St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church

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Rock, Paper, Scissors?

Mark 6:1-13

July 9, 2006        (Click the date to see the bulletin)

1. When our General Assembly met in June, it received the Report of the Task Force on the Trinity, after no small amount of conflict, and commended it to the Church for study. The Report is entitled The Trinity: God’s Love Overflowing. The Sunday after our General Assembly adjourned, the Tulsa World carried this "political" cartoon by its own Doug Marlette. The sign in the corner reads "Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. General Assembly," so there would be no doubt in the minds of the readers about the inspiration for his jab at us. We see a panel of four seated behind a table. Two are clergy, one appears to be a man and the other probably a woman, and the other two are men, one looks fairly normal, and the other appears to be a bit of a duffus. The sign on the front of the table says NAME THAT TRINITY. The distinguished clergyman is saying, "Father, Son and Holy Spirit." The equally distinguished clergy woman says, "Mother, Child and Womb." The bearded layman says, "Rock, Redeemer, Friend." And the rumpled duffus says, "Rock, paper, scissors." In the audience, one of the clergymen says, "Bad news – we just got word the Episcopalians are praying for us."

2. What do we do with a cartoon like this? I don’t know what you did, but I know what I did. I went through the whole grief process, almost like I had lost something very dear to me. First I was stunned – my brain couldn’t believe what my eyes saw. Then I chuckled – it is kind of funny. Rock, paper, scissors! Then I started getting angry. Marlette had moved out of the realm of politics and was poking fun at our church. What our General Assembly did was a wonderful thing! To ask us to study the ancient doctrine of the Trinity is a real gift! Rock, paper, scissors – the nerve! That old kids game isn’t even close to The Trinity! Think about it: Rock is covered by paper, paper is cut by scissors, and scissors are smashed by rock. Each of these three can obliterate the other. That’s not the way God works! By this time I was mad! I wanted to write a letter to the editor – I wanted the Tulsa World to fire that unChristian upstart. But I didn’t write that letter. I got depressed instead. I thought "Oh, no! Our Church is the laughingstock of the whole country! How can I be proud to be a Presbyterian again?" Before long, tho, I pulled out of my blue funk and started feeling stronger than I ever had felt before. By golly, we can be proud to be Presbyterians in America! Do you want to know how?

3. These words from Mark’s gospel give us a good clue! Look closely at what happened back then. Before this moment, Jesus had been to the mountaintop – John baptized him for obedience, God affirmed him for ministry, sick people came to him for healing – and now he was going back home. But were they ready for him? Not at all! They had the same reaction I did! First they were stunned: "We had no idea he was this good!" Then they got angry: "Wait a minute! We’ve known him all his life! Who does he think he is, telling us what our own scriptures mean? The nerve!" Now, in order to find out what happens next, we must flip over to Luke 4:28. Luke adds detail that Mark omits. The people were so angry that they chased him out of the synagogue, and had a mind to throw him over the cliff at the edge of town. But he did not let either their lack of understanding or their hostility stop him. He slipped away, and made it out of town safely, and sent his disciples out to proclaim the good news (Luke 4:16-30).

4. Now, listen carefully. We have not learned much! Many of us Christians have had the very same attitude about the Trinity that those people had with their tradition about Scripture. We thought the Trinity could only mean one thing. The words Task Force used to explain the Trinity have had the same effect on us as the words Jesus spoke had on those people of Nazareth. And we are feeling the same kind of anger as those people in the synagogue who couldn’t believe the good news that Jesus brought! They had ALWAYS known how to obey the Law. But their restrictive way of obeying the Law was actually killing their spirits. Jesus breathed new life into The Law, and new life into them, at the same time. We find ourselves in the same situation regarding the Trinity. We have ALWAYS known that the Trinity is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But that limited way of imagining God can lock God into a small box, and imprison us at the same time. Jesus called God "My Father," God called Jesus "My Son," and we read throughout the Bible that the "Spirit" filled every human from the time Adam took his first breath. Our early Church Fathers dubbed this phenomenon The Trinity, and some of us want it to stay that way forever – Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

5. But should it stay "the way it’s always been"? After all, there are other images to describe how God works. Could they help us know God better than we do? The writers of The Trinity: God’s Love Overflowing say, Yes, "There are many other images in Scripture and in the writings of faithful Christians through the centuries." So they quote these images in their report. Here are some of them:

6. Those are some of the images of God we find in Scripture. Now fast forward to the 4^th century, to the time of the man we know as Augustine. He wrote a book called The Trinity. He said God is Lover, Beloved, and the Love that binds together the Lover and the Beloved. For him, the Trinity is all about the interdependent, encouraging, energetic relationship between God (the ‘Lover’), Jesus (the ‘Beloved’), and the Holy Spirit (the ‘Love’). Twelve hundred years later, John Calvin, the father of our Presbyterian heritage, wrote these words: "No figures of speech can describe God’s extraordinary affection towards us; for it is infinite and various." In other words, Father, Son and Holy Spirit cannot completely describe God. Neither can Lover, Beloved, and Love. In his Commentary on Isaiah, John Calvin writes "God has manifested himself to be both . . . Father and Mother." God "did not satisfy himself with proposing the example of a father, but in order to express his very strong affection, he chose to liken himself to a mother, and calls us not merely ‘children,’ but the fruit of the womb, towards which there is usually a warmer affection." And in our own day, contemporary Lutheran theologian Gail Ramshaw draws from the story of the flood in Genesis, the beautiful story about Noah and his family and all the animals living together in the ark. The image she finds in that story is this: "God is our Rainbow of Promise, our Ark of Salvation, and our Dove of Peace."^[i] Yes, there are many different ways to experience God.

7. So what does all this mean for us Presbyterians in Tulsa? It means we can be proud to be Presbyterian in our own time! Our denomination has the same courage Jesus had! We are following Jesus! This paper called The Trinity: God’s Love Overflowing tells us there are many ways to think of God. Some will not understand what this means now, just as they did not understand what Jesus meant way back then. Jesus did not throw out the Law, he fulfilled it. We are not throwing out the Trinity. We will continue baptizing only "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." And we are free to supplement this [traditional] language with additional [biblical and historical] images." Doug Marlette missed the whole point. "Rock, paper, scissors"? No way!

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