat, and provides shelter for birds that eat the growing grain? So why does Jesus liken the kingdom to such an apparently counter-productive action? The people who first heard this parable would surely have sat up straight, and scratched their heads at such a suggestion.

And so? The kingdom of heaven is like… well, it’s not always what we expect it to be.

A mustard plant in the middle of a wheat field may be unwelcome, but it can’t be ignored. It is urgent business. The kingdom Jesus announces can also at times be unwelcome, as he challenges us:

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. (Matt 4:17)

The urgency of God’s business puts demands on us: action, commitment, sometimes extreme behaviour, as we work for the coming of God’s kingdom, on earth as in heaven.

Mustard seeds remind us that even the simplest and seemingly most insignificant actions can have big consequences—sometimes unexpected, even undesired. What about yeast? Same thing! The yeast used in ancient Palestine wasn’t the nice domesticated stuff we are familiar with. It was more like what we today call sourdough starter, kept over from the previous batch of bread to leaven the next one. It goes bad or dies very easily, and must be refreshed from time to time. If proper care is not taken, you can produce a loaf of bread laced with poison.

Just so, small actions can produce very large and very negative results, not because people mean to do evil, but more often because they do not take the proper care and attention. This past week, a single cigarette butt caused $10M in damage to a west-end condo, and made 400 people homeless for months or years.

Jesus invites us to be part of that kingdom which has come near. The invitation is a challenge—to us individually, to the church, and to the world around us. The call to follow Jesus can mean being a nuisance like the mustard bush—sometimes unwelcome, but unavoidable in its urgency.

However urgent it may be, the call to follow Jesus is not a call to act blindly or rashly, but to take care in what we do, seeking always to do God’s will, seeking to be good yeast in a world that critically needs God’s leavening.

Far be it from me to suggest that these interpretations are anything more than an opening of a crack—how do YOU hear?

We do have urgent matters before us. Let us therefore seek to know God’s will, through prayer, study, and worship—and then in the holy action—God’s Mission!—that arises from these disciplines. Let us be wise and diligent in attending to them, and may our lives reflect our prayer:

Your kingdom come, your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.