| Trinity Sunday: St. Stephen Episcopal, Oak Harbor The Rev. Rachel Taber-Hamilton The Great Commission Last week, in the celebration of Pentecost, we learned about the significance of the divine power of God manifested in rain and its ability to draw forth life from the desert, to renew the face of the earth and sustain the human community dependent on great and subtle changes in the natural environment in which they lived. This keen dependence on the earth for subsistence generated an equally keen sense of God acting and communicating through the environment. In the Book of Genesis, God creates through the action of speaking. In Genesis, words have generative power to form reality, creating light and everything that follows. Prior to light, there was only darkness and the breath of God in the form of a wind sweeping over the face of the waters. Wind and water continue in the New Testament tradition as images of the Holy Spirit. Whether our personal experience of the Spirit is through more extraverted expression or through introverted contemplation, what is held in common is the force of spiritual creativity that is born within us and into the world in ways that nurture and compel us toward renewal. Our primary task as Christians is not to recreate what has been but to participate in making all things new. We believe in a God who has made that promise to us. As those made in the image of God, we reflect the most essential quality of God whenever we create what is good or life giving. Having children is only one expression of creativity; the Spirit gifts us with many avenues for bringing forth richness and diversity. From the very beginning, encountering God was a spiritual venture literally grounded in the earth and human generativity. From earliest human civilization humanity has attempted to understand the sacred and its relationship to the earth, the nature of the engagement between the Creator and its Creation, the intimate spiritual experience of the Beloved entwined with the Loved. One of the most ancient symbols depicting the mystery of the encounter between the Creator and Creation, between the Divine expressions of masculine and feminine, between God and the human spirit, is captured in a set of two linked circles which create a third space in the gap where they join. Early Christians knew this symbol which would later be called the Vesica Piscis. The sacred space where the rings meet was called a Mandorla, which means “almond.” From this sweet nut image, it was believed, all of creation was born. In ancient Hebrew cosmology as described in Genesis, there were waters above the earth and beneath the earth, while floating like an island where these waters meet was the earth from which all life emerges. The Christian community inherited this ancient symbol and added its own overlay of understanding. Namely, the almond shape denoting the union of the joined circles was reinterpreted this way: one end of the almond was considered as the front end of a fish while the arching lines extended a little ways (both upward and downward) on the tail end. The term Vesica Piscis means “container of the fish.” In the fish symbol the sacred joining of God and the human (Creator and Creation) is retained, but the fish shape representing Christ became the doorway through which new life emerged in the waters of Baptism. First century Christians saw human creativity as a benefit coming from God, who gifted the Son, who gifted the Spirit, who gifted each person within the community with unique attributes. Through engaging one another, it was believed that individuals learned something more about the mystery and nature of God. The formal theological construct of the Trinity did not emerge until the 3rd century A.D. through the philosophical arguments engaged at the Council of Nicea (325AD) and the Council of Constantinople (381AD). When we hear of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the New Testament, we should remember that a conformed Trinitarian doctrine had not yet been developed. In the Christian communities of the 1st century, the experience of God was tied to the mission of the church to create or birth the community of Christ through Baptism. The Gospel reading from Matthew we have heard today contains within it what has come to be known as the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” From this statement was born a missionary movement of a fledgling faith that would ultimately find the shores of every continent through those, like the Apostle Paul, who would travel the known world. As a disciple of Christ, as a Christian, I am an heir to this missionary tradition, just as you are. But for me, when I consider what this historical movement has meant, I feel ambivalent. There are Christians in the historic line of our faith that I admire very much, those who suffered and died in standing up for principles of justice and compassion and others who stood up to oppression and human corruption, even within the historic Church. Ultimately, every Christian, even if they never venture far from home, is a missionary to others who witness their actions of faith. However, when I consider the tradition of the missionary movement through the lens of my Native American heritage, I bear the burden of a cultural memory of great pain, enormous loss and suffering, all in the name of Jesus, all because we are a missionary church. The legacy of Native Americans on this continent is a story of a people who had the Christian faith brought to them, not just as good news but also as a source of enormous suffering and dislocation. The Gospel of Christ was a something of a Trojan horse in that aside from being given something genuinely wonderful, a cruel agenda hidden in its core intentionally exploited and destroyed the cultures which God had gifted with their own genius and creativity within the diversity of Creation, with which He was well pleased. Proud legacies, centuries in the making, were systematically annihilated. As a Native American Christian, I cannot escape the legacy of the missionary movement in North America. No indigenous person anywhere has escaped it. The Rt. Rev. Stephen Charleston, who is Choctaw, shares that for him the missionary expansion of Christianity was often not just a question of the message but of the medium. He notes that while the message was good news (of “hope and light and love”) the medium that most often brought that message was colonization. Missionary Christians sought not only to convert people to a different faith but to convert them to a different culture, the western European culture. They were told not only how to pray and how to worship but also how to dress, how to act, and how to think. In seeking their new Eden, European Christians brought with them the ideological tools for its assured destruction. As Bishop Charleston has noted, “The memory that I have within my own historical tradition is one that is fraught with all of the terrible stories of what missionary activity has done to my people, meaning that at the end of the day, after the great colonization and expansion in North America, those who were left to be baptized in the name of Jesus were simply the survivors of a terrible act of extermination and oppression.” This is not Good News. If we are to be a missionary Church – and I believe we are – we must bear the message of Christ in a manner that respects the diversity and beauty of all that God has made, loving it for its own sake because God does. As missionaries, our love must be just as unconditional, not deformed through the mould of our personal conditions of prejudice and intolerance. As missionaries we must not only, "Go, therefore and make disciples of all nations,” but we must engrave onto our minds and hearts the words that precedes immediately before the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18 where Jesus says, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me." Before Jesus sends us out, he reminds us always of that, that singular, critical fact – "All authority has been given to me," he said. Not to us. The great mistake of missionary activity is forgetting that the authority lies with Jesus and that our role in witnessing the good news is only ever about inviting others to engage in their own faith journey of encounter with God. We do not get to dictate what that relationship will be; that is between God and the individual gifted with free will. We are commissioned only to baptize others into God’s name and thereby initiate new life, a new beginning, launching the inspired individual into the spiritual venture of relationship with the God who created their uniqueness, their diversity and the genius of them. Through Baptism people are welcomed to make the same discovery that you and I have made in our faith journey, the discovery of the God of light and of goodness, of mercy and of compassion, of justice and of reconciliation. We must not impose our own cultural values and traditions in the process, even claiming them to be scripturally based. Oppression, prejudice, intolerance, greed, racism, discrimination, self righteousness – none of these are what Christ teaches, none of these are Christian values. As missionaries witnessing God’s love, compassion and invitation into communion with Christ, we must allow others to make their own spiritual discoveries freely and joyfully. Authority has been given to Christ. The mission to go forth and share good news has been given to us. And as long as we do not confuse the two gifts and who has which, our work as a missionary church will mean being a church of grace and of peace and of hope to all. We must be missionaries for the kind of church the Apostle Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians – a community living in the awareness of “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit.” Therefore, we are missionaries whenever are actions contribute to an experience of radical grace, unconditional love and the invitation to deeper, more authentic relationship with God and with one another. The sacred space we are asked to create, to preserve and to be as the Church is that sanctuary which promotes the encounter between God and his Beloved, between Christ and the human heart. Through the diverse expression of the Trinity the Church is commissioned to be the ever renewing incarnation of the Unity of God – loving, embracing and mutually empowering all our beauty and complexity in every age, to the end of the age. Amen. |