Trinity Sunday (A), June 7, 2020.  The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O Trinity of blessed light, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Happy Trinity Sunday everyone. I’m feeling particularly spun up by the Holy Spirit this week and I want to preach about the turbulence of civil and religious unrest. A mighty wind is blowing people out of their homes, as Bishop Gates preached last week, and into the streets, throughout our land. We are hearing the Spirit in a variety of languages. Last Sunday, because it was Pentecost, we renewed our baptismal promises, and this week I’m going to speak to those promises. I’m particularly speaking to the questions: Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord? And will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being? Because Emmanuel Church is a predominantly white parish, not entirely, but predominately, this white priest is preaching primarily to the white people who are listening today. I think you know deep in your hearts the things I’m going to say, and yet, I have to be sure even though it feels awkward.

First, the Trinity we celebrate today is not white. But you wouldn’t know this by looking at pictures. The artistic depictions of “God the Creator” or “God the Father” most often show pale skin, flowing grey hair and beard, gauzy white clothing, often surrounded by light-skinned yellow-haired cherubs. It’s such a powerful and ubiquitous image, that many people feel the need to tell me when they talk with me for the first time, that they don’t believe in that kind of God. (Neither do I, by the way.) Christians would be far better off if we stopped trying to paint or sculpt depictions of the divine. They are idolatrous.

Speaking of idolatrous, in the US, popular paintings and drawings of Jesus show a light-skinned, northern European-featured man who looks nothing like the majority of the people in the Middle East. For Christians, the exposure to those pictures often starts by Sunday School and in children’s books.  Twenty years ago, I used to take a brown marker or crayon and color in every illustration in books about Jesus before I gave them to my godson. It’s a little better now, but not much. And the Holy Spirit is depicted as a white dove, like the ones magicians use, looking nothing like doves in the Middle East, which are mostly speckled shades of brown. 

I have spent a lot of time and words throughout my life trying to correct the mistaken idea that God is a boy’s name, or the mistaken idea that God is exclusively male, or the mistaken idea that God is literally a “Father,” but I realized this week that I’ve not spent any time preaching against the mistaken idea that the Creator of the Universe, the Ground of our Being, God the Author, is white. The Creator is not white. Jesus was not white, and the Holy Spirit is not white.  The Holy Bible was not originally written by or for white people. Not one word of it. May white people use it? Yes, but not as an instrument of oppression and not as a prop. That is blasphemy. That is blaspheming the Holy Spirit.

Back to our baptismal promises of persevering in resisting evil, of repenting and returning to the Lord whenever we fall into sin, and of striving for justice and peace among all people and respecting the dignity of every human being. These are profoundly spiritual and political promises. We are promising to show, with our words and our actions, indeed with our whole lives, what humility and gentleness look like, and above all, what Love looks like. Church is not the place to avoid the political, which is, by root definition, a desire to shape our common life. Church is the place to give thanks to God for the life and witness of Jesus Christ, and to recharge our batteries for the work of the week ahead. We pray to God in Eucharistic Prayer C, “Open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us. Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength, for pardon only, and not for renewal. Let the grace of this Holy Communion make us one body, one spirit in Christ, that we may worthily serve the world in Christ’s name.”

Indeed, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed were all religious and political leaders, (political threats, in fact) who radically reshaped their worlds, creating alternative narratives to economic, military, and religious oppression, for the sake of living together in justice and peace. I’ve thought of this often in the last several months as I’ve gathered with faith leaders in Boston on a regular conference call hosted by the Mayor’s office. Rabbis, pastors, priests, bishops, and imams have been praying and working together since mid-March in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to serve those who are most vulnerable. This past Thursday, our conversation turned to dismantling white supremacy. Some of my black clergy colleagues, voices trembling with emotion, eyes filled with tears, asked the white clergy to do more. One bishop noted that he was not asking this of white secular colleagues, but of white people of faith – people who profess to love our neighbors as ourselves. Another pastor added, “marching and carrying signs, posting on social media, is not enough. We need you to do things you’ve never done before – even if it means that you risk losing your jobs to stand up for and with people of color.” We responded that we would.

I noticed that in our Gospel reading for today, Jesus was asking his disciples to do something new, after all the trauma they’d been through. “The eleven disciples went to the mountain in Galilee where Jesus had told them to go. And when they saw him, they paid him homage; but some were dubious.”  I love that detail that some of the eleven doubted – that’s more than one or two. Doubt or no doubt, Jesus addressed them all.  The imperative command from the Risen Lord to the eleven in the very end of the Gospel of Matthew that we heard today is not found in the word, “Go.” That’s a participle – as in you are going, with the sense of wherever you go. (Now I’m back in familiar preaching territory!) The imperative is to make disciples [1] (which is to say learners) of the Way of Love by fully immersing (which is what baptize means), fully immersing all people in the name of God’s generative, redemptive and sustaining love, and teaching them to listen deeply to Jesus’ teachings about the inherent dignity of every human being. The best way to teach that, of course, is to show that you believe in the inherent dignity of every human being. The eleven had returned to the spot where they heard “The Sermon on the Mount.” That is not a coincidence. That is what they are to remember from that sermon, starting with blessed are the poor. (You know, it doesn’t say, “all people are blessed.”) According to Matthew, these are Jesus’ commandments that are to be kept – hold dear: do not be afraid, do not worry, do not judge, love your enemies, bear good fruit with your words and deeds. And finally, remember that Jesus is with us always.

Jesus was asking his disciples to do something new. We are his disciples, and we can also do something new, something more than we’ve already done to honor the inherent dignity of black and brown lives, of black and brown people. That might mean getting better educated. It might mean writing to local officials. It might mean, if you have a job, paying attention to the ways white supremacy shows up in your workplace, and naming it. It might mean some courageous and compassionate conversations with your own self, with your family, with your friends. It might mean increasing the time or money we give to support organizations that are actively engaged in anti-racism work. It certainly means supporting economic reparations, strengthening police and military accountability, and taking apart the prison industrial complex. It probably means stepping out of our comfort zones. 

Earlier in the week, this is what my wife Joy wrote, “Dismantling white supremacy can be every white person’s mission, should we choose to accept it. It will take the rest of our lives, and then the rest of the lives of those who come after us. And the probability that we will never finish the work is no reason to not begin it again, every single day. And it requires so much more than what some of us are already doing: donations and marching and learning new vocabulary and retiring old vocabulary and listening and researching and reading. At the most basic level, …this work requires the willingness to stray from our usual paths, going…out of our usual way in both big and small ways.” In other words, those of us who benefit from white supremacy need to start doing things we’ve never done before.

For every single one of us, it can begin with prayer. Whether we are over- or under-resourced, whether we are homebound or out and about, whether we are enervated or energized, we can pray. Perhaps you’ve seen the prayer offered by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. It reminds me of our spiritual communion prayer, which I find to be equally moving. Please pray with me.

Loving God, in Jesus you were bullied, beaten, and killed.  You are always on the side of those whose souls or bodies are mistreated.  While I cannot be present with my body at protests right now, I stand with all those who stand up for justice. Uphold them. Keep them safe. Grant us the courage to stand beside all who are harmed by the violence of racism with our bodies and in our prayers. Give us the words to speak out for those whose breath has been taken. Enkindle in our hearts the fire of your love that together we might end the scourge of racism that has infected our nation. Amen.

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