The Great Omission (Trinity Sunday)

 

The Trinity, from the Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne, 1505-1510

The Great Omission  
Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Sunday after Pentecost, 11 June 2017
Homily preached at 9:00 a.m. sung Eucharist 
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, Rector

Genesis 1:1-2:4a; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20; Canticle 13

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Growing up and as a young man, I always had warm, inspired feelings when reading today’s Gospel lesson: I took the command to go into all nations and make disciples for Jesus as a great sign of his love, sharing a precious thing that had made my life much more meaningful and directed.  It encouraged me to go on a two-year mission for the church of youth. But in France and Belgium as a Mormon missionary, I began to see the strengths of other traditions and faiths, and came to realize that many of my fellow missionaries were driven by a sense of the superiority of their own faith and, concomitantly, the inferiority of others.  Going out to convert the world seemed open, expansive, and welcoming.  It certainly affirmed the faith that I was calling others to.  But the insistence that there was only one true way, and this was it, and we needed to draw others to it for fear that they would be lost without it, well, that became more and more clearly to me exclusionary, small-minded, and bigoted. As much joy as I received in sharing my faith, I began to realize that much mission work was driven by a sense of superiority rather than humility.  

The more open of my brother and sister missionaries used their preparation days to visit the local historical and artistic sites and learn about the culture and world they found themselves in.  The more closed were open to new cultural things as aesthetic experiences only, and really balked at entering and learning about the great churches of that area.  The first time I saw the great altar piece triptych of Ghent I realized that there was something deep and profound going on there for centuries that my own tradition did not credit at all.   This led me, after my mission, in college to pursue classics at Brigham Young University and then Biblical Studies at the Catholic University of America. After one of our early departmental student-faculty get-togethers at CUA, Elena turned to me in the car and tell me how impressed she was with the holiness and deep spirituality of the Catholic priests, monks, and sisters with whom I studied.  She said, “I just don’t see how we can say that we’re the one true Church and everyone else should be like us.”   

Having lost the faith in the “One True Church,” we were gradually drawn into the Episcopal Church precisely because of its openness and recognition of how God was at work in other denominations and traditions.  Many of the closed points of doctrine and polity that drove me from Mormonism kept me from pursuing what the early prayer books call “the enormities of Rome.”  The key here was attraction, not promotion.   Those who gently brought us into the Episcopal Church never beat the drum or tooted the horn.  They simply lived the Gospel and let us know that if we wanted what they had, we were welcome to join them.   We knew we had become Episcopalians and left Mormonism when we joined the choir at our local Episcopal parish in DC. 

But then our parish, somewhat misled under false pretenses, called as rector a very fundamentalist priest.  He preached that Christ was the one true way, cited chapter and verse of the Bible to prove it, and taught that those who did not submit to the Bible’s truth (as he saw it) would be lost.  And again and again over a three-year period he preached today’s Gospel: it was the Great Commission, the great call to the Church.  Since salvation was offered in Jesus and in him alone, we needed to get out there and convert people because they were languishing in sin and darkness and only by converting to our beliefs could they be saved!  I noticed that he talked a lot about converting people in areas where people had darker skins.   And when Gene Robinson was consecrated, he did everything he could to use his connections with people in those areas to drag that parish out of what he called the apostate and unbiblical Episcopal Church.  He did not succeed, though he and the parish he later went to are now in the Anglican Church of North America. 

Whenever he preached the Great Commission, and it was often, I had the feeling I had wandered into a pyramid scheme sales meeting:  sell, sell, sell.  And what were we to sell?  The opportunity to become a salesman too!  In short, that one priest in three years soured me on the Great Commission and made me very gun-shy of Christians with proselytizing agendas and tracts in pockets. 

It is a very sad thing.  Both my Mormon co-religionists and this priest thought they were doing a loving, welcoming, and inclusive thing.  It was only in moments of unguarded candor about their disgust or dislike of the people or traditions they were targeting in their efforts that you could see the exclusion and bigotry that such an approach fed in their hearts. 

It took me a while to mend and heal, and reclaim the Great Commission, this gem of our faith, as my own. 

You see, this exclusionary reading of the Great Commission, and this fist-in-a-velvet glove threatening approach to mission work,  rely on a great omission in how one reads this text.  “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them,” it says.  Disciples of Jesus, not adherents of a particular brand.  And  then it adds: “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”   We tend to pass over this line because most of us understand on an instinctual level that a highly developed Trinitarian doctrine lacks a certain plausibility when placed on the lips of the historical Jesus.  At most, this could be St. Matthew’s placing a threefold formula onto Jesus’ lips, reflecting the experience of the early church of God as transcendent in the Father, incarnate in the Son, and immanent in the Holy Spirit.

But this phrase on Jesus’ lips here was one of the things that got the early church thinking in ways that ended up in the full blown 4^th century doctrine of the Holy Trinity found in the creeds.   And it isn’t just stage dressing. 

The Trinity, oil painting by Rom Isichei.  
 

It is important to remember that the Trinity isn't just “Three guys up in heaven,” who somehow actually are one.  The word describes a process, a dynamism, a mystery in what we call the Divine.  The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is at heart the doctrine that God is social.  And not just social, but inherently loving and respectful of difference, and affirming equality of those in the community.

I think that many of us Episcopalians tend to be shy of sharing our faith because of experiences similar to the ones I just told, ones that make us gun-shy of proselytizing because we see through it for the contempt for others found often at its heart.  This itself has turned the Great Commission into the Great Omission for us.  We just don’t want to stoop so low as to push our faith on others. 

But here’s the thing:  faith that is not shared is faith that is starved and faith that eventually withers.  Faith shared is faith doubled and trebled, affirmed, and ever growing.   Good mission theology has always seen mission primarily as service and love rather than the advancement of a brand. Good mission theology has always asked the missioners to learn from those they serve, and help them find their own authentic expression of faith. 

The modern Church has come to a less sectarian reading of the Bible passages telling that salvation comes through Jesus Christ:  the idea of the anonymous Christian, that people might be saved through Christ even without signing onto Christianity explicitly.  Bishop and theologian Krister Stendahl once said that Christ calls us Christians to be the kind of people that others want to be around, not to constantly harp at others to become like us.  We must so show the joy of the good news that others will wonder at and want what we have, whether in their own tradition or by adopting ours.   A phrase often put into St. Francis’ mouth is that we should preach the Gospel at all times and in all places, and only occasionally open our mouths to do so.  

We must avoid the siren call of the pyramid-schemers, but we must all the same share our faith.  Live it.  Let your light shine.  And then when others ask, be unafraid to share the grounds for your hope.     This is how we bring our Trinitarian faith into our evangelism, and follow Jesus’ call to always focus on the person in front of us, and share God’s love in miraculous and surprising ways. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.

A liturgical note here:  Trinity church is well named after the social interaction, love, and equality at the heart of God.   Back in January, in order to shorten the then somewhat lengthy Prayers of the People, we stopped using names of church leaders, national leaders, and many of those on our intercessory prayer list.  We also were responding to parishioners who were afraid of feeling alienated by praying by name for national leaders whom they found offensive.  In the past months, I have had many requests from various people in the parish to return to the practice of using names.   The issue is intentionality, not length.  Using names intentionally chosen helps this.  We are commanded by scripture to pray for our leaders.  And a prayer for a governmental leader is not an endorsement, but a petition that they might serve the people well, with wisdom and compassion. So you will notice in Prayers of the People starting today names included once again.