Today is Trinity Sunday, the day when we celebrate the divine mystery of our three-in-one God. If you don’t understand the Trinity, then you are in good company, for it is indeed a challenging concept. There is an old question that asks, what do smart Rectors make for Trinity Sunday?
Vacation plans. But this year, preaching about the Trinity feels like taking the easy way out. For life in 2020 presents us with so many challenges, that I feel called to speak on other things.
One of my pet peeves in life is hypocrisy; when we say one thing but do another. Hypocrisy undermines our message and dilutes the impact of our statement to the listener. Yet in spite of my dislike, I am as guilty of it as any of us. When I tell you to that eating right and exercising is the best
way to stay healthy, then you see me at McDonald’s scarfing down a Big Mac and Fries, that is hypocrisy.
While I pains me to say it, even our own Church can be hypocritical. We all saw the video last week of the President in front of St John’s church in Washington. The way that he got to that spot was deplorable. There is no excuse for using pepper spray and rubber bullets on a peaceful crowd, a
crowd who were within their right to assemble in the public square. And while that act was not, and could never be acceptable, for many, this was not the most damaging part. Instead, some were more outraged that the President would hold up a Bible and use our church as a prop in his marketing campaign.
Recognize however, that St John’s calls itself the church of the Presidents. They boast that every President since James Madison has worshipped there and they maintain a special President’s pew. But I am not trying to single out just that parish, for we Episcopalians have a long history of boasting
about our ties to temporal power. We delight in telling anyone who will listen that there have been 11 Episcopalian Presidents and we relish the fact that the US National Cathedral is an Episcopal church. We are, in a word, hypocritical when we call out the President for using us as a marketing
tool when we have been doing the very same thing to the presidency for generations. Perhaps this incident will give us an opportunity to reflect on our relationship with power and cause us to think more clearly about how we balance that relationship with our call as disciples of Jesus Christ.
I want to suggest that we may have missed an opportunity in the response to the President. I wonder what it would have looked like if we said something like this. “Mr. President, you are always welcome at this church. But you need to understand that everyone else is as well. This church is open to the poor and the rich, the empowered and the powerless, to all people of all races and at all times. For you to use the means you did to drive them away from this church is wrong and is antithetical to our purpose and the teachings of Jesus Christ. But now that you are here, we would like to invite you to come inside. Don’t just stand on the steps and pose for pictures, come in and have a conversation with us. Meet our Presiding Bishop, a black man from Buffalo who grew up with a very different experience than you. If you are willing to engage in a dialogue with him and with others, they can help you to understand their plight and want to work with you to have a civil and productive conversation about racism and the killing of black men in police custody.”
“We see that you have a Bible with you. Bring it inside with you and we can explore some passages that may be of help to you. May we suggest that you look to Genesis where we see that we are indeed our brother’s keeper? May we point you to the story of Moses who wields great authority, but is cautioned to walk humbly with God? How about the story of the good Samaritan? Perhaps the way that Jesus came not to the powers and principalities, but to the poor, the downtrodden and sick, and those on the margins? The Bible you are holding has much to help all of us live lives of love in relationship with one another.”
I will leave it up to you to decide whether you think this would have an impact on President Trump, but I wonder if it would have been a teaching moment for the rest of us. Could we have used the spotlight this event gave us to demonstrate true discipleship and underscore that we want to be a
participant in a sincere conversation about racism? Could we have shown the nation that we are serious when we say that everyone is our neighbor, even those who disagree with us? Could we have expanded the big tent that we boast about to truly include everyone? Even if it didn’t reach the
President, this message likely would have reached others. We are living through unprecedented times, but you already know that. People have been asking me as their pastor, “why has God allowed this virus, what possible benefit could it have?” Of course, I don’t have an answer for them. But lately I have been wondering if perhaps the virus has been the irritant that rubs us just raw enough to finally see that we need to change our world. The fact that everyone has been impacted by the virus gave us a shared moment of unity, then quickly morphed into the understanding that we were not all impacted in the same way. But one thing is sure, no one
is comfortable and all of us are a bit on edge. Maybe that discomfort is giving us a new lens with which we can see the injustice in our current world.
We all saw the video of the killing of George Floyd and it was gut wrenching. There should never be a death like that, especially at the hands of the police. Yet, black men die in police custody twice as often as white men. Perhaps now, in this pandemic tempered world, we can finally say enough is enough and begin a real dialogue about racism. It starts with listening to help us understand that our life experience has not been shared by all. I am a middle-class white kid from the suburbs. I was raised to respect the police, but never to fear them. Yet black parents had to have different conversations with their children and that was something I had never understood. We only learn such things from real listening. Listen, ponder, and then act.
This is hard work; it is uncomfortable work. That’s OK, it is supposed to be. Anything worth doing involves some pain. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who has gone through physical therapy. We are going to stumble, we are going to say the wrong thing, we are going to feel awkward and be afraid we have offended someone. That is part of a journey to understanding. But we are people of good will and if we make a genuine effort to work through the discomfort together, maybe we can finally
put the scourge of racism behind us.
For Jesus did not call us to love only the people who look like us, or talk like us, or love like us. Jesus calls us to love our neighbor and he is quite clear that EVERYONE is our neighbor. But we can’t love our neighbor if they live in fear of us or in fear of the authorities that represent us, so let’s finally take this opportunity to understand the fear so that together we can build a world beyond it.
While that task may sound impossible for us, take heart for we are not alone. At the end of Matthew’s gospel Jesus reminds us, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”