Trinity: Relationship Powered by the Holy Spirit, by The Rev. Donald L. Hamer
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Trinity Episcopal Church
Trinity Sunday 2016
May 22, 2016
Rector’s Annual Report
Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity…
- From the Collect for Trinity Sunday
This is my 13th Annual Report to the congregation. It is a time of tremendous challenge for many of our Episcopal and other so-called “mainline” congregations, including our own here at Trinity. It is also a time of tremendous opportunity for us.
It has become a tradition at our Annual Meeting for the Rector to deliver his Annual Report to the Congregation as the sermon on this, our Patronal Feast Day. But you all received the Annual Report by email over a week ago, it was snail mailed to people who don’t have email, and there have been hard copies of the report available for the past week. If you did not bring yours today there will be additional copies available as we prepare for the business part of the meeting following Holy Communion. I am also mindful that we have had two Town Meetings – one on January 31 and another just a little over a month ago on April 17 – where I have preached on the state of our congregation and we have had follow up conversation. And so this morning for my sermon, I would like to focus less on “stuff” and more on how I think we ought to be approaching the future.
First, a quick summary of where we are. As I said, it is a time of challenge for many congregations, including our own. Our particular challenge is one we have faced since long before I was called as your rector – that of spending more money than we take in and drawing a dramatically unsustainable amount each year from our once-substantial savings. To refresh your recollection, our diocesan leadership recognized that many parishes have been doing this, and so last November our Convention pass a resolution limiting how much churches can draw against their endowment over a three year period. This has left us with two choices: continue to spend at the same unsustainable rates and risk the diocese assuming control over our endowment, or dramatically reigning in our spending. We – your lay leadership and I – have chosen the latter course as we pursue a two-pronged strategy:
- Seeking to share ministries or to effect a merger with one or more other congregations in the hope of creating a renewed and financially-sustainable community of faith; and at the same time,
- Restructuring our administration and our programming to maintain our core strengths and carry out the ministries that further our core values as a congregation. The hope is that by God’s grace we will enter into new relationships with other congregations, strengthened to serve God’s mission for the long-term.
In the meantime, we have this interim period to get through when we have to come closer to living within our means. As I said, this is not a new challenge for us; what is new is that we are admitting to our addition of living beyond our means --the challenge we have had for decades -- and now we are finally coming to grips with it. And that takes courage. It takes strength. It takes determination. It takes faith.
In this morning’s lesson from the Letter to the Romans, St. Paul writes: . . . we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in or sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and 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. God has given us the tools to do this. Our challenge is to summon the faith that God’s promises to us are true.
We have begun to experience those sufferings in these first months of 2016, in the form of staff changes. As of February 1, I as your Rector have been paid at 80% of my salary in order to get us through the program year. You’ll notice I did not say I am working at 80% time. And in the past week – I may as well acknowledge what Kathie Wilson has called the “elephant in the sanctuary” – you all received letters from me and Bert announcing that after 11 years here Bert has accepted a new position at another, larger Episcopal church out of state. He would not have been seeking to leave Trinity if we had been able to assure him of continued full-time employment after this program year. But during this in-between time, we simply could not give him that assurance. This is part of the suffering we must endure now on our way to the brighter future that St. Paul promises.
We will discuss this and other aspects of our financial situation at the business portion of our Annual Meeting. For now, I want to speak about God the Holy Trinity, and what that signifies for us as a congregation that bears its name. Because I think our hope for the future rests in our commitment to live in, and grow into, that relationship which is Trinity.
What does “Trinity” mean? I remember an occasion about 10 years ago when a friend of mine who is a priest in Puerto Rico called me up to exclaim, “I got it! I got the perfect analogy for the Trinity!” I said, “That’s great, Jose. What is it?” “3-in-1 Oil! It’s perfect!” Trinity Sunday always presents a challenge to the preacher who is striving to come up with a new idea as a model for the Trinity. Written in part to rebut the ancient heresy of Arianism, the Athanasian Creed (although it most likely was not written by Athanasius) uses some 661 words to define the Trinity.
It seems like such a natural thing for we mortals to want to “define” the Trinity. We want it to make sense, to be able to wrap our minds around it. Like the disciples after witnessing Jesus, Elijah and Moses on the mountaintop, we long to preserve the memory in a snapshot and package it up nicely and neatly. And yet it is not the province of mortal beings to place boundaries around a limitless God. We don’t get to define it.
We are a congregation that takes its identity from the Trinity. And so I invite you this morning to focus on a key aspect of what we believe about the Trinity: That our God is above all a God of relationship. God’s self is a unity of God the Creator, the source of all existence; of Jesus, the Christ, the object of the Creator’s love and Mediator of that love in creation and redemption; and the Holy Spirit, the bond of union between the Creator and the Redeemer, who guides us, sustains us, who leads us into all truth and enables us to grow in the likeness of Christ.
The passage from the Gospel of John that we heard this morning does a wonderful job of describing the work of the Holy Spirit in advancing the teachings of Jesus in the earliest Christian communities. And that’s where we as a congregation need to be today as we prayerfully discern where the Holy Spirit is guiding us in the days and months to come.
In verses 12-15, Jesus is speaking to the community, and it is in the community that the Spirit works. Yes, the Spirit comes to individuals, but that is not what John is talking about here. The beneficiary of the Holy Spirit in John’s theology is primarily the wider community, which will be “led into all truth.”
This brings us back to Pilate’s famous question: What is truth? We tend to think of “truth” in terms of “facts.” Is it true or not, we ask? It is really a search for certainty. But that is not how “truth” functions in John’s Gospel. In John 14, Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth and the life.” “Truth” for John is found in the life and teachings of Jesus – what Jesus actually taught, what Jesus actually did. And we can’t absorb all of that. Jesus tells the gathered community in this morning’s passage, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes he will guide you into all truth; and he will declare to you the things that are to come. That’s what we celebrated at Pentecost last week, that’s why Jesus sent us the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, so that we could gradually come to understand what Jesus lived and died to tell us. The story is still being told; God is STILL speaking, and we are a dynamic part of the story.
Every Christian community has to function this way. It was true even when Jesus was alive. In all the Gospels, and especially in the Gospel of Mark, what Jesus has to tell them is too much for them to bear: Jesus’ warning of his imminent death, for example, or his teachings about humble servant ministry. They didn’t get many of his teachings and they couldn’t handle others. And here’s what they didn’t see or comprehend: Jesus himself was the teaching – not the written Word of Scripture, but the Living Word made flesh.
Right now, we are bearing a lot that we are afraid we can’t bear. The old solutions – which were really just band-aids – are failing us, the old solution of kicking the can down the road is not available to us, and we are not sure where to turn. A beloved and faithful staff person – who has been a central figure in our worship and community life these past 11 years, who has been a friend and a rock on whom I have leaned – is about to depart. At this very early stage less than one week out from his announcement, it is not clear who will succeed him or how we will approach the task of finding a successor, and how we will pay that person once we have identified him or her. To many of us, it may seem like a reverse jigsaw puzzle – a masterpiece that we have always experienced as fully completed, and one by one it seems like the pieces are falling out, leaving a gaping hole in our common life together. And it might even feel like the disciples felt the night Jesus was taken into custody – like God has abandoned us.
If that’s how you’re feeling, then Jesus has a comforting word for you.
Earlier in Chapter 16 (John 16:7) Jesus tells his disciples, “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away then the advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you . . . Do you see? Jesus promised us that we can rely on the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and that if we trust that promise, our community will get to where it needs to be. We need more than an intellectual understanding of God, the Trinity and Jesus’ teachings. John’s text seeks to assure every Christian community that Jesus’ promise holds true in every time and in every place: The Spirit will come, not with new truth, but guiding us into new ways of understanding and living out the eternal truth that was – that still is – embodied in the life and teachings of Jesus.
In John 14, Jesus says I am the WAY, NOT I am the PROBLEM SOLVER, or I am the MAGICIAN or perhaps , I am your Fairy Godmother who makes it all go away. We ourselves created this situation; Jesus, the mediator between God and all creation, has given us the framework in his life and teachings to approach it, and every other situation we can ever encounter. The third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is the one Jesus the Christ has sent to lead us into that truth that will set us free. All we need to do is to let go and let God – to step out in the faith that we proclaim each and every Sunday but which we are so afraid to really trust.
As we continue to grow in faith and vitality as a congregation, I would like us to focus on the Trinity as a model for our relationships with one another and with the world around us. I love the fact that Trinity Sunday immediately follows Pentecost Sunday. The Book of Acts teaches us that the Holy Spirit arrived with the sound of a rushing wind. On this Trinity Sunday, the eternal God – Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer – invites us to hold up our hands like the masts of a great ship in the hope that having unfurled our sails, we might catch the wind and be guided by its mighty power. On this Trinity Sunday let’s forget about trying to “define” or “understand” the nature of the Trinity, and instead allow ourselves, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to be transformed by it.
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me;
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.
Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me. . .
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.
Second verse – “Us”