On Easter Day I wore a Central American highly ornamented white stole as we shared the Eucharist. I wore it again at last week’s funeral service that celebrated our friend Robin Brampton’s life. On both occasions I explained its history. And this morning, to celebrate the Church season of Trinity, I am wearing it again – and once more shaping its background story. Then it was an explanation to a curious audience, this morning it is integral to today’s themes of Trinity and reconciliation – and to the single theme that bonds both: ‘Christian theology is poor people’s speech about their hopes and dreams’.
James Cone, Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary, and advocate of ‘black’ liberation theology, spoke those words in 1979 at a South Australian conference (“What is Christian Theology?” Chapter 1 of Toward a Theology in an Australian Context, edited by Victor C. Hayes, Bedford Park, South Aust.: Australian Association for the Study of Religion, 1979, pp.11, 13). This morning, Trinity Sunday and Reconciliation-Sorry Day, I want his words to take root in your thinking: I want this stole to be a visible reminder that the Gospel we believe and teach is not about power or merely decorative presence but about the celebration of ‘poor people’s speech about their hopes and dreams’.
To treat Trinity Sunday as an exercise in classical theology is to entirely miss its significance to early Christian communities struggling to understand their own human identity in a world of repression and rejection. Yes, the actual doctrine shaped out of the power struggles of the 4th and 5th centuries. But, implicit from New Testament times, was the haunting sense of Jesus the man who lived the spirit of self-giving: his crucifixion was the ultimate statement of his conviction that God is experienced as companion in humanity’s darkest days.
To get a more complete picture of this world, as John and the early disciples experienced it, you need to reflect on the dramatic language of the preceding verses in John chapter 16 about families fractured by religious division, excommunication from synagogue and community life and a profound sense of loss and betrayal. If you have lived through family breakdown, legal challenge over property and inheritance and siblings or children separated from you by sect or ideology, you will have stood at the centre of St John’s passionate appeal to recover your own ‘hopes and dreams’.
This morning’s highly ornamented white stole reminds me of the Jesuits I once shared with, whose six Jesuit compatriots, their housekeeper and her daughter were murdered by the military in 1989 in the El Salvador civil war that pitted the U.S.-backed government against leftist rebels’.
The evening the local Jesuit community invited me to join them in prayer and remembrance is etched in my mind. These Spanish priests and the woman and child who lived in their community had given their lives for liberation. It has taken more than 22 years for their murderers to face justice, but in all that time the Order has continued to live a generous life of poverty and struggle as advocates for those denied liberation – the homeless, the oppressed, refugees and asylum seekers.
But the stole has a more personal life as some of you may recall from my earlier accounts of working and sharing with street people. Their generosity and embracive humanity have held Margaret and me in the same general area of inner Sydney for the past twenty-four years. I have told the story of the street response to an appeal to build a well in a poverty stricken village in India too many times – so I will not repeat it now. I could multiply the principle of that story from our long years in inner Sydney.
We met generosity and compassion where we never might have expected to see or experience it. I wear this stole to celebrate the ‘people at the margins’ of our respectable, comfortable lives. Their ‘speech about their hopes and dreams’ shaped as it always has our Christian theology.
As I move to bind the twin themes of Trinity and reconciliation, let the driving energy of both be grounded in the cry of the Exodus people and the poor of the land to God their redeemer. Explore this a moment longer through James Cone’s explosive challenge:
Christian theology is language about the crucified and risen Christ who grants freedom to all who are falsely condemned in an oppressive society. What else can the crucifixion mean except that God, the Holy One of Israel, became identified with the victims of oppression? What else can the resurrection mean except that God’s victory in Christ is the poor person’s victory over poverty? If theology does not take this seriously, how can it be worthy of the name Christian? If the church, the community out of which theology arises, does not make God’s liberation of the oppressed central in its mission and proclamation, how can it rest easy with a condemned criminal as the dominant symbol of its message? … Theology cannot separate itself from the cultural history of the oppressed if it intends to be faithful to the One who makes Christian language possible.
I have taken you this journey to press to one side assumptions about an abstract Trinity or an inclusiveness of others that is really no more than condescension. Throughout John’s Gospel the story of Cross is central to the way Christian communities then and now understand the life and ministry of Jesus. Like those early communities we explore stories about the historical Jesus, but we always need to reach beyond them. Nothing less than an imagination stimulated by these stories as well as by our own cultural experiences can lead us from the Jesus of history to the Christ of human encounter. Put another way, as John so carefully explores in today’s Gospel reading (John 16:12-15), there is a commitment to engagement by which we learn to discern the image of God in everyone and everything around us.
The Christ we confess is about more than first century stories of an ancient prophet and teacher. Every Sunday, with the world-wide Christian Church, we celebrate the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, stories that shape around event and experience – event and imagination. The event lies at the heart of our community life but the demand to grow as a generous, expansive humanity is the key to who we are. When we confess Trinity we are face-to-face with a God whom we affirm became incarnate, in our flesh and as we are. God is in the contradictions of life, in its oppression and its liberation. We cannot have one without the other.
Trinity and reconciliation go hand in hand. When we live with contradiction then there should be no other option than to experience and then embrace with forgiveness and restoration. In the long ago community that received John’s words, they heard that ‘when the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth’.
We are reading here John’s reflection on Jesus’ ministry. There is, in these words, a sense of something yet to happen. Verse 13 of John 16, heaps up future tenses that culminate in the breathtaking prospect of what lies ahead – the things that are coming. To modern as to ancient ears the language must have been distracting – wars, rumour of wars, distress and loss of people and place. But as we read on, John surprises us with quite a different discovery: at that time the Spirit will lead is into all truth.
Again, let me attempt to shear away some unhelpful assumptions. We are so accustomed to ‘truth’ being an abstract set of ideals, that we miss its ancient meaning. Right now, in political discourse, the word ‘truth’ is being bandied around as part of election sloganeering. Did the Prime Minister lie when she said … Are Tony Abbott’s words truth or are they Gospel truth: do you recall those conversations? Faced with the same political dilemma Pilate said ‘What is truth?’ John demands that truth is what we do rather than merely what we believe in. Truth is the action that comes from an inner spirit that seeks another’s welfare before their own. Truth is not words, but deeds. Truth, said John, is the Spirit of Jesus that awakens us to inclusiveness: Jesus said, and the church is reminded, that ‘all that the Father has is mine’ (verse 15).
Hear that comment as again you listen to John’s words: ‘He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine, and declare it to you.’ Being and becoming human was the essence of Jesus’ life and ministry. The Spirit draws us to the heart of Jesus’ humanity. Our highest goal is to affirm that our own humanity is striven for in every relationship, in every act of contrition and forgiveness, in every embrace of difference. In saying and meaning ‘sorry’, that human goal is the mark of our divinity. Graham Greene’s 1955 Vietnam novel, The Quiet American, concludes with the hero saying after so much death and betrayal ‘how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry’. These heart-wrenching words are the mark of so much inhumanity
Our celebration of Trinity – God taking and entering human flesh and human experience – is the gathering sense of community where we are captivated by the desire to live and serve beyond our own interests. As you and I learn to persevere hopefully through the pain of exclusion – others’ and our own – as imagination drives us beyond simplistic and word-bound religion, we sense the spirit of freedom to grow in our humanity. Saying ‘sorry’ where we have offended and working for reconciliation is humanity’s high point
This nation, with many of its people still living in third world conditions, with many in asylum detention, with appalling stories of child abuse, needs church communities to let go of their long-held power talk. The Trinity should not be one more abstruse affirmation of a 5th century creed about a powerful, all mighty, and distant God. Trinity, viewed through the lens of humanity, is the central theme of our Christian faith. The ideal human society is founded on Trinity where ‘persons’ are equal and interdependent, where power is shared and where the least stands shoulder to shoulder with the great. Today’s white stole signals the power of imagination and hope. James Cone put it this way:
If the church, the community out of which theology arises, does not make God’s liberation of the oppressed central in its mission and proclamation, how can it rest easy with a condemned criminal as the dominant symbol of its message? … Theology cannot separate itself from the cultural history of the oppressed if it intends to be faithful to the One who makes Christian language possible.
A Meditation Homily based on the Gospel reading for Trinity Sunday, John’s Gospel chapter 16 verses 12-15.
Bill Lawton
26 May 2013