16 June 2019

"On Hope and the Trinity" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
June 16, 2019 (Trinity Sunday)
Scripture:  Romans 5:1-5


What do you hope for?  In the deepest, most hidden corners of your heart, of your soul, what do you hope for?

“Hope” is a funny word.  It’s one that we use frequently, along the lines of “I hope that we get some rain for my garden”; or “I hope that the blackflies disappear before I need to cut the grass.”  This spring, I heard a lot of, “I hope that the river doesn’t rise as much as last year.”

Used in this way, “hope” means something like wishful thinking.  Something that you would like to happen, but that you’re not too terribly optimistic about it because it’s a long shot.  Those blackflies probably aren’t going to disappear before the next time I need to cut my lawn.

But hope has a different meaning, a deeper meaning, a God-centred meaning as well.  We often hear it lumped together along with faith and love as a virtue; but used the way that we normally use it, like wishful thinking, well, where’s the virtue in that?

But like I said, this deeper, God-centred hope is more than wishful thinking.  This God-centred hope is more like confidence that something good is coming; confidence that God’s plan for all of creation is going to come true.

And when I read this week’s passage from Romans, it was that word “hope” that jumped out at me.  Hope does not disappoint us.  Our hopes that are wishful thinking – like the blackflies being gone when I cut the grass – these hopes might be disappointed, they might not come true.  But our hopes that are centred on God – this is the hope that does not disappoint us, because we can have confidence in God.

Now the book of Romans in the bible is a letter that was written by the apostle Paul to the early church in Rome.  Paul’s writing is famous – or maybe infamous – for being convoluted, full of logic statements that require you to follow along twists and turns to get to the conclusion, filled with therefores and throughs and whereases.

And it is one of these logic chains that leads us to that word “hope”; but when I looked at the logic chain, it disturbed me a bit.  Working backwards from hope, we have hope coming from character or experience.  And that character or experience is coming from patience or endurance.  And that patience or endurance arises out of suffering.  Therefore hope comes from our suffering.  And much as I love thinking about hope, I don’t like thinking about suffering.

But the thing about hope is that when things are good in life, you don’t need hope – you have everything that you need in the here and now.  But it is when things seem absolutely hopeless – that is when you can only cling to hope.  That is the time when you have to trust in something that seems to make absolutely no sense at all.  It is only when things are hopeless, that we can find hope.

Today is Trinity Sunday – the day when we get to celebrate that God is three and God is one; the day when we get to celebrate this mystery of God that is beyond anything that we could wrap our minds around; the day when we get to celebrate this God of all times and all places and all people.

And because God is Trinity, we can be assured that God is present with us when we suffer, because God has been there before.  God, in Jesus, knows what it is to suffer, to be abandoned, to experience grief, and to die.

And because God is Trinity, we can be assured that God is present with us as God’s Word made flesh – God made human.  Jesus Christ, both fully God and fully human has brought our humanity into contact with God, so that we can no more be separated from God.  As Paul writes to the church in Rome, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.”

And because God is Trinity, we can be assured that God is present with us always, because the God the Holy Spirit is moving and dancing in all of creation, always pulling us into the dance of God.  As Paul writes to the church in Rome, “hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

These verses have sometimes been used to justify suffering or oppression.  “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”  Paul says that suffering leads to hope, and hope is a good thing, therefore suffering must be a good thing.

But I don’t think that is the case.  I don’t think that God (or even Paul) wants us to suffer – I think that Paul is just commenting on a fact of life.  Suffering is present in the world – I don’t think that there is anyone who gets through life without suffering of some sort.  Pain, grief, illness, these are all real things in our world.  But what Paul is saying to the church in Rome and to us is that suffering isn’t the end point.  That there is hope on the other side of our suffering, because God is there.

There are many images or metaphors used to try and describe the Trinity.  You have a three-leaf clover – three parts but one whole.  You have a flame that is shared between three candles – is it one flame or a single flame?  You have a person who is, at the same time, a mother, a lawyer, and a spouse.  All of these metaphors catch a hint of the Trinity, but none of them perfectly describes it.  My favourite metaphor is a dance with three dance partners, swirling and moving as one, so that it is hard to distinguish one from the other.

God is dancing in the world, and we are invited to join the dance.  We are invited to turn away from fear, and trust our dance partners, and embrace the hope that comes from God.  We are invited, especially when shadows lurk all around us and suffering seems to be the only way, that is when we are especially invited to trust in these promises of God, to reach out, and to allow ourselves to claim that hope from God that comes through Christ.

And so I ask you again.  What do you hope for?  In the deepest, most hidden corners of your heart, of your soul, what do you hope for?


A Round Dance - my favourite metaphor for Trinity! 
(Photo from Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 )

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