Trinity Sunday 2011 Sermon

I was pulling out of the driveway here at Church this week when I was approached by a man who has worshiped here a couple of times.  He is a client at House of Charity, and has played basketball in our gym and worked on our garden.  He is in the process of getting his life back on track, he said, and he was getting really frustrated with the obstacles and the troubles he was facing to get back on track.  He had made some poor decisions in the past that were keeping him from moving as fast as he would like.  Decisions that forced him to jump through hoops he was not at all pleased to jump through.  He said his life was chaotic, in upheaval and just plain crazy and sometimes all he wanted to do was run back into those familiar places which held for him, nothing but darkness and death.

We talked about Jesus, and God and faith.  Where do you see God in all this?  How could God be in that?  How could God be in the midst of this chaos working and striving and thriving where you seem to be flailing and failing with great ease?  I talked about how when the chaos is ripping through our bodies and souls, when the world seems to be upside down, that might mean more than ever God is at work not only in our lives, but in our world.  The uneasiness, the uncomfortable nature of chaos, means we are struggling with the moral and theological questions that run through our daily lives.  The chaos in our midst is much more an indicator of being fully alive than it is an indicator of approaching death.  The opposite of faith, you have heard me say, is not doubt, the opposite of faith is fear, because fear immobilizes us and causes us to not act, to stand in silence as injustice glides by eliciting little to no response from us.  Doubt is threshold to belief.  Without doubt, there would be no belief.  Without doubt, there would be no struggle, without doubt there would be no new creation.

After our brief conversation, I pulled out of the driveway and started on my way.  I stopped however, in front of the Parish Hall and waited for him to catch up with me and I asked him, “What did God do at the beginning of the Bible?”  He answered, “Created the heavens and the earth.”  So I asked him, “And after the earth, what did God create?”  He answered, “Mankind.”  And then I asked him, “And what did God say about the earth and human beings when it was all created?”  He shrugged his shoulders, and I pointed at him and said, “God said it was good, it was very good, you my friend are very good, God says so!”  And I drove off, and that alone would have made me feel pretty darn good about myself, but when I turned onto tenth to head to my next appointment for the day, I caught him leaping in the air, tapping his heels together with a huge smile on his face.  We are good, indeed, God says that we are all very good, and the mess we have made of our lives never defines us.

Many of us were taught that God created the world out of nothing, that in the beginning there was nothing at all, nothing existed, and we think we have to do the same, create something out of nothing.  This is not true according to the bible, and oddly enough, should be a comforting thing, that God did not create the world out of nothing.  In the beginning was chaos, a formless void, not of nothing, but of chaos.  And from this chaos the world was brought into being, from this chaos the world was ordered into life.  From this chaos life sprung at the Words of God.  God made the world, yes, and it was God’s words, such as breath, light, darkness, water, land, plants, animals and finally, humans that brought everything into being, but these things did not come into being out of nothing.  They came into being out of chaos.  This should be comforting for us all because out of the chaos of our lives God can create something good and God does create something good.  Out of the chaos that our lives offer the world, something good will be created.  Is it comforting to know that in our chaos, in the chaotic lives we sometimes live, is it comforting to know God can create something beautiful?  The chaos of my life is creating something new, I hope, my life is being honed and built and formed into something I can’t see yet, and may never see, but I can feel it most days, out of the chaos of my life something is being created.  I have been told by many of you that the messiness around me will clear up, it will just take time.

Looking out over all of you I know I am not alone in my chaos.  But I look out over all of you today and I see a lot of chaos, I see a lot of upheaval, I see a lot of pain.  Some of you are going through all sorts of things, individually, or as families.  A number of you have loved ones who are sick or in pain.  A number of you are anxious about friends and neighbors as they deal with crises of their own.  A number of you are dealing with health issues and ticking time bombs that you cannot see or hear or even feel.  Some of you are unemployed or underemployed.  In all this chaos, where is the good, in all this upheaval, where is the calm, in all this stress where do we find peace? 

Walter Brueggeman believes that in creation, God moves over and makes room for others, for us as co creators.  I wonder if that is not what happens in our own lives, in our own chaos, that God moves us over to make room for others, so, as many of you might assume I would say, in our chaos God creates community, God creates opportunities for compassionate community.  Where we are being made new, or being remade into something similar to what we were, in that making or remaking, in that forming or reforming, we are being put in a place where there is more room for others, more room for our experiences, more room for compassion.  When there is room in our hearts and in our souls, then the healing can begin.  Then compassion and love can enter in and transform the brokenness that resides deep in our souls.  Chaos is the threshold to wholeness, maybe, as doubt is the threshold to belief.  But that wholeness is not to be held onto for ourselves, that wholeness is not our own bodily or spiritual wholeness, it is a wholeness for the entire Body of Christ.  The messiness we have created in our lives, the chaos that seems to constantly jostle our lives around is about the creation of God’s future, a future that is not our own.

I heard a wonderful story from some classic and great timeless piece of literature which I have forgotten the name of so if you know from which book this comes, let me know.  A wealthy woman died and stood before the gates of hell facing something really evil looking that was saying to her, “Account for your deeds, if you do not want to enter the gates of hell.”  The woman thought long and hard, she was a very selfish woman who had never given anything to any charity much less to any individuals or homeless people she had passed in her entire lifetime.  As she thought she remembered an onion that she had given to a homeless woman on the streets of the community where she had lived.  She told the gatekeeper about this and sure enough, the records indicated she had done so.  It was not an act you or I would have been proud of, in fact it was quite small and done out of pity more than charity.  Just then an onion, the same onion in fact, small, insignificant and unappetizing floated down attached to a thin string.  The woman grasped the onion with great fear and doubt, how could this one single onion, attached to such a small string carry her all the way up to heaven.  She held on to the little onion and it began to raise, bringing her with it, her hopes began to ascend as well.  As she rose up she felt a tug on her legs, and saw that some others who desperately wanted to go with her were clinging to her.  She panicked and kicked her legs saying, “No, no, no, don’t hold on to me, let me go!”  But the hands were desperate and she could not break free from them, “Please, please, no, let go of me, this onion cannot hold us all, please let me go.”, the hands that clung to her held on even more desperately than before.  Then in anger she hugged the onion as strongly as she could and yelled at them, “Let go! This is my onion!”  The string holding the onion, in that moment snapped, and she fell back to the pit of fire. 

Our acts, our lives, our deeds, almost everything about us is not our own. The woman being carried up to heaven by the onion and string had an opportunity to save a number of others, but could not see past her own chaos, her own danger to witness the possibility that something as small and as ridiculous as an onion on a string could bring countless people into the goodness of God.  Is it possible that when we let go of the chaos within ourselves, and let God create in the midst of that chaos, that we then don’t have to define what our lives will look like or what we will be, we can simply be who we are, and let God do the work in us to create something for other people to cling to, experiences that can raise others up from their darkness, peace within ourselves that can calm the troubled waters of people who are being tossed to and fro.  You see, we are made to be sent into the world to do and be good, to bring the goodness of creation to the world, we are made to delight in creation with God, to dance at the sight of a rainbow, to sing with the birds, to run with the animals of the earth.  We are made to delight in creation, we are made to enjoy the world completely.  So as Meister Eckhart has said, “Put on your dancing shoes and leap into the heart of God”.